In November 2023 The Guardian newspaper suffered a seizure. The cause wasn’t Donald Trump, it was Argentinian presidential candidate Javier Milei. The newspaper wasn’t in a good place, trapped between losing money – as usual – and being screamed at by its transgender staff who were seething about its editor, Katharine Viner.
So, in the final weeks of a presidential campaign in a country it was mostly uninterested in, the newspaper lashed out with an extravagantly retarded idea that publishing an open letter of dread might finally kibosh Milei’s prospects: “Economists warn electing far-right Milei would spell ‘devastation’ for Argentina”.
Among the 100 signatories were the failed economists Thomas Piketty and Jayati Ghosh and Colombia’s former Finance Minister, José Antonio Ocampo.
Some people who read The Guardian attended the recent Kgalema Motlanthe Winter Dialogue. Some people who read The Guardian even spoke at the event, including Zane Dangor, the late Jessie Duarte’s younger brother and Director General of the Department of International Relations and Co-operation, and Mcebisi Jonas, the former deputy Finance Minister and one-time trade hope, whom the Trump Administration has apparently blackballed. (Newsroom Africa’s description of Jonas as “trade envoy” is manifestly false).
Interacting with these geniuses saying things like “South Africa and the African continent must confront current global economic shifts head-on with a clear-eyed, values-driven, and pragmatic foreign policy that repositions Africa at the centre of global trade and diplomacy” was the journalist Stephen Grootes, who wrote about the event for the Daily Maverick.
Covid
Grootes’s coverage of the event began with a nod to Covid, parts of which still trouble him, as they should. Last week Stanford University – not a classically fake news institution – dismantled the WHO’s claim that vaccines saved upwards of 20 million lives. (Stanford’s findings peak generously at 2.5 million). Grootes’s recollection of this era is tempered by association with our present and then caution for perspective: “How will this be remembered in 10 years’ time?”
Try five. Because that’s possibly the expiry date of the country, thanks to the logic and subsequent practices enabled by the folk attending this dialogue.
Seated in that room were profiles we’ve been told to deify. Policy savants, political sages, and rain-men – the cleverest people in the country ever: Oxbridge PPE to LSE and the University of Sussex, or any of the US’s East Coast institutions busy compiling new dissertations entitled “Advanced Blood Libel”. These are supposedly the good guys, the “clean” ANC. Dangor explained to Grootes that trade discussions with the US are subject to an NDA. Relief, Grootes concluded. This guy is going to figure it out.
Half the world away Javier Milei is cheerfully lighting Argentina out of a hellish darkness imposed on that country by the rampant corruption of his predecessor girl boss, and the legacy of pedestrianism occasioned by too many clever people thinking things. The IMF foresees the Argentinian economy growing at 6% in the next two years. Those close to Milei suspect it may be closer to 8%. Similarly, many thinkers predicted chaos for America courtesy of Trump’s tariffs. On Wednesday, the US economy was revealed to have grown by 3%, shocking followers of Piketty and Ghosh and presumably, people who read Paul Krugman, the hopeless New Keynesian who once suffered the same very bad internet day our own Pierre de Vos did.
Talk shop
Back at Kgalema’s talk-shop, there appeared to be no inclination to read these corners of the world. Jonas thought we had yet to have a “conversation” about “elite” white capital. He must have missed the campaign designed by those filthy Londoners and where it got the country, or not read any of the recent statements by Moeletsi Mbeki, William Gumede, or Prince Mashele.
As the shout for monumental change gets louder, the ANC’s respected, supposedly clean intellectuals dig in. More of the same, the event heard, just harder.
Conservatively, I would guess that at least a quarter of the attendees of that dialogue have either attended or collaborated with the World Economic Forum previously. And if any doubt still exists, that thing is a sham, founded by a crook, and not just any crook: a crook who fiddled with data (exposed two weeks ago). How curious, you think, that the theories championed by this swindle aligned so neatly for so many years with the clean and thinking ANC?
For the world that we’re in, and for what is to come, we have the wrong people thinking the wrong things. In addition, we have the wrong people asking the wrong questions. When these people talk of the future, be it US tariffs or policies, they speak in statist, platitudinous, pseudo-philosophical tongues. Give them a hard fact – UNICEF’s measurement that 1.7m children have been lifted out of poverty since Milei took office – and they scramble for an excuse related to some or other obscure injustice.
Screechy
In the same way that screechy little white “anti-racism” protestors in the UK sneer that it is better to be raped than be called a racist, so too do we arrive at the grisly reality of our most prominent thinkers. These clever people, be they in the UK, France, Canada or Australia, would rather starve a nation of its potential by remaining consistent with the delusions of their Marxist professors than admit they are wrong, and change course.
The idealism and naivety are lamentable, but understandable. The pig-headed stubbornness and lack of will are unforgivable.
[Image: Alban_Gogh from Pixabay]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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