"... It is extraordinary that needs to be said, but equality is not racist."

"The Treaty Principles Bill has done exactly what its champion, David Seymour, intended – it has sparked a national conversation. And that conversation has been eye-opening to say the least. Never could I have ever predicted that ‘equality’ would be treated as ... a dirty word.
    "The immortal words of Dr Martin Luther King Junior’s 'I have a dream' speech, treasured for decades after his death, are now out of fashion according to certain sections of our society and Nelson Mandela would today perhaps be condemned for the ideals he said he would die for:

    '… the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities.'

"... It is extraordinary that needs to be said, but equality is not racist."

~ Don Brash from his post 'Equality is not a dirty word'

“Me, me, me” [updated]

“It’s all about me” every speaker at the Mandela memorial might have said, turning their tributes to the man supposed to be their hero into making it all about themselves.

Selfies with each other.

Self-actualisation revelations.

And then there’s Barack Obama.

If people were to have to take a drink every time Barack Obama used “I”, or “me”, “my” , or “mine” in a statement, entire nations would be passed out for years at a time.

Has the word “me” been spoken so many times in one memorial? “The sign language interpreter at … Nelson Mandela's memorial has been called ‘inept.’ Here's what he should have done,” says commentator and illustrator Bosch Fawstin. He calls it ‘Sign of the Times Language’:

Pic by Bosch Fawstin

Here’s George Harrison:

UPDATE: This, right on  cue, from Dr Michael Hurd:

“It’s all about him.” “It’s all about her.”
    You hear people say it. Maybe you’ve said it yourself, about someone you know.
    “She thinks she’s the Queen.” Or, “He acts like the little prince.”
    The analogy of arrogant royalty implies a person who doesn’t feel accountable to anyone, or anything. It’s as if he or she is special—above, or outside of, reality.
    The key to understanding such a person is lack of accountability…

READ: "It's All About Me"...Know the Type? – Dr Michael Hurd, DAILY DOSE OF REASON

Nelson Mandela's battle against socialism, unionism and interventionism

Guest post by Thomas DiLorenzo

“Workers of the world unite, keep South Africa white.”
–Slogan of early twentieth-century South African Labor Unions

“South Africa’s apartheid is not the corollary of free-market or capitalist forces.
 Apartheid is the result of anti-capitalistic or socialistic efforts to
subvert the operation of market (capitalistic) forces.”
–Walter E. Williams, South Africa’s War Against Capitalism

The international socialist movement has long attempted to associate another kind of socialist movement – the former South African Apartheid laws – as some kind of abuse of capitalism.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  Government-imposed discrimination against black South Africans was instigated by white labor unions associated with various Marxist and communist movements.  It was a pervasive system of government regulation, regimentation and control.  This of course is the exact opposite of free-market capitalism.

It was this form of massive government interventionism that the late Nelson Mandela battled against in his youth, and for which he was imprisoned for twenty-seven years by the South Africa government. 

What Was South African “Apartheid”?

Two books are indispensable to understanding the system of government-imposed, institutionalized discrimination against South African blacks known as “Apartheid.”  They are The Colour Bar by William H. Hutt, and South Africa’s War Against Capitalism by Walter E. Williams.  Both were published before the final collapse of Apartheid.

The origins of institutionalized discrimination against South African blacks were in the violent, Marxist-inspired white labor union movement (which had American ties) of the early twentieth century.  One of the first leaders of this movement, as Hutt describes, was one W. H. Andrews, who formed a chapter of the International Socialist League and who became the first secretary of the Communist Party of South Africa.  He championed the use of violence and terrorism to “protect” white workers from competition from blacks.  This union movement eventually became joined at the hip with the South African government so as to use the coercive powers of government (which can be far more violent and terroristic than mere unions alone) to deprive South African blacks of economic opportunity.

The first “Colour Bar Act,” as they were known, was the 1911 Mines and Works Act, which listed numerous jobs that could not legally be performed by blacks.  South African capitalistsopposed this law because they wanted to be able to hire employees in a free market.  In such a market, the generally lower-skilled and less-educated black workers (less skilled because of inferior educational opportunities as well as racism) could indeed find employment, albeit at a lower, entry-level wage than more experienced and skilled white workers.  The unions’ main goal was to deprive “the capitalist class,” which they harshly condemned, of this opportunity to hire black workers.  As Hutt explained, what the general secretary of the white workers’ labor union opposed was “the desire of the capitalist class to achieve economies by bringing better-remunerated and more responsible work within the reach of the Africans.”

The Mines and Works Act of 1926 was the result of “the combination of socialism and racism” brought about by the ruling Nationalist party, a socialist political party that had formed a coalition government with the South African Labour Party.  The lynchpin of this law was known as “the rate for the job,” a law that mandated minimum wages that precluded thousands of black workers from offering to become employed at entry-level wages, thereby depriving them of employment opportunity altogether.  This of course is the effect of minimum-wage laws anywhere and everywhere.   As Hutt wrote, the law “had the effect of preventing the entry of subordinate races or classes into the protected field.”

A 1922 Apprenticeship Act saw to it that only whites could attain apprenticeships in numerous trades, with apprenticeship being a prerequisite for employment.  When South African blacks attempted to bypass all these socialistic, protectionist labor laws by becoming entrepreneurs and starting their own business enterprises, the union-dominated South African government issued Obama-style “directives” or executive orders forbidding the opening of any black-owned businesses,  “even in African urban areas.”  There was also a system of “job reservations” where hundreds of jobs were “reserved” for white workers only.

There were also pervasive separate-and-unequal laws and regulations affecting just about every institution in South African society.  Inter-racial marriage was outlawed, as was sexual intercourse between whites and non-whites.  These all of course had nothing whatsoever to do with capitalism or markets or a free society and were entirely the work of the dark hand of statism.  As Walter Williams concluded in South Africa’s War Against Capitalism, “The whole ugly history of apartheid has been an attack on free markets and the rights of individuals, and a glorification of centralized government power.”

Thomas DiLorenzo is professor of economics at Loyola College in Maryland. This article is excerpted from a post first first appearing at LewRockwell.Com.

Posted with Blogsy

Mandela was no saint [update 2]

Nelson Mandela was no saint. 

Not even Bishop Desmond Tutu thought of him that way, “guffawing at the idea that Mandela was anything so dry, hollow and uninteresting.”

He took up “armed struggle” against the South African state that denied him rights based on his race—becoming the leader of the armed faction of the ANC that emerged after the Sharpville massacre to carry out indiscriminate bombings against innocent South Africans. The Church Street bombing alone, carried out under his successor in the role Oliver Tambo, killed 19 people, and injured many more.

Mandela himself was not in prison for giving out too many hugs. He started a guerrilla army, and to the end of his days he never renounced the violence he started, and then inspired.

In power he remained a member of the South African communist party. He declared the Cuban revolution “a source of inspiration to all freedom-loving people.” He opposed moves against the likes of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, who was a longtime ANC donor (“It is our duty to give support to the brother leader” he said). It took years of Mugabe’s murderous mayhem to finally earn Mandela’s mild condemnation. He closed his eyes to the AIDs/HIV pandemic that killed millions of his citizens, to the crime spree that made South Africa the murder capital of the world, and to the corruption that littered his administration

Mandela was no saint.

There was one thing however for which he should always be revered: Instead of taking revenge when he took the presidency, he took up restraint.  And that wholly unexpected move became the balm thrown over the iniquities of the past that allowed the new rainbow nation to avoid the thunder clouds that could have destroyed it.

In comparison with other politicians, in Africa and beyond, he stands out for his self-restraint. As free South Africa’s first president, he volunteered for only a single term in office. Look just next door, to Zimbabwe, for a striking contrast: Its near-despotic leader, Robert Mugabe, is now in his fourth, disastrous, decade as ruler.

South Africa when Mandela left prison was scarred by apartheid, and thoughts of revenge were rife. Every other African country had collapsed after independence, and expectations were little different over this new regime. An African bloodletting as savage as the Balkan slaughter looked possible—with all the generations of further hatred at which the Balkan adversaries themselves proved so adept at nursing.

Instead, he began his rule very differently. Persuaded by China’s leaders to change the Soviet-style economics he still embraced when leaving prison, he allowed “South Africa’s state-run economy to open up and flourish.” Or at least to have that chance.

Virtually on election day, he began by inviting buy-in over a new constitution from his new opponents. And he cemented this far-seeing wisdom with a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which simply sought out the truth instead of seeking retribution, thereby inviting those who should be embittered by the tyranny and outright atrocities of the past to put it all behind them and live in peace.  It worked.

So instead of bloodshed, there was a peaceful handover and handshakes between former adversaries. This astonishing result began with and was made possible by Mandela’s own exercise of restraint.

His Truth and Reconciliation Commission was both a masterstroke, and a model. What it made possible was in its own way as symbolic as the day Ulysses S. Grant shook hands with Robert E. Lee on the steps of Appomattox Courthouse after Lee had fought for five years in defence of black slavery; or the Queen shaking hands with former IRA Commander Martin McGuinness in Belfast; as the desire for peaceful coexistence in Chile after the fall of Pinochet, instead of the bloody retribution that might have happened there (well portrayed in Ariel Dorfman’s 1990 play Death & the Maiden;  as the end of conflict we can only hope one day inspires those nursing grievances in Palestine.  Inspiring it was the understanding, or the hope, that as long as right is finally recognised and both sides can agree, then in the long term peace and prosperity is far better all round for everyone than years, decades, generations of war and conflict and further horror—and that even shaking hands with murderers, on both sides, might be worth it for the sake of what peace can achieve.

As former Australian Foreign Minister Gareth Evans put so well,

Without Nelson Mandela, South Africa’s apartheid nightmare eventually would have come to an end… But, without Mandela’s towering moral and political leadership, the transition would have been long, ugly, and bloody beyond measure…
    When it comes to national leadership at a time of fragility and transition, so much seems to depend on the luck of the draw. Will a country find itself with a Milošević or a Mugabe; an Atatürk or an Arafat; a Rabin who can see and seize the moment, and change course, or someone who never will?
    South Africa was lucky – almost miraculously so – to have had Nelson Mandela. His memory will be cherished for as long as history continues to be written…

That’s probably a far better epitaph than sainthood.

PS: And the kerfuffle about Minto going to Nelson Mandela’s state funeral?  You might not like John Minto any more than I do but, for goodness’ sake, it’s Mandela’s funeral, and he did. When told in prison of Minto’s mob closing down the Springboks’’s match against Waikate, he reportedly said it “felt like the sun had come out.”  So undoubtedly Nelson would have wanted him there.  And even Trevor Richards, if he can be found. It’s not like there won’t be room for them in a stadium that seats 100,000.

If the taxpayer is going to send other assorted numpties on our behalf, then why not them. If Minto going bothers you that much, write to the Parliamentary Travel Office and ask them to make the ticket one way.

UPDATE 1: More from around the traps:

* A local leftwinger with a history in the anti-apartheid movement bewails all the wailing here at home: “I  haven’t seen such an outpouring of mush since the death of Princess Diana.  While Mandela’s prison sentence made him a personage of rather more gravitas than the royal airhead, the level of grief over the death of someone hardly anyone in New Zealand ever even met is as apparently strange.  In both cases, it seems that much of the public has become extremely emotionally invested.  Indeed, it seems that people unwilling or unprepared to fight for anything themselves, have invested in these folks qualities and achievements which they admire and perhaps feel run counter to a more market-driven way of life (compassion, kindness, fairness, principle).  But this kind of emotional investment tells us more about the investors, and contemporary New Zealand society, than it does about Mandela (or Diana Spencer).”
Mandela and New Zealand: our ‘Diana moment?’ - Philip Ferguson, LIBERATION

* “Much will be written about Mandela in the coming days, but little of it will deal directly with the Apartheid system, particularly its economic aspects. Apartheid is widely misunderstood as a system based purely on racial prejudice, while it was actually a more complex mix of economic controls (primarily, restrictions on capital ownership and movements of labour) and racial separatism — what Tom Hazlett calls “socialism with a racist face.” Apartheid’s political support came primarily from working-class (white) Afrikaners and their labour unions eager to suppress competition from unskilled black labour. As Hazlett notes: ”The conventional view is that apartheid was devised by affluent whites to suppress poor blacks. In fact, the system sprang from class warfare and was largely the creation of white workers struggling against both the black majority and white capitalists.”
Mandela and the Economics of Apartheid – Peter Klein, CIRCLE BASTIAT

"One of Mandela’s greatest achievements was to wean [the ANC] away from the ruthless hard‑line Marxism that had long been such an influential part of its ideology..."
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UPDATE 2:  Useful idiots John Pilger and John Minto were not opposed to racism, they were opposed to capitalism—and used (and still use) Marxist wedge tactics against it. What were the anti-tour protests about for Minto? A chance to drive a wedge into the system using race.

John Minto was one of the heroes of my formative years says the Poneke blog's author in 2008 [hat tip David Farrar].
    At the time, I thought Minto was driven by the same kind of repugnance of the racist apartheid system that motivated the opposition of many other New Zealanders. Apartheid was a stain on humanity.
    In 1995, Mandela visited New Zealand for the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting being held in Auckland. He was mobbed in the streets everywhere he went. He was a hero of almost everyone of my generation and of almost everyone who had marched against the Springboks 14 years before. The one anti-tour protester to whom he was not a hero was a profound surprise. I went to a meeting Mandela attended at the St Matthews in the City church in Auckland. To my astonishment, and dismay, John Minto, who was there, hectored the great man for not kicking private enterprise and transnational companies out of South Africa after apartheid ended. A bewildered Mandela asked Minto how he expected people to find work if their employers were banished. It was at that moment I realised Minto was not driven by opposition to racism but by opposition to the entire capitalist system. [Emphasis in the original.]

Pilger was equally outraged at Comrade Mandela’s backsliding. Writing in the Marxist Counterpunch, he recounts asking Mandela in a 1995 interview

why the pledges he and the ANC had given on his release from prison in 1990 had not been kept. The liberation government, Mandela had promised, would take over the apartheid economy, including the banks – and “a change or modification of our views in this regard is inconceivable”.  Once in power, the party’s official policy to end the impoverishment of most South Africans, the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP), was abandoned, with one of his ministers boasting that the ANC’s politics were Thatcherite.
    “You can put any label on it if you like,” he replied. “ …but, for this country, privatisation is the fundamental policy.”
    “That’s the opposite of what you said in 1994.”
    “You have to appreciate that every process incorporates a change.”

You have to divide by ten to account for Pilger’s inveterate lying, but asked that same question on another occasion, Mandela replied that he failed to see how he could help his people by banishing all their employers.

If the story is true that it was Chinese leaders who turned around Mandela’s anti-Soviet economics, they clearly did a good job.

Can’t remember

When a Prime Minister’s memory and grasp of affairs disappears, isn’t it time to turn him in?

Sure, like a befuddled oldster he has a long history of losing his memory. Unlike every other adult in the country at the time, he couldn’t remember where he was during the Springbok tour.  When he was promising “significant” tax cuts during the 2008 election, forgetting there’d just been a global financial crash, he couldn’t remember that his former employer Merrill Lynch—where he’d earned his fortune—had been swept away in the destructive tide.

He couldn’t remember when he first heard about Kim Dotcom; couldn’t remember a briefing about raiding his house, a cafeteria visit, or cracking a joke about it at the time; who he talked to, or not, about Sky City’s casino application; who he talked to, or not, about Mediaworks’ taxpayer bailout; who he talked to, or not, about how he voted on  the drinking age.

And this week, at the moment, he’s saying  he “can’t remember” the name of the senior American official who flew into Wellington last week in a liveried US government plane, or even if  he’d seen a piece of paper with the name on it.

Can’t remember.

It’s like a little child lying about things he’d rather his mother not know, and hoping she doesn’t notice. But it’s still lying—and if it’s not lying, then it’s incompetence.

Pictures of the Queen

This is the first and probably only time a picture of the Queen will appear on this blog. It appears here because she’s shaking hands with a murderer.

Despite well-argued protestations to the contrary, it is symbolic—a symbol of the long-awaited and much-appreciated peace northern Ireland has enjoyed for a nearly a decade, and which everyone involved wants to continue.

A sign that the English Lion can lie down long term with today’s Irish Republican lamb.

Wonderful!

But let’s not get too carried away with it.

Is it as symbolic on its own scale as, say, the day Ulysses S. Grant shook hands with Robert E. Lee on the steps of Appomattox Courthouse after Lee had fought for five years in defence of black slavery? No, because the issue of right and wrong is much cloudier with McGuinness and Elizabeth.

Is it as symbolic on its own scale as the day ending the Second World War when the surrender of the Japanese was taken on board the battleship Missouri ?  Not really. The peacetime attack on Pearl Harbour was far more murderous than anything McGuinness’s boys ever attempted, fortunately, and the picture of peace breaking out after three years of slaughter was much more widely welcomed.

But it is symbolic. Irish Republicans have still never forgiven the British for Ireland’s brutal seven-hundred year occupation; for the Potato Famine; for partition and the oppression of the Catholic minority in the Six Counties; for the murder of civilians in Derry and elsewhere during the Troubles. These are  reasons enough to bear ill will. But the former commander of the IRA is shaking hands with the figurehead of everything British.

There are just as many well-rehearsed reasons for that figurehead to bear ill will towards McGuinness—the murder organised by McGuinness of her husband’s uncle Louis Mountbatten being just one of many of which you will all be aware. Yet she still shook hands—even if her husband couldn’t.

What the handshake symbolises then is that those things are in the past. There’s no likelihood of then happening again. That the peace begun when the IRA laid down their arms after the atrocity of 9/11—laid them down in part in the realisation they would never have the stomach for that scale of atrocity themselves—that peace has continued, its benefits are recognised, and the participants wish it to continue.

And being people of honour that desire for harmony is best symbolised with a handshake.

It’s true that one reason they can shake hands is because both the causes of Irish Republicanism and British Imperialism look somewhat quaint today. This is not the age of Parnell and Palmerston. The world has moved on, passing by what seemed issues of great moment generations ago. So in truth  it’s a rather moth-eaten English Lion preparing to lie down with an emasculated Irish lamb.

Still, whatever they think themselves these two can only shake hands because their constituents support it. Perhaps their supporters too have come to understand that it matters less what colour flag you have flying over your head than what that flag stands for—and these days both the Union and Irish flags stand for much the same brand of failing mixed-economy morass.

In the end I think it is a good picture.  It’s one of the better things the English Queen has done. I’d like to think it represents that same understanding that occurs at the end of wars like the two cited above; that animated the desire for peaceful coexistence in Chile after the fall of Pinochet rather than bloody retribution; that impelled Nelson Mandela’s Truth Commission after the ousting of South African apartheid; that we can only hope one day inspires those nursing grievances in Palestine –that as long as right is recognised and both sides can agree then in the long term peace is far better for everyone than war—and then even shaking hands with murderers might be worth it for the sake of the peace achieved.

It’s a shame the Queen’s husband couldn’t see his way clear to understanding that.