Weblog 80109
Jozi
There is something Pyrrhic about Israel’s current activities in the Middle East. It is hard not to see the citizens of Gaza in much the same position as the Jews of Warsaw some sixty odd years ago.
Israel keeps hoping that their presence in the Middle East will come to be accepted forgetting that it was their intransigent obsession with non-assimilation that has always [unfairly] condemned them to being the planet’s pariahs.
I have nothing to say about Gaza that has not already been said and chewed over. Intrinsically Israel has to implement the same “final solution” thing on the Palestinians that was wished on them by the evil Nazi regime back then when monsters ruled. Frankly I think they have as much real heart for a final solution as the average Hutu Intera-hamwe [sic] warrior has for a Tutsi Rwandan.
While I don’t doubt for a moment that the Palestinians have just cause for grievance, I don’t think they help their case by electing a government that decides to go to war with their biggest enemy. Firstly by refusing to recognise the place’s existence and then by engaging in pestilential and inherently futile terror activities, which are guaranteed to provoke the world’s sympathy through forcing the enemy to overeact and overplay their hand. Ultimately the Palestinian position is irrational.
One is reminded of the outcome of the Lopez War back in the 19th Century when Paraguay lost more than 90% of its population in an irrational clash with the triple alliance of Brazil, Argentina and Peru.
This invasion of Gaza represents the politics of Gengis Khan. Israel has to decide what it is going to do… They seem to have two choices: exterminate the Palestinians, the way the ruling regime in Namibia wiped out the Herero in the first 20th century genocide, a century ago. This seems to be on their agenda notwithstanding that Gaza [apparently] has a spectacular birth-rate; Or like the Afrikaner before them they can concede defeat and negotiate the best terms they can while they prepare for a new Diaspora.
This is an endgame and this global depression that is beginning to appear immanent is going to distract many people from the foolishness of playing silly games while the floods rage.
Much play is made of the democratic right of the Palesitinians to vote in the most violent party they can… Like the activities of the late President Lopez their strategy appears overplayed.
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At home we had the Matric results for what is no longer supposed to be called Matric.
For offshore readers this refers to the final, nationally supervised national examination to finish school at grade 12.
The 2008 finalists were the first to complete and write the new highly controversial Outcomes Based education syllabus, which has the confused purpose of assessing a battery of learning skills that are learned not taught and presenting content that is neither learned nor taught.
The examinations are more complex than before with red fire engine questions [what colour is the red fire engine?] for those who are intellectually disadvantaged to garner some precious points; to seriously complex analysis and synthesis answers, to critical questions requiring complex dimensions of acquired knowledge.
In the event 62% of kids passed the State Exam with about 20% of those qualifying to enter a higher education institution like a University. Generally fewer candidates passed than under the previous system but a higher percentage of those who passed can enter university.
According to the theory of the system, universities should experience a considerable decline in first year's failures as these “matriculants” are allegedly better prepared for the rigours of University life than was previously the case.
So as I pointed out in last January’s blog we shall wait until the end of 2009 to find out if the experiment is /has been effective.
Judging by the panicked sound accompanying the voices of education hierarchy fat cats, during the hotly reported, results delivery process, with the reedy whine of denial ringing with strident clarity through their respective radio interviews, one can expect adjustments to the programme.
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There is undoubtedly a sense of an historical turning point in the air as we progress into 2009. Mr Obama {BO] takes over the helm in the USA [Firmia] and has the Herculanean task of changing the course of history. The Bank of England today lowed its Interest rate to the lowest level since it came into existence hundreds of years ago. We hover on the edge of hovering. The global managerial class' current behaviour reeks of panic.
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In December each year we celebrate a day called ‘Reconciliation Day’. This historical day has existed in many forms for about 170 years and originally had little to do with reconciliation. Now it is hoped that the contending parties to power in SA will bond in the post revolution era and make their journey together into a bold future; except that the interest of empowerment for past wrongs collide with the interests of reconciliation.
Those who wielded power for so long have gone and are replaced. Those who are replaced are denied opportunity in the interest as of Affirmative Action. On a reconciliation day in the millennium year of 2000 I spent time in and out of various privatised informal drinking venues to which former rulers have retreated: beaten back by a new wave of discriminatory legislation with the boot now firmly on another foot.
What follows from my collection: Border Crossings, is the outcome of that day: it is not so much a poem as a polemic, which, I believe, has as much relevance to the Palestinians and Israelis as it does to the defeated Afrikaner. Since this was written the “white” South African diaspora has accelerated. We don’t acknowledge this and therefore it is a shock that awaits… something, which one suspects, we will only discover in verity, in the post-election recriminations. We have a general election due this year for a new government in SA. It promises to be momentous. It also promises electoral sidelines for the so-called “Whitey” parties.
161200
Reconciliation Day
In our new society it is not enough that
we were sorry about Apartheid;
we: the Whitey, the scumbag honky males who
Gotitall: have now to make a reckoning.
Without Apartheid we would have been nothing
is the claim, implicit in the demand.
We must pay the piper, now we have called the tune.
Perhaps the truth we seek to hide from
is that we became nothing because of Apartheid.
We have the credit side and the debit side.
On the credit side we were the beneficiaries
of Apartheid: then.
We being whitey; this meant we got
To live in the biggest houses, had all the best jobs
And had the wonderful opportunities in the world which
We had invented in the first place.
We also got
to go on long holidays often, to handle our
state of permanent insecurity and everyone we knew (other whitey’s)
gradually disappeared off to some place
where they
Could all make
a living without enduring the poverty inducing
manic depressive morass
of living in an economy that jumped
around with all the frantic uncertainty
of a virgin on initiation night.
That was the credit side of
Apartheid.
On the debit side
were the costs of that benefit.
The apparent benefit was Western Society with all its warts and
plum pudding delights.
The absence of that benefit: the Chthonian night,
stripped of feudal niceties.
We (the perpetrators) of the benefit did
It to make our own lives easier; with Apartheid we sought to combine
the benefits of western society
with the benefits of Feudalism.
Western society prevailed and our feudal system
collapsed
to reveal your own covert feudal structures.
We had found these, lurking in
your shadows when we came here, to this savage paradise
and
imposed this terrible rule
of colonialist apartheid (which resulted in a more
than four fold increase in the population:
such was the reduced nature of our
reign of terror compared to those
you had imposed upon yourselves).
Of course we never realised, that just before
we came in and wrecked your lives, you had just been involved in wars
and catastrophes and all the general shit
that goes with a fucked up world.
We thought that was how you normally lived
Coming here after the Deficane* or Rinderpest* or the
National Suicide*
Was our equivalent of meeting the survivors of Auschwitz
Or Nagasaki.
But we didn’t know,
You never wrote things down and seemed to
Make up all your history, to suit the momentary occasion
We never knew you had all sorts of cities and fabulous
foundations which had temporarily dissipated in the African mist; in
pursuit of some or other disaster.
No we just came here and built our vision of paradise and rudely
shut you out, because you, continually, in our eyes,
insisted on bringing your
own expropriatory darkness to our
Dinner tables.
What was the cost of this Apartheid benefit?
One, practical, was
to pour hundreds of millions of tax bucks
[which we were faking anyway
so the millions subtly became billions]
down a long forgotten chute: water
to a leaking drum, constantly drained;
to be impoverished to the extend
that today, white south Africans (me) list amongst
the world’s poorest white people
where once, before apartheid we were almost
the richest.
Makes you wonder just how rich everybody else
became while we
were
busy hogging what was left
of our redistributed wealth, doesn’t it.
This is not a benefit.
To have lived in Africa as I have for more than half a century
has left me impoverished, robbed of most of my possessions,
robbed of job opportunities,
robbed of my youth, thrown away on lies. My children live in foreign places
and I am
robbed of their pleasures.
It seems we were all robbed by Apartheid;
although there may be people who would never
have been what they became, under a free system:
the compradors, the lackeys, the flunkies and the minions who now
bleat for alms where once before they stole them.
Do not look at me for a man who has benefited from Apartheid;
the best part of this country was here before Apartheid:
the best weather (Gauteng) in the world, few earthquakes,
grand raging ocean shores: all here before people.
I pay my taxes and more.
All else is the price
Of our presence… Without us this place would be
shrouded in darkness as it
was before we came here.
From where I stand
The only beneficiaries of Apartheid have been Black people
(Not the suffering masses perhaps, not those brutalized
by living as they always had, in a world
that suddenly changed)
Notice how the traffic light cash collection agents
seldom go to larney cars driven by blacks.
They know the truth:
that black men have inherited the earth
and they are jealous.
Benefit cannot be seen as a then thing
Who cares about then?
We don’t remember then
Which was whatever we conveniently
Presume it to have been. Then I wasn’t married, then I was young.
Then I did foolish things like getting drunk and getting laid.
Then I never had a teevee
or a newspaper
in which the news wasn’t days old
Then I never had a car so I never went far
Then I never had them, in my face, all the time;
Stealing my stuff: shooting me twice in the back.
Or was that the benefit?
Was that the real benefit?
Have I discovered the truth?
Was the real benefit of Apartheid that we didn’t have You?
The real benefit was that i could pretend that You did not exist.
You are angry with me today because now you have learned to hate
Yourself, and me, for making you aware that you were different
and, at that time, undesirable competition
in a world you yearned to share.
I cannot repair this wound, it was made inadvertently through my own ignorance
of the true nature of the benefit.
No one can bring light to those who choose to remain in the dark.
This wound may be a cancer which
eats away
the soul of all our reckoning.
This wound can no longer be licked lest
like an old dog we put ourselves down.
When I realise that you feel, that I still seek now that benefit again:
that I seek to push away the darkness you embody
the sturdy pit of horror in the piss and blood of nightmares that
we can never quite escape,
explain to me again, what it is you feel that I have gained; what this benefit should be
for which I must atone.
Tell me once again so that we can move on.
.NiK(00)
from the collection: Border crossings
• Difecane: also known as Mfecane: a period of time in Southern Afrika during the 1830’s when violence raged across the region prompted by the expansionist behaviour of the mighty general Chaka, prompting genocidal massacres of tribe by tribe took place in a time of consequent population dispersal. And it was a time of lamentation and weeping.
• Rinderpest: A viral disease introduced [inadvertently?] into Africa by Italian military planners who brough live cattel containing the virus into Africa from the Crimea to feed their soldiers during the African expansion campaigns of the late nineteenth century. The effect was the almost entire destruction of all African livestock in the form of cattle horse etc. A holocaust if ever there was one.
• The National Suicide: A time 1820’s when an entire tribe/nation ie The Xhosas, starved themselves to death in the belief that all white people would thus vanish.
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