Eugene TerreBlanche murdered

Last Saturday, Eugene TerreBlanche, one of the pivotal figures of the end of apartheid, was murdered at his home outside of Ventersdorp in Northwest province, apparently over a wage dispute. This comes in the midst of a racial controversy over a song sung by the ANC youth leader Julius Malema which included the lyrics "kill the Boer." (Boer is Afrikaans for farmer, and has become a rather offensive phrase for whites in South Africa.) ANC president Jacob Zuma and other ANC leaders are distancing themselves from Malema, but he has yet to be formally punished.

Terreblanche was a sinister yet somewhat goofy figure during the end of apartheid. His organization, the AWB (Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging--Afrikaner Resistance Movement), used faintly disguised Nazi paraphernalia (like a three-pointed swastika) and brandished all kinds of weapons. They stormed the World Trade Centre during the CODESA negotiations. Later they showed the last gasp of white supremacist resistance when they invaded Boputhatswana and were humiliatingly defeated. He was imprisoned in 1997 for assaulting a black petrol station worker.

Despite TerreBlanche's obvious lunacy, this is a real blow for South Africa. The last thing we need here 10 weeks before the World Cup is this kind of racial tension. It's good to see Zuma and others being a calming influence. It would be nice to not hear any more violent songs, especially as many of us volunteers are right in that neighborhood (I just drove right through Ventersdorp on the taxi ride home). As former president FW de Klerk said, "It remains to be seen whether the Shoot the Boer song played a role in Mr Terre'Blanche's murder. However, at the very least it may have contributed to an atmosphere in which impressionable young black farm workers might have felt that their actions were somehow justified."

Comments

Why Did Reality Winner Leak to the Intercept?

So Reality Winner, former NSA contractor, is in federal prison for leaking classified information — for five years and three months, the longest sentence of any whistleblower in history. She gave documents on how Russia had attempted to hack vendors of election machinery and software to The Intercept , which completely bungled basic security procedures (according to a recent New York Times piece from Ben Smith, the main fault lay with Matthew Cole and Richard Esposito ), leading to her capture within hours. Winner recently contracted COVID-19 in prison, and is reportedly suffering some lingering aftereffects. Glenn Greenwald has been furiously denying that he had anything at all to do with the Winner clusterfuck, and I recently got in an argument with him about it on Twitter. I read a New York story about Winner, which clearly implies that she was listening to the Intercepted podcast of March 22, 2017 , where Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill expressed skepticism about Russia actually b

The Basic Instinct of Socialism

This year I finally decided to stop beating around the bush and start calling myself a democratic socialist. I think the reason for the long hesitation is the very long record of horrifying atrocities carried out by self-described socialist countries. Of course, there is no social system that doesn't have a long, bloody rap sheet, capitalism very much included . But I've never described myself as a capitalist either, and the whole point of socialism is that it's supposed to be better than that. So of course I cannot be a tankie — Stalin and Mao were evil, terrible butchers, some of the worst people who ever lived. There are two basic lessons to be learned from the failures of Soviet and Chinese Communism, I think. One is that Marxism-Leninism is not a just or workable system. One cannot simply skip over capitalist development, and any socialist project must be democratic and preserve basic liberal freedoms. The second, perhaps more profound lesson, is that there is no s

Varanus albigularis albigularis

That is the Latin name for the white-throated monitor lizard , a large reptile native to southern Africa that can grow up to two meters long (see pictures of one at the Oakland Zoo here ). In Setswana, it's called a "gopane." I saw one of these in my village yesterday on the way back from my run. Some kids from school found it in the riverbed and tortured it to death, stabbing out its eyes, cutting off its tail, and gutting it which finally killed it. It seemed to be a female as there were a bunch of round white things I can only imagine were eggs amongst the guts. I only arrived after it was already dead, but they described what had happened with much hilarity and re-enactment. When I asked why they killed it, they said it was because it would eat their chickens and eggs, which is probably true, and because it sucks blood from people, which is completely ridiculous. It might bite a person, but not unless threatened. It seems roughly the same as killing wolves that

Ryan Cooper

Search This Blog