I am sure the posting of this article to the SAS comments was a little endearment from my most devoted fan..The Anonymous Joo Hater...poor thing, he flies into a rage every time I delete his comments...and I just love it when he gets all hot n nasty...
I spose it's ment to rile me and freak me out..haha...very flippen funny Mr Poo poo pants...I dig it when you get pissed off! Now go and get a blog so I can have a turn to crap on you!
Moonie, you know me since I was in training bras...tell him...am I a sensitive and touchy Jooish Kugel..?
Now of course, this article it is not the kind of material I could chance on 'other' blog, as the subject leads to way too much trouble...like a fire in a dynamite factory to be more precise, and I don't mean readers comments, and so, that's just way more than I am up to... but it's still an interesting bit, and well worth a post somewhere...so here goes Poopsie..!
German-born physicist Albert Einstein, pictured here in 1948, described belief in God as "childish superstition" and said Jews were not the chosen people, in a letter to be sold in London this week, an auctioneer said Tuesday.
The father of relativity, whose previously known views on religion have been more ambivalent and fuelled much discussion, made the comments in response to a philosopher in 1954.
As a Jew himself, Einstein said he had a great affinity with Jewish people but said they "have no different quality for me than all other people".
"The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish.
"No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this," he wrote in the letter written on January 3, 1954 to the philosopher Eric Gutkind, cited by The Guardian newspaper.
The German-language letter is being sold Thursday by Bloomsbury Auctions in Mayfair after being in a private collection for more than 50 years, said the auction house's managing director Rupert Powell.
A man holds up a Bible during the visit of Pope Benedict XVI to New York last month. German-born physicist Albert Einstein described belief in God as "childish superstition" and said Jews were not the chosen people, in a letter to be sold in London this week, an auctioneer has said.
A man holds up a Bible during the visit of Pope Benedict XVI to New York last month. German-born physicist Albert Einstein described belief in God as "childish superstition" and said Jews were not the chosen people, in a letter to be sold in London this week, an auctioneer has said.
In it, the renowned scientist, who declined an invitation to become Israel's second president, rejected the idea that the Jews are God's chosen people.
"For me the Jewish religion like all others is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions," he said.
"And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality for me than all other people."
And he added: "As far as my experience goes, they are no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot see anything 'chosen' about them."
Previously the great scientist's comments on religion -- such as "Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind" -- have been the subject of much debate, used notably to back up arguments in favour of faith.
Powell said the letter being sold this week gave a clear reflection of Einstein's real thoughts on the subject. "He's fairly unequivocal as to what he's saying. There's no beating about the bush," he told AFP.
Wednesday, 14 May 2008
The Einstein letter
Tuesday, 13 May 2008
Mommy's Boy..!
Another brilliant review by R.W. Johnson that I found while scanning the links on something Magnus posted. I am fast becomming a fan of this oke, and I'm sure this article will be of interest to readers who commented to our post some months back on the extradition of Simon Mann.
With all the changes that took place in South African since 1994, some celebrities of note made South Africa, and particularly Cape Town their home. Among them has also been a colourful assortment of shady characters and skabangers, not just small time mobsters and crooks like Jürgen Harkson, but big fish players with connections to powerful people at the upper echelons of South African and international politics...most noteworthy being the molly coddled son of former British Prime Minister Baroness Thatcher.
Since the original publication of this review, Mark Thatchers man, Simon Mann has been extradited to Equatorial Guinea to join his band of South African mercenary brothers in on going pain and suffering in Black Beach prison. All the while, Mark the lily livid looser is enjoying the company of his new young wife, in the safety of the comfort zone Mommy made for him back in the UK.
Hopefully Mann and his manne are plucky anti-hero's whose luck has run out, and one can only hope that this is not the first sticky situation they've been in..maybe...just maybe they may yet pull off a cunning plan....
A good film could be made of this lot. But I think Mark Thatcher should be played by Judy Dench. And his mother by Sly Stallone, trying to rescue Mann and his team and smuggling them out of the jungle. Sly never played an Englishman before...
- Thatcher’s Fortunes: The Life and Times of Mark Thatcher
by Mark Hollingsworth and Paul Halloran
- The Wonga Coup: The British Mercenary Plot to Seize Oil Billions in Africa by Adam Roberts
There is a terrible relentlessness about Thatcher’s Fortunes, a chronicle that can be easily summed up. Mark Thatcher, talentless, and so graceless that the most charming thing about him was that he would sometimes introduce himself as ‘charmless Mark’, was – is – doted on by ‘Mummy’, in whose eyes he could do no wrong and who insisted, against all the evidence, that he was a ‘born businessman’. What this meant was that he traded endlessly and ruthlessly on her name and had better access to her than anyone except – maybe not even except – Denis; and that he was happy to get involved with all sorts of shysters and downright crooks in order to become rich. Being rich seems to have been something Mark thought he was born to, that he had a right to, and he was in a great hurry to get to it. He got there all right but from the start you realise that the only mensch in the plot is his twin sister, Carol, who kept her feet on the ground, remained unbothered by fame or fortune, and was reluctant to trade on her mother’s name.
For those of us – or some of us – who lived through the Thatcher era there is something slightly mysterious about the degree of deference which Thatcher was and, to some extent, still is shown, and thus about how tradeable her name was. She was a woman of unusual energy and determination but not of great depth or intelligence. She was revered by the rich and by conservatives all over the world because she reasserted certain fundamentals very dear to them, and did so at just the right time. That was the key. Had she come to power in 1960 or 1970 she would have failed – she had no second suit – but by 1979 the foundering of old social solidarities and, with them, the postwar consensus opened the way to her simplistic truths: Victorian values and all the rest. Mark Hollingsworth and Paul Halloran describe the way Mark took over the marketing of his mother’s memoirs, and almost completely messed it up. At one stage an experienced literary agent, George Greenfield, was brought in to advise, but found himself ‘constantly interrupted by Mrs Thatcher . . . who fixed him with a blank, self-absorbed stare. “The extent of her ill-conceived ignorance at that time was only matched by the brazen vigour with which she expressed it,” he recalled.’
That was Thatcher all over, as even such slavish acolytes as Geoffrey Ripon gradually discovered. She exalted rags-to-riches entrepreneurialism but the launch of her career depended on her having married a wealthy older man able to pay for childcare and make it unnecessary for her to earn her own living. It should come as no surprise that Mark was without talent but filled with self-belief and utterly brazen. Denis saw this for what it was but Mrs Thatcher never has. Raised to riches, married to a desirable heiress, he is now, at the age of 53, unwanted in Switzerland, South Africa and Monaco, alienated from his wife and children, banned pro tem from America, and doomed to live with his mum in Britain, where he has always been an embarrassment.
Take the al-Yamamah ‘arms deal of the century’. Mark is said to have received £12 million in commission from the Saudis, though he has denied it. Mrs Thatcher herself took the lead in pushing this £40 billion contract and the Saudis seem to have concluded that Mark had to be rewarded as her crown prince in the way a Saudi prince would have been. This deal and others like it were so curious in terms of both rules and political convention that British embassies were, time and again, horrified to find Mark wheeling and dealing on their patch. He in turn appears to have regarded embassies and their staff as little more than family retainers, an attitude which, again, may not seem so surprising when you remember that Mrs Thatcher greeted the news of the arrival of Mark’s first child with ‘We are a grandmother.’
Everything about Mark is so rebarbative that it seems only natural that he would count Jonathan Aitken and Jeffrey Archer among his closer associates and that even those invited to his house found his rudeness to servants – and to his wife – so repellent, verging on outright cruelty, that they often took an instant and lasting dislike to him. ‘Don’t you realise who I am?’ is his customary response to not getting his own way. My heart goes out to the American waitress whom he once tried to force into serving his table first. When she resisted he exploded with ‘Look, I am Mark Thatcher,’ to which she replied: ‘I don’t care if you’re Mark Twain, you take your turn like everybody else.’ Mrs Thatcher’s friends and advisers endlessly anguished over ‘the Mark problem’ and the political danger in which it placed his mother, but few had the courage to broach the matter with her and those who did were sent packing.
By 1995, however, Mark was faced with five separate legal actions in the US, and threatening Revenue investigations in both the US and the UK. To Mrs Thatcher’s horror, it seemed possible that he would be cross-examined about the al-Yamamah deal and asked to explain how exactly he’d made £12 million out of it. Worse still, an American former business associate was suing him for allegedly ‘hijacking’ his company, a case which involved Thatcher family money. Denis was livid: ‘I never thought I would see my family name on the front page of the Sunday Times associated with fraud,’ he told a friend. Money was paid, actions were settled out of court and Mark was bundled off to South Africa, specifically to the leafy suburb of Constantia in Cape Town.
Constantia (where I live myself) is quite a large area because, as generally happens with fashionable suburbs, many peripheral districts lay claim to the name. But its most upmarket streets include mansions of stunning size and grandeur, with magnificent views of Cape Town and Table Mountain. Among those who have bought houses here are Earl Spencer, Elton John and Michael Douglas, but the oddity is that, while you might assume, as you drive through its wonderful avenues, that Constantia’s residents are nothing if not respectable, you’d be dead wrong, because not only did Mark set himself up in palatial style here but so did Spencer’s ex-friend the convicted fraudster Darius Guppy; Simon Mann, the leader of the attempted mercenary coup in Equatorial Guinea in 2004; and Teodorin Nguema, the playboy son of the Equatoguinean dictator, Obiang Nguema, whom Mann was trying to overthrow.
It was Thatcher’s involvement as a financial backer of this coup that saw him eventually leave Constantia in disgrace and which also led Hollingsworth and Halloran to put a picture of Mann and his comrades in Zimbabwe’s hellish Chikurubi prison on the front of their book, though this is a little misleading: most of the book was written before the coup and a new edition has been rushed out with some added material. For the real story one must turn to Adam Roberts’s gripping, well-researched and – given the ludicrous ease with which African tyrants have been able to milk the English libel laws – legally very bold book.
Equatorial Guinea had the bad luck to come to independence under Macias Nguema, whose rule was so terrible that a third of the population was either killed or fled. Though he had people garrotted, buried alive and beheaded (and their heads stuck on poles), the detail that sticks in my mind is his having 150 people executed to the tune of ‘Those Were the Days, My Friend’ played over stadium loudspeakers.
In 1973, a group of mercenaries attempted a coup that Roberts claims was planned by the novelist Frederick Forsyth – The Dogs of War, which chronicled the plot in detail, was published the following year. Although it was generally regarded as a work of fiction it became a do-it-yourself manual for mercenaries mounting coups in Africa for years afterwards.When Obiang Nguema, Macias’s nephew, seized power from his uncle (whom he killed) in 1979 things improved only slightly. Opposition leaders tend to die behind bars; torture is commonplace; Obiang is reported to eat the brains and testicles of those he particularly dislikes; and members of his family as well as some of the country’s diplomats have been accused of large-scale drug-running. With the country now Africa’s third largest oil producer, Obiang and his family are fabulously rich, while the small population languishes in
unchanging poverty. By the same token Obiang became increasingly vulnerable to anyone with notions of mounting a coup, an idea that came to Simon Mann as a result of his long association with Tony Buckingham’s Executive Outcomes in Angola. There mercenary success earned huge financial rewards: Buckingham walked away from that adventure worth some $150 million in oil and diamonds. Mann, an Old Etonian scion of the brewing family, seems to have hatched his plot after consultation with the Lebanese tycoon Ely Calil, who was already helping to fund Obiang’s chief rival, the opposition leader Severo Moto.Early in 2003 Mann began assembling his team, which, he hoped, would fly in to Malabo, the Equatoguinean capital, surprise and topple Obiang, install Moto in his stead and run the country through the Bight of Benin Company, founded for the purpose. It has occurred to more than one plotter, looking around at the many failed and failing states of Africa, that such countries would be better off run by companies, in the way that the Dutch East India Company ran the Cape and Rhodes’s British South Africa Company colonised Zambia and Zimbabwe. The problem is that Equatorial Guinea, like many African countries, is well endowed with natural resources and any number of companies had – or might have – already invested in it. So it was essential for Mann to drop heavy hints of a coup at an early stage, both in Madrid (Spain being the former colonial power) and Washington – and there had to be no messing about with the rights of the American oil companies since that’s ‘what gets the marines coming in’. Meanwhile, Calil knew Peter Mandelson – Mandelson had rented a flat from him – and questions were asked in the House of Commons as to whether ministers or officials had discussed the matter with Mandelson (Mandelson denied it). At any rate, British intelligence soon knew about the impending coup and talk leaked into mercenary circles.
A regime like Obiang’s depends heavily on mercenary bodyguards, even for intelligence; and Obiang was very dependent on one Johann Smith, a South African special forces veteran, who repeatedly warned him of possible plots to impose Moto. Smith had teamed up with Nigel Morgan, an Irish-Brit who had trained to be a Jesuit priest, worked in a Thatcher think-tank, served in the Irish Guards and then got into the private security business in the Congo, where he recruited the fearsome Victor Dracula, an Angolan who had served with SA special forces, and James Kershaw, a radio and computer geek. Morgan’s nicknames, ‘Nosher’ and ‘Captain Pig’, are self-explanatory but a far more impressive man to cross Smith’s path in Malabo was Nick du Toit, a legend in the SA special forces. Du Toit was on the qui vive for opportunities. As luck would have it, he ultimately threw in his lot with Mann, not Smith.
All this was to have fateful consequences. South Africa’s National Intelligence Agency is stuffed full of agents who learned their craft as operatives for the ANC’s armed wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), once one of the world’s least effective guerrilla forces. As a result President Mbeki still relies for anything really serious on white Afrikaners from the ancien regime, several of whom have set up private security companies with ties to mercenary and special forces circles. ‘Nosher’ Morgan moved in these circles and supplied intelligence to Mbeki’s network. A friend of both Thatcher and Mann, he realised early on what was up and inserted Kershaw as Mann’s special assistant. With Kershaw reporting back to Morgan and Morgan in turn reporting to South African intelligence, the plot was no secret in Pretoria. Interestingly, Obiang and Mbeki were both to fulminate against the phenomenon of white mercenaries, but both depended on them to foil Mann’s plot.Mann’s coup was so poorly organised, and leaked information so freely, that it was discussed in the course of a Chatham House seminar before it took place. The plotters had a penchant for meeting in loud groups at fashionable restaurants – in one instance in Malabo itself, with 35 drunken Afrikaners roaring away to anyone who cared to listen. Mann assumed that almost everyone would be pleased to see the back of the odious Obiang, and that by noising his plans abroad he was allowing Britain, the US, Spain and South Africa to know what was happening: if they didn’t react he would take it that he had their tacit consent. The plotters actually told Bulelani Ngcuka, the head of South Africa’s prosecution authority and a Mbeki intimate, what they were planning and again assumed that the lack of official response meant they had Mbeki’s implicit permission to go ahead. In fact, there is strong reason to believe that the coup did enjoy US and Spanish support, and London certainly did nothing to stop it. Moreover, when the first attempt was mounted on 19 February, the two DC3s carrying the mercenaries were allowed to take off unhindered from Polokwane airport, north of Pretoria. The almost farcically complicated plans fell apart when the Antonov coming to meet them suffered a bird-strike; the mercenaries got as far as Ndola in Zambia before having to turn back.
The assumption that Mbeki knew about the plot and was willing to let it go ahead was fairly crazy. For one thing he had entertained Obiang in late 2003. More important, his vision of an ‘African Renaissance’ is based on the notion that Africa must achieve peace and stability before it can achieve anything else. Were it to become known that South Africa was still, as in the bad old days, allowing itself to be used as a launching pad for mercenary activities, Mbeki’s entire diplomatic stance would be undermined. Not surprisingly, the ANC has a visceral dislike of mercenaries in general: the notion of a handful of white-led soldiery changing African governments or suppressing African rebel forces is an uncomfortable reminder of white supremacy. As it happens, Mbeki’s government is so enraged that large numbers of South Africans are employed in the ‘security’ business in Iraq and elsewhere that it is now attempting to pass an obviously unconstitutional law to criminalise such activity retrospectively.
Roberts doesn’t seem to understand that the sight of the US and Britain intervening in Iraq with the avowed objective of ‘regime change’ has been a waking nightmare for Third World despots. Remember how Gaddafi abandoned his now acknowledged WMD programme and his backing for terrorist groups and snuggled up to the US – clearly out of fear that Washington might start thinking that ‘regime change’ was appropriate for him, too? Mugabe, too, was appalled – Gaddafi after all was his patron – and quickly installed anti-aircraft batteries not only around the main civilian airport in Harare but around his own house. His overwhelming fear, his intimates said, was that British special forces would carry out a coup, for deep down he knows that most Harare residents would be thrilled and that the Zimbabwean army is unlikely to put up a fight. According to those who brief him, even Mbeki has nightmares of that kind.
Roberts seems to believe that Pretoria was in two minds as to whether to let the Malabo coup go ahead, but this seems doubtful. That the 19 February attempt had been allowed to get off the ground says more about the shambolic state of the South African intelligence services than anything else. When ‘Nosher’ Morgan realised what had happened he was furious and made certain that a red alert went out to stop the next attempt on 7 March. By now Mann had obtained – with suspicious ease – a superbly equipped Boeing 727 from the US. The arms needed for the coup were to be bought from the (state-owned) Zimbabwe Defence Industries, on the general assumption that Zimbabwe was in such dire straits that ministers would sell their own mothers for a bit of foreign exchange. So Mann decided to fly the 727 from South Africa, full of mercenaries, pick up the weapons in Harare and proceed to Malabo to overthrow Obiang. (Obiang, forewarned, had apparently slipped out of the country weeks before.)The huge error was to combine the arms procurement with the mercenary flight. It was perfectly possible to get someone in ZDI to sell arms for the right amount of foreign currency. And there was no problem about assembling the mercenaries at some remote launching pad. But putting all one’s counters down on the tarmac at Harare airport was to put them at the mercy of the paranoid Mugabe, who was only too ready to believe that the mercenaries were coming to topple him.
Mugabe had of course nothing to worry about. One of the mercenary leaders explained the choice of Equatorial Guinea as a target: ‘The place had to have oil. I mean, who’s going to do a coup in Zimbabwe?’ But, thanks to Morgan and, ultimately, Mbeki, Mugabe was tipped off and the 727 was detained as soon as it landed. Mann and his colleagues were thrown into jail. In Malabo, Nick du Toit foolishly disregarded a warning to get out, and he and his advance group were rounded up and tortured – one man died as a result.
Du Toit is still being held in Malabo, as is Mann in Harare, both in horrific conditions. For all his frantic denials, the trail led back to Mark Thatcher in Constantia (he had invested $275,000 in Mann’s scheme though he claimed to have noknowledge of any coup) and to a J.H. Archer (Jeffrey Archer has denied that ‘he issued a cheque in the sums mentioned’). In the end, Thatcher was able to haggle her son’s way out of trouble (again) but only via an admission of guilt which gives him a criminal record and thus prevents him entering the US to see his children, his long-suffering wife having at last divorced him. As one reads about the grisly fate of the would-be mercenaries (they never got a chance to fight or do anything much at all) it’s hard not to feel that Thatcher got off very lightly.
The mistake, in the words of another mercenary leader, was to ‘play with the Second XI’. One looks in vain through Mark Thatcher’s record for any solid achievement: everything he has has come through tail-coating his mother or somebody else’s enterprise. If things went wrong, Mummy would get him off the hook. This time he tail-coated the wrong lot and Humpty-Dumpty fell right off the wall, so that not even Mummy has been able to put all the pieces together again.
Monday, 12 May 2008
Rogue’s Paradise
The Russians and the Anglo-Boer War
by Apollon Davidson and Irina Filatova
‘I am wholly preoccupied with the war between England and the Transvaal,’ Tsar Nicholas wrote to his sister at the outbreak of the Boer War. ‘Every day I read the news in the British newspapers from the first to the last line . . . I cannot conceal my joy at . . . yesterday’s news that during General White’s sally two full British battalions and a mountain battery were captured by the Boers!’
Britain’s hold on South Africa was significant for the Russians partly because the route to India lay via the Cape, and as Governors of the Cape were only too aware, Russia had its own designs on India. Indeed, in 1875 when Lord Carnarvon attempted to create a South African Confederation he justified his scheme by the need to defend British interests from Russian ambitions. In 1879 the British feared that Russia might take advantage of the Zulu War and strike in Central Asia – or even send arms to the Zulus. The young Jan Smuts, conscious of this Russian interest, advised his Boer colleagues on the eve of war to prevail on the Russians to foment an anti-British rising in India. In fact, Kruger, thinking along similar lines, had already sent the Russian émigré financier Benzion Aaron to represent the Transvaal at Nicholas’s coronation in 1896 – a singularly ignorant move since, as the authors of this book point out, Aaron was a Jew and the Tsar would have regarded the choice of such an emissary as an insult. Nonetheless, the Tsar grasped the larger point and quickly established diplomatic relations with the Transvaal.
Russian interests clashed with Britain’s in Central Asia, Iran, the Bosphorus, the Mediterranean and the Balkans as well as over India; and in addition to her vengeful feelings about the Crimean War, Russia felt herself blocked at every turn by Britain. Wildly excited at the thought that the Boers might at last have created the vital crack in the wall of the British Empire, Nicholas rushed off to see the Kaiser – ‘I intend to set the Emperor on the British, reminding him of his famous telegram to Kruger!’ – while the Russian Foreign Minister tried to interest the French in an anti-British alliance. In order to increase the pressure, Russia built up its Mediterranean and Atlantic fleets and even courted provocation with the dispatch of four cruisers to the Channel. At the same time, Russian troops were moved up to the borders of India and Afghanistan.
The Tsar was, in fact, quite carried away. ‘You know, my dear,’ he told his sister, ‘that I am not arrogant, but it is pleasant for me to know that I and I only possess the ultimate means of deciding the course of the war in South Africa. It is very simple – just a telegraphic order to all the troops in Turkestan to mobilise and advance towards the [Indian] frontier. Not even the strongest fleet in the world can keep us from striking England at this her most vulnerable point.’ Such was Nicholas’s ‘dearest dream’ but it came to nothing. The Germans and French scuttled away; Russia was in no position to take on Britain without their help; and the Tsarina Alexandra had her doubts, which was not so surprising given that, like the Kaiser, she was Queen Victoria’s grandchild – and in regular contact with her grandmother.
The enthusiasm of the Russian public for the Boer cause knew no such constraints. Books, articles, poems, plays and pamphlets about the Boers poured out, orchestras played ‘Transvaal, Transvaal, My Country’ over and over again, money was collected and sent, prayers were offered up in church for a speedy victory against the British and pictures of the Boers were everywhere. ‘Wherever you go these days you hear the same story – the Boers, the Boers and only the Boers,’ one writer complained. For years on end, and throughout the Empire, they were the favourite heroes of popular serials and penny dreadfuls. Restaurants, inns and cafés were given Boer names, their inter-iors refurbished in ‘Boer style’, and whole new lines of children’s toys appeared glor-ifying the Boers and ridiculing John Bull. Even the pacifist Tolstoy was caught up in the wild enthusiasm for the war: ‘You know what point I’ve reached? Opening a paper every morning I passionately wish to read that the Boers have beaten the British.’ He knew that he ‘should not rejoice at the vict-ories of the Boers or grieve about their defeats, after all they kill the English soldiers too’. But he couldn’t help it: ‘I am glad when I read about the defeats of the British, it cheers my soul.’
Russian conservatives were pro-Boer not only for the usual nationalist, anti-British reasons but because they thought the Boers were like the best sort of Russians – conservative, rural, Christian folk resisting the invasion of their land by foreign (especially Jewish) capitalists. ‘The deep historical meaning of this war,’ wrote one conservative Moscow paper, ‘is that faith, patriotism . . . the patriarchal family, primordial tribal unity, iron discipline and the complete lack of so-called modern civilisation have . . . become such an invincible force that even the seemingly invincible British have begun to tremble.’ But the Left, too, loved the Boers. Lenin supported their struggle against imperialism; and the works of Olive Schreiner, who had opposed the British invasion of the Boer republics as a matter of principle, were adopted with a real popular passion. Yet in 1980 Ruth First, who knew both the Russian and the South African contexts well, published what was meant to be an exhaustive list of all the translations of Schreiner’s works, including those into Czech and Esperanto, without realising that there had been literally scores of Russian translations. The events of 1905 and 1917 had wiped Boermania from the general memory.
Several hundred Russians came out to fight for the Boers and to be their nurses and doctors. It is difficult to be precise about the size of this group because many thousands of Jews, fleeing from the pogroms in Russia, had already joined the great gold rush to the Transvaal in the latter part of the 1880s. A good number of these left the Transvaal at the outbreak of war, some to join the British forces; but many fought for the Boers and probably accounted for the majority of the entire Russian contingent. The problem was that in the eyes of the often anti-semitic Russian nationalists who flocked to the Boer cause such people were not Russians at all: the nationalists formed a separate Russian Commando unit in the Boer Army and refused to allow Russian Jews to join it. On the other hand, the British, enraged that such recent émigrés should take up arms against them, found it convenient to regard them as Russians and deported large numbers of them back to Russia to face the pogroms again, an act of callousness which has never attracted the attention – or opprobrium – it deserves.
Not much is known about the Russian Jews who fought on the Boer side, though several rose to significant rank; we find a Commandant Kaplan and a Commandant Isaac Herman, while two others, Josef Segal (‘Jackals’) and Wolf Jacobson (‘Wolf’), who acted as scouts, were legendary figures in their time; Segal became a special adviser and secret agent for the Boer general, Christiaan de Wet. Benzion Aaron, by now a very wealthy man and a personal friend of Kruger, set up a Jewish Ambulance Corps and bankrolled whole depots for the Boers. The anti-semitism of the Russian nationalist volunteers doesn’t seem to have caused any difficulties. Wounded nationalists were shown great solicitousness by Aaron’s ambulance corps while the members of the anti-semitic Russian Commando, according to their own reports, were greeted as compatriots on their arrival by Russian Jews who showered them with fruit, cigars and good wishes.
Among the major new sources discovered by Davidson and Filatova are the journals and diaries of one Yevgeny Augustus, a gifted writer who gives a dramatic account of the battle of Spion Kop – though his main contribution to the history of the war was to have pointed up what a shambles it was. Proceeding to Pretoria from Poland or Lithuania via Brussels and Mozambique, he was hurriedly sworn in to the Boer cause in broken Dutch and informed that the Boer Army had run out of Mauser rifles. He quickly realised that the place had become ‘a paradise for adventurers and rogues of all kinds’ – among them, bogus volunteers who got endlessly re-equipped, only to sell their arms and horses before volunteering again.
Boer tactics were poor and many of the volunteers, Yevgeny Augustus recorded, ‘have been brought here either by a poorly concealed instinct for robbery and pillage or by a dirty story back home’. He and his comrades rode off to the Tugela front, arriving just in time to see an African being badly beaten on suspicion of spying for the British. When the victim’s stick broke – it was being used to beat him – a plan of the Boer fortifications fell out of it and he was shot on the spot.
Plenty of Russians were taken aback at the Boers’ casual brutality towards the Africans. Augustus was one; another was the Georgian Prince Nikolai Bagration, a descendant of the Marshal Bagration who had fought against Napoleon, and so well-connected an aristocrat that he had represented Georgia at the Tsar’s coronation. Niko the Boer (as he came to be known) was swanning off from the Paris Exhibition to go big-game hunting when he heard that war had broken out. He felt an instinctive affinity between the Boers, a lost white tribe in Africa, and native Georgians marooned in a sea of Muslims. He had never heard of the Transvaal until then, ‘but it felt very much like my motherland and I felt I must protect it.’ The first Russian volunteer to arrive in Pretoria, he was greeted with hugs by Kruger and his generals, who fancied that he would win European support for their cause. A giant of a man, he was attended by two Georgian servants who, like him, were generally taken for Cossacks. He fought bravely, was captured by the British and summoned by Lord Kitchener to explain his conduct – a memorable confrontation in which he accused Kitchener of atrocities (the charge was denied). Exiled to St Helena, Niko remained hugely cheerful among his depressed fellow prisoners, organising sports and other activities, even though he lost 90 lbs in weight. Returning to Russia, he showed similar courage in the face of the Bolsheviks, whom he detested, and ended his days selling cigarettes in Tbilisi marketplace, still dressed in princely garments.
Some Russian aristocrats who came to fight were men of the left. Prince Mikhail Yengalychev, like his comrades, Ivan Zabolotny and Alexander Essen, must have loathed the conservative monarchists of the Russian Commando. On his return to Russia the Prince was placed under police surveillance for having tried to bring about a peasant uprising against the Tsar, while Zabolotny became a leader of the Trudoviks and a member of the first Duma. Essen was already a member of the Social Democrats when he arrived in Pretoria and was to play an active role in the 1905 Revolution – his underground alias was ‘the Boer’. He went on to become a leading Bolshevik and in the Twenties was appointed deputy chairman of the Russian State Planning Committee.
The book’s most tragic figure is ‘the Russian Boer General’, Lt-Col. Yevgeny Maximov, who seems to have had such extraordinary influence with Kruger and his generals that he is thought to have arrived in South Africa on a secret mission from the Russian Government. And even after Kruger was exiled to Holland after the war, he remained in touch with Maximov, thanking him for his bravery. Maximov was the real thing: a professional soldier, a wonderful horseman, an almost miraculously good shot (on one occasion he shot a springbok at 800 metres from a moving train) – the sort of man who fought on despite his wounds when most of his unit had been wiped out. (He returned from that engagement a hero and was personally thanked by Smuts.) Like most of the Russians, he left via Mozambique once it became clear that the Boer cause was lost.
Thanks to the remarkable feats of detection they have displayed over and over again in this book, Davidson and Filatova have reconstructed Maximov’s career. He was born in 1849 and at the age of 20 joined an élite regiment, but three years later was transferred to a lesser regiment and at the age of 26 took retirement from the Army with a note on his service record referring to his ‘shattered home circumstances’ and an attempted suicide by poison – a mysterious but utterly damning black mark which ruined his army career. He spent the rest of his life fighting wars and reporting them as a war correspondent, as if in a frantic and impossible attempt to expiate this sin. No sooner had he retired than he volunteered to fight for Serbia against Turkey; he then enlisted in the Russo-Turkish war. By 1880 he was with the Russian campaign in Turkmenistan. A passionate conservative and monarchist, he was horrified by the Tsar’s assassination in 1881 and joined the secret police in order to root out the anarchists. By 1895 he was embroiled in the Italo-Ethiopian war, after which he volunteered to fight for the Greeks against the Turks. That was followed by a spell in Iran and Afghanistan; and it was from Afghanistan that he departed for the Transvaal.
Returning to Russia from the Anglo-Boer War, Maximov found himself in a train compartment with the mistresses of a number of prominent citizens. Sensing his disapproval, the women mocked him, drawing in turn a sharp retort from him and a challenge to a duel from one of their consorts, Prince Alexander Sayn-Wittgenstein-Berleburg, a member of the Tsar’s corps of personal guards. Knowing that no one could match him with a gun, Maximov told his seconds that he would let the Prince have the first shot and, if he survived that, would wound him in the leg. The trouble was that the seconds had deliberately overloaded both pistols to make them shoot high. The Prince missed but Maximov’s shot went high and killed his opponent. At the end of a sensational trial, Maximov was sentenced to two years in jail but a public outcry led to a pardon. The Prince’s friends took their revenge by trying to poison him and then throwing him out of a third-floor window. Maximov recovered, fell in love with a much younger woman and married her. His first child was born soon after the wedding.
When the Russo-Japanese war broke out in 1904, there was a strong case for staying at home, but Maximov, who was 55, immediately volunteered. He was rejected and appealed to the Dowager Empress. Her intercession, together with the utterly murderous casualties the Russians were suffering, persuaded the Army to change its mind. Arriving at Mukden, Maximov announced that he expected to die on his first day. In fact, he lasted two days before being cut down in an engagement in which more than half his regiment was killed.
Maximov is a figure of considerable pathos, his whole career seemingly devoted to the hopeless task of eradicating his early disgrace. ‘One of the many consequences of 19th-century imperialism,’ Davidson and Filatova conclude, ‘was that passion, direction and even grandeur were given to many lives which might otherwise have been empty, disconnected and sad.’ Maximov was in love with a conservative ideal of Russia – but spent his life escaping a country which in point of fact did not accept him and which was far too stifling and bureaucratic for a spirit such as his. His stirring deeds in the Transvaal represented the summit of his career, the nearest he came to the glory he always sought. But like all the Russian volunteers, he was in any case doomed. Those who survived the Russo-Japanese War were likely to die either in the First World War or the Civil War and those who got through both were likely to fall in the Purges or the Second World War. None seems to have survived to 1945.
On the Boer side it was different. Jonkheer van der Hoeven, Secretary of the Transvaal mission in Europe, arrived in St Petersburg in 1901 and, to the fury of the Foreign Minister, Lamsdorf, played on popular pro-Boer sentiment to get himself invited – amid bitter protests from the British – to the wedding of the Tsar’s sister. Lamsdorf sent him packing after that. A man without a country after Kruger’s fall, van der Hoeven took up gambling on a professional basis at Monte Carlo and elsewhere. During the First World War he turned to spying for the Germans in Russia; he was caught and exiled to Siberia, whence he emerged with a passionate hatred of his former employers. He was back in South Africa in 1942, volunteering his services against the Germans to the newly-opened Soviet Consulate: his pet plan was to leave cholera bacilli on chocolates and sausages in shops which the advancing German troops were likely to come across. The Russians did not take the offer up and van der Hoeven, who had once seen himself as a world-historical figure, died destitute in Cape Town in 1950.
There is more than a touch of Richard Cobb in the way Davidson and Filatova tease out these bizarre biographies and, in so doing, they have opened up a new front in a war long thought to be over. But it is the novel refraction of the British imperial world through St Petersburg which is the book’s larger achievement. For Britain’s imperial success was a challenge to the Tsarist state, and the impetus for many new and surprising alliances – Maximov’s Ethiopian adventure, for example, seems to have derived from a notion that, as Copts, the Ethiopians were the natural allies of the Russian Patriarch’s congregations. It was the Boers, however, on whom the Russians pinned their greatest hopes. Unfortunately for them, Kruger was not George Washington and Britain was willing to dispatch half a million troops to South Africa rather than lose the gold mines, a fact which only heightens the sense of doom hanging over the extraordinary cast of characters rescued from obscurity by this book.
Britain’s hold on South Africa was significant for the Russians partly because the route to India lay via the Cape, and as Governors of the Cape were only too aware, Russia had its own designs on India. Indeed, in 1875 when Lord Carnarvon attempted to create a South African Confederation he justified his scheme by the need to defend British interests from Russian ambitions. In 1879 the British feared that Russia might take advantage of the Zulu War and strike in Central Asia – or even send arms to the Zulus. The young Jan Smuts, conscious of this Russian interest, advised his Boer colleagues on the eve of war to prevail on the Russians to foment an anti-British rising in India. In fact, Kruger, thinking along similar lines, had already sent the Russian émigré financier Benzion Aaron to represent the Transvaal at Nicholas’s coronation in 1896 – a singularly ignorant move since, as the authors of this book point out, Aaron was a Jew and the Tsar would have regarded the choice of such an emissary as an insult. Nonetheless, the Tsar grasped the larger point and quickly established diplomatic relations with the Transvaal.
Russian interests clashed with Britain’s in Central Asia, Iran, the Bosphorus, the Mediterranean and the Balkans as well as over India; and in addition to her vengeful feelings about the Crimean War, Russia felt herself blocked at every turn by Britain. Wildly excited at the thought that the Boers might at last have created the vital crack in the wall of the British Empire, Nicholas rushed off to see the Kaiser – ‘I intend to set the Emperor on the British, reminding him of his famous telegram to Kruger!’ – while the Russian Foreign Minister tried to interest the French in an anti-British alliance. In order to increase the pressure, Russia built up its Mediterranean and Atlantic fleets and even courted provocation with the dispatch of four cruisers to the Channel. At the same time, Russian troops were moved up to the borders of India and Afghanistan.
The Tsar was, in fact, quite carried away. ‘You know, my dear,’ he told his sister, ‘that I am not arrogant, but it is pleasant for me to know that I and I only possess the ultimate means of deciding the course of the war in South Africa. It is very simple – just a telegraphic order to all the troops in Turkestan to mobilise and advance towards the [Indian] frontier. Not even the strongest fleet in the world can keep us from striking England at this her most vulnerable point.’ Such was Nicholas’s ‘dearest dream’ but it came to nothing. The Germans and French scuttled away; Russia was in no position to take on Britain without their help; and the Tsarina Alexandra had her doubts, which was not so surprising given that, like the Kaiser, she was Queen Victoria’s grandchild – and in regular contact with her grandmother.
The enthusiasm of the Russian public for the Boer cause knew no such constraints. Books, articles, poems, plays and pamphlets about the Boers poured out, orchestras played ‘Transvaal, Transvaal, My Country’ over and over again, money was collected and sent, prayers were offered up in church for a speedy victory against the British and pictures of the Boers were everywhere. ‘Wherever you go these days you hear the same story – the Boers, the Boers and only the Boers,’ one writer complained. For years on end, and throughout the Empire, they were the favourite heroes of popular serials and penny dreadfuls. Restaurants, inns and cafés were given Boer names, their inter-iors refurbished in ‘Boer style’, and whole new lines of children’s toys appeared glor-ifying the Boers and ridiculing John Bull. Even the pacifist Tolstoy was caught up in the wild enthusiasm for the war: ‘You know what point I’ve reached? Opening a paper every morning I passionately wish to read that the Boers have beaten the British.’ He knew that he ‘should not rejoice at the vict-ories of the Boers or grieve about their defeats, after all they kill the English soldiers too’. But he couldn’t help it: ‘I am glad when I read about the defeats of the British, it cheers my soul.’
Russian conservatives were pro-Boer not only for the usual nationalist, anti-British reasons but because they thought the Boers were like the best sort of Russians – conservative, rural, Christian folk resisting the invasion of their land by foreign (especially Jewish) capitalists. ‘The deep historical meaning of this war,’ wrote one conservative Moscow paper, ‘is that faith, patriotism . . . the patriarchal family, primordial tribal unity, iron discipline and the complete lack of so-called modern civilisation have . . . become such an invincible force that even the seemingly invincible British have begun to tremble.’ But the Left, too, loved the Boers. Lenin supported their struggle against imperialism; and the works of Olive Schreiner, who had opposed the British invasion of the Boer republics as a matter of principle, were adopted with a real popular passion. Yet in 1980 Ruth First, who knew both the Russian and the South African contexts well, published what was meant to be an exhaustive list of all the translations of Schreiner’s works, including those into Czech and Esperanto, without realising that there had been literally scores of Russian translations. The events of 1905 and 1917 had wiped Boermania from the general memory.
Several hundred Russians came out to fight for the Boers and to be their nurses and doctors. It is difficult to be precise about the size of this group because many thousands of Jews, fleeing from the pogroms in Russia, had already joined the great gold rush to the Transvaal in the latter part of the 1880s. A good number of these left the Transvaal at the outbreak of war, some to join the British forces; but many fought for the Boers and probably accounted for the majority of the entire Russian contingent. The problem was that in the eyes of the often anti-semitic Russian nationalists who flocked to the Boer cause such people were not Russians at all: the nationalists formed a separate Russian Commando unit in the Boer Army and refused to allow Russian Jews to join it. On the other hand, the British, enraged that such recent émigrés should take up arms against them, found it convenient to regard them as Russians and deported large numbers of them back to Russia to face the pogroms again, an act of callousness which has never attracted the attention – or opprobrium – it deserves.
Not much is known about the Russian Jews who fought on the Boer side, though several rose to significant rank; we find a Commandant Kaplan and a Commandant Isaac Herman, while two others, Josef Segal (‘Jackals’) and Wolf Jacobson (‘Wolf’), who acted as scouts, were legendary figures in their time; Segal became a special adviser and secret agent for the Boer general, Christiaan de Wet. Benzion Aaron, by now a very wealthy man and a personal friend of Kruger, set up a Jewish Ambulance Corps and bankrolled whole depots for the Boers. The anti-semitism of the Russian nationalist volunteers doesn’t seem to have caused any difficulties. Wounded nationalists were shown great solicitousness by Aaron’s ambulance corps while the members of the anti-semitic Russian Commando, according to their own reports, were greeted as compatriots on their arrival by Russian Jews who showered them with fruit, cigars and good wishes.
Among the major new sources discovered by Davidson and Filatova are the journals and diaries of one Yevgeny Augustus, a gifted writer who gives a dramatic account of the battle of Spion Kop – though his main contribution to the history of the war was to have pointed up what a shambles it was. Proceeding to Pretoria from Poland or Lithuania via Brussels and Mozambique, he was hurriedly sworn in to the Boer cause in broken Dutch and informed that the Boer Army had run out of Mauser rifles. He quickly realised that the place had become ‘a paradise for adventurers and rogues of all kinds’ – among them, bogus volunteers who got endlessly re-equipped, only to sell their arms and horses before volunteering again.
Boer tactics were poor and many of the volunteers, Yevgeny Augustus recorded, ‘have been brought here either by a poorly concealed instinct for robbery and pillage or by a dirty story back home’. He and his comrades rode off to the Tugela front, arriving just in time to see an African being badly beaten on suspicion of spying for the British. When the victim’s stick broke – it was being used to beat him – a plan of the Boer fortifications fell out of it and he was shot on the spot.
Plenty of Russians were taken aback at the Boers’ casual brutality towards the Africans. Augustus was one; another was the Georgian Prince Nikolai Bagration, a descendant of the Marshal Bagration who had fought against Napoleon, and so well-connected an aristocrat that he had represented Georgia at the Tsar’s coronation. Niko the Boer (as he came to be known) was swanning off from the Paris Exhibition to go big-game hunting when he heard that war had broken out. He felt an instinctive affinity between the Boers, a lost white tribe in Africa, and native Georgians marooned in a sea of Muslims. He had never heard of the Transvaal until then, ‘but it felt very much like my motherland and I felt I must protect it.’ The first Russian volunteer to arrive in Pretoria, he was greeted with hugs by Kruger and his generals, who fancied that he would win European support for their cause. A giant of a man, he was attended by two Georgian servants who, like him, were generally taken for Cossacks. He fought bravely, was captured by the British and summoned by Lord Kitchener to explain his conduct – a memorable confrontation in which he accused Kitchener of atrocities (the charge was denied). Exiled to St Helena, Niko remained hugely cheerful among his depressed fellow prisoners, organising sports and other activities, even though he lost 90 lbs in weight. Returning to Russia, he showed similar courage in the face of the Bolsheviks, whom he detested, and ended his days selling cigarettes in Tbilisi marketplace, still dressed in princely garments.
Some Russian aristocrats who came to fight were men of the left. Prince Mikhail Yengalychev, like his comrades, Ivan Zabolotny and Alexander Essen, must have loathed the conservative monarchists of the Russian Commando. On his return to Russia the Prince was placed under police surveillance for having tried to bring about a peasant uprising against the Tsar, while Zabolotny became a leader of the Trudoviks and a member of the first Duma. Essen was already a member of the Social Democrats when he arrived in Pretoria and was to play an active role in the 1905 Revolution – his underground alias was ‘the Boer’. He went on to become a leading Bolshevik and in the Twenties was appointed deputy chairman of the Russian State Planning Committee.
The book’s most tragic figure is ‘the Russian Boer General’, Lt-Col. Yevgeny Maximov, who seems to have had such extraordinary influence with Kruger and his generals that he is thought to have arrived in South Africa on a secret mission from the Russian Government. And even after Kruger was exiled to Holland after the war, he remained in touch with Maximov, thanking him for his bravery. Maximov was the real thing: a professional soldier, a wonderful horseman, an almost miraculously good shot (on one occasion he shot a springbok at 800 metres from a moving train) – the sort of man who fought on despite his wounds when most of his unit had been wiped out. (He returned from that engagement a hero and was personally thanked by Smuts.) Like most of the Russians, he left via Mozambique once it became clear that the Boer cause was lost.
Thanks to the remarkable feats of detection they have displayed over and over again in this book, Davidson and Filatova have reconstructed Maximov’s career. He was born in 1849 and at the age of 20 joined an élite regiment, but three years later was transferred to a lesser regiment and at the age of 26 took retirement from the Army with a note on his service record referring to his ‘shattered home circumstances’ and an attempted suicide by poison – a mysterious but utterly damning black mark which ruined his army career. He spent the rest of his life fighting wars and reporting them as a war correspondent, as if in a frantic and impossible attempt to expiate this sin. No sooner had he retired than he volunteered to fight for Serbia against Turkey; he then enlisted in the Russo-Turkish war. By 1880 he was with the Russian campaign in Turkmenistan. A passionate conservative and monarchist, he was horrified by the Tsar’s assassination in 1881 and joined the secret police in order to root out the anarchists. By 1895 he was embroiled in the Italo-Ethiopian war, after which he volunteered to fight for the Greeks against the Turks. That was followed by a spell in Iran and Afghanistan; and it was from Afghanistan that he departed for the Transvaal.
Returning to Russia from the Anglo-Boer War, Maximov found himself in a train compartment with the mistresses of a number of prominent citizens. Sensing his disapproval, the women mocked him, drawing in turn a sharp retort from him and a challenge to a duel from one of their consorts, Prince Alexander Sayn-Wittgenstein-Berleburg, a member of the Tsar’s corps of personal guards. Knowing that no one could match him with a gun, Maximov told his seconds that he would let the Prince have the first shot and, if he survived that, would wound him in the leg. The trouble was that the seconds had deliberately overloaded both pistols to make them shoot high. The Prince missed but Maximov’s shot went high and killed his opponent. At the end of a sensational trial, Maximov was sentenced to two years in jail but a public outcry led to a pardon. The Prince’s friends took their revenge by trying to poison him and then throwing him out of a third-floor window. Maximov recovered, fell in love with a much younger woman and married her. His first child was born soon after the wedding.
When the Russo-Japanese war broke out in 1904, there was a strong case for staying at home, but Maximov, who was 55, immediately volunteered. He was rejected and appealed to the Dowager Empress. Her intercession, together with the utterly murderous casualties the Russians were suffering, persuaded the Army to change its mind. Arriving at Mukden, Maximov announced that he expected to die on his first day. In fact, he lasted two days before being cut down in an engagement in which more than half his regiment was killed.
Maximov is a figure of considerable pathos, his whole career seemingly devoted to the hopeless task of eradicating his early disgrace. ‘One of the many consequences of 19th-century imperialism,’ Davidson and Filatova conclude, ‘was that passion, direction and even grandeur were given to many lives which might otherwise have been empty, disconnected and sad.’ Maximov was in love with a conservative ideal of Russia – but spent his life escaping a country which in point of fact did not accept him and which was far too stifling and bureaucratic for a spirit such as his. His stirring deeds in the Transvaal represented the summit of his career, the nearest he came to the glory he always sought. But like all the Russian volunteers, he was in any case doomed. Those who survived the Russo-Japanese War were likely to die either in the First World War or the Civil War and those who got through both were likely to fall in the Purges or the Second World War. None seems to have survived to 1945.
On the Boer side it was different. Jonkheer van der Hoeven, Secretary of the Transvaal mission in Europe, arrived in St Petersburg in 1901 and, to the fury of the Foreign Minister, Lamsdorf, played on popular pro-Boer sentiment to get himself invited – amid bitter protests from the British – to the wedding of the Tsar’s sister. Lamsdorf sent him packing after that. A man without a country after Kruger’s fall, van der Hoeven took up gambling on a professional basis at Monte Carlo and elsewhere. During the First World War he turned to spying for the Germans in Russia; he was caught and exiled to Siberia, whence he emerged with a passionate hatred of his former employers. He was back in South Africa in 1942, volunteering his services against the Germans to the newly-opened Soviet Consulate: his pet plan was to leave cholera bacilli on chocolates and sausages in shops which the advancing German troops were likely to come across. The Russians did not take the offer up and van der Hoeven, who had once seen himself as a world-historical figure, died destitute in Cape Town in 1950.
There is more than a touch of Richard Cobb in the way Davidson and Filatova tease out these bizarre biographies and, in so doing, they have opened up a new front in a war long thought to be over. But it is the novel refraction of the British imperial world through St Petersburg which is the book’s larger achievement. For Britain’s imperial success was a challenge to the Tsarist state, and the impetus for many new and surprising alliances – Maximov’s Ethiopian adventure, for example, seems to have derived from a notion that, as Copts, the Ethiopians were the natural allies of the Russian Patriarch’s congregations. It was the Boers, however, on whom the Russians pinned their greatest hopes. Unfortunately for them, Kruger was not George Washington and Britain was willing to dispatch half a million troops to South Africa rather than lose the gold mines, a fact which only heightens the sense of doom hanging over the extraordinary cast of characters rescued from obscurity by this book.
Sunday, 11 May 2008
Freekin Wiccans, a 100 overweight weemen all calling themselves Raven..!
Help help...I'm being taken over...impostors are giving me a bad rap.....everyone wants to steal my handle...! It's that time of year again, when all the wiccans dust their altars off, anoint their black candles and get ready for the spring rites before planting their veggie patch for summer...*yawn*
Some years back my girlfriend and three other women she knew from King drove all the way from King Williams Town to Cape Town to visit me....well...so I thought...(bitches)...they were actually making a pilgrimage to the annual Holistic Earth Market and Fair held in Obz, I kidz you not...my friend Lee jumped at the opportunity to catch a ride with them to come and see me...which was great...but since it's Sunday, and a day for matters spiritual, let me tell you about the fun at the fair...
What is it with pre and menopausal weemin that they feel the urge to get into all sorts of New Age bunk peddled by Femina and Fair Lady, it does fook all for their sex appeal...don't they get it?
I dunno, the last years or so has seen a huge increase in all this 'New Age' bullshit, that strangely enough, the Americans tend to find a way of using to make money and pollute the rest of humanity with...lets face it..this is the nation that brought us 7th Day Adventists, Scientology, Mormons and Jehovah's Witness...so now I guess with the decline in interest in main stream religion (like Christianity for instance, church communities shrinking an all...churches being converted into disco's)..I suppose the time was ripe to develop a new product and peddle new kak, keep an industry going an all that... so enter Wicca....supposedly age old wisdom passed doon from wizard to crone...anything from curing piles to broken marriages.
It has even caught on in South Africa...ja...who would have thought hey! People have always had their tea leaves read and tarot cards at the fun fair in the old days...but believe it or not, even behind the boerewors curtain Mev van der Merwe is having the Feng Sui consultant round to get the chi in the house balanced, and some young women are getting spells from 'sangomas' to get their man...and...South Africa has some hard core wiccans and witches...yeah...you should be shitting yourself by now...not all of them are papvreters you know!If you ask me, it just seems to be the catchy flava of the moment...since it got punted by Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings. Another industry selling rubbish with a need for accessories like crystals, zen gardens, bells, chimes, candles, oils, charms, books...colonic irrigation...whatever...there's a whole lot of shit that can be turned into cash when you consider the possibilities of 'Esoteric'......Yip...Wiccans, pagans.... I even have one in my family... yeah...she has her house on the market in Pretoria and wants to move to London...I asked her why stinky ol London, it's no place for kids...might as well stay in baboonburg...so why the hell London..."Oh, because it's so Pagan"...*sigh*...talk about priorities...see what I mean?...but anyway...back to my story..
shall we have a treesome luv?...Nah...I'll pass.. that's a bit too much wood even for me..!
I'd never been to any gathering of 'Alternatives' or 'Esoterics' before... if you have ever lived in places like Bothaville, Wolmanranstad, Rissieville or Daggafontein you would know that showing any interest or getting involved with that kindda stuff was considered 'duiwels goed'! It was like making friends with satan himself, inviting him around for a shin dig and becoming one of his mates...that could get you anything between 2 years to life in Bible study with an 'ouderling'...so, I had never heard of the 'Holistic Fair' till Lee and her band of estrogen replacement therapy cayote chums announced that they were dragging me along...Lee and I were the youngest gals there by the way, these other old hens were Lee's hubby Brian's senior partners wives or colleagues..something like that..anyway they were biltong compared to us chicks..(just so ye know, I'm not an old bitch on hormones.....nothing wrong with me and my eggs ..I'm just a bit short tempered!) Anyways..I actually had to take leave from work to go with to this jol..I was really expectant...I hadn't met these females my friend had pulled in with...I thought they were young hip chicks who carried hip flasks in their Louis Vuitton handbags ..thought I would be getting a facial or a massage or something at this 'holistic fest'...had envisioned a raving day of shopping and lunch with the gals, copious amounts of alcohol being consumed while watching male pole dancers being swamped by middle aged housewives stuffing handfuls of their hubby's hard earned dosh into some tasty bits jocks....well fook me...it was not to be ...not this time pally..
Turned out to be a perfect example of Multi Culti Ubuntu hodge podge, New Age touchy feely vibes among mixed races and all...among the pot pourrie of stall holders were lots of charras selling incense and smelly oils and little brass statues of Shiva and that Elephant god, there were darkies with dreadlocks who were probably selling zol to the treehuggers along with the jembe's they had displayed. Chinese peeps selling Chinese muti, Tiger Balm and other cheap shit...there were lots of 
potters and artists...but not artists like me who wear normal clothes and buy their art material from CPS...no, this lot dug their clay out of the nearest river, prayed and chanted while they coiled their posts and only fire with wood you see..this lot were real 'earthy', looked like they wove and knitted their jumpers out of Fido the pooch's hair balls...
The place was filled with visitors to the stalls, mainly white woman... house wifey and arty types, rich bitches from places like Constantia and Tokai in their beemers and convertible Golfs...those kindda femalse who have husbands that earn a lot of dosh and keep them in loads of pocket money for just such shitty expos like holistic fairs and Decorex...Every now and then you would see some poor fucker in shorts and a golf shirt pushing a pram and looking bored while his wench was gushing over Feng Sui toads....There was not a tasty bit of male to look at really...apart from one or two of the young daddy's...the male stall holders were just a couple of tall skinny slabs of misery, pasty and gaunt from a diet of alfalfa and buckwheat.. with unkempt long hair and beards.. wearing sack cloth and beads and crochet caps in Rasta colours, some bare foot in baggy cotton pants and Indian shirts...some with no shirts...blond dreds hanging down their tanned backs...probably no jocks...probably part time Tantra Masters...perish the thought...smelly, stinky, bad breath, long toe nails, earrings and nose rings...no deo...nooit china.!
Tree huggers in Jesus sandals and tie dyed caftans as far as the eye could see...hairy legs and armpits, the order of the day..the whole place smelled like josh sticks and funny cooking smells...bedredlocked white gals stirring pots of veggo specialities while chattering to their darkie mates with pikkanins on their backs...peeps playing the flute dressed like medieval jesters...fortunetellers, aura photographers, chakra consultants, Hari Krishnas peddling their books and what all, crystal therapists, reflexologists, acupuncture, tarot readings, Ayurveda...man I tell you...it's another world out there....!
When this bunch of upper middle class, liberal white women suggested we have lunch there, sitting on the grass with paper plates of tofu and vegan curry with yogurt sauce...eating this goo with our fingers... I put my foot doon and told Lee if she values our friendship she had better get me to the V&A proto...I got the filthiest looks from the ol trolls, but fook that, my mate came to her senses just in the nik of time, before I had to beat her head chakra with a totem pole. We blew the joint... for Balducci's...!... where the waiters are all tall and young and white and good looking and lekker and smell like Hugo Boss and CK One...to hell with the holistic, BIO, naturally earthy alternatives...we left the coyotes to it!
Typical Wiccan, goth, tree huggers and freaks, " why can't people accept us? love and light, merry meet, blessed be and may the force be with you."
You've been warned!
Wednesday, 30 April 2008
John Scott on Chocies
I suppose if you had to combine two of my favourit things one would end up with chocolate shoes...but I gotta love John's wife, a gal I can really relate to...lets face it...anyone who hates chocs has gotta be weird..!!
First the good news," I said to my wife, a self-confessed chocoholic. "They are calling for female volunteers to eat a slab of chocolate every day for a year, for free."
"I couldn't possibly," she said regretfully. "I'd get as big as a house."
"Now the bad news. The offer is only open to menopausal women suffering from Type 2 diabetes. Also, you have to be living in England."
"Well, thank goodness for that, otherwise I might have been tempted," she said.
The experiment is being conducted to see if the flavanoids found in chocolate reduce the risk of heart disease in 150 such women. It follows other findings that seem to show dark chocolate helps to reduce high blood pressure and clear the arteries. And all this time Villa Scott has been sparing in its consumption of chocolate for fear of its sugar and fat content!
When visitors bring gifts of chocolate, my wife instructs me to hide them from her, in case she is overcome by a need to finish the box. I have become expert at finding good hiding places, usually high up somewhere, but she still manages to fish them out sometimes.
"Don't tell me you ate them all?" I ask.
"No, I didn't, I left one for you, but you had better hurry up and eat it."
Her younger son, while still living at home, wasn't taking any chances. Someone gave him a box of English Thornton toffees and chocolates. He hid them under his mattress, only to return and discover that his hoard had been pillaged.
He rushed out to accuse his mother, but for once she was innocent. Then they noticed that the family dog, a Staffie named Tigger, seemed to have trouble opening and closing her jaws. It was she who had nosed under the mattress and polished off the lot, except for those toffees which stuck to her teeth.
In Plumstead, where I grew up, one of the roads leading to our house was even named Cadbury Way. It had a sweet savour to it, and we were all dismayed when they changed its name to Dick Burton Street, after some councillor nobody now knows anything about. Come to think of it, we didn't know anything about him at the time.
Ghana, the second-greatest producer of cocoa in the world, did some renaming in the opposite direction and declared February 14 (Valentine's Day everywhere else) to be National Chocolate Day. The churches complained this encouraged casual sex, and in a funny sort of way they were right. Chocolate, says another study, promotes the urge.
Talking of which, there's a plan afoot to pay people for resisting the urge in Tanzania. Some 3 000 men and women aged 15 to 30 will receive cash for not doing it, or at least not with anyone suffering from a sexually transmitted disease. Funded by the World Bank in a drive to cut Aids, they will be periodically tested, and if they are still HIV-negative after three years they will receive $45.
Enough to buy a bit of chocolate afterwards, but hardly a year's supply.
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