Personal Random Thoughts on the Mandela Memorial Show

December 12th 2013 | كتبها

 

 

Muhammad Abu Nasr

We live in deeply irritating times.

Mandela’s memorial turned out to be a big circus. If I identified with the current South African leaders, I’d feel deeply humiliated right now at how that show went. But since South Africa is very far from being a bastion of the liberation struggle, I really don’t care. I can dispassionately regard it as a bit of dark humor on the world stage. And it seems like I’m in the same boat with the South African people. It looks like they don’t much care either.

At the memorial, those few South Africans who bothered to come just bounced around and wiggled and danced and sang and yelled constantly – honestly they reminded me of a bunch of first-graders at recess – while all the world leaders gave their speeches – mostly drowned out by the noise, or unintelligible due to the crappy sound system.

The media had predicted that the local people would just pack the stadium and flood the surrounding fields, but it was mostly empty seats – obviously they care a lot more about soccer matches than this stuff.

And, after all, we live in a world where in fact sports often has more real substance than the political shows of the elite.

Then there was that clown who did hand-signing for the deaf – standing by Obama and all the other world leaders. But it turns out that the guy – some functionary of the African National Congress it is said – was just wiggling his hands! He didn’t know any sign language at all. A total fake who probably got paid well and now has disappeared.

I’m sure Alex Jones and all the other anti-establishment racists are going to town over that bizarre memorial show – privately or publicly – it was such a joke. Too bad racists will get mileage over it, lamenting the disappearance of White rule. But, as usual, they miss the point, because race isn’t the issue. Revolutionary change isn’t a matter of Blacks sitting in chairs formerly reserved for Whites. Either you have revolutionary change or you do what they’ve done there – institutionalize and prolong the rot of the old system by giving it a local face.

Sure enough, just as I expected, Obama got the biggest reception from the crowd at the show. Not that that’s saying much, since the crowd was probably not really listening. But it’s typical of the liberal world we live in that empty bullshit from Obama would be warmly received just because of his skin color. That’s a reflection of how the imperialists have derailed all radical activity.

I mean, they channeled people away from class struggle to ‘racial equality’. What does that mean? It means that instead of aiming to get rid of an exploitative system, you direct people’s attention at the race issue. And then if you fill the offices of the government and the businesses with enough Black faces, then nobody notices that the exploitation is just the same as before, only it’s hired more local people to work for it.

In exactly the same way, we’ve got Obama putting a Black face on US imperialism. I saw some article a couple months ago by some Hollywood liberal lefty who complained that nobody in Hollywood will so much as express doubts over Obama – because he’s Black.

What a brilliant scam! Instead of trying to defend exploitation openly, you change people’s focus from class struggle to ‘racial equality’ and ‘equal opportunity’ and then the elite can carry on undisturbed – all it has to do is pack its offices with enough well-paid ‘people of color’ who will mouthe the elite propaganda.

It is widely reported that the South African political system is badly corrupt. Well of course it is. It’s a system designed to put a Black front on for globalist business. You insure that the Black officials do their job and don’t complain by paying them, which is also known as corruption. They won’t rock the boat if they’re getting paid off from every quarter.

And there you have it: ‘reconciliation’.  The colonialist economic elite carries on by using Black front men in a hired ‘government’ – and everybody is ‘reconciled’ and everybody loves one another. Beautiful. The poor remain poor, but hey, now there’s no racial barrier, no more apartheid, so every Black child can aspire to become a corrupt official if he wants to better himself.

And here it’s just the same – Obama’s administration is full of Black imperialists. Like his Attorney General Eric Holder prosecuting whistleblowers and enforcing the Patriot Act and what not. And they can even keep the ‘racist’ card in reserve in case anybody starts complaining. Just like Oprah Winfrey did with her European interview where she complained ‘they’re all after Obama just because he’s Black.’

I was thinking about Mandela the other night. I still have an old Cuban English-language Granma paper from about 1987 when the Cubans were in Angola fighting the South African racist regime. That epic anti-colonial war was raging as recently as the late 1980s. And then Mandela was released just – what – three or four years later – I guess in 1990 or so. In other words, just at the time that the USSR was collapsing and the US was getting ready to crush Iraq and take over the world.

So in the early 1990s Mandela is released but he has no backing. He once had been head of an insurgent movement backed by the socialist community and Communists and anti-imperialist progressives around the world. But in 1990, the USSR is vanishing and so there’s no more socialist camp or organized radical movement in the world. Mandela is released because he’s powerless. He represents prestige and nothing else. They let him loose and offer him nominal political power on condition that he doesn’t challenge the economic establishment. What choice has he got? There’s no more socialist camp to pressure for real anti-colonialism. Maybe Mandela didn’t even realize that. It was hard for anybody to grasp the profundity and extent of what was going on. Saddam thought the USSR would block a direct assault by the Americans, but the USSR was on its last legs and ready to cooperate with the USA.

So Mandela accepted the deal. Who knows? Maybe he actually thought he could use the power of the socialist camp, of the movement that he was accustomed to feeling behind him, to pressure for real transformation. Maybe only later did it prove obvious to him that he was a ‘general’ but had no ‘army’ out there ready to fight for real change anymore. That he was powerless. They’d give him political power but with the colonial economy intact with its globalist network, he could either work with them, or be kicked back to prison – or into oblivion – for talking “negatively” about ‘revenge’ and ‘hate’ instead of love and reconciliation. This time there’d be no international solidarity for him to rely on.

Maybe that’s why Mandela only served one term as president. Perhaps he knew it was all a sham, that he’d fought the good fight for years but then been outplayed and overwhelmed.

He played along with the sham, and so his memorial was true to form – a big show, another sham. Local folks – a few of them – bopped along for a dance party. Some guy with chutzpah volunteered to do the interpretation for the deaf – even though he didn’t have a clue. And through it all the western liberal leaders like Obama could take time out from reviewing their Drone Death Target Lists to pontificate about their devotion to brotherly love.

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