Amabhulu Anyama Asenzeli Iworry

"How can you claim to be a private citizen?” he fumed. “There is nothing like that. South Africa is ruled by the ANC. We all belong to the ANC, like it or not!” Comrade Mayor, South Africa 2011.

"There is something wrong that is happening in this country. That is not what we struggled for.” Archbishop Tutu, 2009.

The Archbishop's latest run-in with the ANC State, over the Dalai Lama being refused entry to South Africa, ought to have drawn quite a bit of unwanted high profile attention to that country's growing deficit in the values of freedom that the self-styled "Rainbow Nation" was once claimed to uphold.

When are those in the international community who supported the fight against Apartheid going to wake up to what's really being done in the ANC State now. As Pedro Alexis Tabensky wrote in February this year: "The poor are steadily getting angrier and they are preparing for something. They have relatively little to lose, except the hope that drives their movements, informed predominantly by desire for justice for those who are systematically dehumanized in our country today."

Toussaint Losier in a detailed piece from "Left Turn" further explains: "[O]nce elected, the ANC government failed to live up to its campaign promises, as commitments to neoliberal trade agreements and the paying-off of apartheid-era debt quickly overruled its social democratic proposals. In 1996, the ANC reiterated earlier agreements with South African capital and the International Monetary Fund by formally adopting the Growth Employment and Redistribution (GEAR) policy as its economic program."

"Reflecting a neoliberal approach to development, GEAR has promoted market deregulation, fiscal discipline, wage restraints, and the privatization of government services. In place of redistributive policies, GEAR relies on foreign direct investment and integration into the world market to ‘trickle down’ benefits to the poor and working class. As a result, the government has largely relied on bank-financing and private construction firms to meet the vast housing backlog."

With the new South Africa looking like a very scary chimaera of totalitarianism and neo-liberalism, little wonder then that it also presents naturally fertile ground for the blossoming #occupy global movement.

"We will occupy Grahamstown in the name of freedom. We insist that all people have the right to organise themselves according to their own free choices. We denounce the ANC for the murder of Andries Tatane and all the others. We denounce the ANC for the repression of the Abahlali baseMjondolo, the Landless People's Movement, the Anti-Eviction Campaign and all the others. We denounce the ANC for their attempts to censor the media. We denounce the ANC for continuing to claim that the movements of the poor are a Third Force. The ANC insult us by making us live like pigs and excluding us from all decision making and then, when we rebel, they insult us again by saying that it must be a white academic that is making us rebel. The ANC is incapable of understanding that poor black people can, like all other people, think for ourselves. The ANC is incapable of understanding that they do not and have never had a monopoly on struggle. The ANC is incapable of understanding that they are the real counter-revolutionaries."

From the Unemployed People's Movement Press Statement, 13th October 2011
@ Abahlali baseMjondolo

Archbishop of Canterbury a Christian - Shock!

Someone ought to break it to Melanie Phillips, but the elephant she is missing in her hyperbolic traduction of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Christmas Day sermon and Boxing Day newspaper article, a large pachyderm which you might have thought all too predictably present, is that Rowan Williams is not like Melanie or her socially conservative bedfellows in the US, who are clearly more interested in the jealous G-d of the Pentateuch and Old Testament.

Unlike them, the Archbishop is a Christian!

The Victorian upper classes, under contention by Archbishop Rowan and Ms Phillips were also, like herself and US fundamentalists and self-styled ‘freedom lovers’, not Christian. The nineteenth century British ruling classes doubtless spent far more time studying ancient Roman and Greek literature and thought in the public schools than they spent contemplating the words of the Prince of Peace, for obvious reasons - they too had an Empire to rule and peasants to oppress.

I found this paragraph particularly hilarious:

“Indeed, by demonising the better-off while investing the poor with a halo, he came close to suggesting that wealth — however honestly or arduously earned — is intrinsically evil, while poverty is a holy state.”

Er … Melanie, that might be because it does actually say in the New Testament, Matthew Ch.19 v.24:

"Again I say to you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God."

Or how about 1 Timothy Ch.6 v.10?

 “For the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil. And some people, craving money, have wandered from the true faith and pierced themselves with many sorrows.”

In fact, looking through what Rowan Williams has said in the sermon, and in his piece in the Daily Mail I cannot find any demonising, so presumably the demons are more to be found in Ms Phillips mind than in the Archbishop’s.

Melanie should try to realise also that underlying Christian thinking on comportment is the key concept of Forgiveness, a notion which is absent from the Old Testament mentality of punishment and vengefulness, which, especially when turned against the poor, is so painfully apparent in the words and deeds of social conservatives in the USA as well as their sad Transatlanticist hangers on and imitators in this country. Compare, for example, Matthew (NT) with Genesis (OT).

Matthew Ch.18 vv.21-22:

"Then Peter came up and said to him, “Lord, how often will my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? As many as seven times? Jesus said to him, “I do not say to you seven times, but seventy times seven ..."

In sharp contrast to this, Clarke's Commentary apparently points out that: "Seventy times seven - There is something very remarkable in these words, especially if collated with Genesis 4-24, where the very same words are used - "If any man kill Lamech, he shall be avenged seventy times seven."

There is also the crucial Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus is not big on people judging one another, saying things like:

"But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother shall be guilty before the court; and whoever says to his brother, "You good-for-nothing," shall be guilty before the supreme court; and whoever says, "You fool," shall be guilty enough to go into the fiery hell."

Who'd have thought it, eh? The Archbishop is a Christian, and Melanie Phillips and her allies are not!