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| | |-+  Why the West Loves Mandela (and Hates Mugabe)
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Author Topic: Why the West Loves Mandela (and Hates Mugabe)  (Read 29094 times)
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« on: December 10, 2013, 01:41:33 PM »

Why the West Loves Mandela (and Hates Mugabe)


President Mugabe gives a toast to a closer relationship between Zimbabweans and progressive South Africans
and to peace and prosperity in 1990.


By Stephen Gowans
December 09, 2013


In the wake of Nelson Mandela’s death, hosannas continue to be sung to the former ANC leader and South African president from both the left, for his role in ending the institutional racism of apartheid, and from the right, for ostensibly the same reason. But the right’s embrace of Mandela as an anti-racist hero doesn’t ring true. Is there another reason establishment media and mainstream politicians are as Mandela-crazy as the left?

According to Doug Saunders, reporter for the unabashedly big business-promoting Canadian daily, The Globe and Mail, there is.

In a December 6 article, “From revolutionary to economic manager: Mandela’s lesson in change,” Saunders writes that Mandela’s “great accomplishment” was to protect the South African economy as a sphere for exploitation by the white property-owning minority and Western corporate and financial elite from the rank-and-file demands for economic justice of the movement he led.

Saunders doesn’t put it in quite these terms, hiding the sectional interests of bond holders, land owners, and foreign investors behind Mandela’s embrace of “sound” principles of economic management, but the meaning is the same.

Saunders quotes Alec Russell, a Financial Times writer who explains that under Mandela, the ANC “proved a reliable steward of sub-Sahara Africa’s largest economy, embracing orthodox fiscal and monetary policies…” That is, Mandela made sure that the flow of profits from South African mines and agriculture into the coffers of foreign investors and the white business elite wasn’t interrupted by the implementation of the ANC’s economic justice program, with its calls for nationalizing the mines and redistributing land.

Instead, Mandela dismissed calls for economic justice as a “culture of entitlement” of which South Africans needed to rid themselves. That he managed to persuade them to do so meant that the peaceful digestion of profits by those at the top could continue uninterrupted.

But it was not Mandela’s betrayal of the ANC’s economic program that Saunders thinks merits the right’s admiration, though the right certainly is grateful. Mandela’s genius, according to Saunders, was that he did it “without alienating his radical followers or creating a dangerous factional struggle within his movement.”

Thus, in Saunder’s view, Mandela was a special kind of leader: one who could use his enormous prestige and charisma to induce his followers to sacrifice their own interests for the greater good of the elite that had grown rich off their sweat, going so far as to acquiesce in the repudiation of their own economic program.

“Here is the crucial lesson of Mr. Mandela for modern politicians,” writes Saunders. “The principled successful leader is the one who betrays his party members for the larger interests of the nation. When one has to decide between the rank-and-file and the greater good, the party should never come first.”

For Saunders and most other mainstream journalists, “the larger interests of the nation” are the larger interests of banks, land owners, bond holders and share holders. This is the idea expressed in the old adage “What’s good for GM, is good for America.” Since mainstream media are large corporations, interlocked with other large corporations, and are dependent on still other large corporations for advertising revenue, the placing of an equal sign between corporate interests and the national interest comes quite naturally. Would we be shocked to discover that a mass-circulation newspaper owned by environmentalists (if such a thing existed) opposed fracking? (Journalists will rejoin, “I say what I like.” But as Michael Parenti once pointed out, journalists say what they like because their bosses like what they say.)

Predictably, Saunders ends his encomium to the party-betraying Mandela, the ‘good’ liberation hero, with a reference to the ‘bad’ south African liberation hero, Robert Mugabe. “One only needs look north to Zimbabwe to see what usually happens when revolutionaries” fail to follow Mandela’s economically conservative path, writes Saunders.

At one point, Mugabe’s predilection for orthodox fiscal and monetary policy was a strong as Mandela’s. Yet after almost a decade-and-a-half of the Western media demonizing Mugabe as an autocratic thug, it’s difficult to remember that he, too, was once the toast of Western capitals.

The West’s love affair with Mugabe came to an abrupt end when he rejected the Washington Consensus and embarked on a fast-track land reform program. Its disdain for him deepened when he launched an indigenization program to place majority control of the country’s mineral resources in the hands of black Zimbabweans.

Mugabe’s transition from ‘good’ liberation hero to ‘bad’, from saint to demon, coincided with his transition from “reliable steward” of Zimbabwe’s economy (that is, reliable steward of foreign investor and white colonial settler interests) to promoter of indigenous black economic interests.

That’s a transition Mandela never made. Had he, the elite of the imperialist world would not now be flocking to South Africa for Saint Mandela’s funeral, overflowing with fulsome eulogies.

http://gowans.wordpress.com/2013/12/09/why-the-west-loves-mandela-and-hates-mugabe/
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« Reply #1 on: December 10, 2013, 09:17:41 PM »

South Africa: Cheers Greet Mugabe At Mandela Funeral

BY TINTSWALO BALOYI, 10 DECEMBER 2013
 
Johannesburg — ZIMBABWEAN President Robert Mugabe received a standing ovation at the funeral of former South African President Nelson Mandela while the country's president Jacob Zuma was booed.

There were raptures after his presence was acknowledged at the FNB Stadium in Soweto by the country ANC deputy president Cyril Ramaphosa.

Mugabe waved back to the thousands of mourners at the giant stadium which accommodates a capacity 90 000 crowd.

Mugabe was seated next to his wife Grace and children when other African heads of state clapped and stood in appreciation of his presence.

Goodluck Jonathan, the Nigeria President, and Joseph Kabila of the Democratic Republic of Congo, are two other heads of state that drew ovations, nonetheless lesser than Mugabe.

Several international media houses were ahead of the event portraying Mugabe as unpopular in South Africa.

International media compared Mugabe and Mandela, a development which was roundly condemned by Zimbabwe, and other African countries.

In Zimbabwean, the country's Minister of Information, Media and Broadcasting Services, Jonathan Moyo, dismissed the comparisons as "frivolous attempts by the Western media".

“It is kind of disappointing that Nelson Mandela's passing on has attracted gratuitous comparisons between him and other African leaders including our own President Mugabe whose iconic standing as a liberator and empowerer is now an indelible imprint of history.

“While the subtext of the gratuitous comparisons has been that other African leaders such as President Mugabe should emulate Mandela, the more important and rather self-evident fact that cannot therefore be masked by the shrill comparisons is that God created only one Nelson Mandela with no clones in the same way he created only one Winston Churchill; one John F Kennedy, one Mao, one Lenin and one Mahatma Gandhi with no clones.”

“The notion being peddled in some propaganda quarters that some African leaders should style themselves as Mandela clones has no precedence in the history of civilised nations," Moyo was quoted as saying.

Moyo was quoted as saying Britain has not had another Churchill and America has not had another Kennedy, arguing that Africa would not have another Mandela insisting that the gratuitous comparisons of Mandela and other African leaders were ultimately "a waste of time.”

Mandela died last Thursday at the age of 95. He will be buried on Sunday.



http://allafrica.com/stories/201312101528.html
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« Reply #2 on: December 10, 2013, 10:00:05 PM »

MUGABE CHEERED, ZUMA BOOED IN SOWETO

There were mixed reactions to the various world leaders gathered at the event. China's vice-president Li Yunchao was booed, while Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe was greeted with cheers. Mugabe is well regarded on the continent for fighting against white supremacy and standing up to the west. It is a different story at home where he has run his country into the ground.

Full Article:
http://www.newsdzezimbabwe.co.uk/2013/12/mugabe-cheered-zuma-booed-in-soweto.html

"It is a different story at home where he has run his country into the ground."

FLASHBACK: Landslide victory for Mugabe in Zimbabwe elections

August 4, 2013

Robert Gabriel Mugabe was re-elected the President of Zimbabwe on Saturday, extending a thirty three year reign at the helm of the country he helped liberate from white rule in 1980. Mr. Mugabe’s ZANU (PF) proved similarly dominant, winning two-thirds of the seats declared thus far.

Now 89 years old, Mr. Mugabe and the ZANU (PF) have ruled Zimbabwe since independence, seeing off numerous challenges through a recipe of realpolitik and control of security forces and institutions of state.

The victory was as comprehensive as it was controversial with Mr. Mugabe sweeping the polls with 61 percent of votes cast, nearly twice as those polled by Morgan Tsvangirai, his closest rival, amidst opposition allegations of fraud. At the time of press, Harare was calm with none of violence of the 2008 election in which security forces killed 200 people after Mr. Tsvangirai emerged as the front-runner in a presidential run-off.

Full Article:
http://www.thehindu.com/news/international/world/landslide-victory-for-mugabe-in-zimbabwe-elections/article4986066.ece
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