Body
Back in December we posted the “Mother of all ‘Not Satire’ Pieces,” the ANC Youth League’s extraordinary homage to the late Kim Jong-il. The piece elicited considerable feedback, most of it private, along the lines of “it’s amazing anyone is still around who could write like that” (except expressed in more vivid language—which maybe explains why these missives were sent privately). Our man in Jozi, Brooks Spector, has now passed along a piece of reporting by South African writer RW Johnson, whose career has arced from the Left to the Right, which suggests that the Youth League might have had some help from a foreign postal code in drafting that obituary.
Johnson’s piece concerns the recent Presidential Council of the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU) held in Johannesburg. (Parental advisory warning: the article (and the comments on the site that follow it) contains some amusingly vivid language.) The gathering was hosted by four South African trade unions, most notably NUMSA, the National Union of Metalworkers, the country’s second largest union with nearly one-quarter million members. Johnson ascribes NUMSA’s role at the confab to internecine rivalry within the larger COSATU (Congress of South African Trade Unions) which belongs to another international labor group, the more prominent International Trade Union Council (ITCU). Still with me? (Makes one long for the day when the Village Voice used to publish a gossip column, "Tom's Tattles," complete with Bolded Names following the escapades of the sectarian far left.)
Anyway, the WFTU was historically financed by the USSR and was so dominated by the Soviets that even the Yugoslavs and Chinese quit in protest, and came close to collapse in 1990 with the implosion of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc. Yet the group soldiered on. According to Johnson, at the Jo’burg meeting, WFTU General Secretary George Mavrikos, in his day job a Greek Communist parliamentarian, seen above chucking some legislation at Finance Minister Evangelos Venizelos (as if he did not have enough trouble already), repeatedly referred to the body’s shaky finances and then acted to imply that it was the North Korean comrades who were picking up the tab.
In my earlier piece I observed that South Africa’s relations with South Korea dwarf anything that they have going on with the North, and wondered why no one in the ANC exercised any adult supervision over the YL whose over-the-top piece among other things described South Korean President Lee Myung-bak as a “traitor of the people” and accused him of sinking the Cheonan. Now I have to wonder, if Johnson’s inference is correct, then why does the otherwise mendicant Pyongyang splash its money around such hapless operations as WFTU?
