by Albert Brenner
The bewildered herd must be governed by a specialized class whose interests reach beyond the locality. (Walther Lippmann)
Knowledge is power… and power is money. In order to make big money, you need big money.
The first big fund to invest in Naspers was Comerica Foreign Equity. This fund is run by World Asset Management, the investment arm of HSBC. This bank has its main (private) office on Tortola, the largest of the British Virgin Islands.
And guess where Naspers’s investment arm, MIH Holdings Limited, is located? Yes, in the exact same street of this tax-haven of the (mostly) British elite. Just think about the above every time you pay a small fortune to watch M-Net, SuperSport, DSTV, et cetera.
Now, HSBC is the world’s 3rd largest bank with $2.36 trillion in assets. Formerly known as Hong Kong Shanghai Bank Corporation, HSBC is one of the most unscrupulous banks ever. It has been the cash cow of the British elite since its inception as a repository for British Crown opium proceeds accrued during the Chinese Opium Wars.
Armed with a royal charter, Lord Shelbourne started the Chinese opium trade in 1783 with merchants from the East India Company. Shelbourne’s main spin-doctor was Adam Smith. The latter worked for the East India Company, which was formed from the slave-trading Levant Company and later became known as Chatham House. The latter is home to the Royal Institute for International Affairs (RIIA), the second most influential think tank in the world.
The RIIA was founded in 1920. Its American sister institute, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), was founded one year later. Walther Lippmann, the Pulitzer-Prize essayist, journalist and mass-media genius was one of the founding members of the CFR. But more about him later. Needless to say, these two organizations, the RIIA and CFR, work hand in hand.
Now, the CFR is run by some of the best brains in America. They are truly exceptional people. They basically run the State Department, the CIA and are connected to nearly everybody that matters in the business and academia in America, and globally.
The CIA operates under the cover of various organizations when it comes to furthering America’s strategic and economic interests. The Ford Foundation is one of the main fronts of the CIA (i.e. the CFR).
In June 1985, this foundation hosted the first ever meeting between the ANC and the Broederbond (i.e. the NP).
The conference took place in Glen Cove, Long Island on June 1st. The main players were Professor JP De Lange (Head of the Broederbond) and ANC officials, Thabo Mbeki, Mac Maharaj and Seretse Choadi.
This meeting did not produce the results the CFR were hoping for. So they summoned the (economic) artillery, David Rockefeller.
Along with being a CFR director for 46 years, David Rockefeller served as chairman of the board from 1970-85 and was the organization’s honorary chairman till 2001. During this time, he was also chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank.
On 31st July 1985, Chase Manhattan decided not to roll over South Africa’s debt. Apparently Pik Botha’s traitor heart nearly stopped beating: “I will never forget the night of July 31 when [Minister of Finance] Barend du Plessis phoned me … [He said]: ‘Pik, I must tell you that the country is facing inevitable bankruptcy … The process has started.'” (source).
The rest is history.
So what has this got to do with Naspers? Well, it just shows that Naspers is just another appendage of interest groups beyond the borders of South Africa. In other words, it does not serve the interests of South Africans. But then, neither do other media giants in South Africa.
Caxton/CTP’s chairman in the early 1990s was Van Zyl Slabbert, who also became the chairman of the Johannesburg Stock Exchange. Slabbert was the useful idiot of CFR member George Soros. The latter, through his Open Society Foundation, sponsored Slabbert and super-useful idiot Max Du Preez… especially with his anti-Afrikaner Vrye Weekblad newspaper.
So, every time you hear about the Davos Afrikaner called Koos Bekker, the big boss of the 33rd largest media company in the world called Naspers (worth R344 billion or $34,88 billion) just know that he is just another witting puppet on an Anglo-American string.
He is just like those rich Boer farmers who became hensoppers during the Anglo-Boer War… selling out their own people purely for profit. Nothing more, nothing less.
Meaning that the “Who is Naspers?” question is not really that interesting. The really interesting question is the “why” behind Naspers.
Answering this question will take us through the wonderful worlds of Baudrillard (e.g. see my article Mandela’s Empire), Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, the Washington Consensus, Bretton Woods, Walther Lippmann’s Public Opinion… all the way back to Edmund Husserl`s phenomenology (e.g. see my article Why Mandela).
It is a fact that people can only make sense of Reality through “ideal meanings”. Those ideal “pictures in your head” prevent you, more often than not, to “… come to judgment by critical thinking” (Walther Lippmann).
Journalism is “intelligence work” and journalists are a link between policymakers and the public, according to Lippmann.
Meaning that journalists (and the media companies that employ them, e.g. Naspers) always sanitize the Truth at the behest of their pay-masters…
(to be continued)
