-- mother of a guy killed by the ANC’s cops at a demonstration, whilst Mandela was president
We need but looke upon a man advanced to dignity; had we but three daies before knowne him to bee of little or no worth at all: an image of greatnesse and an Idea of sufficiency doth insensibly glide and creepe into our opinions; and we perswade our selves that increasing in state and credit and followers, hee is also increased in merit. We judge of him, not according to his worth, but after the maner of casting-counters, according to the prerogative of his ranke... Antisthenes one day tried to persuade the Athenians to give order that their asses might be employed in manuring the ground as well as the horses were; to which it was answered that that animal was not destined for such a service: "That's all one," replied he, "you have only to order it: for the most ignorant and incapable men you employ in the commands of your wars become worthy enough simply because you employ them"; to which the custom of so many people, who canonise the king whom they have made from amongst themselves, and are not content only to honour, but must adore them, comes very near. Those of Mexico, after the ceremonies of his consecration are finished, dare no more looke him in the face; but as if by his Royalty they had deified him, they afterward deeme him to bee a God... I differ from this common fashion, and more distrust sufficiency when I see it accompanied with greatnes of fortune and lauded by popular commendation. Wee should speedfully marke what advantage it is to speak when a man pleases, to choose his subject, to interrupt or change it with a magisterial authority; to protect himself from the oppositions of others by a nod, a smile, or silence, in the presence of an assembly that trembles with reverence and respect. A man of a prodigious fortune, coming to give his judgment upon some slight dispute that was foolishly set on foot at his table, began in these words: "It can be no other but a liar or a fool that will say otherwise than so and so." Pursue this philosophical point with a dagger in your hand.
-- Michel de Montaigne
The great appear great because we are on our knees.
-- Jim Larkin
A 95 year old multimillionaire dies peacefully and the ruling world treats him as an endearing demi-god because he spent 28% of his life in prison under a vile fascistic form of government and on his release became an international political star. Did the world’s most well-known shitheads turn up for the 44 killed at Marikana, who never even had the option of the misery of prison? Do people even know their names? Have they heard of Teboho Mkhonza, Michael Makhabane, Marcel King and all the others killed by the ANC filth in peaceful demonstrations before Marikana? No – because these unknowns never had any mystical aura fabricated for them that could possibly wash off on the powerful scum hoping to bathe in Mandela’s reflected glory. Vitriolic? Sure! How else should one express oneself against such a sickeningly insidious manipulation? “Reasonable” genteel tones incite fuck-all.
In the melting pot that is South Africa, when things came to the boil and then the people stopped stirring, the scum rose to the top. The story of Mandela’s rise to Sainthood is the story of the revolution that stopped.
The function of the circus put on now for the funeral of Mandela in South Africa by the world’s dominant powers is to try to implant in the spectators’ heads the idea that capitalism can reform itself, can make progress, through “reconciliation” of formerly antagonistic forces. And this, during an epoch when, once again, proletarians are expressing their anger everywhere. It is designed, once again, to reconcile the poor to those who keep them poor, smothering them in some transcendent fog where the only thing visible is Mandela’s smile whose charm is meant to induce amnesia about any significant contradiction. Judgement of people on the basis purely of their personality is generally a flight from looking beneath the surface – at their relation to class society. Whilst the intensified commodification of everything and the constant reinforcement of state power and the market economy everywhere creates ever-worsening disasters both on the ecological level and in the everyday lives of the vast majority behind the scenes, on stage the show must go on. We are everywhere encouraged to forget history in order to gaze admiringly on “the giant of history”, the man who, apparently, ended apartheid and improved the lot of millions of blacks. “History” is for the “Great”, not for nothings like you and me. The truth of the past and present of South Africa and elsewhere is photoshopped out of the picture. But in the real world, as a recent Oxfam report said, South Africa is “the most unequal country on earth and significantly more unequal than at the end of apartheid”.
-- black youth quoted in the film “Call It Sleep”
After sitting round a table with de Klerk (a man who had been an integral part of the brutal apartheid regime since 1978) Mandela’s first gift to the rulers was to call for discipline, an end to looting and an end to the theft and burning of cars and an end to classroom boycotts. That is, an end to the subversion of exchange value and an end to the subversion of “education” – i.e. ideological conditioning aimed at acceptance of relations of domination and submission. Back to work, back to school. Back to wage slavery and back to brainwashing. Whilst the war cry of the uprising in 1976 had been “The school for the oppressed is a revolution”, the peace cry of the new rulers was “The school for the oppressed must be subordination”. The call for “discipline” here clearly meant a call to accept the discipline of the commodity economy with a bit of a change of those who run it, “peace and reconciliation” to your miserable lot. After 15 years of the advances and retreats of a genuine revolution already having a global influence, the vast majority accepted the “no good future” brought to them courtesy of St. Nelson, giving up practical struggle for the carrot of a better tomorrow through a change in the personnel of the state. A road that led straight to Marikana. So nowadays in any potential future uprising it would be better to say, “Sitting around a table and talking about these things with the ruling world, black or white, in the electoral charade or on the telly, brings no good future to us. It’s just like talking to a stone. Now by violence they will understand a little of what we say – a little. Now by war they will understand everything – by war.”
As everyone with a bit of knowledge about the situation knows, the idea that apartheid no longer exists is yet another myth:
“Heritage Park is enclosed by a computer-monitored fence that zaps intruders with 35,000 volts and alerts a corps of security guards…. Heritage Park, at 200 hectares (494 acres) slightly bigger than Monaco, is resolutely middle class. Of 1,500 residents, 1,495 are white. Beyond the fence are three townships, home to tens of thousands of poor black people and coloureds, the term given to those of mixed race. It is a brutal juxtaposition: inside the fence, pastel-coloured two-storey homes in Cape Dutch, English Tudor or Tuscan styles, neatly divided into seven suburbs with names like Beaulieu, Cape Heritage and Tuscana Close. Walk outside the wire and within metres you are in a sea of tin shacks and low-cost government-built houses.” (The Guardian online, 6 February 2006)
And if you think this was had nothing to do with the Mandela when he was locked up in prison, that he changed when power got to his head, then this quote from the mid-80s should disabuse you of such illusions: “We want Johannesburg to remain the beautiful and thriving city that it is now. Therefore, we are willing to maintain separate living until there are enough new employment opportunities and new homes to allow blacks to move into Johannesburg with dignity.” New homes for the ANC and their lackeys, new employing opportunities for the small number of rich black middle class, but for the rest – very few nicely worded “employment opportunities” (ie an opportunity to get a bit more money being shafted than being “redundant”) and no social security – certainly not like during apartheid, when the whites desperately tried to buy off the revolutionary movement with increases in benefits and massive wage rises. Black poverty, of course, lacks “dignity” and the sensitive souls of the rich want their beautiful thriving environment to remain untainted by such unsightly sights.
The fact that this Christian funeral of the Modern Christ is attended by both the rich mass murderers of this world (Barack Obama, Tony Blair, George W. Bush, Hilary Clinton, John Major, Francois Hollande, etc.) as well as those at the sharp end is indicative of how Christianity means different things to different people depending on their position in the hierarchy. “Give unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s” is what the rich Christians promote, but the poor Christians, relegated to the back row, forget “It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven” when mourning the death of this multimillionaire. But of course, probably many adoring Jesus Mandela will express, sometimes even a little publicly, their contempt for the living fat cats at this funeral. The other day, at the memorial service, the crowd booed Zuma – but, ever-contradictory, remained respectfully admiring of millionaire President Barack Obomber (whose drones just killed 15 people on their way to a wedding in the Yemen). This is the essence of the Christian mentality – it provides the vast majority with an internal moral sense of self-justification on the basis that they, at least, are not fat cats, that they are not patent scumbags, whilst remaining passive towards those who are and the society they maintain, and even wanting to believe that there is good in some of them, that, contrary to all honestly reflected experience, the system can be made good by a change in the personnel of those at the top.
'Every revolution tends to worship its leaders, and Carranza, the first of the revolutionary Ceasars, was a forerunner of the so-called 'personality-cult', which is merely a euphimism for modern political idolatry. (This cult, which deifies political rulers as in the kingdoms of ancient Egypt, Ghana, China, Rome, Mexico and Peru... still rules our political life, though the law forbidding re-election keeps it within limits.) At the same time, the revolutionaries who gathered around Carranza... strove to articulate and give coherence to the people's instinctive wishes. But the ideological insufficiency of the Revolution became plain almost at once, and the result was a compromise: the Constitution... The Revolution had no other recourse than to take over the programme of the liberals, though with certain modifications. This adoption of the liberals' scheme was a direct consequence of the lack of ideas among the revolutionaries. The intelligentsia did have some ideas, but they were completely useless: reality had smashed them to bits... The revival of the liberal programme, with its classical division of powers (non-existent in Mexico), its theoretical federalism and its blindness to our realities, opened the door once again to lies and pretences.' (Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude)
*
“Turn the other cheek….Love your enemy” said Christ. “Mandela taught us to forgive”, say the spectators. Forgive and forget – the sermon of those who want history to be repeated: the chant of those who want the rulers to be forgiven will invariably want to become like them, as Mandela did. You can only really forgive and “move on” when the material conditions, the miserable social relations, have moved on – when the world and life has been changed fundamentally. The Mandela show from his release from prison onwards aimed to give the impression that things had changed – but only in the standard sense (from Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's “The Leopard”) of “For things to remain the same, everything must change“.
It’s no coincidence that this almost overwhelming show - the world’s biggest funeral ever - is taking place during an epoch when, once again, proletarians are expressing their anger everywhere. The global show of unity in false memory of the dead – aimed at distracting from the real struggle for life by the living. The spectacle is, as ever, the rulers’ most insidious stun grenade, making everyone see stars as they fall into unconsciousness. Mandela is constantly evoked by the world’s rulers as a model for correct forms of “opposition” as much as by some of the world’s ruled. ”What cannot be done, as Mandela has taught us, is to sow hatred. Oppositions are a sign of democracy, but you should not stir up, nor exploit the anger and discontent or fuel dangerous feelings,” said an Italian politician about the wildcat strike and independent social movement spreading across Italy this month. But for the masses of individuals attacked by the brutal power of the economy, by its ideologies, cops and armies, to evoke Mandela means repressing such feelings and repressing the acts that develop from them, which truly are dangerous to the hierarchical social relations embodied in bourgeois democracy.
“Hanging on the walls of the house I had pictures of Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin, Gandhi … I explained to the boys who each of the men was, and what he stood for.” (Long Walk to Freedom, p240). In this autobiography Mandela declared that he “…had always been a Christian” (p620). It’s not in any way contradictory that this Christian used to have a picture of Stalin on his wall. The Bolsheviks were great pioneers in this type of cultifying: Lenin declared that to really be a Marxist one should always ask oneself, “What would Marx have thought and done in this situation?” Today one can find people protesting against this and that ignorantly using the image of Mandela to substitute for their own words and ideas. It’s no coincidence that the current global spectacle, with its tendency to pick up ideas and practices from, and unify, all previous forms of hierarchical power, particularly those developing capital accumulation, should today find itself united in its eulogy to a former Stalinist-turned-neoliberal. Christ, Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin, Gandhi, Mandela – the need for “radical” heroes tears us away from our own rebellious initiatives, and ends up crushing and co-opting every independent initiative. The need for rebel role models, for external authorities in pretensions to changing the world, imbued in some glow of perfection (though the content varies between the different forms necessary for each geographical place and epoch) is based on the maintenance of the utter nothingness of the lives of the admirers. Such an emptiness expresses the brutal powerlessness imposed by the self-same system they fail to set their minds and bodies against, the system that erects and resurrects the need for heroes and saints, particularly ones that are integral to the system, as Christ, Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin, Gandhi and Mandela, all in their different ways, most clearly were.
The mythical history of Mandela is a grandiose version of one that everyone is meant to somehow identify with: a long struggle, heavy repression, endurance in the face of persecution, release, realisation, and a happy old age surrounded by admirers, dying satisfied with the feeling that one has made a significant mark on the world. How we all would like to feel that! Pushed to the margins of existence, most of us enter old age with a feeling that our lives have been meaningless. Of course, loads of people have fought and been killed, or fought and been locked up, remaining unknown. So the political hero is created by the capitalist show to provide a vicarious substitute meaning. Above all, to provide those who are constantly crapped on from above and excluded from any direct power to have the deluded consolation that within this shithouse of a world not all those who occupy the thrones of power are bastards.
Samotnaf Fantom as the Sanctity of the Saints
Canned-Spirit Canonized and Certified by
The Life Unrest Celebration Ministry
December 2013
For a glimpse at the reality behind the Mandela myth, I suggest those wishing to struggle against this world of lies read at least the first part of my introduction to “South Africa – Now & Then”, a critical history of the social movements in South Africa, which I wrote almost 9 years ago. And for those who want some insights into the current situation, I suggest they read these passionately expressed pieces by Siddiq Khan called “Another man done gone” & “Post-marikana notes”. All free for the world to see on my website dialectical-delinquents.com [An alternative version of these texts are also available there. I have added certain quotes and illustrations of my own to those versions -- SK]
Affirmative Action and Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment working hard to correct the Legacy of Aparthied in the board-rooms of every company. 'Another thing, which this History will clearly establish and which holds true in every connection, is that the people were usually more important than the leaders. The deeper I have excavated, the more surely I have satisfied myself that the best was underneath, in the obscure depths. And I have realized that it is quite wrong to take these brilliant and powerful talkers, who expressed the thought of the masses, for the sole actors in the drama. They were given the impulse by others much more than they gave it themselves. The principle actor is the people. To find the people again and put it back in its proper role, I have been obliged to reduce to their proportions the ambitious marionettes whose strings it manipulated and in whom hitherto we have looked for and thought to see the secret play of history.' (Jules Michelet, History of the French Revolution)
