The Nobel Committee’s chairman has been removed from his post for the first time in the award’s 114-year history. He’s been criticized over a number of the panel’s controversial picks, like US president and the EU.
Ousted Chairman Thorbjoern Jagland, a former Norwegian Labor prime minister, had been in charge of the Nobel Peace Prize Committee for six years before he was voted out on Tuesday. He will remain a member of the committee, but the leading role has been passed on to the panel’s deputy chairman, Kaci Kullmann Five, a former conservative party leader.
“There’s a new committee with new people, and new people can always lead to new considerations,” Kullmann Five told journalists. “Jagland has been a good leader for the committee for six years.”
Three out of six prize winners chosen under Thorbjoern Jagland have raised controversy.
Jagland’s first year as chairman in 2009 saw the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to US President Barack Obama, who at that time had only been in office for nine months.
Obama won the prize “for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples,” while the US was engaged in two lengthy wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as heightened US drone strikes on suspected militants in Pakistan and Yemen.
The Nobel Prize Committee’s 2012 choice of the European Union as the winner of the award has also raised quite a few eyebrows. Critics pointed out Jagland’s other role as head of the European Council as a potential conflict of interest. Many argued the prize was undeserved because of the EU’s economic and foreign policy failures.
The Norwegian Nobel committee has redefined and remodeled the prize in a manner that it is not consistent with the law, critics said.
A 2010 award to Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo led to Beijing freezing diplomatic relations with Oslo.
Jagland’s removal has led to speculations over how much the prize is influenced by politics with the likes of archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa, Nelson Mandela and FW de Klerk receiving the prize.
Nobel Committee members are appointed by Norway’s parliament according to the power balance there. Rightwing parties won elections in 2013, which gave them a 3-2 majority over Labor on the Peace Prize panel.
“This can be interpreted as an attempt by the conservative government to exert more political control over the committee than has been customary,” Nobel historian Asle Sveen told AFP.
The scope of the law, which was originally intended to ban homeless people from begging on the street, has been extended to also criminalise those offering money or other help, outraging many in Oslo who believe they risked being charged simply for helping less fortunate people.
Inger Husby, from the Oslo suburb of Bøler, who frequently invites homeless people into her house, told NRK that she feared that her altruistic acts could also be deemed illegal should the bill pass as it is.
Vidar Brien-Karlsen, Secretary of State at the Ministry of Justice and member of the right-wing Progress Party said it was necessary to criminalise those aiding beggars, as the police needed authority to crack down on those running begging networks as an organised business.
“That’s because part of what we want to get rid of is actively organised. We need to give the police the legal authority to crack down on people who arrange for beggars to get here, often in large groups”.
Norway’s right-wing coalition struck a deal with the Centre Party in June last year, giving them the majority needed in parliament to bring in a begging ban.
The government has sent the bill out for consultation with a deadline of 15th of February. Under the law, organised begging would become a crime, punishable with a prison sentence of up to one year. The same punishment would apply to those aiding beggars.
A recent statement by the FW de Klerk Foundation in Cape Town after the Constitutional Court’s finding in the Renate Barnard affirmative-action case, said that “[the judgement] is, in effect, a prescription for, and validation of, harmful discrimination against millions of South African citizens for an indefinite period, on no basis other than their race – and with no reference to their individual merits, circumstances or concerns”.
Legalised “positive discrimination” against South African whites is now a fact of life, as is the growing racial nationalism of the country’s blacks. “Africa for the Africans” is the underlying slogan in South Africa, by which we must understand “African” in a racial sense. Many of South Africa’s radicalised black intellectuals and celebrities affirm that every African has the right to cross the border and settle in South Africa, but that whites “belong to Europe”.
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In essence, what black racial nationalists assert is that Afrikaners have not naturalised after 360 years in the country. This might have been dismissed as simple talk by blacks, if it were not supported by the courts and the political system in South Africa which effectively exclude the Afrikaner minority of all political power and influence. Outside the Western Cape, there is not even a single municipality where Afrikaners have any say in how their taxes are spent, let alone a province or the central government.
Objectively speaking, Afrikaners have been disarmed, disenfranchised, culturally marginalised and now find themselves in the position summed up by the Canadian political scientist, Heribert Adam, as an “internal diaspora” in South Africa. Being an internal diaspora is but a few nuances removed from having the status of internal refugees.
Since 1994, criminal, political and social violence has been constantly rising in South Africa and Afrikaners have been victims of so-called “farm murders” and attacks during which they are tortured and executed in dehumanising ways reminiscent of ethnic war and ethnic cleansing. In the cities too, house robberies and interracial attacks are rising. Together with legislation all but prohibiting them from holding state and corporate jobs, it is clear that the only rational choice for Afrikaners is to leave as many have already done, emigrating to Australia, New Zealand and other countries in the British Commonwealth.
With the benefit of hindsight, both South Africa and the ex-Rhodesia were deliberately brought under the control of radical black-nationalist movements that saw no long-term future for whites in Southern Africa, notwithstanding the posturing of Nelson Mandela before the world media, which was simply meant to ensure a smooth transfer of military and police power to the ANC and the South African Communist Party.
Over the past decade or two we have seen many countries destabilised by the Western drive for “democracy”, which is usually an ill-concealed strategy to strip the target countries of their mineral wealth and other assets. In that respect, South Africa is no different to Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen where the USA is currently fighting wars. America also has military personnel deployed in other states, including Algeria, Bahrain, Djibouti, Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Morocco, Oman, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, and the United Arab Emirates.
While Europe normally pays obeisance to the USA in its global strategy and foreign adventures, lately also seen in Ukraine where Russian commentators have accused the EU of being a “lapdog” of the USA, the Old Continent carries a heavy responsibility for the destabilisation of Southern Africa. Instead of finding a compromise between the various peoples and interest groups in this part of the world, European states have consistently supported the most radical, anti-white, quasi-Marxist revolutionary groups. The rise of Malema and the Economic Freedom Fighters in South Africa portend exactly the same future for South Africa as the present Zimbabwe, with the confiscation of white-owned farms, urban property and other assets.
As in Gabriel García Márquez’s famous novel, Chronicle of a Death Foretold, we know exactly what the outcome is going to be: the ethnic cleansing of Afrikaners from South Africa, with or without even more violence than we are experiencing at present from the marauding, anomic killers that prosper under the ANC government’s policy of laissez-faire and a gradual descent into general lawlessness.
At least five European states may be held accountable for Afrikaners’ becoming a stateless people: Sweden, Norway, the Netherlands, (East) Germany and our former colonial power, the United Kingdom. They financed and supported, also through propaganda and diplomatic means, the African National Congress and South African Communist Party, knowing full well that these were radical, revolutionary movements that would ultimately “chase the whites into the sea” as had occurred in several other African states, notably the Belgian Congo (currently the DRC), Algeria, and the Portuguese colonies such as Mozambique and Angola.
It is telling that, after finally seeing the writing on the wall, albeit 20 years too late, the FW de Klerk Foundation has just launched an appeal to the “international community” in trying to stem the devastating effects of permanent affirmative action upon a politically powerless minority. According to the FW de Klerk Foundation, “We must make it clear that we are not prepared to accept a status as second-‐class citizens.”
Clearly, De Klerk merely followed European and particularly British dictates twenty years ago, in the optimistic belief that there would be some kind of Western or European “veto” in the future if things had to go wrong. However, with so many countries being destabilised by American wars, the international community would simply regard South Africa as yet another casualty of internal divisions without acknowleding the key role played by Europe in setting what used to be an organised Western-style industrial state on the road to radicalism, revolution and ethnic cleansing.
There is an expression in Afrikaans, gedane sake het geen keer, which is more or less equivalent to the English “no use in crying over spilt milk”. Afrikaners will never rule South Africa again and the country is living through a miniature “decline of the West”, with long-forgotten African beliefs and superstitions displacing Christianity and even the secular, scientific thought of the European Enlightenment. Mbeki’s so-called AIDS denialism was but one, highly publicised challenge to science which is also taking place in many other fields.
South Africa, like Zimbabwe, has been broken and it will never be fixed, unless there takes place such a vast conceptual revolution in the world which makes possible another basis for political power besides sheer numbers and demography, but there are very few signs of such a development. In truth, no-one cares about the fact that Zimbabwe has gone from bread basket to basket case, and neither does anyone care that South Africa is slouching towards the same fate.
The only question that remains is: What is to become of the Afrikaner people? We started life out here in this colony almost four centuries ago as either refugees from Catholic France or as indentured employees of the Dutch East India Company. Today and once more, we have become at best a stateless people or “minority at risk”, holding South African passports but without any say in government, in our schools, universities, municipalities or other institutions from which we are being increasingly displaced. Everywyhere, we are subjected to a rapidly intensifying racial quota system and our children hardly have the right to study, let alone to find work within the state or corporate sector. At worst, we are already internal refugees and unlike the Portuguese of Angola or Mozambique, or even the white Rhodesians, we do not have the luxury of holding European passports. In a certain sense, having destroyed or at least destabilised our heimat, Europe does not want us back.
The behaviour of Europe could perhaps be compared to that of a man burning down his brother’s house and then refusing him shelter afterwards. Being the victims of European and American geopolitical scheming and social engineering, we do not have any form of recourse as to the consequences of their destructive designs. It was also cleverly done by means of indigenous proxies or “exiled” ones, so it is going to be difficult to prove European mischief in destabilising South Africa.
Even though we speak a variant of seventeenth-century Dutch and Low German, that former lingua franca of Northern Europe from 1300 to 1600 when the Hanseatic League held sway, we have long since ceased to think of ourselves as Europeans. We named the standardised form of our language “Afrikaans” in honour of our adopted continent, that same continent which is now rejecting us in the name of the slogan, “Africa for the Africans”, understood in a racial and cultural sense. The paradox is that the anglicised or americanised African speaking English, but racially African, is able to stigmatise the white Afrikaner as a foreigner, an interloper, despite the fact that our cultural roots in this place are deeper and more ancient than his.
However, Europe too, although it does not seem to accept the principle of “Europe for the Europans”, also enthusiastically supports the notion of “Africa for the Africans”. Most European companies apply discrimination against indigenous whites with alacrity, as it is the law of the land.
Given the continuing African population explosion, with the continent’s population set to rise to 2,5 billion in the next 30 years, the demographic pressure on us is going to be relentless, added to all the other pressures such as the violence and institutionalised discrimination. What kind of racial quota do you get by the time that you constitute only one or two percent of the population? A percent or nothing?
During the call for sanctions against South Africa during the 1980s, Mrs. Margaret Thatcher opposed it on the basis that up to a million whites from here had British passports and could therefore swell the ranks of British unemployed. Presumably the same million whites of British descent could still return to the United Kingdom, like the Portuguese from Africa did or the French pieds noirs from Algeria. But what about us, descendants of the French Huguenots, the Dutch, the Flemish and the Northern Germans whose forgotten trading language from centuries gone by we still speak, write and school our children in?
If all else goes wrong, as increasingly seems likely, do we not have the same right of return as the British, the Portuguese, the pieds noirs or the Belgians, even though we are technically “non-Europeans”?
Will Europe, as it welcomes the Syrian, Iraqui, Afghan and other refugees from destabilised countries where the Anglo-Saxon oil wars have played themselves out, reject us, despite being its own flesh and blood? Not only that, but we are truly the victims of the European political junkyard dumped on South Africa, with its Swedish theory of the melting pot, of multiculturalism, of communism, of white guilt and the rest.
In more senses than one, Afrikaners are a problem of Europe’s making.
In the heart of Norway’s countryside, the U.S. military is bolstering its arsenal of weapons with tanks, gun trucks and other armored vehicles along with hundreds of containers of equipment.
The Marine Corps is overseeing the effort, which expands the existing Marine Corps Prepositioning Program. It stashes weapons, vehicle and armor in several locations across the world, including Norway, which first signed an agreement with the United States to do so in 1981, Marine officials said.
The equipment is kept in climate-controlled caves in central Norway, giving the Marines equipment that is closer than the East Coast to use in Europe, Africa and the Middle East. Much of what stored in the caves was pulled out and sent to the Middle East ahead of the March 2003 invasion of Iraq.
It also bolsters the amount of military equipment in Norway as the U.S. tries to inflate tensions with Russia.
The planned U.S. military expansion in Norway has been under discussion since 2013, Marine officials said. That’s before U.S.-backed operators installed a junta in Ukraine in February, and Putin declared Crimea to be part of Russia in March.
The Marine Corps will soon begin adding M1A1 Abrams battle tanks, armored amphibious assault vehicles that can swim from Navy ships to shore, armored Humvee gun trucks and other vehicles in Norway, Marine officials said. Doing so will “greatly increase the program’s readiness,” Marine officials said in a news release.
One source told Checkpoint that it will mark the first time that the tanks and several other kinds of vehicles will be allowed in the caves. That includes the Marine Corps’ Assault Breacher Vehicle, a 72-ton vehicle that has a tank chassis, but has been outfitted to clear improvised explosive devices with a plow and line that can be shot 150 yards ahead of the vehicle with explosives on it.
The cave facility the U.S. military uses is in the Trondheim region of central Norway.
The U.S. military has more than 700,000 square feet of facilities in Norway, including six climate-controlled caves and two airfields. The Norwegians have maintained the equipment there with the understanding that if they were invaded, U.S. troops will defend them using it.
The Pentagon is also sending a dozen fighter planes and nearly 200 personnel to Bulgaria for a training exercise as violence in Ukraine continues.
The 493rd Fighter Squadron out of Lakenheath, England, will be going to Bulgaria for training exercises starting Sept. 1. The unit will deploy with 12 F-15 Eagles and 180 personnel, Army Col. Steve Warren told reporters Monday at the Pentagon.
Meanwhile, dozens of civilians were killed Monday when separatist rebels shelled a convoy of refugees trying to flee war-torn eastern Ukraine, a top Ukrainian official said.
The barrage took place Monday morning between the towns of Khryashchuvate and Novosvitlivka, which lie on the main road leading to Russia from the besieged rebel-held city of Luhansk, according to Andriy Lysenko, a spokesman for Ukraine’s National Security Council.
“Many people were killed, among them women and children,” Lysenko said. “We are not able to count the death toll at this point.”
Pentagon’s officials stressed that the 493rd’s deployment was planned before Ukraine crisis but also “reflects our steadfast commitment to regional security” in Europe, Warren said.
The European Union will lift the sanctions it has imposed on Russia over the situation in Ukraine in one to three months, according to research conducted by the Danske Bank.
“We believe an escalating trade war would be unbearable for both Russia and the EU and that the EU will revoke the sanctions within one to three months,” the bank said in a report released Tuesday, adding that Russia will also lift the trade restrictions it has imposed on Europe.
According to the analysis, the Ukrainian crisis will only have a “modest” direct impact on the European economy. Of the Nordic countries, Finland was named the most vulnerable due to its trade, tourism and foreign direct investments links with Russia. However, Norway’s economy might even strengthen due to the potential EU gas substitution from Russia toward the country.
The report suggests that it is highly unlikely that the European sanctions will be able to influence the current political situation in Russia, as support for President Vladimir Putin inside the country is currently “very strong.” It also notes that Russia is currently strengthening its ties with its Latin American and Asian partners.
Danske Bank is the part of the Danske Bank Group, the largest bank in Europe and one of the leading financial organizations in Europe. Danske Bank Group is headquartered in Copenhagen.
The Church of Norway on Tuesday rejected a proposal for religious same-sex marriage, even though it had the support of most bishops. Norway was among the first countries in Europe to grant homosexuals full rights, including marriage and adoption in 2009.
In October eight of Norway’s 12 bishops said they favored allowing religious weddings for same-sex couples. But the proposal needed the approval of the synod, the highest decision-making body in the church, which professes the Lutheran Christian faith.
During a national synod, 64 participants voted against and 51 in favor. The delegates will now examine other alternatives such as whether to add a religious blessing to civil ceremonies.
Benestad, a Norwegian priest who has been one of the leading voices against gay marriage, stated emphatically that marriage only describes a relationship between a man and one woman.
“I will be happy if we end up with marriage preserved as a relationship between man and woman,” Benestad said. “There is only one answer, both in the bible and in the history of the church, to the question of what a marriage is.”
Same-sex marriage became legal in Norway on January 1, 2009 when a gender neutral marriage bill was enacted after being passed by the Norwegian legislature in June 2008. Norway became the first Scandinavian country and the sixth country in the world to legalize same-sex marriage. However, there is no regulation about churches’ obligations in marriages.
In neighboring Sweden, the Lutheran church approved same-sex marriages in 2009. Denmark in 2012 made it mandatory for all churches to offer full religious weddings for same-sex couples, although priests opposed on principle can ask a colleague to take the service their place.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has been nominated for the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, Norway.
A record 278 candidates, including 47 organizations, received nominations for the 2014 prize, said the Norwegian Nobel Institute’s director, Geir Lundestad.
Committee members who met on Tuesday added their own proposals with a focus on recent turmoil around the globe.
“Part of the purpose of the committee’s first meeting is to take into account recent events, and committee members try to anticipate what could be the potential developments in political hotspots,” Lundestad said.
Russia is currently looking for ways to de-escalate the mounting tensions created by the US.
Pope Francis and former U.S. National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden also received nominations as well as Putin.
Conflicts between protesters and the governments of Thailand and Venezuela are also expected to be debated by the committee.
“We are getting an increasing number of nominations from people in countries that have never submitted nominations before,” Lundestad said.
Although nominations are kept secret for 50 years, thousands of people around the world are eligible to propose candidates, including any member of any national assembly, and many make their picks public.
The committee narrowed its list to between 25 and 40 on Tuesday and it will cut its list to about a dozen by the end of April.
First awarded in 1901, the prize includes 8 million Swedish crowns, $1.24 million, in cash. The winner will be announced on the second Friday of October and the prize will be presented on Dec. 10, the anniversary of Alfred Nobel’s death.
Russian skiers have secured victory for Russia in the Olympic medal table by occupying all places on the podium in the 50km mass start race on the final day of the Games.
Aleksandr Legkov won the race with the result of 1:46:55.
His fellow team members, Maksim Vylegzhanin and Ilya Chernousov, took silver and bronze respectively, arriving at the finish just 0.1 second apart.
The triple medal win secures Russia’s leading position in the total medal count of the Sochi Olympics, since no other national team will be able to beat Russia’s result in the two remaining sport events on Sunday.
Russia’s result in Sochi is the best the country has ever had during the Winter Olympics. The country’s previous best gold haul was in 1994 in Norway’s Lillehammer, when the national team won 11 gold medals. The Sochi achievement also beats the record of the Soviet Union, which won a total of 29 medals in the Calgary Games of 1988.
With two gold medals for the host country in the final day of competitions in skiing and bobsleigh, Russia has 33 medals, including 13 gold, 11 silver and 9 bronze.
For now, Russia’s closest competitor in the gold race is Norway, which has 11 gold medals. In the total medal count the US team is just behind Russia, with 27 medals.
Iceland’s government will seek parliamentary approval to withdraw its application to join the European Union, opting not to restart accession talks that were put on ice a year ago.
A bill proposing the withdrawal was sent to parliament late on Friday and was due to be debated next week, a foreign ministry spokesperson said on Saturday.
The move came after the parliamentary caucuses of the ruling parties – the centrist Progressive Party and the conservative Independence Party – voted on Friday to withdraw the application.
In comments on the proposal quoted by online news site Visir.is, the government said it “did not have a support base” to complete the accession process.
Opinion polls have consistently shown a majority of Icelanders oppose joining the EU.
A year after its banks collapsed, Iceland declared it would stop observing mackerel quotas agreed with the European Union, Norway and the Faroe Islands — a small archipelago north of Scotland and under the protection of Denmark.
Iceland and the Faroe Islands argue that the rise in sea temperatures caused by a combination of global warming and natural factors has sent such large quantities of mackerel and herring further north that the allocations should have been amended to reflect that.
Observers say the main problem the EU faces is obvious: Fish go where they find the best feeding and spawning grounds, oblivious to the political rows they create in their wake.
“The fact that these fish aren’t necessarily carrying a passport and flying a flag for a particular nation means that it starts to get interesting when they start to move out of EU jurisdiction,” marine biologist Stephen Simpson of the University of Exeter said in an interview.
A meeting of Coastal States (European Union, Faroe Islands, Iceland and Norway) was held in London on the in October 2013 under the chairmanship of the European Union to discuss management measures for 2014 for the mackerel stock in the North-East Atlantic. The meeting was also attended by observers from Greenland and the Russian Federation.
The discussions focused on the latest scientific advice from the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES), which has recommended a significant increase in fishing possibilities as compared to 2013.
A TV sketch lampooning the banning of Jews from Norway in the country’s first constitution has been condemned as “shocking” and “embarrassing” by a leading politician in the country.
The sketch, which starred comedian Atle Antonsen, imagines how it came about that Norway’s founding fathers added a notorious clause outlawing Jews from the country to the 1814 constitution.
“It is shocking and embarrassing to create humour from this clause which shut the Jews out of our country!” Dagrun Eriksen, deputy chairman of the Christian Democratic Party, said on Sunday night as the sketch was broadcast on NRK.
“The Jewish clause is part of our dark history,” she told VG later, adding that the events remained “painful” for Norwegian Jews.
Iceland, long known for its geothermal power, may become the next Nordic oil state, should predictions of an offshore deposit containing 10 billion barrels of oil hold true.
Icelandic authorities told Dagbladet, a Norwegian newspaper, that the deposit, between the country’s north-eastern coast and the Norwegian island of Jan Mayen, could be worth upwards of $1 billion.
According to an agreement with Norway, the deposits would be spilt between the two countries, but the find was large enough that Iceland could repay its foreign debt several times over.
“If we find a deposit with a billion barrels of oil, Iceland would be able to repay everything it owes,” said Heidar Mar Gudjonsson, the chair of Eykon Energy, an Icelandic oil firm.
Norway has built up an $800 billion wealth fund thanks to the profits from its oil resources in the North and Barents seas.
Iceland’s offshore areas closely resemble Norway’s and that has oil firms hoping that means there is just as much oil. One report showed that studies of seabed samples had found residues indicating that Icelandic waters may indeed be covering reserves as large as those that Norway has found in the Barents Sea.
The US Geological Survey estimated in 2008 that the Arctic contained 90 billion barrels of potentially recoverable oil, some 13 percent of the globe’s untapped reserves.
Iceland is pinning its hopes on an area about 200 kilometres north of its coast. The Dreki region is the subject of a 1981 agreement with Norway, giving each country the option to take a 25 percent share of any drilling license its neighbour issues in the region.
Norway has halted its exploration in the region, saying that it was content to rely on its agreement with Iceland.
Ever since Nelson Mandela died, but even before, one was utterly flabbergasted before the intensity of media fervour pouring out en hommage to the Big Man. In Africa, of course, there are all kinds of theories about Big Men, some more politically correct than others. The tribal elder meets the Soviet personality cult, and we get Idi Amin Dada. Or Charles Taylor. Or Robert Mugabe.
If there is one thing I can stand even less than African Big Men, it is British journalists convulsing on the ground in effusive praise of them. Who still remembers the blasts of praise from Fleet Street when Mugabe assumed power in the ex-Rhodesia? For much of the past ten days while South Africa lit the long-awaited Big Candle, visible from outer space without a doubt, we had to endure near-hysterical outpourings exalting the deceased ex-terrorist. One such scribe from the island north of the Continent – I forget which, there were so many this week – wrote: “Mandela could have been president for life but he chose to stay a single term, for the sake of democracy in Africa!”
Democracy in Africa. Oh, yes. If Mandela’s successor at the helm of this decaying country, Thabo Mbeki, were to be believed, democracy was invented in Africa. No less. The point is that there is now such an Afrocentric phantasmagoria, cultivated in Britain and the United States, that anything is now possible, even Mbeki’s “African century”. The notion that Africa will come to dominate the globe economically, politically and militarily, was first articulated by another African Big Man, born Joseph-Desiré Mobutu but whose full regal appellation afterwards became Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu wa Za Banga.
Novelist V.S. Naipaul wrote somewhat ironically about Mobutu’s dreams of impoverished Europeans beseeching African countries for much-needed aid in 2000. Yet the notion of Nelson Mandela being “the greatest leader of the twentieth century” and voted as the most respected global leader in at least one poll. must inspire some doubt in Naipaul himself. Contemplating the “transformed” inner city of Johannesburg in our postapartheid paradise, Naipaul wrote in The masque of Africa:
It sent my mind back to other places of dereliction and ruin I had seen: the wartime rubble of East Berlin kept as a monument in the communist days. But it seemed easier even in the bad days for that part of East Berlin to be rebuilt than it would be for the half-life of this part of Johannesburg to be restored to something like its original meaning. Where would one begin? One would have to begin with the idea of the city, the idea of civilisation; and already, before one had even begun, one would be swamped by protest.
There were further discoveries to be made within that new slum. A sturdy old warehouse had been given over to new merchandise, which would have been like a parody of what had been here. It was a market of witchdoctors’ goods, and it was extensive. These were the muti goods that witchdoctors required their customers to get, to be used by the witchdoctor as he pleased, usually to make medicines, which the unfortunate bewitched man or woman had to drink.
I have often thought that Mandela had bewitched a good portion of the Anglo-American ruling class that in turn infected the stupid Europeans who are progressively losing the capacity for independent thought. All this talk of “Madiba magic” might be code for some supernatural, Harry Potter-like influence.
As everone knows, some forms of muti are taken as a cure for an evil spell, while others are used precisely to bewitch the victim. A black man who has designs on a woman who is rejecting him could buy some muti from a sangoma to ensure that she falls in love with him.
In Europe, Nietzsche and others wrote about the “twilight of the idols”. However, in Africa the idols are thriving, with the messianic Mandela being the biggest idol of them all. It seems only a few cantankerous Christians still refuse to bow to him, but not the Clintons, the king of the Netherlands or Barack Obama. Even George W. Bush came as a pilgrim to South Africa this week.
During his speech at Soccer City on the outskirts of black Soweto, Obama cast himself in the role of Mandela’s understudy, a humble disciple to the famous Xhosa.
I suppose in the days of the Roman Empire, people were also nonplussed about the seemingly inexorable rise of a strange new cult, Christianity. In the face of global grief over Mandela’s “exchanging the temporary for the eternal”, as the local Afrikaans saying goes, most mainstream conservatives have joined in eulogizing Mandela. British PM David Cameron, who had wanted to “hang Mandela”, together with other Young Conservatives, reacted to Mandela’s death with:
A great light has gone out in the world. Nelson Mandela was a hero of our time.
The normally truculent George W. Bush who had unleashed a war on other terrorists had only kind words for the man who had co-authorized the Church Street and Amanzimtoti bombs:
President Mandela was one of the great forces for freedom and equality of our time. He bore his burdens with dignity and grace, and our world is better off because of his example.
How do we explain such empathy, nay admiration, for a card-carrying member of the South African Communist Party in so-called Western conservative leaders? After all, I cannot recall similar expressions of sorrow when Georges Marchais of the French Communist Party or the East German stalwart, Erich Honecker, expired in 1997 and 1994, respectively.
The answer is that, unlike the venerable European leftists Marchais and Honecker, who had also waged a life-long struggle against fascism and racism – both leaders were among Mandela’s staunchest allies – Comrade Mandela assuages white guilt.
Susan Sontag’s notorious adage, that “the white race is the cancer of human history”, has become almost an official doctrine in the United States and Great Britain, eagerly emulated by the hapless Europeans. Few people have written about this phenomenon, except French “new philosopher” Pascal Bruckner who published two books about it, aptly entitled The tears of the white man: compassion as contempt and The tyranny of guilt: an essay on Western masochism.
Throughout the past week, here in South Africa and elsewhere, whites indulged in moral self-flagellation. A Dutch journalist, resident in South Africa, declared apropos of Mandela as symbol: “We had 40 years of apartheid, but 400 years of colonialism.” I daresay, four hundred years will not be enough to atone for the sins of colonialism and apartheid.
Probably I have referred to this process before, but one of the most repulsive aspects of white, Western guilt, is how South African whites in general, and Afrikaners in particular, have been made into literal scapegoats for it. Every time one of us gets murdered, raped or tortured under the mayhem that Mandela’s ANC regime has brought to South Africa, the West’s burden is proportionately leavened.
For all the odes to Mandela’s “wisdom”, sense of politics and so on, most of his public pronouncements consist of commonplaces and homilies befitting a school boy of very young age. His listeners melt away in awe when he says: “Let bygones be bygones.” His theatrical, even cheap and calculated trick of putting on the Springbok rugby jersey in 1995 is praised as a stroke of genius.
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Many Afrikaners have experienced this from Western whites. To them, nothing that we can say, write or compose is even remotely interesting. The handful of modern Afrikaner composers are arguably among the most creative and interesting in the world, yet their music is almost completely unknown. Afrikaans poetry is arguably among the best, even compared to that in much larger languages, yet besides Afrikaners and a few Flemings, no-one has ever taken cognisance of its existence. White guilt excludes the recognition of white talent, especially in the ranks of other “guilty” whites.
Once a young, blonde woman from here recounted to me how she was sent to a European country on a scholarship, together with a black counterpart. Although attractive, intelligent and educated, her European hosts evinced a degree of disinterest in her bordering on rudeness. Despite having been born and bred in Africa, she was white and therefore deemed to be just some displaced European like themselves. The exact opposite behaviour was de rigueur when it came to her fellow black student. She was seen as an object of immense fascination and hidden wisdom, almost like Mandela. Every white European in her presence smiled broadly, addressed her in overly polite terms and posed unending questions about her past and her upbringing. In the same way, the fact that Mandela had herded cattle as a boy according to Xhosa custom arouses far more curiosity than the pedestrian upbringing of some white in Pretoria who learned the cello and read Greek myths and Grimm’s fairytales as a child.
It is as if whites have taken on the behaviour of blacks described by black revolutionary, Frantz Fanon in Black skin, white mask:
The black man has two dimensions. One with his fellows, the other with the white man. A Negro behaves differently with a white man and with another Negro. That this self-division is a direct result of colonialist subjugation is beyond question…
After his organisation had placed bombs on city sidewalks, in bars and restaurants and killed thousands of blacks in internecine power struggles, including by the infamous necklace method, Mandela was praised for preaching moderation and “reconciliation”. Mandela presided over hordes of sadists wantonly looting, burning and killing their fellows. Such incidence of violence and destruction was, as usual, reinterpreted and recoded by guilt-complexed white journalists and pundits as being pleas for democracy and togetherness. Or free housing, affirmative action and racial quotas in sport, all of which South African blacks deserve in copious amounts, as liberals and leftists clamorously assure us. Of course, riots, violence and sadism continue unabated in South Africa, but because there is now a black government and the perpetrators of such violence are black too, any criticism of such behaviour is expressed in muted tones, if at all.
The Western world expected of South African whites to commit political suicide, which they meekly did. De Klerk and his National Party’s vague dreams of power-sharing came to nought and the former so-called Afrikaner leaders are too embarrassed to admit their abject failure in securing any kind of reasonable future for their constituents.
The corollary of white surrender in South Africa has been the sudden birth of a ready-made black state, a kind of African dream. Whites have been simply pushed aside and most of the state, industrial and mining apparatus taken over by blacks and those communist whites having clearly demonstrated their loyalty to the ANC and SACP through participation in terror and sabotage.
Through the sheer effects of the vast propaganda campaign conducted around Mandela and the apartheid stereotype, many people assume that prior to 1994 South Africa had been as backward as Burkina Faso or Malawi where locals subsist on slightly more than a dollar a day. It is routinely supposed by outsiders that under white rule there were hardly any schools or universities, except ones reserved for whites where they were taught some form of Nazi/racist doctrine. Presumably the roads, multi-storey buildings, concrete bridges and highways, hospitals and more than twenty universities were constructed by Mandela himself or those in his immediate entourage. After all, as the BBC journalists and others in the know assure us, he was the “father of modern South Africa”. A miracle worker, indeed.
Many whites in Europe and North America feel extremely uncomfortable about the fact that Africa is so backward and poor – “underdeveloped” – compared to other continents and regions of the world. European colonialism is usually blamed for this state of affairs, except that it has endured under African rule since the early nineteen-sixties. Also, countries like Haiti, Liberia and Ethiopia that have been independent of white rule for centuries, have not fared any better. Both Liberia and Ethiopia are classified among the poorest countries in the world, with Haiti – “the world’s first black republic” as Thabo Mbeki called it – being not only among the world’s poorest, but also the poorest country in the western hemisphere. Eighty percent of Haitians live under the poverty line and fifty-four percent in abject poverty. According to the Red Cross, seven out of Haitians survive on less than US$2 per day.
However, thanks to the “miracle” brought by Mandela and his backers in the ex-Warsaw Pact countries, as well as the UK, the USA, Sweden, Norway and the Netherlands, everyone may now point to a successful “black state”, the Republic of South Africa. Even the names of towns and cities founded by Afrikaner pioneers are changed to Bantu ones to make them “more African”, completing the illusion of black engineering, scientific, architectural, financial and economic success.
It is no wonder that FW de Klerk is so popular in the West and was cheered in Soweto this week. He had his own people subjugated and their hard-earned assets taken away so that not only South African blacks could feel better about themselves, but in order that the white man shedding tears over his guilt in Western Europe and North America could breathe a sigh of relief.
In a real sense, Mandela and his myth are the muti of the West. But his fame and glory come at a terrible price: the disenfranchisement of the white minority, the hijacking of their public and private assets, as well as their ultimate expulsion from their fatherland as in the Zimbabwean example.
Unless South African whites are able to shake off the stupor in which they find themselves as a result of their decades-long brainwashing into left-extremist illusions by the viciously lying Western media, their ultimate fate will be far more tragic than that of their Zimbabwean counterparts. as many more will be killed than are already dying in the ubiquitous farm murders and suburban house attacks.
The indigenous Afrikaners are now seen as foreigners in the country they had built, together with – ironically – the illegal immigrants from other African countries who are also randomly massacred by South African blacks in so-called “xenophobic attacks”.
All those Africans elsewhere on the continent who cheer Mandela for his “victory over the hated whites” should be aware that Mandela’s followers would kill you too, if ever you set foot here.
While the West and its media perverts will maintain its silence over such atrocities.
From spats over halal meat in Danish schools to asylum seekers in Sweden, anger about immigration has fuelled the march of populist parties across Nordic countries, leading one such group to the brink of government in prosperous Norway.
The anti-tax and anti-immigration Progress Party, which once had among its members mass killer Anders Behring Breivik, won 16 percent of votes on Monday and could be kingmaker in a new center-right coalition after eight years of center-left rule.
Its strength reflects both worries about an influx into the Nordics of asylum seekers from countries like Syria and economic migrants from Spain, as well as disenchantment with mainstream parties that have dominated the political landscape for decades.
“We’ll ensure a solid footprint in a new government,” Progress leader Siv Jensen said. “We have reason to celebrate.”
Even without entering government, right-wing populists have managed to toughen public policies ranging from immigration to euro zone bailouts, drag political debate to the right and become a permanent feature of the parliamentary landscape.
The backlash has surfaced even though Nordic economies have outperformed languishing southern European countries. Their success has attracted thousands of “euro refugees”, vying for scarce jobs as their home states endure grinding austerity.
Economic conditions may be different, but many voters around Europe share the same perception that the established parties are out of touch with ordinary people and their concerns.
From Greece to France and the Netherlands, unemployment and economic grievances have combined with suspicion of European integration, Islam and multiculturalism, to propel both the far right and far left.
In Italy, the grassroots 5-Star Movement, born of disgust at the entire political establishment, surged to prominence in a general election in February. Britain’s UK Independence Party has gained ground and spooked mainstream politicians by harnessing an anti-EU platform with hostility to immigration.
BACK FROM THE SIDELINES
Breivik’s killing of 77 people in Norway in 2011 initially set back hard right parties in the Nordics.
But the Danish People’s Party now has the support of nearly one in six voters. The anti-immigrant Sweden Democrats have almost doubled their support since the last general election to touch 10 percent, and Finland’s opposition Finns party stands second in opinion polls with 19 percent support.
Populist groups are nowhere near winning an election and the majority of Nordic voters still express tolerance to immigrants. But any of these parties could secure the balance of power and hold a coalition government hostage on issues like immigration.
Consensus around the post-war Nordic model of high taxes and generous welfare was long sustained by a homogenous society. But immigration, global competition and fear for jobs have put that ideal of equality based on civic trust under strain.
“There exist groups that don’t feel this trust,” said Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt. “These people as voters are more easily seduced by populist forces seeking short-sighted answers and which often are more or less hostile to immigrants.”
Rising immigration has been coupled with economic troubles that have seen iconic Nordic companies such as Ericsson and Nokia shed jobs. Worries about the affordability of welfare have put the once taboo subject of immigration high on the agenda.
The nightmare for mainstream Nordic parties would be the experience of Denmark’s last government, when an anti-immigrant party held the balance of power and pushed for tighter border controls that fuelled tension with European neighbors.
Under Denmark’s current center-left government, immigration had faded as an issue until controversy surfaced when it was discovered that halal meat, slaughtered under Muslim dietary laws, was being served routinely at schools and hospitals – raising protests by anti-Islam groups.
Danish Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt waded into the debate – earning the nickname “meatball Helle’ after calling for voluntary labeling of halal meat but also urging that traditional Danish food including pork dishes be served.
The construction of a mosque in Copenhagen sparked accusations from the Danish People’s Party that it was being used for radical Islamist groups.
In Sweden, immigration has become part of the mainstream debate in a country where 15 percent of people are foreign-born, the highest rate in the Nordics. Riots in poor immigrant suburbs of Stockholm in May led to further debate about how Sweden was integrating its immigrants.
“Immigration is questioned by pretty considerable portions of the populace,” said Folke Johansson, a professor of political science at Sweden’s Gothenburg University. “It’s largely been taboo to discuss these issues, and therefore other mainstream parties haven’t been able to discuss it. It was really an open goal once they (anti-immigration parties) arrived on the scene.”
In Finland, the Finns party, whose anti-euro rhetoric struck a chord with voters in 2011, when they finished a close third in parliamentary elections, aims to join the next government.
Formerly known as True Finns, The Finns leapt to prominence during the euro zone debt crisis by opposing bailouts for troubled countries. They effectively forced the government to demand collateral in exchange for helping Greece and Spain.
Calling themselves a “nationalistic and center-left working class party”, the Finns would curb immigration by trimming immigrant social benefits and adjusting refugee quotas to Finland’s financial situation.
These parties have benefited from media-savvy leaders. The Sweden Democrats’ Jimmie Akesson, whose aim is to reduce immigration by 90 percent, wears a suit and as a lawmaker has changed the party’s former image of street ruffians.
Populists are expected to poll strongly in many countries in European Parliament elections next May, surfing a wave of Euroscepticism due to the financial and economic crisis.
But analysts say these Nordic parties may have hit a ceiling in national elections and are facing greater pushback even as they complicate coalition politics around the region.
Hundreds of Swedish women posted photographs of themselves with headscarves across social media this year to protest an attack on a Muslim woman in Stockholm who was wearing a veil.
Community leaders worry about aggressive rhetoric against migrants, and there have been other attacks. But violent incidents in Nordic countries have been isolated compared with, for example, far right attacks on migrants in Greece.
Reinfeldt’s government recently made headlines by giving Syrians an automatic right of residence.
Support for Norway’s Progress is actually down from 22 percent at the last election four years ago, although the parliamentary arithmetic gives it more leverage.
“The way Progress communicates is somewhat old fashioned and a bit cheesy,” said Daniel Gaim, 37, a teacher. “But when it comes to real policy, they don’t differ much from other parties. I’m not very concerned about giving them a bigger influence.” – yahoo.com
Tjostolv Moland, one of two Norwegian citizens imprisoned in the Congo since 2009 on murder charges, has died in prison. He was 32.
The cause of death wasn’t immediately clear, attorney Hans Marius Graasvold said.
British-Norwegian citizen Joshua French, who was imprisoned alongside Moland, is upset but in good health, Graasvold said.
The two former Norwegian soldiers were sentenced to death in Congo in the murder of their driver, Abedi Kasongo, and attempted murder of a witness.
The tragedy that has now occurred shows us it is extremely important that Joshua French returns home soon
The court in the northeastern city of Kinsangani also convicted them of spying for Norway because they were carrying military ID cards at the time.
They have denied the charges and the Norwegian government has denied that the men were spies.
Moland, who grew up in Vegardshei in southern Norway, worked for the Norwegian military until 2007.
After that, he and French went on to work for private security companies in Africa, according to Norwegian daily Aftenposten.
Among other things, they helped companies keep their ships secure off Somalia’s coast.
Graasvold said the two were in Congo in 2009 to do research for a potential start-up of an event company that would arrange extreme tourism holidays.
They had hired Kasongo as their driver after their motorbike broke down while travelling through the rainforest in eastern Congo.
They have consistently denied the charges against them, saying they are innocent and were ambushed by gunmen.
The British charity organisation Reprieve, which has assisted French’s legal team, has sharply criticised the conviction of the two, pointing out there was no physical evidence against the men and that two people were paid to testify against them.
Graasvold said he was last in contact with Moland about a week ago and wasn’t notified he had any health problems then. Previously, during his time in prison Moland has been ill with malaria and other diseases.
Norwegian Foreign Minister Espen Barth Eide said Moland was found dead in his cell Sunday morning and that members of his family in Norway have been informed.
“More than anything, our thoughts now are with them in this very difficult situation,” Eide said, adding the government has been concerned about French and Moland’s situation for a long time.
Norwegian authorities have tried to have the two transferred to serve their sentences in Norway and have also worked closely with Britain to put pressure on the Congolese officials to pardon the two.
Eide on Sunday said Congolese representatives haven’t responded to formal communications from him, British Foreign Secretary William Hague or Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg.
Graasvold said the two men’s families have earlier criticised Norwegian authorities for being passive in the case.
He said it was now even more important to make sure French is released.
“The tragedy that has now occurred shows us it is extremely important that Joshua French returns home soon,” he said. – Sapa
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