By
Stephen Gowans
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.
Stephen
blogs at
http://gowans.wordpress.com
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