Fascist America, fascist Zimbabwe

It was Guardian Unlimited that had the extraordinary innuendo that Thabo Mbeki was the worst president in the world. But here they publish the criteria by which, I believe, Thabo Mbeki looks a lot better than George Bush and Robert Mugabe. Hat tip to Douloi Johanna for the link.

To summarise: Naomi Wolf outlines 10 steps taken by most dictators to establish their dictatorship, and shows how they have been taken by the Bush administration in the USA. I don't think it would be difficult to show that most of them have been taken by Mugabe in Zimbabwe as well. But in South Africa?

1. Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy
2. Create a gulag
3. Develop a thug caste
4. Set up an internal surveillance system
5. Harass citizens' groups
6. Engage in arbitrary detention and release
7. Target key individuals
8. Control the press
9. Dissent equals treason
10. Suspend the rule of law

Of course all 10 were in place in South Africa under National Party rule, but they were removed in the democratisation process during the 1990s. They all now seem to be present in Zimbabwe as well as in the USA.

The ANC and ZANU-PF

Robert Mugabe likes to create the impression that all the problems of Zimbabwe are caused by imperialists and colonialists of the west, and that all his critics are somehow allied with George Bush, Tony Blair & Co.

Actually it is not so.

The opposition to Mugabe's rule comes from the urban working class in Zimbabwe, and it is they who have borne the brunt of his oppression. As I noted in an earlier post, the open tension between ZANU-PF and the MDC in Zimbabwe is mirrored in the tensions within the tripartite alliance in South Africa.

And now Blade Nzimande has said something on the subject:

'ANC following in Zanu-PF's footsteps'
Christelle Terreblanche
March 25 2007 at 03:14PM

Blade Nzimande, the SA Communist Party leader, has warned that the ANC government may be falling into the same trap as its Zimbabwean counterparts.

Nzimande on Saturday said the SACP should carefully scrutinise its own alliance partner for signs of similarity between the ANC and the Zimbabwean ruling party, Zanu-PF, which has come under renewed international condemnation for its recent repression of opposition and civil society.

Nzimande coined the phrase "govermentalisation of the national liberation struggle" to warn against the dangers of Zanu-PF's and President Robert Mugabe's hold on power.

More here: 'ANC following in Zanu-PF's footsteps'

Hanging Saddam Hussein and loving enemies

Hanging Saddam Hussein will do as much for Iraq as hanging P.W. Botha would have done for South Africa -- see my earlier post: Notes from underground: What to do with old dictators.

Pastor Phil Wyman makes some interesting points on treating people as enemies in his blog Square No More: Those Who Pray Together Slay Together.

In the recent obituaries on Gerald Ford, the former US president, it seems that for many the biggest mistake he made was pardoning Richard Nixon.

St Paul warns us (in Eph 6:10-12) that our struggle is not against blood and flesh, but against principalities and powers, against spiritual forces of wickedness. Hanging oppressors does not get rid of oppression. Yet we persist in thinking that we are fighting against flesh and blood, and so the cycle of vengeance continues.

It appears the US president George Bush wants Saddam Hussein to hang -- but if Bush is ever brought to trial for his war crimes, will there be any to plead for him to be pardoned?

I have heard that at the war crimes trials of Nazi leaders at Nuremburg one of the difficulties faced by the court was convincing the accused that they were not on trial for losing the war, but for starting it. That Bush would lose the war in Iraq was a foregone conclusion; his crime was starting it in the first place.

PW Botha, so far as I know, went to his death unrepentant. Would hanging him have made things better? Did Jesus make loving enemies conditional on their repentance? It seems to me that in demanding vengeance we demonstrate that we have been infected by the same virus as those we seek to kill. Killing people does not kill the virus, it just causes it to seek a new host. And the spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenlies behave very much like viruses in that respect -- C.S. Lewis called them "macrobes" rather than "microbes".

People with secular values find this difficult to understand. They believe it is letting people off the hook, denying responsibility, and letting them get away with it using the excuse "The devil made me do it." But for Christians that excuse doesn't wash. "Resist the devil, and he will flee from you." That is the real spiritual warfare -- resisting the devil when he tempts us, and especially when he tempts us with the relatively undemanding exercise of confessing other people's sins and ignoring our own.

What to do with old dictators

Saddam Hussein is sentenced to death while PW Botha is offered a state funeral and flags fly at half-mast.

Is that the difference between Muslim values and Christian values, or what?

In South Africa there is much talk of the need for moral regeneration, and every now and then there are reports in the media about religious leaders and political leaders, and even sometimes business leaders deploring the "culture of violence" and calling for the teaching of values.

There is a problem in teaching values, say, in schools in a multicultural society, where some are quick to complain about other peoples' values being forced down their throats. But it is at times like this that one realises that ubuntu is alive and well, and that one of the core Christian values of love of enemies come to the fore, and that projects to promote values, like Heartlines, are not just whistling in the dark.

PW Botha was not in the first rank of dictators of the 20th century. He was not up there with Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot. He belonged a bit lower down the list, along with Pinochet of Chile, Franco of Spain, Mussolini of Italy, Saddam Hussein of Iraq, and a few others. Unlike many, he did not create the evil system he presided over, he inherited it from his predecessors, and his contribution was to prop it up and prolong it with ever more brutal repression of those who opposed it. There were signs, just before his fall from power, of his willingness to change, when he invited Nelson Mandela, the jailed leader of the opposition, to tea at Tuynhuis, his official residence. But, unlike Adriaan Vlok, his minister of police, he showed no indication of repentance or remorse.

Nevertheless, the South African government, including President Thabo Mbeki, showed the kind of magnanimity that indicates the enormous difference between the values of the new South Africa they are trying to create, and those of the old South Africa that PW Botha was trying to preserve. It's at times that these that I feel proud to be a South African.

And I wonder what would happen if these values had been (or were to be) applied in the former Yugoslavia, Sudan, Iraq, and Israel/Lebanon/Palestine instead of raining down bombs on people?

Tags: South Africa, Christian values

Don't we need a new political language?

Katrina Vandenheuvel writes, in a piece entitled Don't we need a new political language? about the habit politicians have of likening their opponents to nasty dictators of the past.

But journalists are at least as much guilty of this kind of hyperbole, a recent example being the reports on the feath and funeral of Slobodan Milosevic, where he was described as "butcher of the Balkans", "mass murderer", and was said to have "orchestrated" the wars of the Yugoslav succession, and killed 250000 people.

Where do they get this stuff?

Is this sort of exaggeration particularly common in the USA, or does it happen in other places as well? IT's hard to tell, sometimes, because so much of waht we read here in South Africa is syndicated from US columnists and wire services. But the falsehoods seem to be getting bigger and more obvious.