About a month ago, JWN regular Dominic and I were doing some online work together looking at potential areas for comparison between the “total strategy” adopted by the SA apartheid regime in the 1970s and the “Global War on Terrorism” launched by the Bush administration after 9/11.
We’re still really only at the beginning of this work. But if you go to this early-April post you can see some of the exchanges we had– plus some helpful comments from JWN readers, too.
Okay, here’s a bit of an update. First, I have finally managed to scan an excerpt of the text of the TS, as compiled in “South African government documents on the
4 thoughts on “Apartheid’s ‘Total Strategy’, contd.”
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Professor Emery alludes to something that is crucial to understanding international political dynamics. It is difficult enough for capitalist states to create strategies for control that actually work at the domestic level, since there are always national and international forces that turn out differently than expected or simply cannot be controlled. At the international level, those difficulties are magnified very many times, politicians’ attempts at political theorizing and sloganeering not withstanding. Iraq is a powerful example, where in a sense the U.S. is hanging on by its teeth. In general, geopolitical strategies (and theories) fail because they are unable to come-to-grips with the underlying anarchy of international capitalist economies and politics.
Hi Helena and all Just Worlders,
Sorry I was not on to this earlier. I have had some computer problems.
This exercise is fruitful, just as we thought it would be.
Prof. Emery doesn’t half know his stuff too and he puts it down very succinctly.
I can’t help thinking of the first words of Marx’s “18th Brumaire” about the way history repeats itself. Perhaps “farce is not the word but when the comparison with the brutal old SA regime makes the US look the cruder one, by far, what can you say?
The link won’t work for me at the moment so I am still going to have to wait a bit longer for that Total Strategy Word document. I’ll try again tomorrow.
I just re-uploaded the TS text document as an HTML file, which should make it a lot easier to download.
I gave a little talk about the ME here in Charlottesville today and amazingly, again and again, the Afrikaners came to mind as “hard-headed realists” who had nonetheless, after years of trying to bash their opponents into submission, realized that perhaps sitting down and talking to ’em as equals might be an option worth trying…
What’s more, my audience here seemed nearly all to “get” the analogy and the lessons that flow from it. In other words these people– mainly wise, well-informed older people in the community– realize that there is something deeply wrong with our country’s current posture toward the rest of the world.
Thanks, the link is fine now.
I think we should also note that liberal imperialism works better as imperialism than the direct and brutal kind as practised by Hulako (the Mongol conqueror of Iraq: is that the correct spelling?), Cecil Rhodes, or Dr. Verwoerd.
We might even say that the two in effect work together in historical a good cop, bad cop routine. Bush ravages Iraq, then allows “elections”.
The liberal concessions can bind the oppressed even tighter. In South Africa we still sit with 40% unemployment but under the Washington consensus and all the “rule-based” international institutions, as well as our sainted bourgeois-democratic constitution, there is nothing we can do about it.
Some day soon we have to overthrow the liberal-imperialist order as well. Let us hope we are allowed to do so peacefully. Peace is always better than war.