EDITORIAL: Mahlobo’s Rubicon
Comments on Sunday by the state security minister sounded at times eerily like the state security folk of the total onslaught era
And who remembers this one: "The tragedy is that hostile pressure and agitation from abroad have acted as an encouragement to militant revolutionaries in SA." The quotes are from then state president PW Botha’s 1985 "Rubicon" speech, the one that caused a flight of capital from SA and a collapse in the rand. The speech was a disappointment because there had been speculation that Botha would announce big changes. But the narrative and the style were pretty typical for that period of the "total onslaught". It was a period in which the blame for domestic uprisings against apartheid was frequently placed on hostile foreign forces, providing a justification for increasingly authoritarian measures such as the state of emergency, which was declared in 1985. It was a period, too, in which Botha’s state security council, rather than the Cabinet, increasingly called the shots on policy. It was a long time ago and one would like to think it was in a country far, far away from the one we have n...
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