Tag: Dublin

Rugby and the Afrikaner

pienaar+mandelaby Albert Brenner

You`ll find him sauntering through the streets of many a city in the West – especially in Commonwealth capitals like London, Dublin and Sydney.

And in the cities and towns of South Africa he is a common sight… the lone big Afrikaner man wearing the Springbok jersey with rightful pride. It is as if wearing the jersey of the national rugby team makes him the real Springbok player, that winner – if only for a moment.

And who can blame him? The Springboks – those gloriously sculptured athletes of a physical game perfectly suited for the rough-and-tumble Afrikaner man – are legends. They have always been one of the top two teams on the planet. It is a tremendous source of pride… for winners they are!

By wearing the Springbok jersey in public, Afrikaner men are finally receiving that positive recognition, that international ego-boost, which they have been denied ever since being blamed – by their peers in the West – for all the woes besetting blacks in South Africa.

It is, in fact, the only source of pride the Afrikaner is allowed to nurture… the sole recognition s/he may claim. For they find themselves in a socio-cultural and politico-economic environment that still regard them, their whole being, only in terms of Apartheid. Not unlike post-WWII Germans, the Afrikaner has, literally, been stripped of all his achievements – his very historical being – before Apartheid.

His unique language, Afrikaans – the third youngest Germanic language on the planet – is still being criminalized and marginalized as the “language of the oppressor” … and derided as the uncool “dumb Dutchman” language by arrogant native English-speakers in South Africa.

His legendary military prowess – as, once again, displayed in the Angolan War – has also been criminalized. Those brave young Afrikaner men – many of them 18-years old at the time – who helped win the Cold War for the West have been vilified as nothing but cruel Apartheid “killers” by the black-run ANC government… which actually rooted for the other side.

His remarkable performance and achievement in having built South Africa into the richest, most powerful and most developed country in Africa have been all but wiped from History by the black government and white liberals in the West – simply because they assume that South Africa`s blacks would have done so any case, had it not been for the “evil” Afrikaner’s Apartheid “intervention”.

Not even to speak of the Afrikaner’s incredible guts and determination for having literally pulled himself, without any help, from the ashes left by Lord Milner’s cowardly scorched-earth “warfare” during the Anglo-Boer War. A war in which the Afrikaner was outnumbered 10/1, a war that left 33 000 of his women and children dead in British concentration camps – and reduced the Afrikaner to the poorest white nation on the planet at the time.

In short; the Afrikaner’s whole historical being has suffered the same fate as his farms during Milner’s attempted genocide a century ago… except this time round it is his mind that has been scorched!

But this doesn`t bother the international community in the least. And most disturbing of all; it does not seem to bother the majority of the modern Afrikaner. Why? I mean, how come a unique people with an incredible history simply forget, as if nothing has happened?

Well, this is where rugby comes in. The recognition the (majority of the) Afrikaner gets through rugby seemingly suffices to keep him happy… even amid all the barbaric chaos in Mandelatopia.

The search for recognition (thymos) is one of the most powerful drives in the human psyche. So powerful that it has even been postulated as the motor of history, by Francis Fukuyama. His (rather trite) book, The End of History and the Last Man, had many a Western leader in hysterical glee, because it provided a utopian underpinning/validation for neo-liberalism, after the Cold War against Communism had been won.

Be that as it may; all of us crave recognition – some more (and on a larger scale) than others. The puberty-wing on the boot of a Ford Escort may be that thing which strokes your ego the most, or a beach house in Hermanus, or a Dr. title before your name, or a multi-national company that gets you invites to Davos (like Kdoos Bekker of Naspers). Whatever the size and shape of your ego, you will go through hell and high water to have it stroked. And when it finally gets stroked, you are that winner… you have craved to be for so long.

And that is exactly why Afrikaners are willing to live with a scorched mind in a lost kingdom run by “noble” savages. For winning in rugby is all the recognition he (thinks he) needs, because just like the Springboks he has never really lost. He is still the “Baas of the Plaas” in his mind.

The dastardly Old Empire Brits won the Anglo-Boer War, but they never succeeded in breaking the Afrikaner’s spirit. The Afrikaner won the Angolan War outright, even though they lost the peace, thanks to the treachery of their half-wit leaders. The Afrikaner never lost their “kingdom” to god-Mandela; they simply gave it to him – like the Springbok jersey they gave him at the closing ceremony of the 1995 RWC.

All in all, Afrikaners, as individuals, are still (on average) winners in Mandelatopia, and globally as expats – especially financially – just like their Springbok heroes and role-models.

The only problem is that rugby is a team sport, like a nation… like a civilization. Even the mighty Springboks can only remain winners, provided they play as a team. That is why fewer and fewer lone big Afrikaner men wearing Springbok jerseys will saunter pridefully through the streets of the cities of the West in the future.

Read Albert’s blog.

Lees dié rubriek in Afrikaans.

Anglo Irish Bank jokes about fleecing Irish government

Fitzgerald and Bowe
Fitzgerald and Bowe

Executives at the Anglo Irish Bank were recorded joking about how they lied to Dublin about the bank’s financial future in 2008, convincing lawmakers to invest in the failing bank with figures “picked out of my arse” – with no plans to pay them back.

John Bowe, the head of capital markets for Anglo Irish, was recorded laughing as he explained to Peter Fitzgerald, the former head of banking, how Anglo Irish had fleeced the Irish government into providing billions of euro to keep the bank solvent.

The 2008 conversation was captured by the bank’s internal recording system and published by the Irish Independent. Ireland still has yet to fully recover from the financial crisis, despite attempts to bring the country back to normalcy by way of a drastic austerity program set in motion in the four years since.

In the September 2008 conversation caught on the tape, Bowe admits he knew the €7 billion he initially asked for would not be enough to spare the bank, which was within mere days of a complete meltdown. When asked about the origin of that figure, Bowe referred to then-Anglo Irish CEO David Drumm.

“Just as Drummer would say, ‘picked it out of my arse,’ you know,” he said. “I mean, look, what we did was we basically said: ‘What is the amount we can securitize over the next six months? And basically say to them: ‘Look our problem here is time, it’s not our ability to create the liquidity, the enemy is time here.’”

Both Bowe and Fitzgerald can be heard laughing through the discussion. The tapes’ release also confirms the long-held suspicion that Irish bankers knew the initial government investments were far too small.

“Yeah and that number is seven, but the reality is that actually we need more than that,” Bowe said. “But you know, the strategy here is you pull them in, you get them to write a big check and they have to keep – they have to support their money.”

Anglo Irish has since been renamed the Irish Bank Resolution Corporation, and is still in the process of being liquidated, as the austerity-hit country awaits a high-profile court case into the collapse of the bank.

Recent estimates indicate that, all told, Irish taxpayers will have supplied Anglo Irish Bank alone with €30 billion – a massive sum for the small island nation of just over 4.5 million people.

“If they (the Central Bank) saw the enormity of it up front, they might decide they have a choice. You know what I mean? They might say the cost to the taxpayer is too high,” Bowe went on. “If it doesn’t look too big at the outset – if it looks big enough to be important, but not too big that it kind of spoils everything, then, I think you have a chance.”

“So, so it’s bridged until we can pay you back. Which is never.”

Fitzgerald is heard saying, “Yeah. They’ve got skin in the game and that is the key.”

In statements to national broadcaster RTE, the two executives denied any wrongdoing and any “strategy or intention on the part of Anglo Irish Bank to mislead the authorities.” The two men did not deny the conversation in the excerpts of the statements that RTE read out, Reuters reports.

Bowe excused his comments as “off-the-cuff” when questioned by reporters over the weekend.
Irish opposition parties called for a new probe into the banking crisis, calling the conversation “shocking to the core.”

Government officials have previously blamed an inability to establish a parliamentary committee as the reason for Dublin’s failure to hold a public inquiry.

“Any suggestion that the taxpayer was lured into bailing out Anglo Irish Bank under a false impression about the state of the bank’s financial condition is deeply disturbing and has to be fully investigated by the authorities,” said Michael McGrath, finance spokesman of Fianna Fail (The Republican Party).

Ireland has yet to criminally prosecute a single banker who helped gamble the country into an economic tailspin. Pearse Doherty, a finance spokesman for the Irish party Sinn Fein, told the Financial Times the new revelations are a perfect opportunity to reverse that trend.

“They prove conclusively that an investigation is needed into the events surrounding the bank guarantee and subsequently that the people must be prosecuted for their roles in collapsing the Irish economy,” he said. – RT