column – praag.org

Obama has placed the US press under surveillance

by Ilana Mercer

No wonder the language being deployed to describe the forlorn Associated Press reporters is something redolent of a jilted lover.

The AP has been violated by its beloved Barack Obama and his gang-bangers. The news agency has gone from sexting, so to speak, with the president, to being snooped on by him.

Politico offered readers an endearingly intimate glimpse, “Inside the AP,” where the flaccid folks were overcome by feelings of “fear” and “determination.” Nevertheless, they had not lost their resolve and were proceeding with “heads-down determination.”

What made The Beloved and his dream team turn to rough play?

According to the (idiomatic) mainstream, Obama’s Justice Department had been monitoring AP phone lines in D.C., in the Hartford and New York bureaus, and in Congress. Subpoenaed too were the phone logs, “credit card receipts, airplane records and other digital information” belonging to individual AP editors and reporters. All this in violation of Fourth Amendment protections; without presenting a judge with evidence of probable cause and absent a search warrant (all SOP, or standard operating procedure, at the Transportation Security Administration).

The Justice Department in the person of Attorney General Eric Holder has claimed, comically, to have been looking to plug a “very, very, very, serious leak.” Perhaps “the most serious” since the AG started his prosecutorial career in 1976.

A pesky detail has eluded all those invincibly stupid special interests who’re piping up for the privacy of the press, as opposed to fighting for the privacy of all Americans.

Have the various tele-lawyers, the director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and protesting members of the House Judiciary Committee forgotten the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) and the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, whose provisions were extended until Dec. 31, 2017, by the people’s representatives?

There is nothing new about warrantless wiretapping – other than that the American people haven’t been particularly exercised about them. They’ve trusted Uncle Sam to go about this activity judiciously.

Order lIana Mercer’s brilliant polemical work, “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa”

Peeping Sam had promised, after all, that covert surveillance would never be executed against “United States persons.” Were a “United States person” to fall under suspicion, he or she would not be subjected to surveillance without “judicial and congressional oversight,” puled the same perverts.

It’s not as if the National Security Agency (NSA) under George W. Bush was not accused of bypassing the courts to spy on the 43rd president’s many critics. It was! Sideshow “O,” however, has done Bush one better. Obama is using the FISA provisions against “friendlies.”

George Bush, you’ll recall (or maybe not), also authorized the President’s Surveillance Program (PSP). Subsumed within the PSP are activities whose scope has yet to be disclosed. Attorney General Holder – at the behest of President Obama, no doubt – is expanding the remits of the Surveillance State, as did “W” before him.

The incontinent coverage of the AP outrage has a delusional quality. Contra those whose job it is to feign indignation on TV – America is not a free country. Media convulsions notwithstanding, the government is reading over your shoulder – has been doing so for some time. It can spy on Americans without breaking the law.

It is perfectly permissible for the state to monitor you, me or The Other Guy, without a “perfunctory nod to due process and legal restraint.” In other words, without a court order.

National Journal is agreed, writing that “the Obama administration technically broke no rules.” Companies that give up this information to the government have “immunity,” which has been “built into a 2008 revision of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.”

Here’s the other rub: FISA permits surveillance sans court order, explains Wikipedia, for “the period of one year provided it is only for foreign intelligence.”

And provided the president has authorized the fishing expedition.

In my understanding of the impossibly complex and cancerous Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, Obama has to have authorized the dragnet that was cast at the Associated Press.

‘Apartheid’ as metonym for Afrikaners

In a multiethnic society like South Africa, groups will always blame each other for their lack of wealth, education, political power, and so on. In this respect, SA is no different to Malaysia, Sri Lanka, Northern Ireland, Belgium or anywhere else.

Apartheid is a national obessession. To some extent it has imparted some sort of inverse identity to the so-called New South Africa where people wonder whether we are really the 51st state of the USA, the southern province of Zimbabwe or part of the British Empire. Of course, one of the first steps after 27 April 1994 was to rejoin the Commonwealth so in a sense that made many people feel “whole” again.

Apartheid is, however, also a metonym. Being an Afrikaans word, sometimes the only Afrikaans word that many people know, it stands for “Afrikaners”. A statement like “apartheid destroyed black wealth” decodes as “Afrikaners destroyed black wealth”. The massive participation of Afrikaners in education between 1948 and 1994, mainly because the angelic English owned all the mines and industries, may therefore be seen as “de-educating South Africa”. At one point 50% of teachers in English-language white schools were also Afrikaners. Soon these “deprived” Engelse will be blaming Afrikaners for not having won more Nobel prizes for science, not having founded Google or Microsoft or not inventing the Ipod. Instead, they were “forced” to read Somer by CM van den Heever or some Afrikaans poetry in their second-language class, which “dehumanised” them.

Of course, Afrikaner teachers also taught millions of people science and mathematics, but as some minister once said: “Verwoerd made it too difficult, because he was a racist.” Fortunately Kader Asmal introduced “mathematical literacy” which is is the non-racist version.

As Paul Berkowitz so eloquently argues in How do you solve a problem like Apartheid?: “In the end, perception usually trumps truth.” Someone will have to be blamed for the fact that the average black South African does not enjoy the same standard of living as the average citizen of Luxembourg or Norway. Nor does the average white, of course, but that is besides the point.

Apartheid, like Satan, still lurks within dark corners of South Africa, usually on farms or in Afrikaans schools or within the homes of poorer Afrikaners living on smallholdings such as in Muldersdrift or Kameeldrif.

Within the metonymic logic of South African ethnic discourse, eliminating apartheid is easy: you have just have to eliminate Afrikaners. This can be done in three ways: putting them all on a boat to Australia, assimilating them completely, or by killing them en masse. Or maybe one by one, family by family.

In Muldersdrift, Kameeldrif, on farms and even in the cities, the clarion call to “eliminate the last vestiges of apartheid” is being responded to with vicious enthusiasm. Remember that Lord Milner or one of his contemporaries also used those terms on the eve of the Anglo-Boer War: “eliminating the last vestiges of Afrikanerism from South Africa”. Afterwards 500 000 British soldiers and 100 000 armed blacks put the Boer women and children in concentration camps and burned everything to the ground, homes, barns, even churches. In fact, the British were the only Western people to have burnt churches in the modern era.

According to historians, it took Germany 120 years to recover from the Thirty Years War (1618-1648) when a similar “scorched earth policy” had been followed on its soil. However, no-one – least of all the omniscient apartheid theorists of today – has ever argued that the Anglo-Boer had any economic effect whatsoever. On the contrary, the economic effect is generally seen as positive, in having put control of the economy firmly in English hands. Confiscated Boer livestock and grain were sold to the British army by English companies whose names have changed since, some of which are today listed on the JSE. “Apartheid capital” therefore metamorphosed into “English entrepreneurial flair”. This was the first form of BEE, or British Economic Empowerment. Arguably, the current form of BEE still benefits bankers and stockbrokers more than it does blacks, because these rake in huge fees for enriching a few high-profile blacks.

After the war, irate letter writers from Natal castigated Milner and others for not having killed all the Boers and “cleansing the country for England”. That would have been one way of nipping apartheid in the bud, as it were.

But it is never too late and we can all agree that apartheid is being eliminated every day, whether metaphorically by erasing Afrikaans names of towns or streets, or physically by terminating the bearers of the disease. There is an uncanny resemblance between the gentlemanly style of the British in 1900-1902 and the methods of the current crop of freedom fighters, who appreciate that children, especially girl children, represent the next generation and it therefore makes sense to eliminate them first. The names of Alyssa Botha and Danielle Esterhuizen come to mind, but there are many others too.

The ANC’s second revolution (okay, ‘transition’) against whites

by Dan Roodt

South Africa, like Cuba, is the last outpost of communism. Elsewhere in the world, experiments in collective farming and nationalisation have been abandoned as the grim mistakes of nineteenth-century radicalism, issuing forth from the bearded Karl Marx, scribbling away in the British Library.

However, behind Karl Marx there was a capitalist, Friedrich Engels, who bankrolled him and actually paid him to pour forth his books and pamphlets that would sow discord and resentment for more than a century.

The ANC, like many of the “tenured radicals” at South African universities, loves Karl Marx. The class struggle is their favourite nursery tale. And if you could add that the capitalists are actually white, then it’s no longer Little Red Ridinghood; it’s Little Red Soldiers marching from one conference to the next.

Unlike most journalists and newspaper pundits, I have actually read the ANC’s document on “the second transition”. Not so long ago, the ruling party – maybe we should capitalise “Party” as is communist practice – entertained us on the notion that South Africa was going through a two-stage revolution. Classical marxist theory holds that all of human history advances through a succession of “epochs”, culminating in “the most advanced stage, the classless society, or communism”. That is when people start queuing for bread, potatoes, shoes or waiting ten years to buy a two-stroke-engined car with nineteen-fifties technology.

At one point Cuba was going back to the bicycle. Not that I have anything against bicycles; on the contrary. Quite a few of our BEE moguls and traffic cops taking bribes alongside the roads, bulging out of their blue uniforms, could do with some exercise.

But to go back to stone age economic principles – “sharing” things around the camp fire – is a great leap backwards, if you will pardon the pun. In fact, Mao’s “great leap forward” was another communist cliché floating around the ANC’s Midrand conference yesterday.

According to Marx and Engels, there is first a political revolution, alternately called a “bourgeois revolution”, before the real transformation, the social revolution, begins. In the case of Russia, the “capitalist epoch” lasted only a few months, from February to October 1917, but we need not detain ourselves with such finer details. In ANC parlance, the transition of 1994 when De Klerk fired all his generals and handsupped before the Party’s militia, Umkhonto we Sizwe, was the political or “National Democratic Revolution”.

Until now, the second or social revolution has been chomping at the bit within the Luthuli House stables, ready to propel its bright-eyed, sushi-chomping jockeys into the apocalyptic dawn.

According to Jacob Zuma yesterday, the enemy, the class enemy, to put it more politically correctly, seems to be so-called white males. South African marxists have always confounded race and class. Mbeki, the great black marxist – or should I use the fashionable euphemism, “progressive” – intellectual, used to rave quite frequently about the white ruling class while he was still president. Or maybe Mbeki was just too habitually drunk to realise that putting yourself forward as a victim while you are wearing the crown represents a colossal contradiction.

However, not so long ago I read that 75% of white males over 50 were self-employed. That is only logical as BEE and affirmative action have already swept South African corporate life, not to mention the civil service and municipalities. Most municipalities are now all-black, with whites actually doing the cleaning. Our municipalities must have the most highly educated cleaning staff in the world; apparently some of the people wielding brooms and mops have postgraduate qualifications. But they happen to be white, which is a fatal handicap in the Republic of South Africa.

Younger white males are hanging on in the SME’s where racial headcounts are pursued with lesser fervour. In fact, a survey that I found on the internet yesterday showed that one in four white males of all ages was actually self-employed in 2006. By now the figure must be far higher.

So maybe the ANC, in its racial-marxist zeal, pursuing the Second Coming – wasn’t Mbeki also fond of quoting his favourite Xhosa poet, William Butler Yeats? – is barking up the wrong tree, “full of passionate intensity”.

One of the few people I mostly agree with in South Africa, is liberal historian Hermann Giliomee. I think that is because we both look at the current situation from the vantage point of history. Not… fantasy. He recently told me that he was just glad to have severed all ties with universities. In fact, the universities have become little ANC kindergartens, producing the type of pompous, quasi-marxist “papers” of which the ANC’s latest policy document is but a carbon copy.

We have to acknowledge that race, not class, is what the South African revolution is all about. That is why the white male bogeyman will be brandished, even if most of us white males eke out a measly living doing odd jobs on our computers in SOHOs. For those less familiar with American acronyms, that is “small office home office”. While the BMW-driving, black bourgeoisie are feasting out there, living it up in five-star hotels and bleeding this country dry.

To understand black identity, we have to look at America and a book such as Jared Taylor’s recent White Identity – racial consciousness in the 21st century.

In a nutshell: whites, with the exception of a few so-called “right-wing Afrikaners”, no longer have an identity. Blacks, on the other hand, are completely lacking in any European class consciousness. Their only consciousness is one of race. Not being very culturally assertive and preferring English as their means of communication, their only identity is being black, which may be further enhanced by hating whites.

Ultimately, the second revolution is not about poverty, equality, redressing past wrongs or any of the usual clichés offered by the ANC. It is about the black elite affirming its own identity.

Like Narcissus, they are looking at themselves in the mirror, whispering: “I am black, so black.” All other consequences flow from that existential premise and experience.

When I was a student, some of the campus radicals used to call it “black-being-in-the-world”. It had a kind of Heideggerian ring to it.

South Africa is going to pay a very high price for that singular mode of being.