Rastafari Speaks - From South African Apartheid to North American Fascism

By Franz J. T. Lee

For a quarter of a century, I spent ny whole youth in Apartheid South Africa, and have experienced what fascism is all about. My very birth was a "racial" scandal in "White" South Africa; my father, of British origin, was as "white" as snow, seen through "Boer" eyes, my mother, of indigenous descent, was as black as the night.

I was classified as "Colored", and was not accepted in any camp, across the "race" barrier. I suffered all the evils of Apartheid, even escaped attempts to assassinate me. The "Afrikaner" nazis who conquered political power in 1948, led by Malan's Nationalist Party, immediately applied what the architect of Apartheid, Verwoerd, had learned in "Duitsland".

They supported Hitler, and later launched fascist practices, ... segregationist institutions, racist laws, meted out brutal torture. In their "Vaterland", in their "Home Land", inspired with "race superiority" and legal, "civilized" impunity, the "white chosen people" at whim and caprice, left and right, in ecstasy murdered the "barbarian", godless "Kaffers", they decreed "concentration camps", "Bantustans", etc. ... and across South Africa, they disseminated nazi ideology, fabricated "Bantu Education", "Education for Barbarism", religious indoctrination, etc.

They warned the sonorous members of the white "superior race" that they should not mix with the "black" "carriers of water, and hewers of wood", else South Africa would become a coffee-brown inferior nation. This was the slogan against the "Kaffer Gevaar", against the "Kaffir Danger".

South Africa was armed to the teeth, even developed atomic weapons of mass destruction, produced arms for sale to the rest of Africa, and intervened in sovereign countries, like Angola, Botswana or Lesotho, at its borders, leaving bloody trails of heinous massacres behind.

At least then, in the 1960's, for decades, internationally, the whole world, groups in the USA, hundreds of thousands were protesting against fascism in South Africa. They saw, they knew that "White" South Africa was a fascist, nazi, totalitarian, police state.

Across Europe, Canada and the USA, I held lectures, gave interviews to the mass media, even addressed the United Nations Special Committee on Apartheid, spoke to the "Black Panthers", to followers of Malcolm X, to the Socialist Workers' Party, to Christians in Harlem and Watts, and met Jewish opponents of Apartheid, in the "Four Seasons", in New York; just about everywhere there was a deep concern, a preoccupation, "that it may happen again".

Hence, for sure, I know what is fascism, when I see it, sense it. I suffered under Apartheid, I lived in Nazism, I fought for over 40 years against this barbaric monstrosity, however, today I just cannot understand how millions of US citizens could elect their very own butchers themselves.

What happened to Lincoln's "government of, by and for the people"? With the "Bill of Rights"? With the democratic "Constitution"? With the minds and intelligence of millions?

Why protest en masse against Apartheid, against the Vietnam War? And now, why are most of you practically silent, while hundred thousands of "Arabs" and "Palestinians" are being tortured, murdered and massacred by the US military government and its local lackeys and coupsters? Why do you not protest against the "Plan Colombia", the construction of an "Israel" in Latin America?

Please, please, do not label me with "anti-semitism"!

Are the innocent, slaughtered women and children in Afghanistan and Iraq not "white", not "Aryan", not "civilized", not "American", not "Children of God"?

Will you try to stop the pending invasion of Iran? Will you destroy the stacks of piled-up WMD's in the USA and Israel, that could wipe out life on this planet? In your "elections", why always the "loser takes it all"? Why allow the Bush gang to hack the results, making democracy a total farce?

Have you never heard of "full spectrum dominance", as is being planned and realized by the "Project for a New American Century"?

When I was studying in Germany, most of my professors, Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse and Ernst Bloch, told us how they had fled from Nazi Europe, yet I did not exactly grasp the real fear that faced all these "enemies" of the Third Reich. I did not understand the "war of ideas" against them.

When I read the diatribal speeches of Hitler, Goering and Goebbels, and saw documentaries of the yelling, brain-washed masses, of the stacked-up piles of the Jewish victims in Dachau and Auschwitz, their gold teeth extracted, then, I remembered the transatlantic slave trade, the quartering of African slaves, the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the millions of starved exploited Russians, in Siberia, in Workuta, in the "gulags". Then I understood what is capitalism.

Yes, as long as capitalism, colonialism, imperialism and corporatism are alive, it can again happen anywhere, anytime.

Now, please, do not label me as a "Marxist", "communist" or "terrorist"!

At the moment, as Great Power, armed to the teeth, in crisis, in agony, the USA has its turn, is showing its fascist Draculian bloody grin. In its "foreign policy", since the days of the "Founding Fathers", as Simon Bolivar had warned, the USA had, and now, more than ever, has the historic destiny to sow the seven plagues across Latin America and the world.

We need not mention here how many millions have been massacred in the name of the US$, that trusts in God, and which blesses America, in each US presidential speech to the nation.

Wake up, Americans, from your opulent slumber! Many are already fleeing to Canada and Europe. America is not becoming fascist, it is fascist long ago already. Do not wait until they have fetched all of us, because when they come to fetch you, we will not be there anymore, to protest, to give you a helping hand.

http://southafrica.indymedia.org/news/2004/11/6951.php