Keyword: fascism

Julius Malema: It's Just a Jump to the Left, And Then a Step to the Right

Picture: Julius Malema courtesy Gary van der Merwe/Wikimedia Commons. Richard Pithouse - Being against [one form of] evil doesn't make you good. - Ernest Hemingway, Islands in the Stream, 1952 Over the last ten years or so there has been an extraordinary degree of popular protest in South Africa. The seemingly incorrigible elitism of the higher reaches of our public sphere has meant that, particularly in the absence of sustained formal organisation, popular protest has seldom won the right to represent itself in this space. For years the media, NGOs, academy and political...

The Turn of the Fascist

Picture: bcnn5.com Jane Duncan - Jacob Zuma’s rise to power has unleashed a torrent of rash, boorish, misogynistic and inciteful speech from politicians and commentators. In this regard, the utterances of ANC Youth League’s Julius Malema and ex-columnist Eric Miyeni come to mind. Why has public discourse plumbed to such depths of late? How serious is the problem and what can be done about it? In 2009, the South African Communist Party (SACP) warned against the emergence of what it described as a proto-fascist...