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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   993 thread views

Transnational Thursday for May 30, 2024

Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.

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Ukraine

US officials are allowing Ukraine to use American weapons in limited (depending on your point of view) strikes on Russian soil, following the example of France. Macron is also reportedly considering sending military advisors (though I'd be surprised if they didn't have boots on the ground already), and his statements in recent months make it seem as though he is willing to condone quite extreme levels of escalation if the Ukrainian position continues to deteriorate, up to and including a repeat of Borodino on the Dnieper.

Mexico

I have just found out that Mexico is having a presidential election this weekend and that the candidate favored to win is a Jewish woman with an engineering PhD expected to continue the left-wing populist policies of the current president AMLO. As you can infer, I don't hear much about Mexico these days, so I assume they're mostly muddling along as they always have. In any case, it's always interesting to see the diversity of political candidates and leaders in Latin America, whether it's Arab strongmen who clean up the streets, a corrupt Japanese political dynasty, Chainsaw Man, or Croatian socialists.

Ukraine

I don't know how deliberate this is (probably not very, just a natural consequence of doing as little as possible to keep Ukraine alive), but it looks like the plan is to keep Russia busy as long as possible, to keep Putin thinking that victory is just around the corner, he just has to endure a dozen more attacks on oil refineries, maybe shoot down a few F-16s, power through another round of sanctions, maybe conduct another mobilization and then he'll be in Kiev by Christmas. The plan is definitely not about helping Ukraine regain its territory quickly and decisively.

Bit of a quick one:

The Victorian state government (Australian) has failed in its 4 year bid to halt the processing of a Freedom of Information release of documents related to the reasoning behind the Covid lockdowns. The documents were to brief the state's chief public health officer and Minister for Health prior to lockdown public orders.

The court involved noted there was a large public interest in the justifications for the lockdowns and that it would not be an undue burden on department resources to process the FOI request. It should be noted the same political party (Labor) is still in continuous power since the time of the lockdowns.

Hopefully the public can get some answers for why Melbourne suffered the longest Covid lockdowns in the world.

South Africa held elections yesterday. Results are still being counted, but the BBC has preliminary outcomes(https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cjll8nr6962o.amp):

With results from around 27% voting districts counted so far, the ANC is leading with 43%, followed by the Democratic Alliance (DA) with 25%.

The radical Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) has about 9%, while the uMkhonto weSizwe Party (MK Party) of former President Jacob Zuma is on around 8%.

For those of you who don’t remember, the ANC is the ruling party losing seats due to corruption and incompetence, the DA is basically a good-governance party with the chops to back it up, the EFF are anti-white communists, and MK is a corrupt splinter from the ANC.

These results virtually assure that there will be a coalition, and the ANC will be senior partner therein. The actual contours remain to be seen.

I'm pretty interested in the situation in SA generally but have very little insight of my own to provide. Hopefully adding a comment here at least bumps the salience of this thread such that it attracts the attention of someone more knowledgeable about the area.

I do hope more opinions come in, I am South African but can't promise good insight.

My opinions for what it is worth. I think the rise of MK vs ANC is being framed as a new party doing well, whereas I would rather frame it as the ANC splitting between Xhosa and Zulu. I feel many don't want to acknowledge what that represents going forward. There is history there that some over here would prefer to ignore.

I have received a few memes joking about the Eastern Cape still supporting ANC strongly, making fun of them for being stupid etc. But a hypothetical Xhosa voter, looking at the situation, who would you vote for? I would strongly argue that the EFF's rhetoric, claiming to me be marxist and supporting pan-Africanism, has made them the party of affluent black (and leftist white) university students. I would strongly argue that SA mirrors the US in so many ways. I can just look at how well the EFF has done in university suburbs in Cape Town, which are not cheap. In the rural Eastern Cape, these messages don't land. What resonates to these Xhosa voters, is that the Zulus are trying to take over. They already had an uprising a few years ago, they had some in the 50s etc. The rise of MK is driven by the feeling of Zulus being persecuted, particularly in the recent court case for Zuma (a fascinating parallel with the US). Lawfare, it sows grievance. And the reactive force to that is fear.

The ANC has fallen below 50% dramatically, and will have to choose who to govern with. The coalition options are limited, and I think it will have to be the DA for it to make any sense. White South Africans that remain want to make this work

Appreciate the response!

I would strongly argue that the EFF's rhetoric, claiming to me be marxist and supporting pan-Africanism, has made them the party of affluent black (and leftist white) university students. I would strongly argue that SA mirrors the US in so many ways. I can just look at how well the EFF has done in university suburbs in Cape Town, which are not cheap. In the rural Eastern Cape, these messages don't land.

Aren't the EFF the ones famous for (at least some of them) claiming they're going to kill white people? I would have thought even leftist white students might find that somewhat objectionable. The revolutionary spirit is one helluva drug, I guess.

Pretty much nobody thinks ‘kill the boer’ is a literal call for killing off the whites. The EFF’s platform is to dispossess white asset-holders, which university students are not.

Pretty much nobody thinks ‘kill the boer’ is a literal call for killing off the whites.

I'm reminded of that NYT quote Scott mentioned a while back:

But several reliable, well-informed sources confirmed the idea that Hitler's anti-Semitism was not so genuine or violent as it sounded, and that he was merely using anti-Semitic propaganda as a bait to catch masses of followers and keep them aroused, enthusiastic, and in line for the time when his organization is perfected and sufficiently powerful to be employed effectively for political purposes.

(To be a little less fallacious, even if it's not serious now, if it's part of the rhetoric new members are exposed to those new members will tend to become serious, and years down the track they'll wind up in charge of the organisation. There was a post about the phenomenon on here a while back.)

The EFF has suffered in recent years because the most salient culture war issue in South Africa, especially to poor urban [black] proletarians (who would presumably be the core audience for this kind of socialist party), is immigration from elsewhere in Southern and Central Africa putting downward pressure on wages for working class urban black people. The EFF, as a socialist party with vaguely anti-imperialist and pan-Africanist views, endorsed and then partially walked back an open borders position that was extremely unpopular with those voters. Anti-white animus isn’t popular enough in SA for the EFF to exceed 12% of the vote; it’s possible they could go higher in the event of an economic collapse driving some kind of populist socialist sentiment, but I don’t think that’s really the same thing.

The ANC becoming the Xhosa party and the Zulus leaving is probably good. It means that the DA should be able to participate in most or all coalitions, and in any case increases the chance of the parties curtailing the most egregious corruption to try to compete for the vote, which the ANC has never previously had to do.

Socialist parties have struggled for actual working class votes recently; I wouldn’t think the EFF would be an exception anyways.

Yeah, and as in Europe the position on immigration and borders is a big negative for them in SA.

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