Surviving Capitalism (Not) : South Africa Police Say They Killed 34 Miners

We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Friday, August 17, 2012

South Africa Police Say They Killed 34 Miners

Click here to access article by Thomas Phakane and Michelle Fault from Huffington Post.

This is one of a very few pieces online that provides anything like an objective report. All mainstream news reports frame the event as police defending themselves. Of course, this is the typical way that the media of the One Percent portray all clashes between the 99 Percent and themselves and/or their enforcers.

Some accurate reports covering other aspects of this incident are from World War 4 Report entitled "South Africa: paranoid politics of platinum mine massacre" and from CounterFire entitled "South Africa: the story behind a brutal police massacre".

Most class wars are of a non-violent type in the sense that they occur in legislative bodies and legal courts that are controlled by the One Percent. However, whenever they cannot be successful by these bodies, the One Percent have no compunctions about using violence against workers to gain their wealth.

The One Percent in the US have their own history of massacres against striking workers: the 1886 Haymarket massacre, the 1892 Homestead Strike massacre, the 1894 Pullman Strike massacre, the 1897 Lattimore Massacre, the 1914 Ludlow Massacre, and the 1937 Chicago Memorial Day massacre among the most notorious.