The first disc is also the most recent and it considers Mandela in his whole personal and political history and South Africa in its present state. What is the legacy and heritage South Africa will keep and benefit from coming from Mandela? It shows very well the icon he has become for South Africa, for Africa and for the world. This is a change in the whole world that no one can ignore. The lasting icon of change from servitude to freedom and democracy, from all types of centralized authoritative systems to direct and systematic democracy, and two events represent the turning point in our world on this question, the liberation of Mandela and his election to the presidency of his country on one hand and the fall of the Berlin wall and the implosion of the Soviet system on the other hand.
After these two events the world will never be again what it used to be. The fundamentalist Islamist movement essentially represented by Al Qaeda first and George W. Bush second have tried all they could, and for some are still trying, to bring the world back to what it actually never was: a world dominated by ONLY ONE power, the USA, either by attacking it directly and making it responsible for every evil in the world (Al Qaeda), or by sending troops everywhere they could to impose their solutions (the USA, and note France has recently followed that line TOO MUCH and had to be stopped twice by Obama's USA). The two attitudes created a world that could have become dominated by Islamist terrorism and US state terrorism. But that has vastly failed in spite of the tremendous tension these two sides have created and are still creating and thanks to, among others, the momentous defeat of the LTTE in Sri Lanka.
The first disc, and first documentary film, does not insist enough on this fact, on this dimension, and consequently gets more or less trapped in insisting on the present difficulties of South Africa to (in order to) tarnish Mandela's heritage. It also probably insists too much on the sole personality of Mandela himself. The people who made that film (the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) would have been well inspired if they had followed Mandela's example more closely and particularly what he wrote about his life and action. Mandela did not engineer a socialist revolution, certainly not a racial revolution, but he – with a lot of others –engineered a national transformation that is multiracial, multi- ethnic, multi-religious, multi-linguistic and multi-cultural within a general private property market economy that has to be regulated in a way or another and within a democratic system in which everyone has one vote and only one vote, and in which all votes are equal.
The consequence could not be anything but a difficult situation since before millions of people, the vast majority of the people, were not even counted as workers of any sort. They were some kind of reserve work force that was used when necessary, exploited as much as possible and in no way guaranteed employment, education, housing, electricity, or whatever basic goods and services. The transformation is enormous and the unemployment figures (practically the only element considered, along with AIDS, in some length) are only reflecting the fact that for the first time people are recorded as having a job or not having a job, i.e. as having the right to be registered as a worker with or without employment. What was the real level of work and income available to Black South Africans under apartheid? We do not even know. So a 20% rate of unemployment today does not mean much. What is important is that South Africa is a member of the BRICS alliance, is an emerging economy and will be able to improve its situation a lot faster than the documentary says. And these elements I have just listed are not even mentioned ONCE in the documentary.
In fact this documentary is typical of western news reports that want to be "objective" and they do not understand that objectivity is not to paint one side in pink and to paint another side in black and bring the two sides next to each other. The documentary should have looked for the central contradiction and it is not the fact that the distance between the richest and the poorest has increased. This is purely circumstantial even if socially important, but not necessarily existentially important. The main dynamic contradiction is somewhere else: the contradiction is in the potential growth perspective based on individual and collective initiative within a national and international frame. The question is: Is South Africa's market economy able to bring development to the country within the world's market economy? The concept of capitalism is not even needed here, except if we consider the vastly state-owned Chinese economy is capitalistic like the nearly uniquely private-owned US economy, not to speak of the deregulated market economy of Reagan and following presidents and today's post-2008-9-crisis re-regulated market economy.
But this first film is essential to retrace the long historical perspective.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU
After these two events the world will never be again what it used to be. The fundamentalist Islamist movement essentially represented by Al Qaeda first and George W. Bush second have tried all they could, and for some are still trying, to bring the world back to what it actually never was: a world dominated by ONLY ONE power, the USA, either by attacking it directly and making it responsible for every evil in the world (Al Qaeda), or by sending troops everywhere they could to impose their solutions (the USA, and note France has recently followed that line TOO MUCH and had to be stopped twice by Obama's USA). The two attitudes created a world that could have become dominated by Islamist terrorism and US state terrorism. But that has vastly failed in spite of the tremendous tension these two sides have created and are still creating and thanks to, among others, the momentous defeat of the LTTE in Sri Lanka.
The first disc, and first documentary film, does not insist enough on this fact, on this dimension, and consequently gets more or less trapped in insisting on the present difficulties of South Africa to (in order to) tarnish Mandela's heritage. It also probably insists too much on the sole personality of Mandela himself. The people who made that film (the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) would have been well inspired if they had followed Mandela's example more closely and particularly what he wrote about his life and action. Mandela did not engineer a socialist revolution, certainly not a racial revolution, but he – with a lot of others –engineered a national transformation that is multiracial, multi- ethnic, multi-religious, multi-linguistic and multi-cultural within a general private property market economy that has to be regulated in a way or another and within a democratic system in which everyone has one vote and only one vote, and in which all votes are equal.
The consequence could not be anything but a difficult situation since before millions of people, the vast majority of the people, were not even counted as workers of any sort. They were some kind of reserve work force that was used when necessary, exploited as much as possible and in no way guaranteed employment, education, housing, electricity, or whatever basic goods and services. The transformation is enormous and the unemployment figures (practically the only element considered, along with AIDS, in some length) are only reflecting the fact that for the first time people are recorded as having a job or not having a job, i.e. as having the right to be registered as a worker with or without employment. What was the real level of work and income available to Black South Africans under apartheid? We do not even know. So a 20% rate of unemployment today does not mean much. What is important is that South Africa is a member of the BRICS alliance, is an emerging economy and will be able to improve its situation a lot faster than the documentary says. And these elements I have just listed are not even mentioned ONCE in the documentary.
In fact this documentary is typical of western news reports that want to be "objective" and they do not understand that objectivity is not to paint one side in pink and to paint another side in black and bring the two sides next to each other. The documentary should have looked for the central contradiction and it is not the fact that the distance between the richest and the poorest has increased. This is purely circumstantial even if socially important, but not necessarily existentially important. The main dynamic contradiction is somewhere else: the contradiction is in the potential growth perspective based on individual and collective initiative within a national and international frame. The question is: Is South Africa's market economy able to bring development to the country within the world's market economy? The concept of capitalism is not even needed here, except if we consider the vastly state-owned Chinese economy is capitalistic like the nearly uniquely private-owned US economy, not to speak of the deregulated market economy of Reagan and following presidents and today's post-2008-9-crisis re-regulated market economy.
But this first film is essential to retrace the long historical perspective.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU
