Wages of Rebellion (16 page)

When I met with Kasrils in New York, he spoke of an incident in 1984 involving a South African death squad led by the notorious killer and former police colonel Eugene de Kock. De Kock was the commanding officer of C1, a counterinsurgency unit of the South African police that in the 1980s and 1990s kidnapped, tortured, and murdered hundreds of anti-apartheid activists and ANC leaders. He and his hit squad had recently assassinated three of Kasrils’s ANC comrades. Kasrils tracked de Kock, nicknamed “Prime Evil”—and now serving a life sentence in South Africa—and his squad of killers to a motel in Swaziland. Kasrils organized a group of ANC insurgents to gun down the members of the hit squad. De Kock and his men had left, however, before Kasrils and his armed group burst into the room where they had been. I asked Kasrils whether, should the situation be repeated today, he would organize an armed group to kill de Kock and his henchmen.

“I see this as similar to the French Resistance and the resistance in Europe against the Nazis,” he said. “So, you know there were the battles in the open, but most of the battles were by stealth. I don’t think there’s anything morally wrong in the battle of stealth against power when you are engaged in a war. They had killed, murdered in cold blood, three of our people in Swaziland. You’ve got to take harsh decisions at times, and this is in the context of an ongoing war there.… I put it within the context of a revolutionary war.”

Nevertheless, he said that “when I look back and I meet some of these people who we fought before, and I hear from them how they knew someone who died, I wish that that person didn’t have to die.”

Kasrils served as the commander of the Natal Regional Command and in 1964 underwent military training in Odessa in the Soviet Union. As a leader in the MK, Kasrils carried out sabotage and bombings of state infrastructure and industrial sites. The attacks took an inevitable
toll on unarmed white civilians. A 1983 MK guerrilla attack left nineteen dead. A 1986 raid killed three and injured seventy-three.
⁸
Kasrils was unrepentant. Blacks, he pointed out, paid a far higher price. Tens of thousands were slaughtered by the apartheid state.

Kasrils, a stocky bull of a man, argued that all rebels are driven by an instinctive compassion, concern for others, and a tendency toward “standing up for the underdog.” These impulses are often present in children, he said, but they are muted or crushed by the institutions of social control, including the family and school. Kasrils, although an atheist, said he saw the rebel in Jesus Christ, as well as in the thunderous denunciations of evil and oppression by the Hebrew prophets of the Bible. He said that those who endure oppression, such as Mandela, and rise up to resist are better described as revolutionaries. The rebel, he said, is one who often enjoys certain “liberties” but who is “prepared to give up his class or her class, or tribe.” Rebels, he said, turn their back on their own.

Kasrils spoke about a discussion he had on the nature of the rebel with Jack Simons, a retired university professor who was teaching ANC recruits in Angola and who had been a leader in the South African Communist Party before it was outlawed in 1950.

“Unconventional thought is a force for development,” Simons told Kasrils. “It is wrong to suppress it. The likes of you and I were thrown to the lions in Roman times and burnt at the stake in the Middle Ages as heretics.”

It was in post-apartheid South Africa that Kasrils fully realized Simons’s wisdom. Kasrils’s relentless quest for political and economic justice eventually turned him into a fierce critic of the two organizations to which he had dedicated himself for fifty years—the African National Congress and the Communist Party. The failure of these two organizations to ameliorate the suffering of the poor, the rampant corruption that he said exists within the leadership of the ANC, and the Marikana Massacre of 2012, in which thirty-four striking miners were gunned down by the South African Police Service—the country’s most lethal single assault on unarmed civilians since the 1960 Sharpeville massacre—left him alienated, once again, from the centers of power.
⁹
Camus observed that “every revolutionary [who achieves power] ends by becoming either an oppressor or a heretic.”
¹⁰

“I have to speak up,” Kasrils said. “It’s deep within me.”

Kasrils said that the ANC’s fatal mistake, which he concedes was partly his fault, was its decision during the transition to power in 1994 to shelve its socialist economic agenda, known as the Freedom Charter. Written in 1955, the charter had wide popular appeal. It demanded the end of the exploitation by the white oligarchic elite, who treated black laborers as serfs on farms, in mines, and on factory floors. It called for the right to work, freedom of expression, access to decent housing and land for all South Africans, and the sharing of South African wealth, especially its mineral resources. Banks, industries, and mines were to be nationalized.

Kasrils and other ANC leaders believed that they could deal with economic injustice later. They were fearful of defying Western imperialism and, as Kasrils put it, “neoliberal global economy market fundamentals.” But the ANC’s capitulation to global pressure to adopt a free market economy has proved to be a disaster. South Africa continues to be one of the most unequal societies on the planet. Whites, although they number less than 10 percent of the nation’s population, earn 7.7 times more on average than their black counterparts. Only a few thousand of the country’s 41 million blacks earn more than $5,000 a year. It is apartheid by another name.
¹¹
“[A] true rebel would not have accepted that,” Kasrils said.

T
he goal of the counterrevolutionary is to physically eradicate the insurgents’ logistical base of operations, disrupt their communication, and shatter their organization. Counterrevolutionaries seek to dry up popular, financial, and material support for the revolutionaries. They hunt down and decapitate leaders. Counterrevolutionaries create rival organizations to discredit and purge the rebel leadership and infiltrate the movement to foster internal divisions and rivalries. They provoke the movement by forming front groups that carry out repugnant acts to
alienate the wider populace from the insurgency. Meanwhile, the counterrevolutionaries churn out shadowy propaganda that the mainstream press often runs uncritically. Finally, they offer a political alternative that appears reformist but is ultimately under the control of the state.

The tools to break resistance are similar whether those movements are violent or nonviolent. The physical eradication of the Occupy encampments, the attempt to marginalize the protesters from the wider society, the use of figures such as Anthony Kapel “Van” Jones to co-opt the language of the Occupy movement and funnel energy into a dysfunctional electoral process—all these strategies fit the classic outline of a counterrevolutionary agenda.

Counterinsurgency campaigns, although they involve arms and weapons, are primarily, as in the old cliché, about hearts and minds. The goal is to win back, or at least render passive, a disaffected population. And the tactics employed by our intelligence operatives abroad are not dissimilar from those employed by our intelligence operatives at home. In fact, these operatives are frequently the same people.

But once violence is added to the mix, whether to defend the state or destroy it, something poisonous and insidious takes place. Violence is directed against society not to convert but to eradicate. All aspects of civic life are targeted—political, religious, educational, familial, economic, and traditional. The goal—as we see in Iraq and Afghanistan—is not to control territory but to control populations. Terror, assassination, imprisonment, and death become the glue that replaces the tissue of social cohesion. Society is mutilated. Civic life is destroyed. And in wartime each side uses violence to attempt to shape civil society to its own ends.

We do not have the tools or the wealth of the state. We cannot beat it at its own game. We cannot ferret out infiltrators. The legal system is almost always on the state’s side. If we attempt to replicate the elaborate security apparatus of our oppressors, even on a small scale, we unleash paranoia and fracture those who build movements. If we retreat into anonymity, hiding behind masks, then we provide an opening for
agents provocateurs
who deny their identities while disrupting the movement. If we fight pitched battles in the streets, we give authorities an excuse to fire their weapons and demonize the movement to the public.

All we have, as Vaclav Havel wrote, is our powerlessness. And that powerlessness is our strength. The ability of the movement to overthrow the corporate state depends on embracing this powerlessness. It depends on two of our most important assets—utter and complete transparency, and a rigid adherence to nonviolence, including respect for private property. These assets permit us, as Havel puts it in his classic 1978 essay “The Power of the Powerless,” to live in truth. And by living in truth, we expose a corrupt corporate state that perpetrates lies and functions by deceit.

Havel, who would become the first president of the Czech Republic in 1993, reflects in the essay on the mind of a greengrocer who, as instructed, puts up a poster “among the onions and carrots” that reads: “Workers of the World, Unite!” He displays the poster partly out of habit, partly because everyone else is doing it, and partly out of fear of the consequences for not following the rules. Havel notes that the greengrocer would not display a poster saying, “I am afraid and therefore unquestioningly obedient.”
¹²
This, for Havel, was the difference between the terror of a Joseph Stalin or an Adolf Hitler and the collective charade between the rulers and the ruled that by the 1970s had gripped Communist Czechoslovakia.

“Imagine that one day something in our greengrocer snaps and he stops putting up the slogans merely to ingratiate himself,” Havel writes.

This attempt to “live within the truth” brings with it ostracism and retribution. Punishment, Havel points out, is imposed in bankrupt systems because of the necessity for compliance, not out of any genuine
conviction. And the real crime committed is not the crime of speaking out or defying the rules, but the crime of exposing the charade. “By breaking the rules of the game, he has disrupted the game as such, he has exposed it as a mere game,” Havel says of his greengrocer.

Those who do not carve out spaces separate from the state and its systems of power, those who cannot find room to become autonomous, or who do not “live in truth,” inevitably become compromised. Kasrils understood this during the Sharpeville Massacre. By refusing to act, he was part of the system of oppression.

Movements that call on followers to “live in truth” do not always succeed. They failed in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala in the 1970s and 1980s, as well as in Yugoslavia in the 1990s, triggering armed insurgencies and blood-drenched civil wars. They have failed so far in Iran, the Israeli-occupied territories, and Syria. China has a movement modeled after Havel’s Charter 77—which was formed in 1977 to pressure the Czech government to abide by human rights guarantees enshrined in the Constitution and honor international human rights accords that the Communist government had signed—called Charter 08. But the Chinese opposition to the state has been effectively suppressed, even though its principal author, Liu Xiaobo—currently
serving an eleven-year prison term for “incitement of subversion of state power”
¹⁵
—was awarded the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize.
¹⁶

Power elites who stubbornly refuse to heed popular will and resort to harsher and harsher forms of state control provoke counterviolence. The first Palestinian uprising, which lasted from 1987 to 1992, saw crowds of demonstrators throw rocks at Israeli soldiers, but it was largely a nonviolent movement. The second uprising, or intifada, which erupted in 2000 and endured for five years, included armed attacks on Israeli soldiers and civilians. And the clashes during the summer of 2014 saw Hamas launching rockets into Israel from Gaza and carrying out armed assaults in Israeli territory via tunnels it had constructed. History is dotted with brutal fratricides spawned by calcified and repressive regimes that ignored the legitimate grievances of their citizens and continued to visit injustices upon them—or in the case of Israel, upon the people it occupies and whose peaceful protests it crushes.