FINALLY: THE TRUTH ABOUT THE MURDER OF SAMORA MACHEL On June 25th, 1975 thousands cheered as Mozambicans celebrated their independence from over 400 years of Portuguese rule. Soldiers from the revolutionary army, Frelimo raised their weapons in triumph. Peasants saluted their new flag of green, black and yellow. Samora Machel, Mozambique's new president declared, " Our perspective is to form a new society in Mozambique. Our options are various: in the first place we want to wipe out misery which in our country means hunger, lack of hospitals, and products. We are against exploitation." If there's one thing Machel understood about a successful revolution against the Portuguese, is that it had to have the complete support of the people it sought to liberate. For that reason the liberation strategy that Samora and Frelimo put into motion succeeded; Mozambique's' was a people's revolution, and Frelimo the people's army. In October of 1986 Machel died in a "mysterious" plane crash on South African soil. Now, a former member of an apartheid death squad has confirmed that the death of Mozambique's first president was not an accident, but murder. The man making this revelation is a Namibian national, Hans Louw, who was once a member of the notorious Civil Cooperation Bureau (CCB). Despite its innocuous name, this body was one of the most sinister of the apartheid regime's special units, dedicated to clandestine operations, up to and including murder, against the regime's opponents. Louw is currently serving a 28 year term for murders not connected with the CCB, in Baviaanspoort Prison near Pretoria. Louw claims that he was part of a "clean-up team" whose job was to go to the crash site, and finish off the Mozambican President if he survived the disaster. In fact, the back-up team was not activated, because the original plan - to lure the plane off course by using a false navigation beacon - worked, and Machel died on impact, as the presidential aircraft smashed into a bleak hillside at Mbuzini. Louw said the false beacon was put in position by members of the apartheid regime's Military Intelligence. A second man, Edwin Mudingi, says now that he was also part of the operation, and confirmed that Louw was on the team. Mudingi's unsavoury past includes membership of the Selous Scouts, a unit in the armed forces of the illegal Rhodesian regime of Ian Smith that was responsible for many atrocities. Samora Machel was an internationalist. He supported and allowed revolutionaries fighting white minority regimes in Rhodesia and South Africa to operate within Mozambique and he earned their wrath in return. Frelimo deputy Rafael Maguni just last October told the Mozambican parliament "The conspiracy of which Samora was a victim was an expression of the destabilization strategy used by the apartheid regime in the region, which sought to block the African National Congress (ANC), and had our country as a major target". At the time of that speech Maguni predicted that the truth of the murder of Samora Machel would come out. Today, he has been proven right. Sources: All Africa, sahistory.org., Agencia de Informacao de Mocambique, kulcha, Mozambique The Oread Daily provides daily (Monday-Friday) progressive, left, anti-racist, anarchist, commie, activist, environmental, Marxist, revolutionary, etc. news and information from around the US and around the world. Web Site Address/URL: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/OreadDaily/ Subscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED] AND The Triumph of Hope Over Self-Interest By DAVID BROOKS NASHVILLE - Why don't people vote their own self-interest? Every few years the Republicans propose a tax cut, and every few years the Democrats pull out their income distribution charts to show that much of the benefits of the Republican plan go to the richest 1 percent of Americans or thereabouts. And yet every few years a Republican plan wends its way through the legislative process and, with some trims and amendments, passes. The Democrats couldn't even persuade people to oppose the repeal of the estate tax, which is explicitly for the mega-upper class. Al Gore, who ran a populist campaign, couldn't even win the votes of white males who didn't go to college, whose incomes have stagnated over the past decades and who were the explicit targets of his campaign. Why don't more Americans want to distribute more wealth down to people like themselves? Well, as the academics would say, it's overdetermined. There are several reasons. People vote their aspirations. The most telling polling result from the 2000 election was from a Time magazine survey that asked people if they are in the top 1 percent of earners. Nineteen percent of Americans say they are in the richest 1 percent and a further 20 percent expect to be someday. So right away you have 39 percent of Americans who thought that when Mr. Gore savaged a plan that favored the top 1 percent, he was taking a direct shot at them. It's not hard to see why they think this way. Americans live in a culture of abundance. They have always had a sense that great opportunities lie just over the horizon, in the next valley, with the next job or the next big thing. None of us is really poor; we're just pre-rich. Americans read magazines for people more affluent than they are (W, Cigar Aficionado, The New Yorker, Robb Report, Town and Country) because they think that someday they could be that guy with the tastefully appointed horse farm. Democratic politicians proposing to take from the rich are just bashing the dreams of our imminent selves. Income resentment is not a strong emotion in much of America. If you earn $125,000 a year and live in Manhattan, certainly, you are surrounded by things you cannot afford. You have to walk by those buildings on Central Park West with the 2,500-square-foot apartments that are empty three-quarters of the year because their evil owners are mostly living at their other houses in L.A. But if you are a middle-class person in most of America, you are not brought into incessant contact with things you can't afford. There aren't Lexus dealerships on every corner. There are no snooty restaurants with water sommeliers to help you sort though the bottled eau selections. You can afford most of the things at Wal-Mart or Kohl's and the occasional meal at the Macaroni Grill. Moreover, it would be socially unacceptable for you to pull up to church in a Jaguar or to hire a caterer for your dinner party anyway. So you are not plagued by a nagging feeling of doing without. Many Americans admire the rich. They don't see society as a conflict zone between the rich and poor. It's taboo to say in a democratic culture, but do you think a nation that watches Katie Couric in the morning, Tom Hanks in the evening and Michael Jordan on weekends harbors deep animosity toward the affluent? On the contrary. I'm writing this from Nashville, where one of the richest families, the Frists, is hugely admired for its entrepreneurial skill and community service. People don't want to tax the Frists - they want to elect them to the Senate. And they did. Nor are Americans suffering from false consciousness. You go to a town where the factories have closed and people who once earned $14 an hour now work for $8 an hour. They've taken their hits. But odds are you will find their faith in hard work and self-reliance undiminished, and their suspicion of Washington unchanged. Americans resent social inequality more than income inequality. As the sociologist Jennifer Lopez has observed: "Don't be fooled by the rocks that I got, I'm just, I'm just Jenny from the block." As long as rich people "stay real," in Ms. Lopez's formulation, they are admired. Meanwhile, middle-class journalists and academics who seem to look down on megachurches, suburbia and hunters are resented. If Americans see the tax debate as being waged between the economic elite, led by President Bush, and the cultural elite, led by Barbra Streisand, they are going to side with Mr. Bush, who could come to any suburban barbershop and fit right in. Most Americans do not have Marxian categories in their heads. This is the most important reason Americans resist wealth redistribution, the reason that subsumes all others. Americans do not see society as a layer cake, with the rich on top, the middle class beneath them and the working class and underclass at the bottom. They see society as a high school cafeteria, with their community at one table and other communities at other tables. They are pretty sure that their community is the nicest, and filled with the best people, and they have a vague pity for all those poor souls who live in New York City or California and have a lot of money but no true neighbors and no free time. All of this adds up to a terrain incredibly inhospitable to class-based politics. Every few years a group of millionaire Democratic presidential aspirants pretends to be the people's warriors against the overclass. They look inauthentic, combative rather than unifying. Worst of all, their basic message is not optimistic. They haven't learned what Franklin and Teddy Roosevelt and even Bill Clinton knew: that you can run against rich people, but only those who have betrayed the ideal of fair competition. You have to be more hopeful and growth-oriented than your opponent, and you cannot imply that we are a nation tragically and permanently divided by income. In the gospel of America, there are no permanent conflicts. David Brooks, a senior editor at The Weekly Standard, is author of ``Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There.'' (also a regular on the pbs leherer report.)
