Outraged liberals attack John Minto

Since the publication of veteran anti-apartheid campaigner John Minto’s open letter to South African president Thabo Mbeki refusing his nomination for the Companions of Oliver Tambo award two days ago, a number of outraged liberals around the NZ blogosphere have been busy denouncing him for having the temerity to criticise the ANC government.

One such liberal critic, Poneke, writes

“John Minto was one of the heroes of my formative years. The battered face of the Halt All Racist Tours (Hart) organisation, he was the leading New Zealand figure in opposition to the apartheid regime in South Africa, and thus in opposition to the 1981 tour of New Zealand by the Springbok rugby team that Rob Muldoon allowed here during the cataclysmic winter of that year to help him win the election at the end of it…

“At the time, I thought Minto was driven by the same kind of repugnance of the racist apartheid system that motivated the opposition of many other New Zealanders…

“In 1995, Mandela visited New Zealand for the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting being held in Auckland. He was mobbed in the streets everywhere he went. He was a hero of almost everyone of my generation and of almost everyone who had marched against the Springboks 14 years before. The one anti-tour protester to whom he was not a hero was a profound surprise. I went to a meeting Mandela attended at the St Matthews in the City church in Auckland. To my astonishment, and dismay, John Minto, who was there, hectored the great man for not kicking private enterprise and transnational companies out of South Africa after apartheid ended. A bewildered Mandela asked Minto how he expected people to find work if their employers were banished. It was at that moment I realised Minto was not driven by opposition to racism but by opposition to the entire capitalist system. He was a doctrinaire socialist, five years after socialism’s failings had caused its collapse in its continent of origin.

Reading this, you could be forgiven for having the impression that all that Mandela and the ANC were fighting for during all those long years of struggle under apartheid was an end to formal legal and political discrimination on the basis of race!

Yet, as I pointed out in response to this liberal critic

“…in fact if you look at the ANC’s historic founding document, the Freedom Charter [http://www.anc.org.za/ancdocs/history/charter.html], you can see that they were calling not only for the abolition of formal political and legal inequality in South Africa but also for radical measures to end economic inequality.“This included nationalising the banks, mining industries and other major monopolies as well as introducing universal free healthcare and education and a guaranteed 40 hour work week.

“But of course since coming to power the ANC has moved precisely in the opposite direction towards privatisation, neoliberalism and greater income inequality!

“Thus Mandela, Mbeki et al have broken their own promises – they are the ones who should be criticised and labelled as hypocritical, not Minto.

I guess the reason why people like Nelson Mandela are such great heroes to bourgeois liberals is that unlike other leaders of national liberation movements such as Fidel Castro in Cuba or the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, once in power they quickly ditched their socialist principles and were quite happy to act as managers of the neo-colonial capitalist branch economy on behalf of Western imperialism in return for some measure of limited autonomy.

This is very similar to the pernicious cult of Mahatma Gandhi, who is so frequently hailed as the ideal revolutionary prototype in our school textbooks precisely because he *did not challenge* the fundamental basis of the Indian masses’ economic misery and exploitation (see my earlier post on this here).