Letters to the Editor

THE AGE, October 25, 2005

Remember South Africa - and the rule of law

J. M. COETZEE has just drawn our attention to the parallels between Australia's proposed security laws and apartheid South Africa's destruction of the rule of law in that country. Like Coetzee, I lived through the process in South Africa and I now teach about and research it.

In 1948, the government there started with the basic British system protecting civil liberties through the courts. From 1950 the erosion of the rule of law began, under the justification of opposition to "communism" (from 1950) and "terrorism" (from the early 1960s).

In 1950, the government took the power to ban both organisations and individuals as "communist" (on the word of the minister, with no court involved); from 1963 it gave the police the power to detain people without trial or court intervention (initially for 90 days, then for 180 days, and, from 1982, indefinitely); and it created new capital offences of "sabotage" (from 1962) and "terrorism" (from 1967).

What this resulted in was progressive abuse of these powers by the security police. Successive ministers of justice and law and order gave the police whatever powers they demanded; the courts refused to intervene to prevent the abuses.

By the 1980s, large sections of the security police were effectively responsible and accountable only to ministers who made no attempt to rein in their abuses. The result was appalling human rights abuses on a large scale — all justified as part of the "war against communism and terrorism".

What the South African experience showed very clearly was that police, once given such powers, will demand more and more, and will demand less and less accountability to courts, parliament, government and the public at large.

Many Australians wrongly comfort themselves with the belief that everything that happened in South Africa can be blamed on Afrikaners, and so it can never happen here.

Philip Ruddock sounds increasingly like successive South African ministers of justice and law and order from the 1960s.
This is a naive racial assumption. In fact, Anglo-Saxon police in imperial Kenya and in white-ruled Rhodesia, French authorities in Algeria, Latin American police and military, and Eastern European police show that this is a universal rather than specifically racial characteristic. Once you give police and security authorities powers that they can exercise without the necessary restraints of the rule of law, they will hang on to them and demand more.

Attorney-General Philip Ruddock sounds increasingly like successive South African ministers of justice and law and order from the 1960s in his petulant insistence that his legislation is no threat to civil liberties because it is aimed only at the "terrorist".

Australians cannot afford to trust him on this. Once lost, such civil liberties can be regained — if at all — only at great cost.

Associate Professor David Philips,

department of history,

University of Melbourne



Fredrick Töben responds

25 October 2005

 

1. I spend a number of years in Southern Africa, and witnessed the April 1980 transfer of power from  Rhodesia to Zimbabwe.

 

2. In 1980, after 'black rule' was established, an economic conference was held where international experts aimed to "fix the broken Smith Regime economy"- an outright lie because the Smith economy was not broken, nor was it bankrupt and in serious debt. The conference's outcome was the pumping into the 'new' economy billions of dollars of loans. Even then a small group cried foul because in two decades to come this loan money could never be repaid - with the result that Zimbabwe's strategic minerals would have to be given away for a song, something that did not happen under Ian Smith. President Robert Mugabe is faced with this debt burden - and by pulling the race card the inevitable focus on the evil of usury is temporarily deflected as the world media scapegoats Zimbabweans - black and white - into oblivion. The race card deflects from those who pull the political and economic strings.

 

3. In Nigeria I taught at a tertiary institution and found Nigerians just as intelligent as Europeans - with one exception: The fight for survival - for self and extended family - was uppermost in each Nigerian's mind. There was no chance of opposing the powerful oppressive international financial institutions. The multinationals that at the most elementary level - child rearing - attempted to impose their products on to Nigerian women, e.g. milk powder instead of mother's breast milk, had their way. To the charge of corruption one of my students stated it clearly: " You in the west are also corrupt, except that you are at an advanced stage of corruption!"

 

4. The South African issue is easily explained by pointing out the sad fact that the Afrikaans embraced Old Testament thinking - meaning that the Jews were riding on the back of the Afrikaans. The Afrikaans-Israel alliance is a prime example of similar mindsets working together. When South Africa could not be held anymore, the Jews jumped ship and fled to Australia, New Zealand, Europe, US and Canada, where they immediately embraced subversive movements - culminating in the Jewish-Black alliance in the USA. Once power was achieved - early neocons -  the Blacks were unceremoniously jettisoned, as is always the case with those who ride on others' backs. Another factor that spelled the death-knell of the Afrikaans is the hypocrisy prevalent within Afrikaans households. Many men travelled to the Homelands, there to consort with Black women, then return to their pious family life in South Africa. The children of such men had the chance of fleeing into drugs and pure hedonism or challenge their fathers.

 

5. The odds were stacked against the Europeans. In South Africa, whatever they did, the whites prayed a lot and hoped - and lost the will to hold the fort against the odds - 4 million against 16 million. Likewise in Rhodesia -  it was 250,000 against 6 million, an impossible odds. Interestingly, the Afrikaans homelands were eliminated - a sad matter - while the British homelands of Swaziland and Lesotho remain as independent countries. Now South Africa is again open house for the multinationals - and is again the playground of the rich European elite who are driving house prices up, to the detriment of both Black and White South Africans. The Whites who helped Blacks into power are now seeing their own positions eroded by this new international elite.

 

 6. The comparison of the South African terrorist laws with Australia's situation is a false analogy because in Southern Africa the threat was real while the threat in Australia is a fiction. The purpose of the Australian laws will merely serve to silence critics of Zionist Israel's continued ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Australians will become fearful and submissive - and begin to whisper as the Zionist-Jewish individuals push the Holocaust lies into the community and expect the Australian citizens to pay tribute to Jews - the EPO's know how to milk the system -  without opposition. Professor Philips fails to accentuate the role played by Jews in this whole business  - in Southern Africa, and in getting the Racial Discrimination Act as well as this latest constraint against Australians -  terrorist laws -  through parliament and on to the law books.

 

 

 

Voters say yes to terror Australis
By David Humphries
October 25, 2005

http://www.fairfaxphotos.com/pages/