Re: James Fulford's blog item: Black Police Kill Black Miners "In A Spectacle That Reminded Many South Africans Of The Apartheid Past" And Everyone Else Of ALL THE OTHER GOVERNMENTS IN AFRICA

From: An Anonymous British Reader [Send him mail]

Police killing strikers in "self defense"?

Humm. Well, maybe. But consider this.

Someone breaks into your house and steals all of your food and money and clothes and kicks you out on the street. You threaten then with a baseball bat and they kill you in "self defense".

You are a Jew in 1942 Nazi Germany. Someone tries to drag you and your family off into a cattle-car to an unknown destination, you resist, and the police kill you in "self defense".

You are a starving mineworker, the South Africans elites (white AND black) have imported so many foreign nationals that your wages provide barely enough to eat, your kids are sick and you can't afford medicine, any less money and some will start dying, you protest and the police kill you in "self defense".

I do not advocate violence. But violence can take many forms. When Stalin forced the Kulaks to live in a small area without enough food to survive, isn't that violence as lethal as an attack with guns? If the Kulaks had tried to break out, was that violence? Or self-defense?

Tricky questions, really.

Suggestion: you live the life of a Bangladeshi factory worker, crushed into hopeless poverty, and refuse to ever even consider protesting or rioting, and I will grant you your case.

James Fulford writes: My natural tendency is to sympathize with the riot police, rather than the rioters. The miners are, for example, beating other miners to death to enforce solidarity. Ten mineworkers have been killed at one mine, not by police.

At a considerable cost in blood, treasure, and human life, the South African miners are now living in a "majority-ruled" democracy, where they have the franchise. If they have problems with their government, let them them use their votes, not their pangas and knobkerries.

In an unrelated story, white farmers in South Africa are being murdered regularly in rural areas. South African police are failing to overreact.