A major event in the history of South Africa took place forty years ago, on the morning of 21st August 1968 - the crushing of the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia by Russian tanks. This totalitarian crime, the destruction of the freedom of one nation by the masters of another, was supported and endorsed in public statements by the South African Communist Party and the African National Congress.
As joint participants in the government of the South Africa since the ending of apartheid, despite their official dogma of national liberation, neither party nor the Government of South Africa has made public apology for this affront to the peoples of the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic. Some nations, apparently, deserve liberation more than others.
The crushing of the Prague Spring is a matter of acute relevance for the people of Georgia now, as with Tibet , for whom it is their own present story. That great bully - the "Great Russian Derzhimorda", as Lenin described him in his deathbed writings, in reference to Stalin - is constantly applauded by the dominant majoritarian party of government in South Africa and its Communist brains trust as if it were the apostle of freedom, and in particular of national freedom. They forget Marx's wise remark, that the nation that enslaves another enslaves itself.
This is the real, open secret of the support of the Mbeki government for the dictatorship of the Mugabe junta in Zimbabwe. The heritage of the Soviet crushing of the Prague Spring, endorsed and supported at the time by Thabo Mbeki and his leading ministers, has governed their silence to this day on the genocidal massacre - the Gukurahundi - by the Mugabe regime in Matabeleland 25 years ago, an affront to any notion of an African Renaissance.
From the support of the SACP and the ANC for the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia, a clear thread of political consistency led these parties ten years later to establish their own Gulags for political dissenters in the ANC, in particular at Quatro punishment camp in northern Angola. Its principal inmates were young South Africans of the generation of the 1976 Soweto school students' uprising, who had imbibed the libertarian spirit of 1968 prior to the crushing of the Prague Spring.
Idealistic, brave, and filled with a passion to put an end to apartheid, these young people had sought a real and not a slave's education in South Africa and were no different from the young people of Czechoslovakia in their desire for a real and not a sham democracy in their own organisation, the African National Congress.
The first of the demands of the '76 generation in their peaceful mutiny at Viana camp outside Luanda in February 1984 was for a democratic conference of the ANC. (Every member of the National Executive Committee of the ANC up to that time was an appointee. The members of the '76 generation had no elected representation in the NEC, even though they supplied two of the ANC army's three detachments). Their second demand was for the suspension and investigation of the ANC's Security Department, partly because of its brutal KGB-type behaviour, partly because they believed - rightly - that it was infiltrated right up to the top by the South African regime. Their third demand was to be sent to South Africa to fight, rather than be consumed in an Angolan civil war.
This extraordinary mutiny, in which the mutineers' demand was to be sent to the front rather than withdrawn from battle, was the ANC's Prague Spring. Its crushing was as the crushing of Czechoslovakia by Russian tanks.
This generation from the mutiny in the ANC in 1984, the generation of '76, continues to remain politically mute in South Africa, a generation without a voice, inhibited by its memory of the capacity for violence of the ANC's Stalinist heritage. When it hears of the crushing of the Prague Spring in August 1968, it thinks in the spirit of John Donne's Meditation of 1624:
No man is an island entire of itself...
... never send to know for whom
the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
August 21st 2008 is a day for the most profound meditation in South Africa, the anniversary of the occasion when its governing party directly endorsed dictatorship.
Never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
