Ernst Roets
speaker
479 appearances
3 recordings
3 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard May 2025
Ernst Roets’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the whole world's going to be liberal and democratic, including African countries.
And Samuel Huntington actually cautioned against this in 1996, saying, you know, when he wrote The Clash of Civilizations, and he said, don't expect of African leaders and African liberation movements to suddenly become Western when you give them Western constitutions, because they are still African.
So they will use, it's the democratic paradox, they will use democratic institutions to promote non-democratic ends, right? And that's what we see in South Africa. We have a parliament. We have a very liberal constitution. But if you read the constitution and you compare that to reality in South Africa, it's two completely different worlds.
The de facto and the de jure reality in South Africa is irreconcilable. And so what has been happening in South Africa is, firstly, there was this major excitement about the new South African Elsa Mandela, the miracle story. Oprah spoke about this and Charlize Theron and everyone. Of course, yes. But the reality on ground level was in many ways the opposite.
Gradually. So they started, for example, with these BEE, as they call it. It's Black Economic Empowerment, which of course has nothing to do with economic empowerment. They started with that in 1996. And so they actually said initially in the 90s that that's the ruling party's strategy. They still call it that, the National Democratic Revolution strategy.
which is about using democracy to promote socialist ends. And so the revolution, they say, goes in two phases. The first phase is present yourself as being liberal and democratic and get support, especially international support and local, and then use multi-party democracy as a way of of promoting the goals of taking the country down the road to socialism.
And so recently they even went as far as publishing a document saying, we are now ready for the second phase of the revolution. We now have power. We have control of the state. We now need to use this to become much more aggressive in our socialist policies. And we're seeing this in a plethora of new laws all of a sudden in South Africa.
which I think it's gotten to the point where it's just not possible to maintain the view that people have had of South Africa for the last few decades and look at what's currently happening in South Africa. It's two completely different worlds. And hopefully, or happily at least, a lot of people are starting to wake up to this.
Well, literally, so I have children and they are taught in schools and the government prescribes what children should learn in history. And so the official version is he went to prison because he was a good leader and the government didn't like that. I should say that he certainly was the best that the ANC has ever had to offer.
But the reason why he went to prison is because they started Mkonto Isiswe, which was the military wing of the ANC. which became involved with military actions in South Africa with an attempt to overthrow the government. And they actually, and this is, I'm quoting from the ANC's own policy documents that's on their own website.
So they had this operation when they started, which was used in the Rivonia trial against Nelson Mandela. It was a strategy called Operation Mayibuyeh. And the slogan of this operation was, shamelessly we shall attack the weak and shamelessly we shall flee from the strong. So those were the circumstances in the 1960s.
So that was the – it was an attempt at an armed uprising. Now, we can talk about everything that was wrong with the previous political system in South Africa. There was a lot wrong. But it's simply not the case that he went to prison for being a good leader.
So in 1985, the ANC had a conference in Kabwe in Zambia, and they took a formal decision. that in their so-called military operations, they would not differentiate between hard and soft targets. So it was officially a policy that says we can kill innocent people. And a lot of innocent people died in the political violence in the run-up to 1994.
And 90% of the people who died were black South Africans.
It was... But non-combatants, women, children. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yes. So let me firstly say that I have a lot of respect for Nelson Mandela. I think in terms of his efforts and as I say, I think he's the best the ANC has ever had to offer. Winnie Mandela, his wife, not so much. So she famously, I mean, she's been involved with a lot of things, including what was called the Mandela Football Club, which was a gang that was involved with violence.
killings of innocent people. And she famously said at a political rally, with our necklaces and our matches, we will liberate this country. Which of course is a reference to the necklace murders, which was very popular in South Africa and still happens in South Africa.
That's when you take a rubber tire, you fill it with petrol or gasoline, and you put it around someone's neck so that it's bound around their arms and you set it on fire. And then you stone that person while he's burning to death. And that happened. There were, I think, 500 or 700 people were killed like that during political violence in South Africa. And she encouraged this.
Initially, she denied it, and then it came out that it was recorded of her saying this. So, yes, it's very bizarre that someone like Queen Mandela is a hero today.
Yes, so there were some better and some worse people in the leadership.
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