Stan Winer: South Africa's New Fascism
[South African writer Stan Winer is author of the book Between the Lies: Rise of the media-military-industrial complex, published in London by Southern Universities Press, 2004. Buy this book from www.amazon.co.uk or download a free PDF of the full text at http://www.coldtype.net/archives.html.]
One thing the 'old' and the 'new' South Africa have in common is a capacity for inventing history. History is not seen as a dispassionate inquiry into what happened, but rather as an opportunity to promote some kind of favourable self image. The old apartheid fascists did it, and South Africa's new ruling elite is doing so. They do it because they hate complexity, especially any that complicates the essential message that there are winners and losers in life, and we must trust the politicians to tell us which are which.
The history the Great Trek into the interior, for instance, was told as a story of heroic pioneers who brought the light of Christian values to a dark continent; while the present government would have us believe that, after South Africa’s "peaceful" transition to democracy, the country has become a happily reconciled "rainbow nation" that serves as "a beacon of hope to the rest of the world". Or in other words, the African National Congress (ANC) which won the country’s first democratic election in 1994, has succeeded in becoming "all things to all people". And to some extent this is true.
The ruling party's headlong rush to embrace capitalism, and the government's unwavering commitment to privatisation and to conservative free-market macroeconomic policies dictated by World Bank and IMF consultants has stolen the thunder from the Right, which now finds itself with little else to do other than occasionally carping and pouting — sitting, as Disraeli once said of the British opposition, like a range of exhausted volcanoes. The Left, meanwhile, in the shape of the South African Communist Party (SACP) with its peculiar brand of socialism — if socialism it can even be called at this stage — has subsumed itself to the ANC’s political efforts. South African voters who want to vote for the SACP can do so only by voting ANC.
In this way, South African communists have ironically and perhaps unintentionally become a conservative force through remaining in a stolid, unyielding alliance with the ruling ANC. Which turns the SACP into an aberration, because parties that constitute alliances all over the world invariably contest elections under their own banners. The Left is thus left with little else to do other than pay lip-service to the Hegelian dialectic while remaining essentially a-dialectical. It has been so thoroughly tamed that it is difficult to remember the last time any of one of its aparatchiks said anything surprising, outrageous, or for that matter, even meaningful.
With the end of contestation between Right and Left, it would seem polarity is no longer a factor in the country’s political process; or to quote Francis Fukuyama only slightly out of context: South Africa is experiencing its own "end of history". It is an affront to those trained to respect grand polarities. The dialectical wars were not supposed to be waged like this. But, much as some people may want to have nothing to do with the dialectic, the dialectic always somehow manages to have everything to do with us.
And so, an anarchic force has entered the equation. Not anarchic in the comparatively benign sense of classical anarchism, which advocates the deliberate violation of laws in pursuit of some social goal, but something rather more sinister. It now threatens the social cohesion of the country and is characterised by a desperate, all-consuming criminal nihilism. Since the "new, democratic dispensation" of 1994, violent crime has become an almost metaphorical term invoking the collapse of morality and the decline of social stability in the country.
Although South Africa's general crime rate is comparable to those of developed countries, what basically sets South Africa apart from every other country on earth, is its extraordinarily high level of violent crime. More people are murdered each day in South than the number of civilians being killed in war-torn Iraq. South African police statistics show a daily murder rate of 51, compared with an average of 34 civilians killed in Iraq. Add to this the current average South African road accident mortality rate of 36 killed each day, most of them while breaking road traffic laws, and an even more alarming picture emerges. Not to mention the official average of more than 200 attempted murders, 150 rapes and 350 armed robberies each day, or the 800 children who die annually from gang-related and accidental gunshot wounds.
At one stage, Interpol noted that its own crime statistics for South Africa were approximately double those stated officially by the country’s Crime Information Analysis Centre. At the same time, no less than one in four of the country’s law enforcement officials were themselves under investigation for corruption. The government then imposed a moratorium on its crime statistics, assuring the public that this not to hide the excessively high crime rates, but rather to "put systems in place to ensure accurate crime reporting". The independent Institute for Security Studies later found that at "no stage" were the problems of data accuracy of "such an extent that a moratorium on the release of crime statistics to the public was necessary". One thing not in dispute, however, is that far more violent crimes have taken place since the advent of democracy in South Africa than during the most violent phases of apartheid repression with all its racist massacres and state-sponsored death squads. In the four decades preceding 1994 there was a reported average of 7,036 murders per year, compared with a total of 18,793 last year and continuing.
Social conditioning under apartheid may well have laid the foundations of a violent society where values became dangerously warped, but it can also be argued that the problem of crime in post-apartheid South Africa is ultimately the product of a political elite creating a society in its own image. Many in the ANC leadership and in government circles, including the recently sacked deputy president Jacob Zuma, are associated in the public mind with corruption, crude and rampant accumulation of material wealth, and the abuse of state resources for personal gain. These are people who were supposed to be the exemplars of what defines the product of a liberated South Africa, but they now represent an assault on everything the liberation movement claimed to honour.
Some other things have turned full circle as well, reflecting a profound ideological shift that has occurred in the ANC since it came into power 14 years ago. The ANC, for example, won the 1994 election largely on the strength of its historic Freedom Charter, replete with socialist rhetoric decreeing that the national wealth including "the mineral wealth beneath the soil, the banks and monopoly industry shall be restored to the people as a whole." Nelson Mandela himself, in a message smuggled out of prison before his release in 1990, promised that "nationalisation is the policy of the ANC and a change or modification of our views in this regard is unthinkable". Yet the unthinkable has occurred, with an emphasis on privatisation and free-market macroeconomic policies, and a corresponding decline of nationalisation.
While the government leadership tends to be heavily educated in the European provenance of ideas and action, it appears surprisingly unappreciative of the lived experience of ordinary workers and the poor. Take for example the kind of official thinking as reflected in a recent policy planning document emanating from the Office of the President. The document identifies "the system of ownership and distribution of resources" as a primary determinant of social behaviour. A politics so heavily grounded in the market with its survival-of-the-fittest "morality" as opposed to human decency, runs the constant risk of losing its bearings, as it now seems to have done. At the same time, the government has appropriated some basic ideas of the communist Left, emptied them of their original content and refilled them with an unappealing blend of archaic Bolshevik theory and brute materialism.
In sum, according to government strategy, there must first be a "national democratic revolution" and then socialism will arrive at some unspecified future date. The government started peddling the fallacy of a "black, patriotic bourgeoisie" as a prerequisite to greater equality for the impoverished masses. This irrational policy — racist in essence, because it assumes that black capitalists will automatically behave differently to their white counterparts — has ushered in a small clique of former politicians and state officials eager to get rich quick. Many of them have nothing constructive to offer, other than the colour of their skin and their proximity to political influence in the awarding of tenders.
Today, a majority of members of the ANC's national executive committee, and key ANC provincial and local government officials, have become big business players with some of them ranking as SA's wealthiest men and women. They are "deracialising" the South African economy and "transforming" it, according to the prevailing jargon and premises, while in practice they have little interest in anything that might interrupt their energetic accumulation of personal wealth. The gap continues to widen daily between the impoverished masses and this black bourgeoisie grown flush in the post-apartheid years. These instant millionaires, with their shiny BMWs and glitzy mansions juxtaposed against 40 percent unemployment and five million homeless, have done nothing to create jobs or skills development opportunities. Instead, their "transformation" of society for the better might even have had the opposite effect of imposing a heavy price on it, by unintentionally spawning the kind of criminal cryptofascism — capitalism with a gun — that now threatens social stability. It is difficult for people to remain honest when the integrity of the highest is in question.
The once prevalent idea that, as participants in a collective struggle for freedom, people have a relationship with something bigger than themselves, has been replaced by political disengagement and withdrawal into aggressive self-interest. The problem of crime is not a problem of antisocial behaviour but rather the problem of living in an asocial and anti-socialist society, a society that lacks the capacity to connect people with one another through a common system of meaning. People have lost their trust in political organisations and beliefs, and consequently with one another, while authority has largely come to be perceived as some kind of personal insult. People now play by their own rules. "My world, my rules".
Government policy planners have taken the country deep into dangerous territory from which it will be hard to return, and the Left, sadly, has helped them do it. Together, they have failed to project and promote a national or social sense of purpose and responsibility by uniting people around a common set of values and beliefs. While workers and the poor exhibit a bitter, prolonged restraint on the verge of bursting into violent fury, neither the Left nor the Right are able to give shape to new ideas growing out of ingenuity, common sense and simple decency. By themselves these things do not owe allegiance to any particular paradigm.
Unless the ANC and its labour federation and communist alliance partners substitute their archaic rhetoric and agendas with cohesive development initiatives, those ubiquitous masked men — the capitalists with guns — might well turn out to be the real "winners" in South Africa’s newly emergent correlation of forces.
REFERENCE SOURCES:
"A Nation in the Making", Policy Co-ordination and Advisory Services unit in the Presidency, South African Government, Pretoria: 2006
Annual Reports of the South African Police, 1950 - 1994.
"Crime in the Republic of South Africa per Police Area for April to March 2001/2002 to 2004/2005", Crime Information Analysis Centre, South African Police Service, Pretoria.
Iraq Body Count website www.iraqbodycount.net <http://www.iraqbodycount.net/>;
Statistics of Offence Annual Reports, Central Statistics Service, Pretoria.
Interviews: Red Cross Children’s Hospital, Cape Town, South Africa.
Interviews: Institute for Security Studies, Gauteng, South Africa.
Read entire article at ColdType.net
One thing the 'old' and the 'new' South Africa have in common is a capacity for inventing history. History is not seen as a dispassionate inquiry into what happened, but rather as an opportunity to promote some kind of favourable self image. The old apartheid fascists did it, and South Africa's new ruling elite is doing so. They do it because they hate complexity, especially any that complicates the essential message that there are winners and losers in life, and we must trust the politicians to tell us which are which.
The history the Great Trek into the interior, for instance, was told as a story of heroic pioneers who brought the light of Christian values to a dark continent; while the present government would have us believe that, after South Africa’s "peaceful" transition to democracy, the country has become a happily reconciled "rainbow nation" that serves as "a beacon of hope to the rest of the world". Or in other words, the African National Congress (ANC) which won the country’s first democratic election in 1994, has succeeded in becoming "all things to all people". And to some extent this is true.
The ruling party's headlong rush to embrace capitalism, and the government's unwavering commitment to privatisation and to conservative free-market macroeconomic policies dictated by World Bank and IMF consultants has stolen the thunder from the Right, which now finds itself with little else to do other than occasionally carping and pouting — sitting, as Disraeli once said of the British opposition, like a range of exhausted volcanoes. The Left, meanwhile, in the shape of the South African Communist Party (SACP) with its peculiar brand of socialism — if socialism it can even be called at this stage — has subsumed itself to the ANC’s political efforts. South African voters who want to vote for the SACP can do so only by voting ANC.
In this way, South African communists have ironically and perhaps unintentionally become a conservative force through remaining in a stolid, unyielding alliance with the ruling ANC. Which turns the SACP into an aberration, because parties that constitute alliances all over the world invariably contest elections under their own banners. The Left is thus left with little else to do other than pay lip-service to the Hegelian dialectic while remaining essentially a-dialectical. It has been so thoroughly tamed that it is difficult to remember the last time any of one of its aparatchiks said anything surprising, outrageous, or for that matter, even meaningful.
With the end of contestation between Right and Left, it would seem polarity is no longer a factor in the country’s political process; or to quote Francis Fukuyama only slightly out of context: South Africa is experiencing its own "end of history". It is an affront to those trained to respect grand polarities. The dialectical wars were not supposed to be waged like this. But, much as some people may want to have nothing to do with the dialectic, the dialectic always somehow manages to have everything to do with us.
And so, an anarchic force has entered the equation. Not anarchic in the comparatively benign sense of classical anarchism, which advocates the deliberate violation of laws in pursuit of some social goal, but something rather more sinister. It now threatens the social cohesion of the country and is characterised by a desperate, all-consuming criminal nihilism. Since the "new, democratic dispensation" of 1994, violent crime has become an almost metaphorical term invoking the collapse of morality and the decline of social stability in the country.
Although South Africa's general crime rate is comparable to those of developed countries, what basically sets South Africa apart from every other country on earth, is its extraordinarily high level of violent crime. More people are murdered each day in South than the number of civilians being killed in war-torn Iraq. South African police statistics show a daily murder rate of 51, compared with an average of 34 civilians killed in Iraq. Add to this the current average South African road accident mortality rate of 36 killed each day, most of them while breaking road traffic laws, and an even more alarming picture emerges. Not to mention the official average of more than 200 attempted murders, 150 rapes and 350 armed robberies each day, or the 800 children who die annually from gang-related and accidental gunshot wounds.
At one stage, Interpol noted that its own crime statistics for South Africa were approximately double those stated officially by the country’s Crime Information Analysis Centre. At the same time, no less than one in four of the country’s law enforcement officials were themselves under investigation for corruption. The government then imposed a moratorium on its crime statistics, assuring the public that this not to hide the excessively high crime rates, but rather to "put systems in place to ensure accurate crime reporting". The independent Institute for Security Studies later found that at "no stage" were the problems of data accuracy of "such an extent that a moratorium on the release of crime statistics to the public was necessary". One thing not in dispute, however, is that far more violent crimes have taken place since the advent of democracy in South Africa than during the most violent phases of apartheid repression with all its racist massacres and state-sponsored death squads. In the four decades preceding 1994 there was a reported average of 7,036 murders per year, compared with a total of 18,793 last year and continuing.
Social conditioning under apartheid may well have laid the foundations of a violent society where values became dangerously warped, but it can also be argued that the problem of crime in post-apartheid South Africa is ultimately the product of a political elite creating a society in its own image. Many in the ANC leadership and in government circles, including the recently sacked deputy president Jacob Zuma, are associated in the public mind with corruption, crude and rampant accumulation of material wealth, and the abuse of state resources for personal gain. These are people who were supposed to be the exemplars of what defines the product of a liberated South Africa, but they now represent an assault on everything the liberation movement claimed to honour.
Some other things have turned full circle as well, reflecting a profound ideological shift that has occurred in the ANC since it came into power 14 years ago. The ANC, for example, won the 1994 election largely on the strength of its historic Freedom Charter, replete with socialist rhetoric decreeing that the national wealth including "the mineral wealth beneath the soil, the banks and monopoly industry shall be restored to the people as a whole." Nelson Mandela himself, in a message smuggled out of prison before his release in 1990, promised that "nationalisation is the policy of the ANC and a change or modification of our views in this regard is unthinkable". Yet the unthinkable has occurred, with an emphasis on privatisation and free-market macroeconomic policies, and a corresponding decline of nationalisation.
While the government leadership tends to be heavily educated in the European provenance of ideas and action, it appears surprisingly unappreciative of the lived experience of ordinary workers and the poor. Take for example the kind of official thinking as reflected in a recent policy planning document emanating from the Office of the President. The document identifies "the system of ownership and distribution of resources" as a primary determinant of social behaviour. A politics so heavily grounded in the market with its survival-of-the-fittest "morality" as opposed to human decency, runs the constant risk of losing its bearings, as it now seems to have done. At the same time, the government has appropriated some basic ideas of the communist Left, emptied them of their original content and refilled them with an unappealing blend of archaic Bolshevik theory and brute materialism.
In sum, according to government strategy, there must first be a "national democratic revolution" and then socialism will arrive at some unspecified future date. The government started peddling the fallacy of a "black, patriotic bourgeoisie" as a prerequisite to greater equality for the impoverished masses. This irrational policy — racist in essence, because it assumes that black capitalists will automatically behave differently to their white counterparts — has ushered in a small clique of former politicians and state officials eager to get rich quick. Many of them have nothing constructive to offer, other than the colour of their skin and their proximity to political influence in the awarding of tenders.
Today, a majority of members of the ANC's national executive committee, and key ANC provincial and local government officials, have become big business players with some of them ranking as SA's wealthiest men and women. They are "deracialising" the South African economy and "transforming" it, according to the prevailing jargon and premises, while in practice they have little interest in anything that might interrupt their energetic accumulation of personal wealth. The gap continues to widen daily between the impoverished masses and this black bourgeoisie grown flush in the post-apartheid years. These instant millionaires, with their shiny BMWs and glitzy mansions juxtaposed against 40 percent unemployment and five million homeless, have done nothing to create jobs or skills development opportunities. Instead, their "transformation" of society for the better might even have had the opposite effect of imposing a heavy price on it, by unintentionally spawning the kind of criminal cryptofascism — capitalism with a gun — that now threatens social stability. It is difficult for people to remain honest when the integrity of the highest is in question.
The once prevalent idea that, as participants in a collective struggle for freedom, people have a relationship with something bigger than themselves, has been replaced by political disengagement and withdrawal into aggressive self-interest. The problem of crime is not a problem of antisocial behaviour but rather the problem of living in an asocial and anti-socialist society, a society that lacks the capacity to connect people with one another through a common system of meaning. People have lost their trust in political organisations and beliefs, and consequently with one another, while authority has largely come to be perceived as some kind of personal insult. People now play by their own rules. "My world, my rules".
Government policy planners have taken the country deep into dangerous territory from which it will be hard to return, and the Left, sadly, has helped them do it. Together, they have failed to project and promote a national or social sense of purpose and responsibility by uniting people around a common set of values and beliefs. While workers and the poor exhibit a bitter, prolonged restraint on the verge of bursting into violent fury, neither the Left nor the Right are able to give shape to new ideas growing out of ingenuity, common sense and simple decency. By themselves these things do not owe allegiance to any particular paradigm.
Unless the ANC and its labour federation and communist alliance partners substitute their archaic rhetoric and agendas with cohesive development initiatives, those ubiquitous masked men — the capitalists with guns — might well turn out to be the real "winners" in South Africa’s newly emergent correlation of forces.
REFERENCE SOURCES:
"A Nation in the Making", Policy Co-ordination and Advisory Services unit in the Presidency, South African Government, Pretoria: 2006
Annual Reports of the South African Police, 1950 - 1994.
"Crime in the Republic of South Africa per Police Area for April to March 2001/2002 to 2004/2005", Crime Information Analysis Centre, South African Police Service, Pretoria.
Iraq Body Count website www.iraqbodycount.net <http://www.iraqbodycount.net/>;
Statistics of Offence Annual Reports, Central Statistics Service, Pretoria.
Interviews: Red Cross Children’s Hospital, Cape Town, South Africa.
Interviews: Institute for Security Studies, Gauteng, South Africa.