- From the South African History Archive
I'm all for liberation, but it depends what sort of liberation movement you're supporting.
Opposing racial discrimination such as apartheid is good, because racial discrimination is instrinsically wrong and egregious obstacles to human freedom are worth opposing. (Disclosure: both my wife and I have been detained without trial by the previous regime.)
However, opposing apartheid because it's a form of capitalism, say, because you believe the free-market is the world's greatest evil and to be opposed at all costs (as more than a few of my peers in the 70s and 80s did), is, er, somewhat more debatable. People who work to liberate people from the horrors of the market economy (like Cde Pol Pot) are not all to be unequivocally supported, even if other elements of their struggle are just (such as the battle against colonialism), I would argue.
Like about 99.9999999999999999% of humanity, those who worked in and supported the liberation struggle against apartheid had a mixture of motives, methods and motivations. Sweeping statements such as "s/he fought in/supported the struggle against racism/apartheid" are just not granular enough to canonise or excommunicate anyone, and are not infrequently invoked to kill debate. Of more immediate interest is what the liberator seeks to replace the unjust system with - for example, where are they on the spectrum between a proletarian/peasant/workers' socialist paradise or unbridled capitalism/
anarchism?
As I said, I'm all for those who opposed apartheid, and laud those who spent time incarcerated for their struggle. But we need to be much more careful when it comes to precisely what sort of violence was used against what sorts of targets, and what sort of system is proposed as the replacement.
I would be disingenuous if I did not confess to more than a little nervousness about the intended direction of the incoming cadres now being deployed by the post-coup ANC.
D)
