In 1984 The Special A.K.A released “Free Nelson Mandela”. Jerry Dammers had written the song as an anti-apartheid protest.
The single followed the anti-racist message of the single, “Racist Friend”, released a year earlier, (a song I have quoted in previous posts and especially by reference to its lyric “If you have a racist friend, now is the time, now is the time for your friendship to end” a lyric which remains, sadly, relevant and prescient).
So, why I am I talking about “Free Nelson Mandela”? Besides the fact that it’s a brilliant song?
The picture which accompanies and announces this post is a clue. I want to talk about changing narratives.
Think back to 1984, if you can, the year synonymous with Orwell’s dystopian novel:
- There were Israeli and US troops in Lebanon
- There were Russian troops in Afghanistan fighting the US backed Mujaheddin
- The Palestinian territories remained under tight Israeli military occupation, marked by rising settler violence, continued land confiscation, systemic restrictions on the daily life of Palestinians, significant detention of Palestinians without trial and the growth of Jewish settlements
- The United States was illegally trafficking weapons to Iran. Yes, the Iran that the United States is presently at war with and blockading, the country, which was headed by the recently assassinated Ayatollah and the country which had, in 1979, stormed the US Embassy in Tehran and taken 52 staff hostage, who were held until 1981. The purpose of the weapons sales was to fund CIA covert operations and the funding of terrorist militias such as the Contras in Nicaragua but also Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala and Costa Rica and others. Funding those groups was and is illegal under US law.
- British troops were on the Streets of Northern Ireland
- The Miner’s Strike was underway in the UK, described as “the second English Civil War”, such was the brutality of the Police response. Margaret Thatcher labelled the leaders of the National Union of Miners as “the enemy within” and a threat to society.
- South Africa has a strict apartheid system (though nothing compared to Israel’s present system of apartheid as regards Palestinians)
- Nelson Mandela was still imprisoned (and had been since 1962)
Now, it is that last reality that brings us back to where we began.
Margaret Thatcher and the British Government labelled Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress (ANC) as “terrorists”. The United States also consider Mandela and the ANC as “terrorists” and, perhaps, even worse, communist influenced. Both Mandela and the ANC were on US terror watch lists.
The UK Federation of Conservative Students went further than Thatcher and Reagan and called for Nelson Mandela to be hanged (the cover picture for this post is a poster produced by that group).
In 1984 a young David Cameron was the head of the Federation of Conservative Students. It was he who led the call for Mandela to be hanged. He later became a Tory Prime Minister (from 2010 to 2016 – he lasted longer than those who came after him, noting that when Liz Truss was made PM in 2022, she was elected as I was designing my Christmas Card and was gone by the time the cards were delivered by the printers).
In his role as PM, Cameron apologised to Mandela for such policies by both the Tory party and the Federation he led. Hey, at least Cameron (now Baron Cameron of Chipping-Norton – I can’t help but think of him swanning through the South-West Sydney suburb) was man enough to admit he was wrong.
Compare that to the Satsuma Baby and the exonerated Central Park 5. Like Cameron the Satsuma Baby wanted to hang people (not doing the dirty work himself of course). In 1989, he took out full page ads demanding the death penalty for five Black and Latino (note-not white) teenagers accused of raping a female jogger in New York City. The five were later exonerated, in 2002, after DNA evidence and a confession from another man proved their innocence, but the Satsuma Baby has consistently refused to apologize and has continued to assert their guilt. What he believes, in his feeble little mind, must be true.
Kierkegaard, of whom I am fond, (you’ve got to love those Lutherans), opined that “Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards”. It sits rather comfortably with the oft quoted George Santayana (of whom I am less fond as he was a bit of a white supremacist fascist) “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it“, (along with his all too accurate quote “Only the dead have seen the end of war“).
Both Kierkegaard and Santayana were right. What is happening in the world sometimes makes more sense looking back on it. But it also makes sense at the time if you have a knowledge of history, that can give a context to present actions. And that is the key, for as Orwell described in 1984 “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past“.
You see, by looking back 42 years, to 1984, you can see the lies and stupidity of today or, as it is beautifully stated by Canadian author Omar El Akkad in the title of his 2025 book, “One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This”. And if you don’t know the history which precedes present events, you cannot see through those lies and that stupidity.
Or perhaps it is even simpler and as the somewhat cliched quote goes “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter” although I think it is so beautifully put in the Igbo proverb “Until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter” (Chinua Achebe eloquently remodels it as “so long as the tale of the hunt is told by the hunter, the tiger will always be the villain”). Similarly, Abhijit Naskar opines “Whoever controls the narrative, controls the people“.
What I am getting at is this-everything that is happening today, is portrayed within a certain narrative. And that narrative is false but speaks to fears that are irrational but reinforced by our societal institutions (could it be that H L Menchen was right when he said “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary” or as described by Hitler in Mein Kampf (an apt text for so many leaders) “The great masses of the people… will more easily fall victim to a big lie than to a small one”).
For history is not objective. It is subjective. As the saying “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” alludes to, so historical narratives belong to the author of “history”. Chief Justice John Marshall, in a 1823 US Supreme Court case of Johnson v M’Intosh, made clear that “history is written by and for the victors”. And it is!
You didn’t see any of the allied leaders of WWII appearing at the Nuremberg and Tokyo war crime trials. There were no war crimes trials, for example, after the My Lai massacre in 1968. 500 or so Vietnamese women, children and elderly men were raped and slaughtered by US soldiers. But a war crimes trial? Who would hold such a thing! Especially as the unit involved was given citations and glory when they reported that they had killed hundreds of VietCong or “Terrorists” (a little like Israeli claims that they only kill terrorists and, ergo, anyone they kill, even is a 6-week-old baby, a journalist, a paramedic, is a “terrorist”! – even if you have to photoshop a uniform onto them).
The term “terrorist” is wonderful way to suggest that the world is simplistic and binary. There are goodies and there are baddies. Even my kids understand that there are people and they sometimes do good things and sometimes bad. But, in a binary world, “good guys” only do good things, and “bad guys” only do bad things. So, if the “good guys” double strike a school and kill 165 children, it can’t be bad because they’re good guys. If “good guys” triple strike a group of ambulances (as Israel did yesterday) then it can’t be bad. But it is.
By labelling someone as a “terrorist” you can strip them of their humanity. They are no longer human. They are no longer a man, a woman, a child. They are that label. And you can do to them whatever you like. And if you apply that label everything you do to them is justified. By labelling someone a “terrorist” you can do what you like, without accountability-destroy Gaza, invade Lebanon, bomb boats in the Pacific. The “good guys” can do that. But the same acts by the “bad guys”?
My Lai was investigated by a young army officer Colin Powell, who found no wrongdoing (the investigation by Powell is generally referred to as having whitewashed and covered up the massacre).
Powell went on to be Secretary of State under George W Bush, the man who promulgated the myths around Saddam Hussain’s “weapons of mass destruction” that led the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan and the death of over 4.5 million people. At that time, (2001), George W Bush’s Deputy Secretary of State, Richard Armitage, famously told the then Pakistani President that if Pakistan did not co-operate with the US in their war in Afghanistan that the US was “prepared to bomb Pakistan back to the stone age”. Now, who might have made that threat recently towards Iran? (that’s right, the Satsuma Baby isn’t even clever enough to come up with his own threats-he has to borrow from others).
And the upshot of My Lai? Not much. It is acknowledged, at least outside of the United States, as a war crime. But was anyone held to account? One junior officer was convicted but then immediately released by then President Nixon (who later has some troubles with the law of his own, the Watergate Scandal) and, notwithstanding that officer’s conviction for the murder of at least 20 civilians, he served 3 ½ years of house arrest.
Compare this to Israel’s recently passed laws that mandate death by hanging for any Palestinian who is convicted by an Israeli military court of killing an Israeli. Compare this to the recent discontinuation of the prosecution of Israeli soldiers filmed beating and sexually abusing a Palestinian prisoner (though the prosecution against the officer who leaked the footage continues). Compare this to the actions of the Israeli Occupation Force (IOF) and “settlers” in the West Bank (now that’s real terrorism), the daily killings by the IOF in Gaza and Lebanon.
So, back to Nelson Mandela. He was, of course, released from custody in February 1990 after 27 years in prison. Mandela was, in 1993, awarded the Nobel Peace Prize (albeit jointly with F. W de Klerk) for having ended apartheid in South Africa. The next year he was elected President of South Africa in the first election in which non-whites were able to fully vote.
In the space of 10 years Nelson Mandela went from “terrorist” to Nobel Peace Prize winning President. The narrative changed. Or perhaps, the establishment narrative was always wrong.
In his book “Kill Anything that Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam”, Nick Turse quotes two US soldiers respectively as saying “enemy is anything with slant eyes who lives in the village. It doesn’t make any difference if it’s a woman or child” and “So a few women and children get killed. Teach ’em a damn good lesson. They’re all VC or at least helping them. You can’t convert them, only kill them“.
Again, doesn’t this sound familiar? It sounds very much like the attitudes summarised by the study by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue of “no innocents in Gaza” and identifying that the official X account of the Israeli government used ads to promote a post that featured “no innocents” rhetoric.
If we look back to 1984, the current narrative makes sense. It is a lie. It is a convenient construct to justify what is being done (and with both Venezuela and Iran, the Satsuma Baby lets it slip from time to time, that it’s really about taking their oil and making money).
Nations founded on violence and exploitation are seemingly unable to acknowledge the violence that built their society. Nor, it seems, are they able to learn from that history and move on from it. Countries that colonised and exploited others to gain their territory and wealth seem unable to fully acknowledge that reality.
You can get an interesting insight into this colonialist thinking by considering the voting of nations with respect to the recent UN Declaration as to historical slavery and slave trading being “the gravest crime against humanity”. It has to be unanimous right? No. 123 countries voted in favour of the declaration. No surprises, they were largely countries, led by Ghana, from which slaves were taken.
But there were 55 countries who did not endorse the declaration.
52 countries abstained including Australia, the UK and all 27 EU nations. No surprise that those nations, including Australia and the UK, were at the forefront of colonialism and exploitation. There current wealth was built on the suffering of others.
But 3 countries voted against the declaration. They were Argentina, Israel and the United States.
Now, the United States, the world’s greatest state sponsor of terror, is built on dispossession, exploitation and subjugation of others. In 1823 (the same year that Chief Justice Marshall was proclaiming that Americans were the victors and they had an exclusive right to create the narrative), President Monroe advanced the “Monroe Doctrine”, asserting American control of the “Western Hemisphere”. That doctrine, now Christened the “Donroe Doctrine” (because everything, even the image of a healing Christ, must feed the infantile ego of the Satsuma Baby), is alive and well and sees the subjugation of Venezuela and Haiti, the blockading of Cuba and both covert and open engagement with the rest of Central America and much of South America.
1n 1823, First Nations Americans were dispossessed and being slaughtered in the “Indian Wars”, and slavery was in full swing. The 13th amendment in 1865 is suggested to have “abolished” slavery (as Phil Och’s sang in “What are you fighting for?”, “there’s many kinds of slavery and we’ve found many more”) but segregation continued, in a formal sense, into the 1970’s and continues institutionally to the present day.
In the United States today, armed thugs in balaclavas and uniforms seize people from their homes, places of work and worship and their schools, adults and children alike, and especially those who speak out against the US regime (for that is the most appropriate naming for the gangsters that currently runs the United States) and their allies, like Israel. Inequality grows to obscene levels and profit is spoken of openly as the motive for murder and death in the United States and around the world (you can even, if close to the White House, make a killing (pun intended) on predictive betting on when and where the next US bomb will drop).
Israel was born in the violence of the Nakba, the King David Hotel bombing, the Sergeants affair, etc. Israel maintains a more stringent form of apartheid than South Africa ever practiced and the distraction of current attacks on Iran, Yemen, Syria and Lebanon allow ongoing illegal settlement expansions and violence, annexation, dispossession and colonisation if we want to call it what it really is.
Argentina also has a modern economy built on past slavery.
25 years ago, the narrative was “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq and Osama in Afghanistan. That narrative was subsequently shown to be knowingly false, (but without consequence to those who peddled the lies). In 2026 conflicting narratives are now uttered in the same sentence, such that it can be asserted that Iran’s nuclear program has been “obliterated” and simultaneously that Iran is weeks, if not days away, from a nuclear strike. No longer is truth the first casualty of war, truth doesn’t even matter. It is completely irrelevant.
So, back to 1984. British conservatives were calling for Mandela’s execution. A few years later they were queuing up for photo ops.
Back then the US were surreptitiously selling weapons to Iran. Now the United States is bombing and blockading Iran and openly selling weapons everywhere else, including to us.
The United States is still blockading Cuba and interfering in the affairs of Central and South American countries. The United States remains the greatest sponsor of terror in the world.
The United States is arming Israel to the tune of $6-7 billion a year. And Australia has signed a $billion armaments contract with Elbit Systems and maintains a Military Memorandum of Understanding with both the US and Israel, the terms of which are kept secret and not disclosed. In a democracy, why should we not be told? We’re buying nuclear submarines from the United States (if they can spare them) and hosting their military bases and the Pine Gap Spy Station.
The Israeli government is emboldened in their “scorched earth” approach towards, as Smotrich describes it, wiping the Palestinian people from the face of the earth, seizing territory and killing whoever they wish without restraint. Death from Israeli violence remains a daily reality in Gaza and the West Bank notwithstanding a “cease fire”. And now it’s Lebanon’s turn for the “Gaza approach” of expulsion and scorched earth. The only thing that is surprising is the silence and inaction of world leaders. Israel is so emboldened, who knows, maybe this time they’ll sink the Global Flotilla.
And anyone our governments disagree with are labelled “terrorists”. This includes groups like Palestine Action who have harmed not a single person, but who oppose and actively address Israeli arms manufacturers and UK involvement with those companies and the actions of Israel in Gaza (and now Syria, Iran and Lebanon, etc). And the Australian government?
When Albanese was booed and jeered at a Sydney Mosque and challenged that Australia has stood by and maintained its friendship with and support for the United States and Israel while “a million Muslims” have been killed (a very significant underestimate), challenging him as a “genocide supporter” and telling him “get out of here”, Albanese could only comment that “some people don’t like that we’ve outlawed extremist organisations…and that brought a response from a couple of people”. To so fundamentally ignore complaints that people have been killed in the wars led by the United States and Israel and in which Australia is implicated (very directly as regards Iraq and Afghanistan) is to trivialise and mock such concerns. We can have a dialogue about the dangers of radical Islam but never Radical Zionism.
The reaction of our governments to the death and destructions inflicted by Israel and the United States? You can travel to Israel and fight for the IDF and return to Australia unimpeded. But if you wear a T Shirt saying “From the River to the Sea” or “Intifada” you are arrested. (Mind Netanyahu can use that expression on the world stage, which showing a map with all of Palestine and parts of Syria and Lebanon claimed as “greater Israel” and that is fine).
And you have seen the power of repression in the case of poor Grace Tame. If you dare to raise your trembling voice in opposition, you shall be dealt with. In the space of 2 months after uttering “From Gadigal to Gaza, globalise the Intifada” she is cancelled and rejected to such an extent that her Foundation, to support victims of abuse, is shuttered, unable to attract funding and she is wholesale cancelled from speaking engagements. There is no-one and nothing that cannot be sacrificed to maintain the status quo and supremacy of Israel and the United States and their Empires and ideologies.
If you remember 1984, nothing happening now is new or surprising. It is just more vicious and far more effective, now big, better and more lethal and AI driven-no conscientious objection from a machine learning program. For those who are given no voice, whose humanity is dismissed and for those who are enraged, it is, as the Libertines sang, “cornered boy kicks out at the world, the world kicks back a lot fucking harder”.
When we look back, from 10 years into the future, it will be clear to all just how obscene the present actions of our allies, the United States and Israel, are. We should be able to see that and say that now. We, and our governments, should be able to stop it now.
As Jerry Dammers wrote in “Free Nelson Mandela”:
Are you so blind that you cannot, see?
Are you so deaf that you cannot hear?
Are you so dumb that you cannot speak?
We were then and it seems we are now.
But sadly, the indoctrination starts young.
Last week an 8-year-old boy from my son’s class stopped me in the playground to say to me “I saw you wearing a t-shirt that said, ‘bombing kids is not self-defence’ but for Israel it literally is”. I paused for a few seconds and calmly answered him “if Israel feels threatened by 2-year-old children and feels the need to kill them, then Israel is so, so weak and pathetic don’t you think?”. I didn’t wait for his answer.
Perhaps it is, as James Baldwin described in his famous interview with Kenneth B Clark, that the United States, and for that matter Israel and other countries born from colonisation, violence and dispossession, like Australia, are “criminal nations” and as Baldwin opined:
“What white people have to do is try to find out, in their own hearts, why it was necessary to have a “nigger” in the first place, because I’m not a nigger, I’m a man. But if you think I’m a nigger, it means you need him…then you’ve got to find out why. And the future of the country [and the world] depends on that, whether or not it’s able to ask that question”.
It would seem we have not been able to bring ourselves to ask that question. And until we do, we are doomed to continue to repeat the mistakes of our past in present.
