John Saul and the Global Miasma
(Written in January 2001)
John Saul's important essay in Monthly Review, Cry for the Beloved Country, so thoughtful and balanced, reawakened me to The Critique on South Africa. It laid down what I consider to be the correct historical markers for the last decade, and pointed to possible entry points for progressive change within what has to remain, for me, The Movement, if only as a broad framework – and which The Movement ignored, or rejected, one after another.
I'll offer one reminder of the way our leadership was driven back behind the line when they uttered even the slightest bleat that was not in the corporate script for change: it was mid-to-late 1991, I think, when Mandela was reported as saying that the ANC would seek to introduce anti-trust laws and institutions of the kind the US had. For this mildest of comments, he was immediately shot down in flames by Anglo American – Gavin Reilly, I think it was – for such reckless talk...(and he must have used an air-to-ground missile, because Anglo was busy parachuting its billions of capital out of the country around that time.)
Those other early remarks – nice, but naïve – from ANC leadership about ‘using the state as a means to empower our people, just as the Afrikaners did in their time’ were similarly huffed and puffed at, and ridiculed by the megacorps and their media.
But as John Saul so precisely clarifies at each point, these are NOT excuses for their dragging our society and economy along behind them on their present fools' errand into the global miasma.
Tony Hall
(Written in January 2001)
John Saul's important essay in Monthly Review, Cry for the Beloved Country, so thoughtful and balanced, reawakened me to The Critique on South Africa. It laid down what I consider to be the correct historical markers for the last decade, and pointed to possible entry points for progressive change within what has to remain, for me, The Movement, if only as a broad framework – and which The Movement ignored, or rejected, one after another.
I'll offer one reminder of the way our leadership was driven back behind the line when they uttered even the slightest bleat that was not in the corporate script for change: it was mid-to-late 1991, I think, when Mandela was reported as saying that the ANC would seek to introduce anti-trust laws and institutions of the kind the US had. For this mildest of comments, he was immediately shot down in flames by Anglo American – Gavin Reilly, I think it was – for such reckless talk...(and he must have used an air-to-ground missile, because Anglo was busy parachuting its billions of capital out of the country around that time.)
Those other early remarks – nice, but naïve – from ANC leadership about ‘using the state as a means to empower our people, just as the Afrikaners did in their time’ were similarly huffed and puffed at, and ridiculed by the megacorps and their media.
But as John Saul so precisely clarifies at each point, these are NOT excuses for their dragging our society and economy along behind them on their present fools' errand into the global miasma.
Tony Hall
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