Rootless Cosmopolitan – By Tony Karon | Analysis and commentary by Tony Karon

Bush el Libertador? You’re Having a Laugh!

Posted on November 7, 2005 by Tony

September 11, 1973: Chile’s Presidential palace is
bombed as a U.S.-backed coup overthrows the
democratically elected government

1. Latin America’s 9/11

To understand why President Bush was rebuffed — politely in some cases, less so in others — by the leaders of Latin America at the weekend, it may be worth remembering what September 11 has meant down south along the Andes. It was marked as a dark day by democratically minded people in South America long before 2001 — from 1973, onward, to be precise, because it was on September 11 that year that the democratically elected leftist president of Chile, Salvador Allende, was overthrown in a U.S. backed coup. It was 16 years before democracy was restored, and thousands of Chileans were tortured and murdered simply for their affiliation with parties of the type the Chilean electorate (and the electorates of Argentina, Brazil and others in the neighborhood) have voted into power once again, now that they’re free to choose. We’ll return to the implications in a moment.

2. Bush vs. Chavez and Maradona is “Celebrity Death Match,” Not Real Politics

Much of the U.S. media may have bought into the feeble White House spin portraying Bush’s rebuff by Latin America at the weekend as a points victory over Hugo Chavez (supposedly because despite the tens of thousands of protestors on the streets, the governments agreed to keep talking about trade despite declining to sign on to Washington’s initiative). But Chavez vs. Bush was never the contest, except perhaps in the fantasies of the two men. And spare us march leader Diego Maradona, football genius and legendary cheat, latterday more or less permanent resident of rehab and late night talkshow host. I guess the event did take place a couple of days after Halloween. (Another featured speaker was Evo Morales, the Bolivian coca — as in cocaine — farmer and Chavez acolyte who looks set to be elected president in Bolivia next month).

Chavez, Mardona and Morales are not the face of the Latin American Left, however. That title may be more appropriately used for many of the self-same leaders with whom Bush was conferring behind closed doors at the summit and after. The continent’s electorate has reacted to the failure of free market policies to generate jobs and close the world’s worst income disparities by electing left-wing governments in Latin America’s most economically powerful nations — Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Venezuela. Mexico, of course, has a center-right government, but the left is expected to win the next election there, too.

For the governing left in Latin America, Chavez’s antics are a guilty pleasure — the sort of provocative posturing to irritate the Yanquis that only one of their major oil suppliers could get away with . (Frankly, my suspicion is that even Fidel Castro is a little embarrassed by Chavez’s demagoguery — because the Venezuelan leader claims to be mimicking his Cuban hero — but he’s not about to go rebuking the man who controls his own lifeline to cheap oil, now is he?)

Autarchy is not an option for those without massive oil incomes, and nobody’s about to try and reprise the Cuban model, which was a creature of time and place (enabled, to a large extent, by an $8 billion annual Soviet subsidy that translated into an annual stipend of close to $1,000 per citizen). And besides, Latin America’s new leftist governments are quite different from Castro in their approach to questions of democracy — it was in civil society that they regrouped in the wake of the repression of Pinochet and others, so they’re products of a reality quite at odds with the authoritarian party culture of Cuba. And the governing Left is all too aware of the need to not only remain plugged in to the global economy, but to expand that integration by attracting billions of dollars of investments.

So while they may be as implacably opposed to the Bush agenda as Chavez is, they have to remain at the table and negotiate for better terms. Of course, they’re aware that their economic prospects are not only tied to their ability to deal with the U.S. They’re hedging mightily by dramatically expanding their trade and investment links with the European Union, and particularly with China. (Nowhere is the extent to which U.S. influence has declined during the Bush years as evident as it is right now in its old “back yard.”) But they can’t simply walk away; they need to engage with corporate America.

3. For the Latin Ameican Left, Chavez’s Antics are a Guilty Pleasure

They don’t identify with his personality cult demagoguery or his authoritarian streak. but Latin America’s mainstream leftists have to take a certain guilty pleasure in Chavez’s ability to get up the nose of the Yanquis. If he’s a Mandela figure, it’s Winnie rather than Nelson. But he sure is annoying Bush, and they’ll look warmly on his defiance of U.S. influence in the region. (Because in their very bitter experience, U.S. influence in the region has not been a good thing.) Indeed, the Chavez effect right now may actually echo the Castro effect of the past four decades, where even center-right governments in Latin America respected and admired the Cuban leader for refusing to buckle to U.S. pressure. It went beyond ideology to a kind of nationalist sentiment.

While Chavez played bad cop along with Maradona out in the streets, the likes of Kirschner, Lula and Lagos could play good cop inside the summit.

4. Does Bush Think Latin Americans are Stupid, or Just Amnesiac?

“Only a generation ago, this was a continent plagued by military dictatorship and civil war,” Bush intoned in Brazil on Sunday. “Yet the people of this continent defied the dictators, and they claimed their liberty… Freedom is the gift of the Almighty to every man and woman in this world — and today this vision is the free consensus of a free Americas.”

Right, and where was Washington? Many of the same leaders with whom Bush met at the summit were in prison, or buried their friends and colleagues murdered for their activism, and faced the constant threat of murder and torture for standing up to dictatorship. And in most instances, they were fighting dictators backed by the United States.

Chile’s President Ricardo Lagos is a case in point: He was imprisoned by Washington’s man, Pinochet. Yes, he wants a trade deal with the U.S. But you can hold the democracy lecture, thank you.

Whereas President Clinton had the good grace and sense to recognize the harm done by his predecessors in Latin America and apologize for U.S. failures to apply its own values in dealing with the continent, Bush has simply reverted to type. His national intelligence czar, for example, is John Negroponte, better known in Latin America for his years running some pretty nasty covert operations out of the U.S. embassy in Tegucigalpa and covering up human rights abuses by the U.S. backed Honduran security forces. His Middle East adviser is Elliott Abrams, veteran of the Iran-Contra scandal. He nominated hardline Cuban exile veterans such as Otto Reich to top positions in the State Department concerning Latin America, and nobody in the region was surprised that, despite the democratic consensus praised by Bush, the administration appeared to initially support or at least accept a coup attempt against Chavez a couple of years ago.

Either Bush just doesn’t get it, or he doesn’t care: For many of the leaders of the new democracies whose emergence he praised last weekend, the United States does not symbolize freedom and democracy. Indeed, in the tradition of September 11, 1973 — which Bush doesn’t appear to be inclined to publicly repudiate, even if he’s moved on from them — Presidents Kirschner, Lula, Lagos and Andrés Manuel López Obrador (likely next president of Mexico) would once have had more reason to expect to be overthrown in U.S.-backed coups than to be negotiating trade deals with Washington. So, yes, much has changed — but on both sides of the equation.

Posted in 99c Blogging | 19 Comments

What’s Good for the Jews…

Posted on November 5, 2005 by Tony

Serge Gainsbourg records in Jamaica

In my “What is Rootless Cosmopolitan?” manifesto, I hinted at my belief that being dispersed among the nations (the “Diaspora”) is not some catastrophe to have befallen Jews, as the Zionists maintain; on the contrary, that dispersal among the peoples of the world has brought out the best in us, and in Judaism itself. It has made us better in so many senses, and that’s been good for us and good for the societies in which we live. Pursuing the universal ethics at the heart of my understanding of Judaism makes the Diaspora our natural home. In support of this, I ventured a grab-bag of thumbnail observations:

“All of the great Jewish intellectual, philosophical, moral and cultural exemplars I can think of were products not of a separate Jewish existence, but of the Diaspora, our dispersal among the cultures of the world. Whether it’s Maimonides or Spinoza, Marx, Freud, Einstein or Derrida; Kafka or Primo Levi; Serge Gainsbourg or Daniel Barenboim; Lenny Bruce or Bob Dylan; Mike Leigh or Ali G; kneidlach or rugelach or so many of the brooding operatic tunes I heard in synagogue as a kid; all are products not of Jews living only among themselves, but of our interaction with diverse influences in the Diaspora.”

My kind of Jew: Baruch Spinoza

(Okay, okay, I wont’ go out to bat for that prat Ali G — substitute Lou Reed or Jon Stewart or Marc Bolan or how about Janet Jagan, prime minister of Guyana?) Yes, a Daniel Barenboim may live in Israel today, but he is in every sense a product of the Diaspora (Eastern Europe, via Argentina) and today his cultural milieu spans Berlin and Ramallah. And there are plenty of great Israeli artists, writers, film-makers, journalists and human rights activists, but invariably they are products of interactions with a wider world.

Barenboim conducts in Ramallah

I was pleased to see the same argument taken up by Eric Hobsbawm, preeminent historian of the British left, although he offers a historian’s meticulous observations in support of his case.

Hobsbawm’s curiosity is aroused by the fact that as ubiquitous as Jewish achievement is in the arts, sciences and political and cultural life in today’s world, so is it a comparatively recent development – a trickle that began in the late Renaissance that became a stream in the 19th century and river by the early 20th, but in the post-World War II era has been more of a deluge.

The explanation for this lies in the fact that even in the Diaspora, Jews continued to live mostly in closed communities for much of the past Millennium, either out of choice or as a result of segregation – with some notable exceptions. It was the breakdown of these closed Jewish communities, emancipating Jews from ghettoes both enforced and chosen, that brought on the explosion in Jewish cultural achievements. In Western Europe, Hobsbawm notes, it was largely an emancipation imposed on Jewish communities by the renaissance, which broke the grip of rabbis over the communities where they enforced Taliban-like strictures on Jewish behavior, and particularly on Jewish learning. In many of these communities, reading anything other than religious text was verboten, except in the one place where reading would be deemed to defile a text – thus, I like to think, was born time-honored tradition of Jewish learning in the littlest room. The rabbis had been granted absolute authority by medieval monarchies in many instances, which would allow them to pass sentences of corporal or even capital punishments on those deemed to have contravened religious law. So the wider European Enlightenment, which in its best instances replaced the idea of Jews as a separate community with its own laws and obligations with the modern idea of the Jew as individual citizen, had a profoundly liberating effect.

In Eastern Europe, however, Jews had to fight their way out of the ghettoes imposed by the wider societies in which they lived, and they often did so by making common cause with the progressive and revolutionary movements that defined the most cosmopolitan instincts of their age.

Thus, writes, Hobsbawm, “one might say that Western Jews of the earlier 19th century were emancipated thanks to an ideology not associated with them, while the Eastern Ashkenazim largely emancipated themselves through a universalist revolutionary ideology with which they were closely associated. This is even true of the original Zionism, deeply penetrated by Marxist thinking, that actually built the State of Israel.”

The very identity of modern “Ost-juden” (Jews from the East) was heavily inscribed with Eastern and Central European revolutionary thinking. To be sure, the Zionist ideology that I imbibed as a teenager in Habonim in South Africa in the 1970s came wrapped in a utopian-socialist package, and it was the bearded aspirant kibbutzniks of the movement’s older ranks that first introduced me to the dialectic. Our Israeli shaliach (emissary) from Kibbutz Ein Gedi on the dead sea taught me the words to the Internationale in Hebrew – all I can remember is “Kum hitnaera ka olam…” In Habonim, the obvious contradiction between the inherently cosmopolitan and universalist nature of socialism and the narrow nationalism of the Zionist project was reconciled with the notion that the Zionist dream of a Jewish state was but a stepping stone to universal socialism. (Nobody asked how the Palestinians fitted in with this version of “universal socialism.”) And when I began to demur and suggest that our values may be better applied to the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, the shaliach called me a “Bundist” (a reference to the Yiddisher Arbeiter Bund, a Jewish socialist organization affiliated with the Second International that opposed Zionism and advocated Jewish emancipation via involvement in the broader socialist struggles of Europe – and by the way, the Bund was the largest political organization among the Jews of Eastern Europe before the Holocaust; the Zionist movement had attracted only a small minority).

It was not only in my Habonim experience that the revolutionary imprint of the Eastern European Jewish experience was visible to me: My anecdotal sense (I don’t think there was ever a survey!) is that before the mass movement of the 1980s attracted thousands of white South Africans of all affiliations to the ANC, at least half of the movement’s white activists had been Jewish (and, remember, Jews were never more than about 3 to 5% of the white population in South Africa). When I first met the legendary trade unionist and ANC stalwart Ray Alexander, I was blown away by the fact that she spoke with the same thick Yiddish accent as my Bubbe had.

Interestingly, Hobsbawm also notes that continued uncertainty over the status of Jews in wider societies has actually reinforced the activist trend towards social justice, citing Jewish involvement in struggles against racism in South Africa and the U.S. as examples. He even suggests that such pressure fuels creativity: “The times of maximum stimulation for Jewish talent may have been those when the Jews became conscious of the limits of assimilation,” citing Proust, Freud and Mahler as examples. I’d add Kafka, Barenboim and Primo Levi off the top of my head.

Woody Allen plays the shlemiel in 1969

But it wasn’t just on radical politics that the emancipation of Eastern Jewry had a major impact. Hobsbawm details all the obvious developments in the sciences, arts and intellectual life. And he provides an interesting periodization, noting that in the pre-World War II era emancipation had meant Jews simply seeking to become an outstanding unhyphenated citizen of their own country. He notes that in classical music, for example, although Jewish composers make an outstanding contribution in the 19th century, there is nothing “Jewish” about the music they make – unlike the impact made by gypsies or African Diasporans, or even the likes of George Gershwin, on music, they simply compose great French or German music. Although Hobsbawm doesn’t mention it, I was reminded of the scholarship of Neal Gabler on the Hollywood Jews, most of whom were German in origin and studiously rejected any reference to anything Jewish even when they were portraying Jews or Jewish themes – even to the extent of casting Cary Grant as a journalist posing as a Jew in order to make a movie about anti-Semitism in “Gentleman’s Agreement.” Gabler notes elsewhere that Woody Allen, circa 1970, was probably the first director to bring recognizably Jewish Jews onto the big screen, despite all the major Hollywood studios having been run by Jews for a half century. (Interesting, too, Gabler notes how their desire to assimilate into the American mainstream made many of those same studio heads all too willing to cooperate with Senator McCarthy’s purges — Woody Allen, for his part, honored those, like comedian Zero Mostel, who stood up to McCarthy and got blacklisted for it, in his memorable movie “The List.”)

After World War II, however, Hobsbawm suggests that in the United States, now home to the largest community of Jews – the majority of them Ost-Juden—Jewish culture and identity politics transformed. The Yiddish word “chutzpah,” for example, is universally understood today, he writes. Forty years very few non-Yiddish speakers would have recognized it. There’s a whole book to be written about the twists and turns taken during this period, (and many have been — I’d highly recommend Philip Novick’s “The Holocaust in American Life” for a sharp analysis of the communal politics of American Jewry over the past half century). But Hobsbawm’s primary concern is a global sociology of the Diaspora as an enabler of Jewish achievement.

He suggests that the increasingly favorable conditions in which the increasingly emancipated Jews of the Diaspora established themselves in the West after WWII created perhaps the most fertile field of interaction between Jews and the wider society. Israel, by contrast, has yielded nothing comparable, despite the size of its Jewish population. “It would seem that living among gentiles and addressing a gentile audience is as much a stimulus for physicists as it is for film-makers,” he writes. “In this respect, it is still much better to come from Brooklyn than from Tel Aviv.”

Hobsbawm avoids discussing the Israeli condition at all. But it seems worth noting the enraged epitaph of “socialist” Zionism written, two years ago, by former Knesset speaker Avram Burg. He writes, “We live in a thunderously failed reality. Yes, we have revived the Hebrew language, created a marvelous theater and a strong national currency. Our Jewish minds are as sharp as ever. We are traded on the Nasdaq. But is this why we created a state? The Jewish people did not survive for two millennia in order to pioneer new weaponry, computer security programs or anti-missile missiles. We were supposed to be a light unto the nations. In this we have failed.

“It turns out that the 2,000-year struggle for Jewish survival comes down to a state of settlements, run by an amoral clique of corrupt lawbreakers who are deaf both to their citizens and to their enemies. A state lacking justice cannot survive. More and more Israelis are coming to understand this as they ask their children where they expect to live in 25 years. Children who are honest admit, to their parents’ shock, that they do not know.”

Ironically, despite the dark predictions of the Zionist ideology of my youth, as many as 750,000 Israelis have left to live in the Diaspora. A Jew’s place is in the world. It’s only anti-Semites, and die-hard Zionists, who insist otherwise.

Posted in A Wondering Jew | 12 Comments

The Clerico-Kremlinology of Iran’s Israel Threat

Posted on November 3, 2005 by Tony

ahmedinajad
Working class hero?

In the lexicon of Iran’s faith-based institutional-revolutionary establishment, calling for Israel’s elimination is– well, an article of faith. It’s one of those cornerstones of an outlook whose restatement is, for the most part, unecessary. Ahmedinajad was speaking, after all, at the annual anti-Zionist conference, and it may be tempting to read his restatement of the boilerplate rhetoric simply as the equivalent of wearing a scary costume at Halloween, which also comes once a year. Or, more correctly, the equivalent of a Soviet communist’s restatement of his or her aversion to capitalism. You know, like Kruschev coming to the U.S. and warning that the Soviet Union still planned to “bury capitalism.” But as the Sovietologists of old knew, the restatement of familiar slogans in certain contexts revealed something of the hidden conflict among rival power centers in Moscow. The same may hold true in Tehran.

Ahmedinajad’s comments registered on the international ear because they expressed a long-held view that has long been muted. No other heads of state in the Arab or Muslim world today openly advocate destroying Israel — it’s not that they’ve learned to love the idea of a Jewish state at the heart of the Middle East, they simply know it’s an intractable reality, and that clinging to practices premised on the idea that it will one day be reversed has proved self-destructive and counterproductive to Arab and Muslim regimes. In their ideal world, yes, Israel would be wiped off the map. This is hardly surprising: For Arabs and Muslims, the creation of Israel was an historic defeat and a humiliation imposed on them in the wake of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. They saw it as the West forcing them to accept the displacement and dispossession of Arabs in order to accommodate a people displaced and dispossessed by Western anti-semitism. So they’re never going to love it, although a half-century of defeats has forced most to accept it as an historic fact. To expect anything more would be like asking U.S. politicians to celebrate the fall of Saigon — they can learn to live with their defeat — even to recognize that there is much to be gained from reconciling with the very same Vietnamese communists who drove them out — but they’re never going t0 love it.

For Israel, the statement was a bit of a yawn. As Zvi Barel pointed out in Haaretz, calls for the destruction of Israel have been part of the core identity principles of the regime in Tehran for 26 years, and in that time it has coexisted with Israel — and even taken weapons deliveries from it during Iran-Contra. Regardless of its rhetoric, he says, Iran is a status quo power because its leadership is primarily concerned with the survival of their regime — a priority that dictates pragmatic relations with all sorts of countries friendly with Israel (such as India and Turkey) and increasingly also with the West.

Indeed, no sooner had Ahmedinajad spoken then other officials of the regime were rushing to reassure the world that Iran had no intention of acting on his words, that it respected the UN Charter which would preclude launching any aggression against another state, etc. Even Hashemi Rafsanjani, the former president who enjoys the favor of the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khameini, moved to pour water on the threat — even though he, himself, had made a similar one four years ago.

There’s a certain irony here in the response of some, like Tony Blair who sought to use the outburst to burnish his own case for action against Iran’s nuclear program — Ahmedinajad, after all, is the President, which means that he doesn’t really speak for the regime. We all know that — don’t we? — after sitting through eight years of Mohammed Khatami’s doomed reformist presidency. And that fact may help point us to an explanation for the outburst.

Did Ahmedinajad simply blunder, showing his inexperience in international affairs by uttering inflammatory slogans that brought new diplomatic pressure on the regime? Did he, as the Times put it, simply score a spectacular own goal? I don’t think so; a more plausible explanation may be the emerging struggle between rival conservative power centers in Tehran. Fearful that Ahmedinajad’s sharp-elbowed approach to diplomacy would jeopardize Iran’s interests in various international settings — and also anxious about the emergence of a Baseej-Revolutionary Guard power bloc openly challenging the clerics, with mass support garnered through a populist election campaign, for greater authority over the regime’s direction — Supreme Leader Khameini had recently moved to downgrade the new President’s executive power even further. He did this by delegating some of his own executive authority to the Expediency Council, another unelected clerical body that resolves policy disputes on the domestic and international level. The Expediency Council, of course, is headed by Rafsanjani, the millionaire former president who leads the pragmatic wing of the conservative camp. While supporting conservative positions on the domestic front, Rafsanjani has long been identified as the key to a pragmatic resolution of the nuclear standoff and other international disputes. He personifies the impulse even from within the conservative leadership to secure the regime’s longterm survival by integrating it into the world economy, and making various concessions necessary to achieve that goal. The conservatives know that the economy is the key to the regime’s survival, and Rafsanjani is far more concerned with getting Iran into the World Trade Organization than he is with fulminating against Israel.

Millionaire mullah Rafsanjani

But Ahmedinajad, also a conservative and also all about the economy, cleaned Rafsanjani’s clock in the last presidential election. Whereas Rafsanjani had the ear of the Supreme Leader and the confidence of the diplomatic corps, Ahmedinajad had the active backing of the Revolutionary Guard and the Baseej, the massive morality militia composed mostly of poor and unemployed youths who constitute an internal security storm troop. And in terms of getting out the vote, it was no contest. But this was about far more than institutional power centers and personal loyalties: Rafsanjani is concerned about the economy from a millionaire’s perspective; Ahmedinajad is a working class hero who campaigned on the bread-and-butter concerns of Iran’s impoverished majority — almost 40 percent are believed to live below the poverty line, despite the country’s oil wealth. So, while both speak the language of conservative clerical rule, they’re at loggerheads over how to build the economy, and how to distribute its rewards. Rafsanjani, notoriously corrupt, is viewed on the street as a self-serving fat cat; just the sort of people Ahmedinajad vowed to fight against, to ensure that the massive oil revenues Iran has earned as a result of the rising price would put a chicken in every pot. (And, quite literally, shares in every portfolio!)

Yes, Ahmedinajad’s core constituency are fiercely, belligerently nationalist. But their push for a greater share of power against the clerically-enabled pragmatists like Rafsanjani has a whiff of old-fashioned class politics about it. By sticking it to both Rafsanjani and the Supreme Leader on the question of Irael — essentially taunting them for muting their hostility to the Jewish State in order to ingratiate themselves with the West — Ahmedinajad is showing the clerical autocrats that he’ll be far tougher to tame in the presidency than was his predecessor. Ironically, today it is the unelected clerics that represent the more pragmatic policy option, while the popularly elected president now represents the more extreme choices. Under Khatami, the Mullahs applied the brakes on liberal reform; now they may be applying the brakes on populist rabble rousing.

I suspect that in the case of the latest Iranian Israel-bashing, we may see a peculiarly Persian version of the old aphorism that “all politics is local.” And about to get a lot more interesting, because Ahmedinajad — unlike the liberal Khatami — can rally a very effective mass support base among the regime’s rank-and-file enforcers. I don’t think Israel has much to worry about from Iran as a result of Ahmedinajad’s outburst, but I wouldn’t say the same for Rafsanjani and even Ayatollah Khameini.

Posted in Featured Analysis, Situation Report | 10 Comments

Why Bush Won’t Topple Bashar

Posted on October 28, 2005 by Tony

assad
Bashar, the authoritarian opthalmologist

If the outcome of the Iraq war had been even remotely close to that imagined by its architects, the authoritarian regime of President Bashar Assad in Syria would be ripe for the plucking right now. As loathed by the Bush administration as it is by its own Sunni majority (although for entirely different reasons), the minority Allawite autocracy – whose real power is centered less in an ethnic group than in a series of extended family and patronage network that intersect with the levers of power in the security apparatuses – appears to be more brittle than ever. Under different circumstances, the UN report that fingers top Syrian officials for involvement in the killing of Rafik Hariri, the Saudi citizen and protégé murdered in Lebanon on Valentine’s Day after he refused to do Syria’s bidding in the Lebanese political process, would provide the U.S. the excuse needed to launch political, economic and even military initiatives designed to bring down the regime. (And, by the way, this one actually does have weapons of mass destruction – a stock of chemical warheads that Damascus has been amassing since the 1970s, which they see as their strategic counterweight to Israel’s nuclear capability.)

Instead, the U.S. looks likely to hesitate, having learned a nasty lesson in Iraq: Before you take down a regime, consider whether you find the plausible alternatives more or less palatable than the status quo. (One of the basics of foreign policy realism .101, you might have thought, but these guys had to learn the basics the hard way.) And the answer, in the case of Syria, is far from clear. Indeed, the consensus even in Israeli strategic circles is that there is no “good alternative” to Bashar’s regime. They want him bloodied and intimidated into toeing Washington’s line, but not toppled – a position that probably accords with that of the dominant element in the Bush administration. But given this administration’s track record of intervention in the middle east – anything but surgical – even the likely attempt to calibrate pressure on Damascus to achieve this outcome could spin easily out of control. (Put it this way, if the neophytes and ingénues running the show today had been in charge in 1962, the Cuban missile crisis would far more likely have resulted in a U.S.-Soviet military showdown.)

Still, just as the Reagan administration in its second term, while hardly renouncing the “evil empire” rhetoric, nonetheless pursued policies of pragmatic accomodation with a changing Soviet Union that had the neoconservatives screaming betrayal, so does the second Bush term look set to produce a foreign policy long on revolutionary rhetoric but in practical terms guided by some of the same “realism” they so loudly decry. That’s because the U.S. is overstretched in Iraq, and has failed to remake the region on its own terms. The revolutionary rhetoric emanating from the administration is going to sound increasingly hollow.

The Syrian regime is an almost bizarre caricature of decreptitude: A three-decades old military dictatorship headed by a mild-mannered opthalmologist called home from London to reluctantly assume his “birthright” after his older brother Basil, long-anointed heir to the mantle of Hafez, was killed in a plane crash. Old hands in Washington would be forgiven for sighing that Bashar’s was “not your father’s Assad regime.” Then again, Bashar and his cronies would say exactly the same about the Bush administration – indeed, they had expected Bush’s election in 2000 to restore more of the balance between Arab and Israeli interests in US foreign policy that had been the hallmark of the first Bush administration. Assad-pere got along pretty well with Bush-pere, so much so that he actually sent troops to fight alongside the Americans against Saddam in the first Gulf War. That’s right; the soldiers of the same tyrannical, Baathist, anti-Israel, Hezbollah enabling, chemical-weapons armed dictatorship fighting alongside the U.S. against Saddam Hussein.

But the junior Bush’s administration is nothing like its predecessor, as the New Yorker’s piece on Brent Scowcroft so clearly showed. Nor is Assad-junior anything remotely like his father, the Middle East’s consummate Machievellian. He’s obviously a lot weaker in the authoritarian power structure that he inherited, and has made a number of mistakes as a result — in particular by being so openly hostile to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, even though in practice Syria’s position may not be all that different from those of Iraq’s other Arab League neighbors. As he was going out to whip the Arab world into line, Bush the Younger found the posture of insubordination by Assad the Younger intolerable, and Syria has been in Washington’s sights ever since.

Still, Syria has cooperated very effectively with U.S. intelligence operations against al-Qaeda — a mutual enemy, to be sure — and will likely step up its efforts to police the border with Iraq. Indeed, the institutional memory of the Assad regime is well-apprised of the fact that its survival amidst hostile geopolitical currents has always been premised on its readiness to play a gendarme role on behalf of Western powers, most notably the U.S. and France.

Indeed, it was that gendarme role that had taken Syria into Lebanon in the first place in 1976 — an invasion for which Damascus had sought and received tacit consent from both the United States and Israel. It was the Syrian role to tamp down the Palestinian and radical Lebanese militia to help stabilize the situation. But, of course, Syria also has a longstanding conflict with Israel over possession of the Golan Heights, and so Lebanon became an avenue for proxy warfare (via enabling Hezbollah) to maintain pressure on Israel.

Lebanon, in time, came to represent not only a geostrategic asset to a regime that had precious little diplomatic, economic or military leverage, but also a liferaft for the decrept Syrian economy — hence the extensive and vicious micromanaging of Lebanese politics from Damascus. And the shifting foreign policy focus of the U.S. as well Syria’s failure to toe the line on Iraq, saw Syria’s grip on Lebanon become a pressure point on Damascus. The assassination of Rafik Hariri, symptomatic of the clumsy thuggery of the Syrian regime, was a spectacular error (Hariri’s closeness to the Saudi Royal family and also to the French president merely compounding the diplomatic disaster for Damascus). The resulting international pressure forced the Syrians to withdraw precipitously – far more rapidly than the U.S. and Israel had expected.

But the U.S. continued to press, hoping to force Bashar to crack down on men and material crossing to the Iraq insurgency, and also to endure the humiliation of having to close down the offices of Palestinian radical groups in his capital. And curiously enough, this time the U.S. had France in its corner, Paris chagrined by the impertinence of Bashar daring to carry out a hit on one of its friends in a zone the French still consider part of their sphere of influence.

The Mehlis report into Hariri’s killing, in which a UN investigation has now found senior Syrian officials likely complicit in the assassination, might therefore have been welcomed as an opportunity to activate the opening movement of yet another “regime change” symphony – or, at the very least, to impose sanctions designed to further isolate an already fragile regime. Instead, the U.S. and its allies appear to be moving decidedly cautiously. Russia has already indicated it will veto sanctions, but that may not be the only brake on the process: U.S. intelligence has recognized that the toppling of the Assad regime will not only unleash bloody chaos in Syria; it will make life a lot easier for the Iraqi insurgents. In fact, it would merge that insurgency with a Sunni Arab rebellion in Syria, long suppressed with boundless viciousness by the Allawite-minority regime.

The U.S. plainly doesn’t have the means or the stomach for yet another occupation of a large Arab country. And its officials have no faith in the ability of exiled groups to present an effective option to replace the regime. So, while they may loathe Bashar, they don’t see any credible alternative – except, perhaps, some rival general from within the regime who might be willing to string up the Assads in the town square but still keep the regime intact.

In other words, the Bush administration (43) has come full circle to the sober realism of 41. They may not like the regime in Damascus, but it’s an indispensable gendarme, a necessary evil. Still, they’re trying to modify its behavior — make it a more obliging and less uppity gendarme by posturing towards isolation and regime change. Still, such a nuanced game of carefully callibrated moves designed to achieve lesser effects than the rhetoric that accompanies them may suggest could be beyond the capabilities of the current guardians of national security policy in Washington. Combine that with a very insecure, very skittish and equally inept ruling echelon in Damascus, and I fear that despite the best intentions of both sides to avoid a catastrophic confrontation, accidents may still happen.

Posted in Featured Analysis, Situation Report | 5 Comments

Bush does Brecht

Posted on October 27, 2005 by Tony

bert

As the U.S. comes to terms with its 2000th combat casualty in Iraq and counting, I was reminded of one of the last postings I sent out to my email list on the war’s eve, on January 10, 2003. The idea of tens of thousands of Americans from modest or poorer families, a disproportionate number of them kids of color, being marched off to die in an imperial adventure in the sands of Mesopotamia reminded me of that great line from Brecht about “an army marching off to war, not knowing that it’s enemy marches at its head.” Here’s the piece: (And don’t miss the Joe Strummer obit at the bottom!):

The weirdest thing about the current moment is just how cartoonish Bush appears, sounding more and more each day like a caricature drawn by some agitprop lefty theatre-troupe. This week it was all this “war can still be avoided” stuff when it’s written all over his face (never mind his actions) that he believes the exact opposite. And his announcement of more than $300 billion in new tax breaks for corporations and the rich, in the name of restarting an economy that has millions of working poor and unemployed Americans gasping for breath – along with the warning that anyone who dared challenge this was engaging in “class warfare.” (He’s not short on chutzpah!) And just in case anybody starts getting any wussie doubts about invading Iraq just now, his office comes out with the estimate that a war would cost the US no more than $60 billion – that’s after his own former economic adviser had put the figure at $200 billion last fall, while Congress factored in the inevitability of a long-term occupation and suggested a far higher figure. And then to cap it all, a restatement of his Nixonesque policy on government secrecy – and how about appointing John Poindexter to head up a program to browse your email and your Amazon.com purchases – he mislead Congress? Hell, that’s a virtue in the Bush administration…

I had been reminded, for a while now, about a Brecht poem that included lines about an army marching off to war, not knowing that its enemy marches at its head. Good old-fashioned “imperialist war” stuff. Browsed the web for it recently, and came up with extracts from his “German War Primer.”

And found myself giggling at the extent to which Bush appears to be auditioning for a role in Brecht’s epic theatre where the whole idea is to create cardboard cutouts rather than three-dimensional believable characters.
Brecht writes:

THOSE WHO TAKE THE MEAT FROM THE TABLE
Teach contentment.
Those for whom the contribution is destined
Demand sacrifice.
Those who eat their fill speak to the hungry
Of wonderful times to come.
Those who lead the country into the abyss
Call ruling too difficult
For ordinary men.

WHEN THE LEADERS SPEAK OF PEACE
The common folk know
That war is coming.
When the leaders curse war
The mobilization order is already written out….

WHEN IT COMES TO MARCHING MANY DO NOT
KNOW
That their enemy is marching at their head.
…The man who speaks of the enemy
Is the enemy himself.

Then again, Brecht was about nothing if not “class warfare.” Click here for more on the curiously prescient poet.

As we noted a few weeks ago, the inspectors have found nothing in Iraq. Of course, they still might – but they have not yet been given any intelligence by the Bush administration that would point them to any place where they might find any. Bush promised two weeks ago that such intelligence would be provided, but sources in the inspection system say they’ve been given nada. Could be, of course, that Bush is simply trying to get all his ducks in a row before pointing them to a killer piece of evidence. More likely, though, is that the cupboard is rather bare.

All of this diminishes the prospects of achieving UN backing for war when the inspectors make their formal report on January 27. As Kofi Annan noted at the new year, Iraq’s cooperation with the inspection program means there is no basis at this time for military action. (And, as one reader who trawls the corridors of the UN notes, Kofi’s interventions probably carry some backing from the Powell camp in Washington.)

That doesn’t mean there won’t be a war, of course. This is not about weapons of mass destruction, nor has it ever been. I don’t really believe it’s simply about oil or Sharon, either, by the way, although oil certainly plays a key role in shaping the long-term strategic agenda of which it forms part. As the BBC notes, Cheney’s energy report warned that the US would have to double its oil imports by 2020 (no wonder Kyoto was given short shrift) and would have to secure the necessary supplies in the Mideast, Central Asia and Africa (all of which goals are currently being pursued).

But Iraq is not simply an oil-grab as some on the left would have it. As Nicholas Lemann explained in the New Yorker last fall, Iraq is the launching pad of a new imperial strategy designed to impose a Pax Americana on the increasingly unruly Middle East.

While such a Pax Americana would certainly ease the oil flow, it’s also based on the much broader (Orientalist) idea of pacifying the region through force, impressing the Arabs (according to the theories of the White House’s favorite scholar of the Arab world, Bernard Lewis) with a massive show of force that renders any challenge to Washington’s writ folly in the eyes of the would-be mujahedeen.

But all of this is academic, I think, because once there are 100,000 US troops, complete with hospital ships, in the Gulf (by some time in February) Bush may find it politically impossible to bring them home without Saddam’s head in a bag. This despite the antics of coif boy in North Korea who is, after all, simply negotiating in his own, inimitable way. Interesting thing about the Koreas, actually, is how the Bush administration has lost the South. South Korean democracy is forcing an end to the Cold War framework of dealing with the North, despite the Bush administration’s reluctance to let go. Although the U.S. always maintained that South Korea was a democracy in the Cold War sense (i.e. anti-communist), it only actually became a democracy in 1989. Kim Dae Jung is known these days for his sunshine policy of engagement with the North, but it’s often forgotten that he was basically South Korea’s Nelson Mandela — he spent decades in the prison of a U.S.-backed dictatorship for advocating precisely the policies for which he was later elected president.

So I think what you have here is the end of the Cold War allowing South Korea to become a democracy, and once it became a democracy its electorate essentially renounced the Cold War framework of dealing with the North that still guides the Bush administration. South Korea had been simply a client regime whose dictators could be relied on to march in step with Washington (and frankly, it was not unlike North Korea in many respects — a friend of mine who grew up there recalls with horror his school years of forced mass morning exercises chanting anticommunist slogans…); once it became a democracy a third element emerged in the equation — the South Korean people, caught between the archaic regime in Pyongyang and the bellicose Bush team in Washington, and demanding that both sides compromise. And that’s a huge problem for the Bush administration, because they had previously assumed that Kim’s party would be voted out and they’d have a government in Seoul more amenable to the Rummy worldview; now that’s not going to happen.

White Man in Hammersmith Palais
joe
Hamba kahle, Joe Strummer

Back in South Africa in the late 70s and early 1980s, whiteys who’d opted to join the liberation struggle found themselves in a state of weird cultural alienation, identifying with black South Africa and yet for all our love of Orlando Pirates football club and the mbaqanga sound of Soul Brothers and “Zulu Boy” sandals and even nqushu porridge, we were never going to feel part of it. And yet we were equally alienated from our own roots in white South Africa because of the choices we’d made. And for many of us, I think, that cultural gap was filled by our ability to identify ourselves with a cosmopolitan global progressive culture that came to us in the form of regular injections while traveling abroad and through our imported movies, books, records etc. We may have had little in common with most of white South Africa and most of black South Africa, but we were somehow plugged into the world of Bertolucci and Marquez and, of course, Joe Strummer, who died just before New Year.

The Clash represented a fusing of the rebellious instincts of white youth culture with black youth culture, musically and politically, in a way that resonated powerfully with our own experiences. In an inimitably cool style, they made clear that if you wanted to dance to it, you’d better be on the barricades when the Nazis come marching, ready to throw a brick if you have to, that you had an obligation to join the march against racism, that the white youth and black youth of Thatcher’s Britain had a common enemy, that you could make the reggae rebellion your own, and they used their popularity in America to expose Americans to what their government was doing in Latin America, introducing us to the legendary Chilean troubador Victor Jara, tortured to death in the Santiago Stadium by Pinochet’s thugs who broke his hands and then ordered him to play his guitar – and The Clash made damn sure we understood that Pinochet’s thugs were also Kissinger’s thugs. And they did this effortlessly, unselfconsciously, without preaching, showing how music and musicians could have a message without ever losing its sense of humor and irony about itself, even as their record company was, as Strummer acidly noted, “turning rebellion into money” – of which they saw very little, because they had one of those old-style record deals. They showed countless other bands the way to fuse pop and politics, and did so without hardly trying. So, yes, I’ll freely admit, I cried a few tears the night he died and NPR played out its obit segment with my favorite Clash song, “White Man in Hammersmith Palais.” The world is a poorer place without him. And so we’ll play out with some lyrics from that 1978 classic:

Dress back this is a bluebeat attack
‘Cos it won’t get you anywhere
Fooling with your guns
The British Army is waiting out there
An’ it weighs fifteen hundred tons

White youth, black youth
Better find another solution
Why not phone up Robin Hood
And ask him for some wealth distribution

Punk rockers in the UK
They won’t notice anyway
They’re all too busy fighting
For a good place under the lighting

The new groups are not concerned
With what there is to be learned
They got Burton suits, ha you think it’s funny
Turning rebellion into money

All over people changing their votes
Along with their overcoats
If Adolf Hitler flew in today
They’d send a limousine anyway…”

Posted in From Tony's Archive | 10 Comments

Captain of the ‘Contradiction’

Posted on October 23, 2005 by Tony

Max Ozinsky is one of my dearest friends and favorite people on the planet. We worked together in our young activist days, but made some different choices along the line. These days he’s chief whip of the ANC delegation in the Cape Provincial legislature, still involved in the cut and thrust of the ever-fractious politics of the Western Cape after all these years. But we go back to the time he was first thrown out of home by his father and came to live in the same student house as me. We worked together for years after that, although Max always displayed a far deeper, and infinitely more courageous, commitment than I ever did — as well as a substantial dose of the sheer malkopheid that makes an intractable revolutionary.

I’ll always remember one particular afternoon at UCT, when we were about to go out on one of an endless series of protest marches down to the grass verge alongside the highway, only to be sent scrambling for cover as the cops charged in with tear gas and batons — but this one was a little more tense, because the previous day the cops had ratcheted up the ante by firing shotguns — and Max took me aside, as we assembled to march, and opened his backpack, to reveal five glass bottles half full of gasoline, with rags stuffed in their tops, ready to be turned into Foreign Minister Molotov’s idea of an aperitif… “Are you fucking crazy?!!!” I blurted. These student marches were all about singing praise hymns to Mandela in quavering voices and then running at the first “whumpf” of a teargas cannister being fired, and here was my close friend and comrade about to start a war….

“It’s irresponsible, Max,” I ventured. “Adventurist.” None of my erudite pleas for restraint were registering. “If you’re going to the front of the march, I’m going to the back,” I said, hurrying to the rear of a line of shiny-faced young white students singing a song in Xhosa whose words translated as “when the sun goes down, we will meet in the bush with bazookas,” although I don’t think too many of them/us meant that. (Ironically, that day the cops sneaked up from behind, so my aversion to physical confrontation ended up costing me.)

My high-minded rationalizations had done little to camouflage the fact that Max’s inclination to stand and fight simply terrified me. His slight physique and gentle demeanor suggested anything but a hard man, but he had the bottle to trade licks with the regime’s enforcers. Within two years, he was undergoing guerrilla training in an ANC camp in Angola, and then slipping back into the country. Me, I was mostly editing magazines and writing analytical commentary. (Still am, I guess.)

Unlike myself and most of my generation who moved out of politics as soon as democracy was won in South Africa, Max remained as deeply — and militantly — committed as ever. And in this extended interview in the Cape Town daily Die Burger (translated from Afrikaans), he reflects on those turbulent, yet endlessly fascinating years through which we lived — Max more intensely than most of us.

Ozinsky: Struggler without a face by Willemien Brummer
Translation: Die Burger, Friday, 14 October 2005 (Ozinsky: Stryder
sonder ‘n gesig)

vula
On the cover of the book about Operation Vula, written by the Dutch anti-apartheid activist Connie Braam, are four different faces of the same man: a bearded, macho Rhodie who longs back to Rhodesia, a spectacled yuppie businessman and a wooly-haired resident of the Cape Flats. Far left is a picture of a pliant 26-year old with sad eyes and a beard. Max Ozinsky as he looked then.

Now, 16 years later, the beard and the pliantness are still there. Only the dark eyes found a certain peace.

Because since then, has Ozinsky not only shed his status as “master disguiser” who had every policeman in this country on his trail. He also became more important within the ANC during the past year. He was appointed Chief-whip in the provincial legislature and is the deputy secretary of the ANC in the province since the ANC’s provincial conference in June.

His critics imply that he is a Rasputin-like character- “the actual power behind the throne”.

jayba

At our meeting behind a polished up table in the spacious office of the ANC chief-whip, there is still something fragile in his appearance. He poses with shyness in a beige jersey and brown corduroy pants near an ANC flag and tells his story of resistance and life on the run.

His voice is soft and modest. “My father Joseph Ozinsky, was six months old when he had to escape with his family from Lithuania because of the anti-Semitism of the military dictatorship.”
His grandfather, a Polish hawker “who actually smuggled with diamonds between Poland and Russia”, established himself in Maitland and the young Joseph soon fell in love with an Afrikaans lady – a relationship that caused heated fights between in both families.

He smiles; answers in English: “I am more proud of my Afrikaans roots, even though one of my uncles is a commander in the AWB. The most interesting thing is that the man, who taught me to use a gun in MK, was involved in the murder on some of the farmers in Kirkwood where my mother grew up. It was on a neighbouring farm and I knew some of the victims.’

His voice is resigned. “It was war and I was a soldier. It is something you accept but not something that you celebrate.”

A photocopied medical article above his desk entitled: Professor J. Ozinsky and the World’s First Human Heart Transplant, catches my eye. I ask him about the role of his father, a distinguished anaesthetist. As well as his fallout with Prof Chris Barnard. A proud nod. “My father’s role was quite central because he had to keep the receiver of the heart alive – even when the patient had no
heart. The tension was partly due to all the publicity that Barnard received but there were also matters concerning Chris’s personal life.”

He seems uncomfortable. “It is difficult to talk about these things if you were not involved yourself.” I steer the discussion to his political career. Already in grade 12, he commanded a few school pals at the boys school SACS to also take part in a boycott in solidarity with the school boycott on the Cape Flats.

He frowns. “To my family, my political involvement meant trouble. It was only in 1991, when I received indemnity from prosecution that I realized why I did what I did.”

rhodie

That’s why his family threw him out of the house the first time he was arrested by the police during a student march. He was 17-years old and a mere three months into his BA-degree in the history of the economy at the University of Cape Town.

His face tightens. The policeman, major Dolf Odendaal said: ‘Vat die fokken moffies. Ek is gatvol vir hulle.’ We were taken to the offices of the security police where confiscated ANC placards and photo’s of weapons were all over the wall. It was obvious that they saw us as the ANC and there was soon no question about where we stood.” A pause. ‘Within a short space of time, things became extremely serious.”

Was he emotionally ready for it?

His shoulders parcel forward. “Those were extremely difficult times. We could not expect others to drive the revolution and fold our hands as Whites. For me and many others other it was quite clear that if you don’t want to fight for the South African Army, you must fight against them.

“Many of us never had a youth because everything was subjected to politics. I have never questioned the orders of ANC commanders and to reach your goal, we had to make sacrifices.”
A pause. “Even if it means that every policeman is on your trail and some family members would hand you to them with pleasure.”

Since he was 20-years old, when he joined the ANC, big parts of his life was underground. Two years later he was national media officer of the National Union of Students (NUSAS) and another year later, his girlfriend (now his ex-wife) was detained for six weeks because of her political activities.

It was then that he started to smuggle weapons to South Africa from Botswana over weekends; he even tried to plant a limpet mine at the Wynberg military base.

By this time everything was shady. With the police hot on his heels and almost all his ANC contacts behind bars, he married his girlfriend in Johannesburg. The next day, on 30 December 1987, he reported for duty at the ANC in Botswana.

I hear him sniff. “Apart from a brief encounter with her in Zimbabwe, I only saw her again in August 1990.” (Despite the fact the he stayed right under her and his parents’ noses in Cape Town as part of the very secretive Operation Vula.)

“It was probably stupid of me to get married a day before I had to flee but I did not want to disappear without any ties with the outside world.”

His voice is almost begging. “I was in love with her. It was a crazy time. I did a very mad things that year like smuggling weapons without any real military training and disguise.

“We both knew what we did but politics took its giant toll. Even when I got indemnity, politics continued to be a major player in our divorce.”

His eyes are sad; there is a catch in his voice. “I remember that we agreed to meet in George in March 1990 but Vula was uncovered and I had to run. She saw the bus I was supposed to be in arriving and all the people disembarking the bus but not me. When the bus departed, she was
crushed.

Silence.

“As a soldier I was forced to have a macho attitude. I was alone most of the time. I stayed indoors except when I had to go out.”

His voice comes alive again.

“Vula’s objective was to create a climate that would enable the ANC’s national leadership to return. In May 1989, I was sent to Cape Town as a communications officer under the demand of Charles Nqakula (currently minister of safety and security). This meant that I had to use my contacts so that the leaders could have a place to stay and means to survive. The purpose of the operation was also to create a situation where an insurrection that would lead to the destruction of the regime of the day was possible.

The press later described him as a “master disguiser” – referring mostly to the disguises that Braam and her theatre friends in the Netherlands helped him with in order for him to escape the security police.

He sneers. “The problem was that it was not only a wig and a disguise. You had to become that person. The most difficult of them all was the coloured man with the Afro wig. Stage make-up can only last 8 to 12 hours and if you sweat, you never know whether or not it is the make-up.

A pause. “But it was not only the camouflage. You always had to keep your eyes wide open for the slightest signs that you might be followed.

The dark eyes blink. “It is so ingrained in me that up to now I still can not drive without constantly looking in my rear-view mirror. And then, when the accused in the state’s case against Vula were
indemnified, Ozinsky could move out of the shadows in August 1991.

Like other people.

To such an extend that his wife gave life to a son, Junaid nine years ago. He could also attend to his favourite sports, yacht racing. He laughs when I ask him about the name of his yacht, Contradiction.

max

“I’m a Marxist and the philosophy is based on contradictions. It is also a joke because yacht racing is a sport for wealthy people but I have fought my entire life for the poor. After school I actually wanted to become a yachtsman but my parents forced me to go to university. I do not take part in yacht races like in the past but the one place I feel at home, it is at sea.”

Outside it is becoming darker. We jump to the present. The past 14 years of slow progression within the ANC. His answers become more businesslike, more precise. Especially when it has to do with divisions within the party – or his involvement with the so-called “Africanists” or the Skwatsha camp.

His face looks like that of a politician for the first time. “It is an unfair and wrong label. Almost all of us in the so-called Skwatsha camp have a long history of struggle for a non-racial South Africa. And there is no split in the party. No group enjoys preference over another and we will not accept the Western Cape as a coloured provincelike some people seem to expect. We must take on racism.”

I swallow. And the rumour that he was outmanoeuvred from the provincial leadership structure of the South African Communist Party and that he is even branded a neo-liberal?

He chooses his words carefully. “I am still a member but I disagree with some over the direction the party is going. The question is how can socialism work in a democracy. The party is also fond of occupying itself with militant slogans without a real base in practice. I am concerned about the SACP because the party is extremely weak. I withdrew myself from the provincial leadership in 1996 because I was employed by the ANC fulltime and this could have led to a conflict of interest.”

A frown. “In this province ultra-leftism is a curse. It is also dangerous for any organisation to label people with something such as neo-liberalism.”

Although I knew the answer, I still asked about the accusations that he is the “power behind the throne” in the Western Cape ANC. He is childlike amused; then his voice becomes preachy: “We have a collective leadership in this province. There is no hidden power behind the throne. The ANC chairperson, James Ngculu was a guerrilla commander in the province long before I was involved with the party. In our society people – and especially the press – struggle to analyze things without racial categories. There is especially the perception that black people can’t think for themselves.”

I take a deep breath, but still ask: And the rumors that he is only rising in party circles now, even though he played a role behind the scenes?

His voice is formal. “It is not about power as such. I decided long ago to give everything to build the ANC.”

He hesitates, check if I’m writing. “At first I did not want to be the deputy secretary of the party in the province. Selfishly, I wanted to take a break. As chief-whip in the legislature you need to be on your toes the whole time.”

He reconsiders. “But it is also very rewarding. Institutions such as the legislature have the propensity to swallow you but as a revolutionary it is your challenge to change that.”

“The legislature must play a type of oversight role over the provincial government. We must ask questions even though it is an ANC government, because we have a weak opposition. The opposition is so used to being entangled in the bureaucracy that the real opposition comes from within the ANC. But this is not an attack on the ANC as a party. It is an attack on the state apparatus and what it is supposed to do.”

I hesitate, then mumble my question: If he as a white person has ever felt prejudiced against in the ANC.

It seems as if he was expecting the question. “I don’t think the ANC functions on the basis of race. The ANC is in many ways far ahead of our society that is being curbed by racial division.”

I nod. Yes race does play an important role. We talk about the organisation Not in my Name that he started with Ronnie Kasrils (minister of intelligence) to distance themselves as Jews from
Israel’s military offensive against the Palestinians. Ironically enough, he and Kasrils are now being branded as anti-Semite.

He seems tired for the first time. “I get lots of threats from the Jewish community. The leaders in this community were quick to criticise us. Somebody even wrote that I am not really Jewish.”
A frown. “Yet I was attacked on school for being Jewish.” He wipes his temples. “There are various direct parallels with the struggle against apartheid. We had the moral right to resist, even through an armed struggle. The Palestinian nation also has a right to oppose Israel.”

A tired smile. “But it is not a new position that I assumed. Even on campus the Zionists painted swastikas on my posters.”

It suddenly feels as if we are back where we began. At a circular course of resistance and someone who will never be really at home. I look him in the eyes: Could he make up for his lost youth?

His face impenetrable. “I probably made up for my lost youth in certain aspects. But it is not a short-term struggle. Change is a long-term thing.”

His face is again each one on the book cover. Also the one with the sad eyes.

His voice is gentle. “Ho Chi Minh, the leader of the Vietnamese revolution once said: “A revolutionary owns nothing, not even his own name”.

Or his own face, I wanted to say.

A day later he sent me a song by James Phillips alias Bernoldus Niemand. To him it is a song that encompasses what it means to be young in the eighties. “I’m a white boy who looked at his life
gathered in his hands,” I read.

It is actually these words that strike me: “And you wonder what happened to all those sacred things? They got shot down in the street.” (Download soundclip of the song here.) It was then that I really wondered if one will ever be able to catch up.Max Ozinsky is one of my dearest friends and favorite people on the planet. We worked together in our young activist days, but made some different choices along the line. These days he’s chief whip of the ANC delegation in the Cape Provincial legislature, still involved in the cut and thrust of the ever-fractious politics of the Western Cape after all these years. But we go back to the time he was first thrown out of home by his father and came to live in the same student house as me. We worked together for years after that, although Max always displayed a far deeper, and infinitely more courageous, commitment than I ever did — as well as a substantial dose of the sheer malkopheid that makes an intractable revolutionary.