[Thatcher's toi THE juggernaut is rolling out of…]

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Thatcher's toi THE juggernaut is rolling out of control. The last feeble whisps of debate have been sent flying into the ditch. The feeble struggle to control the charge of the press is broken.

The BBC's capitulation illustrates this as well as anything. The Corporation made bellicose statements against Tory back bench witch-hunts - but it has made sure that its witches have been gagged.

Proudly the Corporation reported that audienco surveys opposed by a majority of 2-1 demands for the BBC to convert itself to a kind of Sun of the air, complete with references to our lads:

But the film from Argentina which had provided tho only alternative to jingoism has virtually dried up since the attack started. The Argentine claims are now hardly mentioned. Although the ovasions of the Ministry of Detence continue to be revealed, the BBC has dropped its questioning of their validity. The list of planes and helicopters which mcet with various accidents reported weeks after the event goes unchallenged.

Panorama is lypical. Is programine on May 10 was the target of the main Tory fire. It was not in fact a programme which reflected any true anti-war feeling in Britain. It combined film from Argentina with an interview with a maverick Tory who represented nothing except the selfdoubt of capital.

It was still a programme which, of course, expressed itself . on the side of Thatcher. It had, however, some criticisms.

When it came under assault the BBC verbally defended itself and suspended presenter Robert Kee, who criticised the programme in a letter to the Times.

Kee is a celebrated and sophisticated apologist tor imperialism, as anyone who remembers his series on Ireland will know.

Having talked tough, Panorama ate humble pie. The programme on May 17 showed a "debate" between Winston Churchill and an Argentine Minister in Denmark, during which hardly a glimpse of the Argentine speech was shown. The opinion polls which appear to show an avalanche of support for Thatcher are the barometer of a sustained campaign which has been answered hy natudy.

Balance, whatever that is, is provided by the virtually invisible differences put forward by the Labour front bench.

Daring alternatives are offered in the form of a feeble Judith Hart who appears frightened and defensive.

Differences between the Sun and the Sun's critics are now entirely secondary. The underlying message is the same.

It may be a good advertisement for "press freedom" that the Mirror carried a front page lead headlined "Charles Backs the BBC', but in practice the Mirror and the BBC do a more efficient job of advocating British imperialism's case than does the Sun.

Virtually only the Financial Times protests with any vehemence Tne gagging the press and it can afford to do so since its readership amongst the masses is still loW.

It alone reported that censors on the fleet refused to allow reports of the attack on HMS Sheffield to be filed. Journalists with the fleet went along with this suppression only to hear over the Work Senice that ced in London.

All the media complied with the "request" not to name a second ship which allegediy had a miracle escape when a bomb went through the deck but failed to explode.

A photograph naming the ship as HMS Glasgow had been sent to all newspaper offices, but was spiked.

No news media protested when the Ministry of Defence casually announced the loss of two helicopters on South Georgia - allegedly several weeks ago and allegedly in an accident and allegedly without any casualties. Operational reasons was good enough reason for sup pression.

The capitulation is complete, at least at home. Bu: one report suggested thai tie Marines on the fleet 2-= tiring of the jingoism sered up to them every morris Perhaps it is not un:*ted that the Minis.: :: Defence has arranged 10 =-** out copies of the **== best selling video Electe Blue' . After all. te :: the media is i do% i* folks back home Ts being prepara slaughier 302 D: <5* to have a -= cabbs.

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Socialist Organiser no.85 May 1982 Page 4 After DWArUs lest mutary successes, inese inree young SWANU lighters, Josef Sagarias, Theofilus Jasen and Lucius Malambo, are on show trial in Windhoek this week. Death senterices will be used to show the white settlers that Pretoria can maintain 'law and order. Most captured SWAPO fighters are simply interrogated and shot.

The key problem is how tionally small black petty to adequately control an bourgeois business class incoming SWAPO govern- proper, but an armed ment once the UN election struggle well advanced and mented. A glance at revolutionary overtones.

lead one to think this a Namibia has been run as a relatively easy job for fifth province by South But hark, the imperialist cist state, Pretoria's strategy of 1978, lead then Nationalist Party is threatby David Owen and Andy ened with further right Young, forgot some ele- split-offs should it "sellmentary politics (some- out" to SWAPO, apart thing the gasping liberals from the boost such an NAMIBIA is arguably the most embarrassing and hushed topic in imperialist diplomatic circles at the moment.

While liberals have presented the issue in a deceptive way as "Africa's last decolonisation" , "the black majority fighting for political liberty against the white settlers and South Africa's 100,000 strong army of occupation", 'the national liberation movement, SWAPO, having to court Moscow to get support for the armed struggle to force the racists to let go" , etc., etc., in reality a complex array of forces is at play, many of which were revealed in the course of a fast moving series of events over the last month.

Cranley Onslow (a British intelligence agent in the 1950s and appointed a month ago to be Britain's new Minister responsible for African affairs) and the Foreign Office's number one henchman for setting up neo-colonial regimes in Africa, Sir Leonard Allinson, last week attended secret talks in Paris with their counterparts from the US, France, West Germany and Canada. plan of 1978 is impleMugabe's Zimbabwe would imperialism. also forget). That is, unlike Zimbabwe, Namibia in 1978 had a classic colonial state apparatus run from Pretoria, and not a Rhodesian-style machine, of violence run by the 'settlers themselves.

Although the 1978 plan drawn up by Owen and Young allowed South Africa to effectively annex Namibia's only port of any consequence, Walvis Bay, thus giving Pretoria a mighty good whipping stick against the 'independent' Namibia, the bulk of South Africa's armed bodies of men would have to be withdrawn.

Proletarian

In the 'decolonisation' of Africa in the 1960s this was not much of a problem for imperialism. The Kenyattas, Kaundas and Nyereres having their reformist nationalist movements grafted onto new neo colonial structures financed by the world boom.

But in Namibia today the nationalist movement is not only based on a highly proletarianised black population with an extremely high migrant labour element linking it well with the peasantry and an excepnationalism assuming What is more, because Africa's white supremaLA While Tory and Labour shout about international law' to back the Malvinas reconquest, they have openiy flouted 'international law' for ten years in Namibia. Below a member of the apparent military defeat would give to Africa's own black struggle.

In Paris, the 'Gang of Five' have therefore been conducting an 'organised delay' - on the one hand to give Pretoria time to build the necessary state apparatus in Namibia to fill what Pretoria calls the 'vacuum' arising from SADF withdrawal and, on the other hand, to ammend the original 1978 UN plan to restrict and limit a SWAPO electoral victory (taken for Namibia Support Committee writes about some of the main contradictions British imperialism finds itself in over Africa's current hot point. granted now).

Pretoria has been socialising the whites for changes. But the whole process has ground, over the last month, to deadlock. Firstly, SWAPO rejected not only the Gang of Five's double vote count formula (unprecedented in African colonial history and doubling the chances of a South African electoral fraud), but, more ominously, rejected the Five's long drawn out negotiating procedure itself lone piece of paper in ten months).

Because of Namibia's peculiar UN status, the imperialists have to endorse any plans in the UN where, despite the Five's worldwide diplomatic machinery, SWAPO can swing the 'Third World and Soviet bloc' behind it.

Plotting 4

The Five are now plotting to sever SWAPO's official UN backing.

Secondly, Pretoria's attempts to build the neocolonial base structures was set back last month when the main puppet party, the tribally-based DTA, split. Now with the local white settlers rejecting it and threatening a mass exodus south, Pretoria is trying to build another non-tribal Muzorewa-type party, the NDP, so as to get the necessary one-third in the UN 'constituent assembly' to block SWAPO.

But the main white party (AKTUR), the DTA and the NDP are totally dependent on South African finance and military backing - what happens if the latter goes, as it should under the 1978 plan?

The Five are now proposing changes in the military arrangements for - the UN plan, first to keep some semblance of a local army intact and secondly to get a prominent NATO role in the UN 'peacekeeping' Thirdly, South Africa's attempts to humiliate SWAPO militarily took a month. To mass the inst sions of southern Angola last year, and the extension of the South African occupation into southern Angola, prompted SADI Generals to declare that they had 'broken SWAPO's military backbone'.

But starting on the Easter weekend, SWAPO fighters scored some spectacular victories against the racists deep inside Namibia. Over two dozen South African troopies died trying to track down SWAPO fighters who had mined the rich cattle ranching Mangetti bloc, around Tsumeb and Grootfontein.

In one incident SWAPO used rockets to instantly destroy a RATEL tanklike troop carrier, killing 7 soldiers. SWAPO held off helicopter gunship skirmishes and even managed to simultaneously hit police and SADF targets in the northern Bantustan areas and derail a military supply train near the capital, Windhoek.

Both the white settlers (most have vacated their farms where they are not turned into military fortresses) and the press in South Africa accused the SADF of incompetence. Politicians were rushed to the area to quell the outrage since nearly a third of Namibia's whites have left over the past 7 years.

No defeat In a few weeks white South Africans could see that, short of exterminating a large slice of Namibia's 1.25 million blacks, SWAPO's small guerrilla force could not be militarily defeated, even by what the local papers call "the world's greatest military to u adults in land Very unsuited to guerrilla warfare (low population density and extremely poor vegetation cover).

It seems certain now that

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...* Wor a tews A NEW INVASION OF ANGOLA?