|
THE ILLUMINATI - THE RISE OF THE SOUTH AFRICAN REICH |
|
Chapter 10 Eliminating all Opposition Democracy is the breeding ground in which the bacilli of the Marxist world pest can grow and spread. -- HITLER in Mein Kampf. From the very inception of their rule in 1948, the Nationalists have held it as a faith that those who are not with them are against them AND MUST BE TREATED AS DEADLY ENEMIES. The basis of their power has always been far too narrow for them to practice tolerance towards their opponents. And the nature of their objective has made it impossible for them ever to make concessions to those who differed from them without endangering their whole apartheid programme. The result has been the adoption of the rigid and uncompromising 'granite wall ' approach which their critics have found to be one of the most objectionable features of their regime. The Cape Times on 18 November 1948 reported a speech by J.G. Strijdom: Before the Nationalist Party could reach its ultimate goal - a republic - it would have to solve the colour problem. Anybody who purposely tried to upset the government's plans to put into operation its apartheid policy or who failed to do their duty towards the realization of that aim would be guilty of treason, just as those who refused to take up arms in defence of their country would be guilty of such a crime. The main principle of apartheid as he saw it was the continuation of European supremacy (baasskap). Those who challenged White supremacy would be guilty of treason. And they have been legion. The implementation of apartheid has caused such manifest injustices, led to such brutality and suffering, that the years since 1948 have been years of mighty and swelling protest in which at one stage or another all sections of the population have joined except those directly under Nationalist influence. The growing frustration of parliamentary politics has driven one section of the people after another into extra-parliamentary political activity, some in the hope of strengthening the hand of the parliamentary opposition, others with a view to substituting for it the mass action of the voteless masses themselves. To all the Nationalists have turned a deaf ear. Criticism has been acceptable only from those who have shown themselves prepared to accept apartheid in the first place. All others have been ignored, unless their protest contained within it seeds of rebellion, when they have been ruthlessly crushed. Outstanding among the movements of protest have been the Torch Commando, formed in 1951 to defend the constitution against the threat of the Separate Representation of Voters Bill; the Black Sash, formed in 1955 to defend the constitution against the Senate Act; the Churches, especially the Anglican Church which has given the country outstanding figures like Bishop Reeves and Father Huddleston and which openly defied the State on the issue of the 'church clause'. These and other bodies have done valuable work in keeping alive the spirit of conscience, especially among the White section of the population. But their protest has been limited because they are not political parties and have therefore proposed no real alternative to apartheid, mapped out no programme for the achievement of political power. (The Torch Commando did, it is true, enter into a United Front alliance with the United Party and Labour before the 1953 election, but this move proved to be its undoing, and it did not survive electoral defeat.) The main threat to Nationalist rule in the extra-parliamentary sphere has come from those who have consciously worked out an alternative to apartheid and who have organized the people to implement it. Where the Nationalists have preached apartheid, they have accepted integration; to discrimination they have opposed equality; to White supremacy, the doctrine of democratic rule. Ranging from the Communists on the left through the national organizations of the non-White people right up to the Progressive Party, these have constituted the real traitors to apartheid in Nationalist eyes. And the vials of Nationalist wrath have been poured upon their heads in increasingly massive doses. Even the United Party has not been excluded from the list of undermining organizations in South Africa. In his maiden speech to Parliament on 19 August 1948, Dr Diederichs, now Minister of Finance, declared: What is at issue (between the United and Nationalist Parties) is two outlooks on life, fundamentally so divergent that a compromise is entirely unthinkable. ... On the one hand we have nationalism, which believes in the existence, in the necessary existence, of distinct peoples, distinct languages, nations, and cultures, and which regards the fact of the existence of these peoples and these cultures as the basis of its conduct. On the other hand we have liberalism, and the basis of its political struggle is the individual with his so-called rights and liberties. ... This doctrine of liberalism that stands for equal rights for all civilized human beings ... is almost the same as the ideal of communism. From the very outset the Nationalists have tended to lump all their opponents together, and to smear the one with the alleged crimes of the other. The Cape Argus on 15 March 1952 reported a speech by Dr Malan: 'All six members of the Labour Party in the House of Assembly were "liberalistic". Some of them came very close to Communism. The Native Representatives wanted equal rights for Natives in all ways and they were also not far from Communism.' It has been in the mounting tension of the last year or so, however, that the Nationalists have launched their most unbridled propaganda assault against the integrationists - even imposing administrative restrictions on some leading members of the Liberal Party. In a speech reported in the newspaper Dagbreek on 18 November 1962, the Minister of Justice, B. J. Vorster, who on coming to office had fathered the memorable phrase 'rights are getting out of hand', stated: 'United Party policy held the same future for South Africa as that of Progressives and Liberals: total destruction of White leadership.' The Minister of Posts and Telegraphs, Dr Albert Hertzog, in a speech reported in Die Transvaler on 3 November 1962, declared that the recent sabotage in the Republic had been the work of liberalist agitators. Liberalism, which was the precursor of Communism, constituted the greatest danger threatening South Africa, even more dangerous than Communism for its methods were much more subtle. The real case of the Nationalists against the Liberals was most succinctly voiced by the Cape Town Nationalist newspaper Die Burger in a series of editorials during February 1963, which defended the banning of Liberal Party leaders. 'The simple truth is', proclaimed the paper, 'that the Liberal Party is the bearer of a policy (one man, one vote) the outcome of which, so far as we can judge, differs so little from Communism as to make precious little difference to the minority groups in South Africa. The party's whole line of thinking is subversive of civilization and order in South Africa.' A similar and even more sinister attack was made on Mrs Helen Suzman, the lone Progressive Party Member of Parliament, after she had dared to criticize the inhumanity of the pass laws in the debate on the Bantu Administration vote in the House of Assembly on 29 May 1963. Nationalist back-benchers were stung to fury. Accusing her of being unpatriotic, of smearing South Africa and inciting the non-Whites, they predicted that her days in Parliament were numbered. P.J. Coetzee, Nationalist M.P. for Langlaagte, said: ' She is a danger for us in the Assembly.' G.P.van den Berg, Nationalist M.P. for Wolmaransstad, addressed her directly: 'You are the greatest political enemy of this country.' Even the Minister himself, de Wet Nel, said Mrs Suzman was being advised by voices that were trying to destroy South Africa. She was not doing her fatherland a service. So the United Party, Progressives, Liberals, Communists - all aimed at the destruction of White supremacy, all were the enemies of Afrikaner Nationalism. Yet, taking a leaf from Hitler's book, it was with the Communists that the Nationalists began because the Communists were more vulnerable on account of the cold war, and because the Communist Party in 1948 was the only political party in South Africa, and had been for a generation, which stood for full and complete equality between all sections of the South African population and which made no distinction in its membership on grounds of race or colour. While in opposition the Nationalists had long campaigned against Communism in South Africa. In 1937 the Cape Province Congress of the Nationalist Party had called for the combating of the Communist menace by (a) stricter immigration laws; (b) the penalizing of undesirable propaganda, through deportation and otherwise; and (c) stricter application of the Riotous Assemblies Act. In 1943 Eric Louw had written a pamphlet on The Communist Danger which preferred as the main charge against Communism that it 'recognizes no distinction of colour or race.... 'At meetings of the Communist Party, White, Black, and Brown persons sit together. At socials they drink tea together and at dances the Black native whirls with his arms around the waist of the White girl, and what follows? Louw didn't lift the curtain, but he concluded: 'Joe Stalin becomes the comrade of Jan Smuts. ... The effect of such (Communist) inflammatory propaganda was quickly visible in the impertinent and even challenging attitudes of natives towards Europeans.' This was the essence of the Nationalist charge against Communism - that it undermined 'traditional' race attitudes in South Africa. As soon as the Nationalists themselves came to power, therefore, they appointed a departmental committee to 'investigate' Communism. On the eve of the 1949 provincial elections the Minister of Justice, C. R. Swart, told the House of Assembly that the committee's report disclosed 'a national danger' which made it imperative to combat 'the dangerous undermining' by the Communists of 'our national life, our democratic institutions, and our Western philosophy'. Early in 1950 the Dutch Reformed Church urged the government to close the Soviet Consulate in Pretoria and to tighten the law punishing incitement of non-Whites against Whites. On 6 March its Church Congress called for State action against Communism, and the Nationalist government obliged by bringing before the 1950 session of Parliament an Unlawful Organizations Bill which barely mentioned Communism and raised a storm of protest from the public because its terms of reference were so wide. The government had started with too much too soon and was forced to withdraw, but it returned before the same session with a Suppression of Communism Bill which eventually became law and has since formed the spearhead of the Nationalist attack on the civil liberties of all sections of the population, Communist and non Communist alike. Communism, according to the definitions clause of the Act: means the doctrine of Marxian socialism as expounded by Lenin or Trotsky, the Third Communist International (the Comintern) or the Communist Information Bureau (the Cominform) or any related form of that doctrine expounded or advocated in the Union for the promotion of the fundamental principles of that doctrine and includes, in particular, any doctrine or scheme - (a) which aims at the establishment of a despotic system of government based on the dictatorship of the proletariat under which one political organization only is recognized and all other political organizations are suppressed or eliminated; or (b) which aims at bringing about any political, industrial, social, or economic change within the Union by the promotion of disturbance or disorder, by unlawful acts or omissions or by the threat of such acts or omissions or by means which include the promotion of disturbance or disorder, or such acts or omissions or threat; or (c) which aims at bringing about any political, industrial, social, or economic change within the Union in accordance with the directions or under the guidance of or in cooperation with any foreign government or any foreign or international institution whose purpose or one of whose purposes (professed or otherwise) is to promote the establishment within the Union of any political, industrial, social, or economic system identical with or similar to any system in operation in any country which has adopted a system of government such as is described in paragraph (a); or (d) which aims at the encouragement of feelings of hostility between the European and non-European races of the Union the consequences of which are calculated to further the achievement of any object referred to in paragraph (a) or (b). The ludicrous nature of these definitions of Communism is best shown by the fact that they have only rarely formed the basis of prosecutions under the Suppression of Communism Act. Of the thousands of people convicted under the Act since 1950, only a handful have been found by the courts to have propagated what Mr Justice Rumpff, in a case arising from the Defiance Campaign, described as a 'statutory Communism ' The bringing of prosecutions in a court of law was not, however, the primary purpose of the Act, which equipped the government with a formidable battery of administrative weapons for striking down its political opponents. The Act declared the Communist Party to be unlawful (the party had, in fact, anticipated this by dissolving itself a month before the Bill became law) and gave the Governor-General the power to outlaw any other organization which professed itself to be promoting the spread of Communism or which engaged in activities calculated to further the achievement of any of the objects of Communism as set out in the definitions clause. |