Reflections — State of Siege.
Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the spirit …..
About six years ago I met up with some long-standing friends and struggle comrades and we decided to start a discussion group.
The idea was to counter the cancelling of public debate in our society. We have found ourselves increasingly in a polarised and polarising world, dismissive of intellectuals and also devoid of public debate.
Post-apartheid South Africa has become an intellectual wasteland when compared with the (often partisan) debates that we engaged in during the rule of the apartheid regime: about the nature of that regime, its relationship to the capitalist mode of production, what type of society we were struggling for and what the prospects were of achieving liberatory objectives of a secular, social-democratic (if not socialist) society.
We have had many interesting and socially enjoyable interactions over the years, at a rate of about once every six weeks. We meet on Saturdays for lunch and then engage around an agreed topic. During September the theme ‘State of Siege’ came up as a topic for discussion.
We all agreed to make individual inputs about the meaning of ‘siege’ at our next discussion this Saturday, 18 November 2023.
Like many of us, I experienced the lockdown of 2020 to 2022 as being under siege. It felt like the imposition of a totalitarian system, about which I have written elsewhere as ‘inverted totalitarianism’, following the definition given by the late United States political scientist Sheldon Wolin.
The intensity of the lockdown siege was accompanied by blatant censorship about conflicting opinions about the lockdown, and indeed about the nature of Covid-19 (the health condition that allegedly necessitated the lockdown).
But Covid-19 lockdowns were just the extreme end of a manufactured consensus that had been enveloping Western discourses for a decade and a half. The narrative of Russian threat to democracy peaked with the coup d’etat in Ukraine in 2014, soon to be followed by the allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 United States (US) elections (Russiagate).
Resisting this consensus ‘news’ from the mainstream media brought its own risks, as the founder of Wikileaks, Julian Assange, found out. In 2010 Wikileaks published a leaked video showing US war crimes in Iraq, for which he — and his informant Chelsea Manning — have been persecuted ever since. Manning was sentenced to a jail siege of 35 years, before being pardoned by Obama, and Assange is held under siege in a maximum-security British prison, awaiting extradition to the US.
Then there are the two million plus residents of Gaza, who have suffered a siege for 17 years, punctuated by genocidal attacks by the Israel Defence Force.
There is also the story of the resistance to siege, exemplified in the 07 November break out of the Gaza open air prison by armed Palestinian fighters.
To capture both the siege oppressiveness as well as resistance to siege, I developed a short video, to the song “Chicago” (1971) by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. The video is accessible through the link at the end of these reflections.
For viewers and readers interested in knowing about and understanding more of the background issues to the events depicted in the video, I have included background details to the brief allusions made to past imposition of siege and struggles against siege, in the comments below the Rumble channel video.
Where necessary I have hyperlinked key words in the comments to sources elsewhere.
I also include these same comments and links on the Stellenbosch Transparency (ST) Videos page. ST is an activist, investigative journalist project that I started with a colleague in 2016, in response to the manipulation of the 99 per cent by the elites of our town, Stellenbosch. You can also view this introduction, video and detail on the ST Videos page.
Paul Hendler, Stellenbosch, South Africa, 16 November, 2023.
