Just for laughs

Malema formally charged over Zim and 'Kill the Boer'

The ANC has formally charged Julius Malema with bringing the organisation into disrepute.

The president of the ANC Youth League will now appear before a disciplinary hearing that will be headed by Derek Hanekom, who chairs the ANC's disciplinary committee. A date has yet to be set.

The charges cite as motivation for a disciplinary hearing:

•Bringing the ANC and government into disrepute over his remarks about Zimbabwe following his visit there. Malema endorsed the ruling Zanu-PF and attacked the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC);

•Malema's remarks that former president Thabo Mbeki never rebuked the youth league publicly when he disagreed with them, unlike President Jacob Zuma. This followed Zuma's public remarks distancing his government and the ANC from Malema's behaviour;

•His remarks again following AWB leader Eugene Terre Blanche's death that he died before changing his racist behaviour; and

•His aggressive behaviour towards a BBC journalist, calling him a "bastard" and a "bloody agent".

The decision to charge Malema was taken by ANC officials, including Zuma, after a number of public spats involving Malema and leaders of Cosatu, the SA Communist Party and the Democratic Party.

ANC spokesman Jackson Mthembu refused to confirm that Malema had been charged. "These are matters internal in the ANC; we do things internally and is not for the media or public," he said.

An SMS, purporting to come from youth league spokesman Floyd Shivambu, informed the league's provincial structures that Malema had been charged for ill discipline by the ANC and urged them to release statements in his defence to the media.

A text message read: "ANC outgoing secretary-general Gwede Mantashe has written a letter to ANC Youth League president charging him with ill discipline for speaking on behalf of the youth league on revolutionary songs, expression of shock with the public condemnation and BBC journalist incident.

"Provinces are requested to release statements in defence of the president. Please target your local media."

Shivambu yesterday denied sending the SMS, adding he had "no knowledge" of Malema being charged.

But the Sunday Times has learnt that Malema received his charges on Wednesday from Mantashe's office.

Youth league secretary Vuyiswa Tulelo said she knew nothing about Malema's charges, but confirmed a meeting with ANC officials tomorrow. She said the discussions would centre around the league's programmes.

According to the ANC constitution the penalties Malema could face include a reprimand, payment of compensation and/or performance of useful tasks, suspension and expulsion.

According to the charge sheet, Malema's actions brought the ANC into disrepute, were a flagrant violation of the moral integrity expected of members and public representatives, and his conduct was unbecoming a member or public representative of the organisation.

Charges included promoting racism, sexism, tribal chauvinism, religious and political intolerance, regionalism or any form of discrimination, and behaving in such a way as to provoke serious divisions or a breakdown of the unity in the ANC and undermining the respect for or impeding the functioning of the structures of the organisation.

ANC insiders said the action against Malema came after several meetings with Zuma, who warned Malema to restrain himself when making public statements.

In March, the ANC's national executive committee resolved that public spats between the alliance partners should stop and that anyone stoking the flames be disciplined.

In his political overview, Zuma said the culture of publicly attacking each other would become entrenched "if we do not act against it".

"We will create an image of an organisation and country dogged by tension and infighting," Zuma said.

But Malema continued to speak out of turn, and his utterances following his visit to Zimbabwe proved to be the final straw.

In a statement, the ANC distanced itself from Malema's backing of Zanu-PF, which together with political foe the MDC is ruling Zimbabwe in a government of national unity.

It said: "The ANC together with its government would like to see all political parties in Zimbabwe (both factions of the MDC and Zanu-PF) implementing the spirit and the letter of the Global Political Agreement.

It is therefore our view that the ANCYL's expression of support for one party in Zimbabwe goes against our country's and President Zuma's mediation efforts in that country."

The Times Live, 18 April 2010

Steve Hofmeyr: 10 out of 10

My Comments follow

Dear Julius,

As of today I withdraw my former World Cup enthusiasm with active endorsements of all warnings to potential visitors until your leadership rebuke you as we see fit. Tomorrow, after you’ve shot the boere you will still be a pitiful black African living in denial of your own impotence parading as a fake achiever without contributing to the world a single original idea.

Yours is mere envy disguised as hatred as nothing you say, wear, drive and steal alas, even your idiocy, is a luxury born of this continent. You must appeal to base sentiment as Africa has yet to yield a single intellectual, a single thought school, a single intellectual thought not inspired by the very West you and Mugabe detest.

You have been a phony from the day you set out to champion a defiance from a period you we not even born. You are still consuming from that productive era living in the lap of luxury thanks to the taxes of the very people you want to shoot, the only tribe to sacrifice a third of its population to breath in the African air.

In history South Africans will choose to forget you when the only thing you should be remembered for is your share in the falling short of a brilliant idea: a working South Africa.


There has been a lot of acrimonious response to Steve Hofmeyr's open letter to Julius Malema above, in the MSM as well as the blogosphere. Try this link for a sample.

It just comes across as openly racist doesn't it?

It's just another tired old white tendency to criticise blacks and is completely counterproductive innit?

Well, that's the point.

Who is being counterproductive in the first instance?

And is the letter really all that racist?

A couple of points really get up my nose and I'd like to clear the air right here. Firstly, is there anyone out there that can explain to me exactly how do you criticise Julius Malema, the ANC and other blacks of his ilk without sounding racist?

I will go further and say criticise "blacks in general" (and may I remind you that the overwhelming majority of black youths support Malema, and the overwhelming majority of blacks voted for the ANC, so I include them in the phrase "blacks in general" as a demographic reference; the source of the tragedy that has befallen ZA since 1994, the unsophisticated electorate)

We may as well just come out and say what the hell we want, because no matter how you soft peddle it, you are going to be branded a racist for criticising someone like Malema, or anyone connected to the ANC, or the retarded sheeple that vote them in on a recurring basis.

So if you want to pin that label on me, go ahead.

Another attitude I have noted that I think needs being halted in it's tracks, is this common public delusion that all that is preventing ZA from blossoming into it's wonderful rainbow glory, is the so called "white supremacists" and racists. It's either the AWB, or the "Oranjans" or the bloggers to blame for all South Africa's woes.

Crazy, but the logic goes like this: If only these nasty "right wingers" (Personally I'm not a right winger, I'm a moderate with a conscience - with eyes - but that's for another post) would stop all this negative nonsense in their communities, the workplace and on their blogs. If only they would stop with their subtle sabotage, setting blacks up for failure in the workplace or broadcasting fear and half baked lies about crime to the world. If only they can change their attitudes and embrace transformation, then ZA would blossom into a paradise on earth, a true Mandelatopia.

What a load of crap!

I could do you a laundry list of the problems in ZA, none of which have been caused in any sense by whites, whether openly or by subterfuge, but I'll only select two:

Crime is endemic in ZA, the stats are there to prove it. On top of that, there is an added dimension of violence and hate killings going on, that are being down played by the MSM and the government for various reasons (the police have a vested interest to downplay crime reporting as it can send the message that crime is easy, profitable and free of prosecution. And the MSM seems to have a tacit agreement with FIFA not to report negatively on crime in view of the soccer world cup due to take place in two months - I could also add that the notorious farm killing phenomenon is not actually so very much against the governments own interests in divesting whites of land ownership and transferring it into black hands) This has nothing to do with whites, except insofar as we are the victims thereof.

BEE - In terms of the opportunities in ZA, blacks have it all going their way. It's a one way street in ZA due to BEE. Promotions, contracts, increases, opportunities, tenders, you name it, are all in favour of the BEE anointed ones. It is impossible for any white person to stand in the way of this trend.

Apartheid is over. We all realise that. It is illegal to call someone a kaffir to their face. You will be arrested, we know this. We stay away from hate speech, there is a law against that too. Hate speech blogs have a limited life and definitely are counter-productive.

Don't accuse me of being a "stumbling block" to SA's success just because I have a white skin and I speak my mind. My attitude has got absolutely nothing to do with the success or failure of ZA.

More to the point, the "black tendency" I note of people like Malema, who refuse to take responsibility for their own actions, for hate mongering and sowing chaos, is really at the heart - the blooming red, pulsating tumour - of the cancer that is eating away at South Africa.

Not whites. Not me.

Enough cringing and tip-toeing around, whilst demographically favoured melanin hued arseholes like Malema and his President Zuma strut their arrogance. Fuck them.

Steve, you said it as it is. Good on yer mate!

Happy Zimbabwe Day!!

Today marks 30 Golden Years of the Glorious Rule of Robert Mugabe over the southern African Paradise of Zimbabwe.

I take this opportunity to wish, on behalf of all our contributors and readers, a Happy Fucking Birthday to the Mugabe Regime - although I suspect cake may be in short supply.

In honour of such an illustrious occasion, I present to you Mark Steyn on Zim:

On April 18th 1980, the Union Flag came down in Harare and the last Governor of Southern Rhodesia, Lord Soames, transfered executive power to the first Prime Minister of independent Zimbabwe. On the thirtieth anniversary of Zimbabwean "freedom", how's it working out?

Zimbabwe didn't have to be like this. "You have given me the jewel of Africa," Robert Mugabe told Ian Smith, his notorious white racist predecessor, at independence in 1980. Actually, at one point Africa had quite a lot of jewels. But through the Sixties and Seventies decolonization delivered the continent into the hands of Afro-Marxist kleptocrats-for-life who reduced viable economies and some of the richest farmland on the planet to an impoverished coup-wracked dump. Mr Smith was a racist but he was not an incompetent and, a generation after Zimbabwe's neighbors had achieved and squandered independence, he bequeathed (albeit reluctantly) a going concern to Robert Mugabe and his Zanu-PF party.

Mr Mugabe then got to work. In 1990, after one decade of Zanu-PF stewardship, the arrangements put in place by Lord Carrington at the Lancaster House conference were still holding, just about. In 2000, after two decades of Mr. Mugabe's rule, per capita income had fallen by half, inflation was running at over 100% and unemployment at 60%, and the government had no idea how to correct any of these lamentable developments except by forcing white farmers off their property and turning productive land to dust.

Today, after three decades, there's no point running any economic numbers: Zimbabwe is off the charts. Last year, the central bank introduced a new 100 trillion dollar banknote. The following month, concerned that the numbers were getting too long to print on any regular sized bill, they had another currency revaluation and removed 12 zeroes from the Zimbabwean dollar: One trillion dollars is now worth one dollar. Unemployment is around 95 per cent. Maize and soya production have fallen by over half since 2000.

There are fewer white farmers to blame. Many were murdered at the urging of Mugabe, and, as is traditional, after hacking up the landowner and his missus the killers then eat the cattle and clog up the irrigation ditches with their carcases and sit and watch as the land returns to dirt, and somewhere at a international agency a bewildered economist tries to figure out why food production falls when a working farmer is replaced by a machete-wielding goon. Those fortunate landowners who aren't dead are mostly fled.

Yet the official position is that the present situation remains the fault of the white minority and of Britain. Mr Mugabe famously described his Commonwealth colleague Tony Blair as a "gay gangster" leading "the gay government of the gay United gay Kingdom."

Back in 1980, Robert Mugabe was a cold but courtly Afro-Marxist. He liked cricket for its "civilizing" influence, he had English hunting scenes on the place mats at Government House, and he spoke in the elegant vowels of a post-war London drawing room, not the flatted tones of the veldt settler. He was always an economic illiterate, and a vicious killer as required, but he was not, as he now appears to be, stark staring nuts. Many have speculated on the reasons for this. In Zimbabwe, it became widely believed during the Nineties that he'd been driven insane by tertiary syphilis.

Reliable sources claim Mr. Mugabe's manhood has crumbled away to nothing. A few years back, George Potgieter, the manager of a Harare engineering company, wound up in the dock after telling his workers that (according to court records) "they had no brains because they were being led by a president who had a rubber penis made in China". The workers immediately seized Mr Potgieter and took him to the nearest police station for breaking the Law and Order Maintenance Act, which forbids exposing the President to "hatred, contempt or ridicule".

I'm not sure what extradition arrangements we have with Harare, so let me hasten to add that neither I nor the management of SteynOnline are for one minute suggesting Mr Mugabe has a rubber penis - or, if he has, we're sure it's very impressive and top of the range, certainly not some factory-made Chinese thing. By the way, I'm no shrink, but it seems to me that if one's twig and berries crumble away to nothing it could conceivably lead one to an unusually intense animus against certain forms of male sex. Thus, Mr Mugabe's speech in 2000 accusing Britain of a plot to impose homosexuality throughout the Commonwealth.

So on this thirtieth anniversary, with his country in worse shape than his penis and no rubber substitute to hand, there's now something for everyone to complain about. On the British right, Mugabe's assaults on the white farmers vindicate everything they always said about him. On the British left, the rampant homophobia cost him the support of all those champagne socialists who cheered his rise to power in 1980. And in the mushy centre there's the usual anguished hand-wringing at every Commonwealth Conference. Mugabe's thugs smash oppositions newspapers, corrupt the judiciary, undermine elections, and kill political opponents, and the Commonwealth issues another statement expressing "deep concern" and urging "all parties" to desist from violence.

The general effectiveness of this approach was perfectly encapsulated by the then Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, emerging triumphantly from a crisis meeting on Zimbabwe in 2002: "Everybody has agreed that nothing will be done before the elections," said M Chrétien. He was boasting of this as a diplomatic feather in Canada's cap, and indeed it was widely reported as such by his poodle press. But it is in its way a brilliant summation of the multilateral approach to even pipsqueaks: "Everybody has agreed that nothing will be done." That's "soft power" in a nutshell.

And after the stolen election Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria and Thabo Mbeki of South Africa, the continent's heavyweights, flew to Harare for a "working lunch" with the old mass murderer. Their suggestion was that he form a coalition government including members of the party he'd stolen the election from. Mr Mugabe laughed so hard his rubber penis fell off. To be honest, Mr Mbeki's heart wasn't really in this "compromise" proposal: After Mr Mugabe's cheerfully straightforward fraud, intimidation and violence paid off on election day, the South Africangovernment had sent him a congratulatory telegram. Mr Mbeki has supposedly committed Africa to self-policing its commitments to good governance. Yet he has a consistent track record of going out of his way to kiss up to even the most psychotic dictators in the name of "African unity."

After the theft of the 2008 election, Mbeki and others prevailed on Mugabe to form a "national unity" government with Morgan Tsvangirai, his rival and the rightful winner, as Prime Minister. Under the agreement, Mr Tsvangirai's MDC party would control the police, and Mr Mugabe's Zanu-PF the army. In practice, the Prime Minister's "government" controls very little, including even trumped-up treason charges against its ministers. Last year, a truck swerved into his car, inuring Mr Tsvangirai and killing his wife.

Thus, the "jewel of Africa" after thirty years of "independence" with every facet of its inheritance reduced to rubble, near total unemployment, and mass starvation. Robert Mugabe is not Saddam Hussein or Kim Jong-Il. He's a nothing, but he meant it and he understood that the weaselly Commonwealth communiques condemning violence by "all parties" didn't: Whether or not he has no penis, he understood that "world opinion" has no balls. "Everybody has agreed that nothing will be done." Happy Zimbabwe Day.

Movie Review: Clash of the Titans

I've waited a long while for this one, it seems, but went away very disappointed.

*beware: contains spoilers*

The original 1981 epic was a part of my childhood, and used to be on at Christmas every year as long back as I remember. But I was determined to enjoy the remake and let it stand on its own merits.

The special effects were ok (although there is something more magical about Ray Harryhausen's earlier creations), but just ok as I have seen better. The clockwork owl makes a nostalgic appearance, which ends with one character suggesting they don't bother bringing it along. They don't.

The action scenes are quite good with lots of jumping about and bronze-age sword-fighting behaviour. But many of the scenes are plain silly. A lot of the Olympus scenes are reminiscent of Harry Potter (complete with Ralph Fiennes) and at one point Liam Neeson (Zeus) looks like he is reprising his role as Obi-Wan Kenobi.

In fact, the biggest changes to the story are theological, and that's where I have the greatest difficulty with the remake. Gone is the arbitrary human-like behaviour of the Olympian Gods, classically both good and evil wrapped up in one, and here in 2010 we have to have good versus evil, with Hades of the underworld playing the villain and Zeus as, effectively, the Christian God.
(This is reinforced at one point with Zeus declaring how he wanted to love of humanity but without losing his son!)

The influence of Lord of the Rings and other recent blockbusters is all too evident, with the Evil god coming to do battle with the forces of Good. Textbook stuff, but nothing to do with Greek Mythology. A familiarity with Greek Mythology should make the story less confusing, but it is clear that the film's producers had little faith in its audiences knowledge.

The historical stuff was good, too, although the appearance of Iron Age Persian architecture in a Bronze Age Greek story bugged me a little. Sam Worthington was good, but Liam Neeson was wasted, as was Ralph Fiennes. Gemma Arterton glowed.

6 out of 10.