HOLLYWOOD'S WAR ON WHITE SOUTH AFRICA

The following is a passage from Protocols of the Elders of Zanuck by Rainer Chlodwig von K.

While audiences were being treated to depictions of whites as berserkers and cannibals in such films as The Mad Butcher (1971), Raw Meat (1973), The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), Welcome to Arrow Beach (1974), Cannibal Apocalypse (1980), Eating Raoul (1982), The People Under the Stairs (1991), and Silence of the Lambs (1991), Africans and other indigenous peoples of the Third World were increasingly being portrayed as repositories of wisdom and common sense.

“Modern [i.e., white] man has only to take a short step to wind up in the primeval jungle of his ancestors,” Night School (1980) admonishes its viewers.

Celebrities have been known to erupt with the most risible sorts of absurdities where the Dark Continent is concerned. “The deeper they dig, the more BLACK TRUTH comes to the surface,” insists Wesley Snipes. “We are royalty that can never be buried away.” Blur lead singer Damon Albarn rhapsodized that Africa is “incredibly sophisticated – the society and the structure of people’s lives is as sophisticated, if not more sophisticated in some ways, than in the West.”

“That’s the one thing about [2016’s] Captain America: Civil War I didn’t like,” gripes Stuff Black People Don’t Like’s Paul Kersey. “And, again, it’s just so silly, when you see this version of some fictitious African nation that makes the African nation from [1988’s] Coming to America with Eddie Murphy pale in comparison, when it’s the most technologically advanced country in the world. You’re like, what the fuck?”

After viewing the trailer for the forthcoming Black Panther (2018) and marveling at Wakanda’s advanced civilization, Affinity’s Nomaris Garcia Rivera reported that the preview “Shows What Africa Would Have Been If White People Didn’t Destroy It”. (“So sad,” reflects RamZPaul. “We need to cut all aid to Africa so they can be Kangz again.”)

Destroy it they did, unfortunately; but entertainment industry figures, to their credit, did not all remain silent while the Boers bigotedly held back the natural technological progress of the Zulu people. United Artists released one of the earliest Hollywood anti-apartheid movies, the Michael Caine and Sidney Poitier vehicle The Wilby Conspiracy, in 1975.

The American Committee on Africa secured the services of Harry Belafonte in encouraging other entertainers not to accept engagements in South Africa. Belafonte, Poitier, Robert Guillaume, and Brock Peters lent their star power to a TransAfrica fundraiser arranged by Maxine Waters, and Tyne Daly donated her South African Cagney and Lacey residual checks to that same organization. Paul Newman and Tony Randall led a Washington march protesting Ronald Reagan’s tolerance of the South African government, and Randall, Stevie Wonder, and Judy Collins picketed the South African embassy in Washington while Yitzhak Edward Asner and Mike Farrell demonstrated in front of the South African consulate in Los Angeles. Bill Cosby even “insisted – over strong protests by NBC censors – that an ‘Abolish Apartheid’ sign be prominently displayed” during an episode of The Cosby Show.

The irresistible moral power of Hollywood.

Allan Konigsberg (alias Woody Allen) took a stance against “the atrocious racial policies of South Africa” by entering a clause in his Orion Pictures contract barring distribution of his films in the pariah state (South Africa, that is – not its ally at the time, the apartheid state of Israel. Konigsberg has alleged that many opponents of the Israeli occupation of Palestine are merely anti-Semites who “disguise it as anti-Israel criticism”. One is led to wonder if certain hand-rubbing critics of the South African government did not simply mask their loathing of whites as anti-apartheid activism).

Israeli musician Chaim Weitz (alias Gene Simmons) likewise believed that South Africa ought to be boycotted in order to “deprive the power structure of potential profits.” (Shockingly, Weitz has also stated that “those who boycott Israel are fools, and should direct their anger to Arab dictators.”) “The major film companies could emulate other American companies and refuse to cooperate with the terms of segregation in South Africa, and call for desegregation among employees in South Africa,” piped in Yitzhak Edward Asner. “Also, the film companies could insist that their films not be shown to segregated audiences.” (Asner has, however, distanced himself from today’s BDS movement targeting Israeli apartheid.)

If the movie industry failed to unite and mobilize in a truly concerted effort at ostracizing South Africa’s apartheid regime, it was because of the racist shekels that many realized they stood to lose, as “South Africa in 1984 was the eleventh-largest foreign market for U.S. films, with $11,200,000 in rentals.” The NAACP continued to complain that Hollywood was not doing enough.

“Cue movies like [1989’s] Lethal Weapon 2, [1989’s] A Dry, White Season, and [1987’s] Cry Freedom,” Andy Nowicki recalls of popular culture’s push to demonize South Africa during the latter half of the eighties: “egregiously simplistic cinematic morality plays with noble and magic Negro/White liberal heroes and hateful, mean-faced, invariably Afrikaner villains.”

Then, too, there was the TV movie Mandela (1987) – starring Danny Glover as the terrorist-saint he does not at all resemble – and Sarafina! (1992), an inspirational Whoopi Goldberg experience about the Soweto Uprising that premiered at the safely exclusive Cannes Film Festival exactly one week after the end of the somewhat less star-studded Rodney King riots in Los Angeles.

“Apartheid is slavery,” asserts the black nationalist college student played by Laurence Fishburne in School Daze (1988). Throughout the period during which such messages of national liberation were being broadcast to the world, however, the financial interests behind the curtain were busy concocting newfangled versions of African servitude. As Kerry Bolton corroborates in his essay “The Geopolitics of White Dispossession,” the anti-colonial struggles of the second half of the twentieth century masked what were actually neoliberal machinations. “To understand it, one must look beyond the vicissitudes of Apartheid, Nelson Mandela, and political correctness, as well as the debates that raged in the American media over economic sanctions of South Africa.” After enumerating examples of how and by whom this was accomplished, Bolton concludes:

While conservatives feared the encroaching spectre of Communism and the USSR throughout the Dark Continent, and hence the capture of the mineral resources and strategic positions, in retrospect, they were blind-sided. The “Soviet menace” allowed the Money Power to establish its hegemony over Africa on the pretext of “stopping Communism,” and in so doing eliminated the White settlers, often with bloody consequences that have not yet concluded.

 

White squatter camp