The meaning of the Zuma insurrection. By Anthony Turton.
About 20% of South Africa’s 59 million people are Zulus (like ex-President Zuma), about 13% are Xhosa (like Nelson Madela), about 8% white, about 3% Indian, about 8% colored, and the rest smaller black tribes.
Does multiracial South Africa have any lessons for the rest of the world? For immigration policy?
In 1989 I was deployed as an intelligence operator with the mission of monitoring up close, what was happening in Eastern Europe. …
One of those myths was the impenetrability of the Berlin Wall, and another was the ubiquity of communist party rule in Eastern Europe. … Nobody would ever have guessed that these hard-core communist states would crumble in the face of a concerted popular uprising, but they did. …
I immediately see a parallel emerging in contemporary South Africa, currently in the grip of the very same sort of popular uprising that unseated Honecker and Ceausescu, leaving a Russian intelligence operator named Vladimir Putin alone in Potsdam, facing an angry horde and without any orders from head office.
You see, Vlad and I both served in the same theatre of operations, at the same time. Both of us witnessed the same series of events, but probably interpreted them differently. Both of us were intelligence operators, deployed in the final days of the Cold War, and both of us were overwhelmed by what we were witnessing — the innate fragility of a myth in the face of forces unleashed by society that had been alienated by the shenanigans of the filthy rich elite, controlling the communist parties of their respective countries.
There we both learned that the communist party is merely a means to an end, that end being self-enrichment of the elite through the control of the levers of patronage flows into their support base.
And that is the parallel that I see playing out today in South Africa. The myth of ANC legitimacy, once described by Jacob Zuma as being so potent that it would rule until the second coming of Jesus. Words from an alienated ANC/SACP political elite, projected with the same brash confidence shown by Honecker, even as he faced the rolling mass action that became known as the Leipzig Option, unable to comprehend the reality before his eyes.
The identical disbelief displayed by Ceausescu, even as he was being tried by military tribunal, refusing to recognize the legitimacy of the court, and announcing the imminent arrival of the Securitaté that would release him and place the military officers under immediate arrest.
Both events displayed the fragility of the myth of communist party rule. Both leaders were biased by their unshakable belief in the legitimacy of their own actions, that they failed to recognize the rising tide of popular discontent that was about to sweep them into oblivion.
Both fell into the trap of believing the same myth they were propagating — the inviolable legitimacy of communist thinking and rule. …
In the Zulu regions of South Africa today:
A popular uprising, triggered by the inflammatory rhetoric of a race war, inciting the masses to mobilize against an ethnically defined minority, to destroy all vestige of so-called white monopoly capital (WMC), was met with an equally potent spontaneous emergence of local militia. …
You see, the “real ANC” is actually the Zulu faction controlled by Jacob Zuma and a cabal of corrupt gangsters in key positions of authority. This is about Zulu hegemony and the financial power that accrues to the cabal of warlords and criminal syndicates that sold the country to the Guptas. The question this raises is how legitimate is the ANC as a racially defined party, but under the control of a tribally defined criminal elite? …
Jacob Zuma has clearly defied the ANC constitutional principle of being a non-racial party, free of all hints of tribalism. …
The “real ANC” is nothing more than a surrogate for Zulu hegemony, denied by the British at the Battle of Ulundi on the 4th of July 1879, so it is as mythical as the unicorn. …
How can the ANC be rebranded as a tribal party, and survive a free and fair election in a multi-cultural society? How can it be rebranded as a racially pure party, and survive in an international trading milieu where economic sanctions would be imposed on its leadership, and the country would be shunned as a pariah? …
The ethnic cleansing needed to meet its stated objective of destroying the white minority leave it out in the cold.
To truly enable Zulu hegemony, the ANC would be transformed into an approximation of the Interahamwe, a political force closely associated with the genocide in Rwanda. This would destroy all political capital embedded in the ANC brand. By adopting it as a strategy, the ANC elite would unleash a scorched earth policy, never to return to the moral high ground it once occupied as the darling of the world in 1994.
South Africa was a first world country only three decades ago. Now, it’s economy is being destroyed by tribalism, corruption, and black politics. Who’s for open borders in white countries?
Some areas, especially around Capetown — which is white and colored — want to break away altogether from the Zulus:
hat-tip Stephen Neil
