Michael Schmidt: An African Anarchist Biography
Michael Schmidt (born in Johannesburg, South Africa, 1966) is an
anarchist journalist, grassroots organiser, ideologue, historian, media
trainer, researcher, consultant, and international free press and human rights
activist. He was raised by a middle-class family of working class origin that
was classified “white” – and as a result was uplifted by apartheid to the
middle class.
For foreign readers, it is important to state that South Africa
has a very complex social structure, distorted and fragmented by a multiracial
yet racialised colonial, dominion, and apartheid past but that unlike
white-majority settler-colonial societies such as the USA, Canada, Britain,
Australia and New Zealand where the middle and upper classes are dominated by
whites, it is more similar to Brazil in being a black-majority country where
most of the white minority (alongside the black majority) are actually working
class. Africans hail from a huge diversity of cultural backgrounds and can be
of Chinese, Arab, Indian, European or other descent – as a staunch
anti-nationalist, Schmidt has always referred to himself simply as an African
rather than as a South African – and of course the continent is home to black
people, differentiated broadly between, in scientific terms, Bantu, Nilotics,
Pygmies and Bushmen (the latter is their own self-description: the supposedly
scientific term “San” means vagrant). But science makes it clear that there is
only one human race and that the “races” of popular discourse are social
constructs, that is, are shaped by certain acquired cultural traits and shared
realities: it is in this sense in his works that Schmidt has consistently used
the terms referring to South Africa’s main cultural groups, blacks, whites,
Indians, Asians, mixed-race “coloureds” (a contested term, but not seen as
pejorative by most of these people), and the indigenous Bushmen and Koekhoen.
It is in this sense of a social construct – and not as some sort of biological reality – that such terms must be
read in the text below.
Schmidt was educated at the private St Stithians College in
Johannesburg and was drafted into the apartheid South African Defence Force in
1985 at the outset of the 2nd Insurrection (1985-1991). It was this
experience that radicalised him, demonstrating to him the emperor unclothed –
the naked, unadorned force upon which the state was founded, especially in
repressing black aspirations – and introducing him to layers of society he had
not encountered before: poor white conscripts from rural South Africa; and the
coloured bandiete (prisoners) who
worked as labourers at 97 Ammunition Depot in De Aar in the desolate Karoo in
the centre of the country. Resistant to the Army’s propaganda, disappointed by
PW Botha’s reactionary Rubicon speech – which had been expected to announce the
dismantling of key aspects of apartheid – and suspected by the depot’s security
officer as a communist, Schmidt accidentally discovered the existence of South
Africa’s nuclear weapons in July 1985 – secretly registered in the Depot’s
inventory as “Category 16” weapons.
After being demobilised and while training as a journalist at
Technikon Natal in Durban, Schmidt became a conscientious objector and in 1992 faced
a military tribunal of SADF officers chaired by a Supreme Court judge in
Pretoria for refusing to serve any further in the apartheid army. That
experience drove his ideology leftwards and he embraced anarchism, then re-emerging
as an organised current in South Africa, initially flavoured by insurrectionism.
In the watershed first all-race elections in 1994, he voted tactically for the
black revolutionary socialist Pan Africanist Congress of Azania (PAC), one of
only a handful whites to do so (in future years he would mostly abstain from
the vote but twice voted tactically for small Marxist/Trotskyist parties as a
challenge to the stultifying hegemony among the working class of the African
National Congress, ANC, and South African Communist Party, SACP).
Schmidt is
today a Council Member of the Instituto
de Teorea e História Anarquista / Institute for Anarchist Theory and History (Brazil): http://ithanarquista.wordpress.com/. He has
authored the following books: Anarquismo Búlgaro em Armas: A Linha de
Massas Anarco-Comunista (Brazil, 2009); Black Flame: the Revolutionary
Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism (USA,
2009), with Lucien van der Walt, which was translated into German (2013) with translations
into Spanish, French, Greek and Portuguese under way; Cartographie de l'anarchisme
révolutionnaire (Canada, 2012), which was translated into English as Cartography
of Revolutionary Anarchism (USA, 2013), with translations into Spanish,
Portuguese, Arabic and Farsi under negotitation; Drinking with Ghosts: the
Aftermath of Apartheid's Dirty War (South Africa, 2014); and of A
Taste of Bitter Almonds: Perdition & Promise in South Africa (South
Africa, 2015).
Schmidt
remains a frequent contributor to the international anarchist news and analysis
website www.anarkismo.net which he
helped found in 2005, and of the Southern African anarchist news and analysis
website www.zabalaza.net run by the
Zabalaza Anarchist Communist Front
(ZACF). Most of his other written works over a 26-year journalist and
23-year anarchist career can be found either in the archives of the newspapers
for which he wrote – The Natal Mercury,
TheSaturdayPaper, Sunday Times, ThisDay, and Saturday Star – in the Southern
African Anarchist Collection, which is about to be launched at the South
African History Archive (SAHA) www.saha.org.za, on the
ZACF’s own Southern African Anarchist
& Syndicalist History Archive (SAASHA) www.saasha.net, or on
this blog and his two other blogs, Black Flame http://black-flame-anarchism.blogspot.com/ and Cartography of Revolutionary Anarchism http://cartographyofrevolutionaryanarchism.blogspot.com/.
LEGAL NOTICE: This biography was originally drafted as a contribution to
SAHA’s Southern African Anarchist Collection, which Schmidt and van der Walt
compiled but is published now as a response to libelous allegations made on
social media by his now-former publishers AK Press (USA) via their agents
Alexander Reid-Ross and Joshua Stephens over September-October 2015 under the
title of About
Schmidt: How a White Nationalist Seduced Anarchists Around the World, that Schmidt is a “white nationalist,” “fascist” and “racist”.
These charges are based on slender circumstantial “evidence,” on
misrepresenting his undercover research as a journalist, cherry-picking quotes
and misquotation, on claims made by largely faceless informants, the
presentation of hearsay as fact, on dubious journalistic practices, personal
attacks and guilt-by-association techniques, and on ignoring all of the
evidence, including the vast bulk of Schmidt’s writings and activities, that
did not fit these claims. In this regard, all his legal rights including his right
to sue his accusers, their agents and their sources for defamation and loss of
earnings, and his contractual rights to his works published by AK Press are
reserved – though AK Press should be aware that its location in the global
imperialist centre makes it prohibitively expensive for a self-employed African
to sue for libel in the American courts.
Because none of these allegations were published in a
peer-reviewed journal, or through professional periodicals, they have been
freed of basic oversight, fact-checking, and standard journalistic ethics and
good practice. It is our opinion that the accusations were published in a
drawn-out fashion in five installments over a month in order to try and bait
our client into engaging in a sporadic debate which would undermine both the
coherence of his riposte and of his right-of-reply (e.g. http://www.spj.org/ethicscode.asp/ or http://ethics.npr.org/ .
As a result, this
biography constitutes a full
refutation of the defamation against Michael Schmidt by AK Press, its agents Reid-Ross
and Stephens, and their faceless sources, he reserves all rights to his reputation and works, and no further correspondence will be
entered into without the mediation of legal counsel.
1.
Early Activism, Research and Writing: 1992-2003
As a result of my radicalisation as a conscript, in 1992, I
joined the Anarchist Awareness League
(AAL), based in the South African port city of Durban while working as a
journalist for a family-owned daily newspaper, The Natal Mercury. The following year, the AAL initiated the Durban Anarchist Federation (DAF), a
synthesist organisation with white, coloured and Indian members that focused on
environmental, gender, anti-militarist and anti-authoritarian propaganda, and
included among its collectives the AAL, forerunner of today’s Zabalaza Books. Also in 1993, I began a decade of work as a
trade unionist, serving as shop steward for the South African Union of Journalists (SAUJ) over 1993-2003, which
gave me a solid grounding for my emerging anarcho-syndicalism. In 1995, I
started dating Mamta, an African of Indian descent, who I got engaged to
in 1997.
In early
1996, at the age of 30, I took the plunge into serious internationalist revolutionary
politics when I was delegated by the DAF to go on a month-long fact-finding
mission in Zapatista-held Chiapas at the time of the San Andrés Peace Accords
between the Ejército Zapatista de
Liberación Nacional (EZLN) and the Mexican government. I also visited
Guatemala in the dying phases of its murderous civil war, during which the
Guatemalan army was massacring entire villages of indigenous Mayan peasants (I
write about the experience in the concluding chapter of Drinking with Ghosts), which inflamed in me a passion for
understanding massacre and memory. The trip also sparked a life-long love
affair with Mexico – to which I would return – and the liberation cause of its
indigenous peoples, with a special focus on the struggles of First Nations
peoples in post-colonial societies such as my own. Over this period, 1996 and
1997, my investigative footwork on the docks in Durban for Sunday Times, then the largest-circulation African newspaper,
helped send to jail two neo-Nazis who had injured several black dock-workers in
drive-by shootings (this story is told in A
Taste of Bitter Almonds). I would carry this anti-fascism with me for life.
Top, my friend and
colleague Philani Mgwaba (at left), in Ixopo, rural Zululand, early 1990s; he
was one of my earliest guides to crossing South Africa’s terrible racial
divide. Bottom, one of my photographs from San Juan Chamula in Chiapas during
the 1996 peace accords between the Zapatistas and the Mexican government.
I left the DAF in 1997 and joined the more tightly organised anarcho-syndicalist
Workers’ Solidarity Federation (WSF)
where I started my long activist relationship with anarchists such as Steve Dhlomo, Siyabonga Mgenge and Lucien van der Walt. The WSF, formed in early 1995, had done
sterling work producing an exhaustive series of new African anarchist analyses
of the South African transition, on race and class, women’s struggles, trade
unions and syndicalism, etc. The WSF identified itself with the Organisational Platform of the Libertarian
Communists written by Nestor Makhno, Peter Archinov, Ida Mett and others,
saw the black African working class as the engine of change, and sought to
build an anarcho-syndicalist current in the trade unions. “Platformism” argues
for the need to build unified anarchist organisations with common positions, to
influence the working class masses. I joined the Durban branch of the
Federation, began writing for its journal, Workers’
Solidarity, and increasingly used my experiences and travels as a
journalist in Africa to inform my anarchist writings and analyses, such as my
coverage of the 1997 general strike in Swaziland, which remains one of Africa’s
last two absolute monarchies, in the process establishing a relationship with
the pro-democracy movement that would endure for a decade and result in the
pamphlet A Bitter Taste to the Sugarcane:
A Decade of Anarchist Writings on Swaziland (Zabalaza Books, 2009).
In
1998, I was sent on a 26-hour bus trip as a WSF delegate to Lusaka, Zambia, to
give a talk to the Socialist Caucus on the similarities between the neo-liberal
turns taken by both Zambia’s and South Africa’s union-linked leftist
governments, at the invitation of Zambian anarchist Wilstar Choongo, who was in
contact with the WSF. The result of the trip was the establishment by Choongo of
the Anarchist Workers’ and Student’s
Movement (AWSM) in Zambia. The intention was initially for the AWSM to
federate with the WSF, but the initiative was stillborn as Choongo died the
following year of meningitis – and I had the sad task of writing his obituary. Yet
I have remained life-long friends with the Socialist Caucus’ Malele Dodia who I
visit whenever I work in Lusaka. The WSF in South Africa meanwhile grew to
about 40 members, mainly black trade unionists, with a smattering of university
students, black and white. WSF distributed thousands of leaflets and pamphlets,
produced around nine issues of Workers
Solidarity, translated materials into Zulu, and participated in many
struggles. In this period, I contributed numerous articles on African anarchism
to the US-based Anarchist People of
Color (APOC) website, which were graciously accepted for publication by
their editorial collective including Ernesto Aguilar and Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin.
With Wilstar
Choongo (standing far left), Malele Dodia (crouching second from right) and members
of the Anarchist Workers’ and Student’s Movement (AWSM) and Socialist Caucus in
Zambia, 1998.
In 1998, I used a work trip to France to meet as a WSF delegate with
both the International Workers’ Association and breakaway factions of the
anarcho-syndicalist Confédération Nationale
du Travail (CNT-IWA, and CNT-France): at this stage, both factions were friendly towards
us as one of the few anarchist organisations on the African continent, and
certainly the most active in South Africa.
It was a 1998 bilateral
agreement between the WSF and the Workers’
Solidarity Movement (WSM) of Ireland that, alongside multilateral
discussions on the international “Organize” anarchist email list, laid the
groundwork for the establishment of the international multilingual anarchist
news and analysis website Anarkismo, www.anarkismo.net, established in 2005. At this stage, the WSF was deeply
influenced by the Irish WSM and by northern sister organisations such as the Federazione dei Comunisti Anarchici (FdCA)
of Italy, and also increasingly by other Southern organisations, notably in
Brazil, a country like ours that had recently emerged from an autocratic
regime, and which had a poor black majority and an anarchist movement
interpenetrated within radical social movements. South Africa shared with both
Brazil and Ireland a history of colonialism, repression and social divisions.
Also in 1998, I covered the South African-Batswana invasion of
Lesotho to supposedly suppress a coup, whereas in fact it was a pro-democratic
mutiny, but the new South African National Defence Force (SANDF), like its SADF
predecessor, acted to impose South African power across the southern African
region. This was the start of my war and defence correspondence.
In late 1998, I was transferred to Sunday Times’ main bureau in Johannesburg; I was devastated that
Mamta was unable to follow me but we maintained a close and passionate
relationship over the next years.
The WSF dissolved in August 1999 for a number of reasons (read
the dissolution statement here: http://struggle.ws/africa/wsfother/dissolution_se99.html). Several new initiatives followed, arising from the WSF. These
included the Bikisha Media Collective
(BMC) as an anarchist nucleus and three BMC members including myself were
elected to the committee of the Workers’
Library & Museum (WLM) in Johannesburg as part of a radical coalition.
We rescued the WLM from R97,000 debt run up by the previous committees, and
revived it as an autonomous, non-partisan working-class space, also
establishing a radical bookshop and t-shirt printing facility. Numerous public
events drew in the black working class. This was at a time when the room for
alternative dialogue was being shut down by the rightward turn of the ruling party,
and the growing control that the ruling African National Congress (ANC) and the South African Communist Party (SACP) sought to exert over the allied Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU).
Towards the end of 1999, for Sunday
Times’ “Living Here” project on lived South African experiences at the turn
of the millennium, I chose the Bushmen’s experiences of attempting to revive
their shattered culture; as a result, I spent two weeks interviewing Bushmen
scientists, activists and communities, including some of the remaining /Nu
speakers, those who of which are still alive I make a point to visit every time
I am in Upington in the Northern Cape.
In 2000, a year in which I repeatedly worked in Mozambique
(initially in the devastating January floods during which myself and
photojournalist Themba Khumalo of City
Press helped rescue scores of black peasants by helicopter from the
floodwaters), the BMC affiliated to the Anti-Privatisation
Forum (APF), an umbrella group mainly of township-based community
movements. The APF started as a merger, that year, of two movements: the
Anti-Igoli 2002 Forum, fighting against ANC-led privatisation in greater
Johannesburg (which includes townships like Alexandra and Soweto), and the Wits
Crisis Committee, fighting against the onset of outsourcing and privatisation
at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits). BMC members were heavily
involved in the latter and founder members, therefore, of APF. The APF was
generally anti-capitalist, with anarchists, dissident Marxists and Trotskyists,
and autonomists, and its mass base consisted mostly of women-led poor black
African township community organisations.
In April-May 2000, three BMC delegates including van der Walt
and myself attended the international Autre Futur (Another Future) anarchist
congress organised in Paris by the anarcho-syndicalist CNT-France union. It proved a vital conference for solidifying north-south
relations and was attended by delegates from Africa, Latin America, Europe,
North America and the Middle East. A multilateral discussion held between the
anarcho-syndicalist trade unions and the anarchist political organisations laid
the ground-work for the establishment in Madrid the following year of the International Libertarian Solidarity (ILS-SIL)
network of 20 participating organisations including from Africa, Asia and Latin
America. The BMC became a member. Although the ILS-SIL did not survive for very
many years, it did important solidarity work in establishing anarchist printing
presses in Latin America, for example, a continent in which alongside Africa, I
had developed an intense interest. While in Paris, I visited the Père
Lachaise Cemetery: its Holocaust and Paris Commune memorials, and the crematory
vault of Nestor Makhno, the Ukrainian anarchist revolutionary who died in
France. Van der Walt and I placed Zulu-language ZACF materials at Makhno’s
plaque.
The BMC had black members, ran numerous Red & Black Forums –
public discussions of anarchism – in Johannesburg’s townships, and actively
participated in the anti-war demonstrations that followed 9/11. It continued to
publish materials. A multiracial team of BMC delegates attended the anarchist
and syndicalist summit at the anti-EU and anti-Bush protests in Gothenburg,
Sweden, in 2001, with a multiracial delegation to the World Conference against Racism (WCAR) in Durban, South Africa,
that same year. At Durban, BMC comrades worked with the Zabalaza Action Group,
also known at the Anarchist Union, and Zabalaza Books, and were part of the APF
marches and camps, as well as publishing and efforts to organise a 60-member
“workers council” amongst black security guards. Earlier that year, BMC and
Zabalaza Books started a new journal, Zabalaza,
to help fill the gap left by Workers
Solidarity.
In this period, I sent box-loads of French anarchist journals
via a radical trade union contact in Kinshasa into the Democratic Republic of
Congo, and maintained correspondence with South Sudanese militiamen interested
in anarchism, and with anarchist organisations and individuals in Latin
America, Europe, and North America, as well as in Africa such as Brahim Fillali
of Morocco, and Sam Mbah, co-author of the influential book African Anarchism (for which Zabalaza Books secured the rights
for a Southern African edition) and founder of the 1,000-member-strong anarchist
Awareness League (AL) in Nigeria (he
died in 2014 or we would still be in contact today). Mbah had previously
intended to undertake a speaking tour of South Africa, organised by the WSF in
1999, but this was not possible in the end.
In October 2000, I was transferred Port Elizabeth as
the Sunday Times’ Eastern Cape bureau
chief; this occurred in the same month that Mamta finally relocated to
Johannesburg as we had been talking about getting back together; it was a
terrible blow and in the two years I spent in Port Elizabeth she started dating
another man who she subsequently married; I still regard her with immense love
and respect.
The WSF had previously sought to stress the history
of anarchism and syndicalism outside of Northwestern Europe and North America.
This included a 1997 introduction to anarchism, largely authored by Lucien van
der Walt. In 1998, the WSF national
secretariat issued Breaking the Chains: A
History of Libertarian Socialism, with an amended version May 1999. In Port
Elizabeth, I began writing a global history of the anarchist movement because I
was irritated by the North Atlanticist (that is, Western European and North
American) bias of most anarchist histories including Peter Marshall’s Demanding the Impossible which reduced
the dominance over decades of the anarchist movement in Latin America to a
chapter at most and which totally ignored the African, Middle Eastern and many
Asian movements. With the collaboration of van der Walt as co-author, over the
following 15 years, this unpaid labour of love evolved into the two-volume Counter-power study, of which Black Flame is the first volume. In
2001, a draft called Black Flame: Revolutionary Anarchism 1864-2001
was completed: 144 pages, single spaced, replacing an earlier revision, called Breaking the Chains: A Workers’ History of
Revolutionary Anarchism, 1864-2000. The title Black Flame referenced the historic black (and black-and-red)
anarchist flags, as well as signaled the role in anarchist and syndicalist
history of people of colour.
In 2001, I began writing for the new BMC/Zabalaza
Books journal Zabalaza: A Journal of
Southern African Revolutionary Anarchism, and, while I was in Port
Elizabeth, made efforts to link up with the local Left and union movements, the
city being a hub of the automotive industry.
Top, BMC
at the World Conference Against Racism, Durban, South Africa, 2002. Bottom,
Awareness League (AL) founder, theorist and historian Sam Mbah.
In 2002, I was back in Johannesburg working as one
of two seniors in the Sunday Times’
main bureau. Faced with intensive police repression of the new social movements
of the multiracial working class and poor during the World Summit on
Sustainable Development (WSSD) in Johannesburg, I founded the South African
section of the international Anarchist
Black Cross (ABC-SA) prisoner-support organisation – making it the 64th
ABC in the world – which in turn established the non-partisan Anti-Repression Network (ARN) which was
soon adopted by the Freedom of Expression Institute (FXI), and started writing
for the ABC-SA bulletin Black Alert! See
for example: http://saasha.net/category/organisations/anarchist-black-cross-sa/black-alert-magazine .
The ABC-SA provided physical security for Indymedia
during the WSSD and provided activists with a constant newswire on police
repression; it soon established contact with a network of about 200
self-described political prisoners, mostly black former
Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) and Azanian People’s Organisation (AZAPO) members
who had not been amnestied under the transition to democracy. Over time, the
ABC-SA and I would work with many people arrested or jailed for involvement in
the new protests – sometimes under spurious charges, sometimes for public
disorder or protest actions.
This work was both done for solidarity, and also to promote
class-struggle, revolutionary and anarchist perspectives. It drew in prisoners
too: a key ABC-SA organiser was the prisoner Abel Ramarope, formerly pf the PAC
armed forces, but recruited to anarchism. He died in in Pretoria Central Prison
in September 2005 under mysterious circumstances. Meanwhile, a young black
Zimbabwean journalist who the ABC-SA was about to relocate to a safe house in
Umlazi (a Durban township) disappeared, presumably “disappeared” by the
Zimbabwean Central Intelligence Organisation (CIO) of the Robert Mugabe
ZANU-PF regime.
This work was both done for solidarity, and also to promote
class-struggle, revolutionary and anarchist perspectives. It drew in prisoners
too: a key ABC-SA organiser was the prisoner Abel Ramarope, formerly pf the PAC
armed forces, but recruited to anarchism. He died in in Pretoria Central Prison
in September 2005 under mysterious circumstances. Meanwhile, a young black
Zimbabwean journalist who the ABC-SA was about to relocate to a safe house in
Umlazi (a Durban township) disappeared, presumably “disappeared” by the Zimbabwean
Central Intelligence Organisation (CIO) of the Robert Mugabe ZANU-regime. The
ABC-SA continued to raise funds for the bail and legal defence of (mostly)
black, indigenous, coloured and Indian social movement activists, and I
personally conducted prison visits such as that to “Professor Jota,” Jaime
Yovanovic Prieto of the Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria (MIR) of Chile, who was deported from South Africa in 2002 to stand
trial before a fascist military tribunal for his
alleged role in the MIR assassination of Major General Carol Urzúa Ibañez, Pinochet’s military governor of Santiago in 1983.
Having met a new layer of black self-described
anarchists living in Soweto, the giant township south-west of Johannesburg, I
and other BMC comrades assisted them in establishing the non-partisan Phambili Motsoaledi Community Project
(PMCP) food garden, social centre and community library in the squatter
camp of Motsoaledi, Soweto, in 2003. Run by the black anarchist Black Action Group (BAG), and with BMC support,
the PMCP provided a model that was to be replicated with less success due to
ANC Youth League thuggery, in the formal township of Dlamini, Soweto, and in
the KwaMasiza Worker’s Hostel in industrial Sebokeng to the south. The
combination of garden/centre/library as site of activism located in the black
working class community was not unique to BMC/BAG/PCMP (and later, ZACF). It
was a model also used by, for example, the Orange Farm Crisis Committee in the
vast Orange Farm squatter settlement south of Soweto. Like the WLM before it,
the point of activities like PCMP was to focus was on the black working class
and townships, rather than the mostly white middle class suburbs in the old
white towns. These were not simple “survival” projects or NGO initiatives or
vehicles for party patronage, but were sites of grassroots political activism,
in this case driven by BAG/ZACF militants like Philip Mzamani Nyalungu and
myself. For an indication of the PCMP/BAG activities in the subsequent years,
including photos and its publications and statements, see here: http://saasha.net/category/organisations/phambili-motsoaledi-community-project/. I spent many weekends in these areas in long
discussions with black comrades involved in anarchism.
In 2003, after dating a black Zimbabwean named
Debbie with whom I remain close friends, I started a relationship with
Shelomi, an African of Indian-Lebanese descent, who I would marry
in 2005, and she accompanied me on several township jaunts, including helping
dig the terraces for the PCMP’s community food garden that fed not only the
PCMP’s 100-odd members, but neighbours in need also.
In 2003, I was sent to Brazil for a month as a BMC
delegate to the Jornadas Anarquistas
(Anarchist Days) – held in parallel to the World Social Forum – where I
attended an International Libertarian Solidarity
(ILS-SIL) and met with delegates from Europe and Latin America, visiting Federação Anarquista Gaúcha (FAG)-linked social movements. I was invited to address the 1st Encounter
of Latin American Autonomous Popular Organisations (ELAOPA) on lessons from
the rise of the new social movements in South Africa; ELAOPA consisted mainly
of mestizo, black and indigenous American members (I am delighted to see that
ELAOPA is still going strong, having held its 11th Encounter in
early 2015).
Top,
Shelomi, later my wife (note the anti-fascist T-shirt). Bottom,
meeting with members of the anarchist Shesha Action Group (SAG), a ZACF
collective, Dlamini, Soweto.
It was there that I made firm friends with Raúl Gatti of the Consejo Indígena Popular de Oaxaca “Ricardo Flores Magón” (CIPO-RFM) in Mexico – who would shortly be forced into exile in Canada (assisting
exiles would later become a key theme of my activism via the ABC-SA, but also
in advocacy via my journalism) – and with veteran Federación Anarquista Uruguaya (FAU) militant Juan Carlos Mechoso. Mechoso in particular grilled me at length on the BMC’s and my own politics until satisfied. The FAU is closely identified with the especificismo, a Latin American-originated approach very similar to Platformism. Founded in 1956 and still active today the FAU is one of the most important post-war anarchist organisations (by 1972, it had established a 400,000-strong trade union central and its own guerrilla force against the Bordaberry Dictatorship), has been very influential in re-establishing revolutionary anarchism in Latin America, is one of the “grandmother organisations” to which I most look up, and is the subject of the next in my Anarchist Communist Mass-Line series (after Bulgaria and before Ukraine).
Top, with
members of the Federação Anarquista Gaúcha (FAG) and
other Latin American anarchist and grassroots organisations at Jornadas
Anarquistas in Brazil, 2003. Bottom, my portrait of anarchist guerrilla radio
and cultural activist Leny Oliviera of the Pixi group, Bolivia; we remain
friends today.
In 2003, I worked for Sunday Times in Mozambique, Swaziland and Lesotho as my focus on
African current affairs expanded before being recruited in October as defence
correspondent for the Nigerian-owned quality newspaper ThisDay. I left the Sunday
Times with regrets and on the best of terms, but ThisDay was positioned as a quality, investigative paper and I
believed this was ideal for my interests. Although my trade union activity
sometimes put me at loggerheads with management, neither at the Sunday Times nor elsewhere did I ever
face any complaints of racism, sexism or any other sort from my colleagues. The
Sunday Times was at that time edited
by Mathatha Tsedu, currently the director of the South African National Editors’ Forum (SANEF) with whom to this day
I remain on great terms. ThisDay was
edited by Justice Malala who remains by agreement on my CV as a key character
reference.
The early 2000s saw a massive upsurge of struggle in
SA, centred on what many called the “new social movements,” “new” meaning
post-apartheid, black and township-based. These were based on struggles around
privatisation and neo-liberal restructuring in municipalities, state industries
and higher education. The rise of the APF was one part of this wave, and it was
mainly active in Gauteng province, but there were similar coalitions around
Cape Town and Durban (the latter now part of the eThikwini municipality). The
WCAR and WSSD provided spaces they could flex their power, although efforts at
a national structure were filled with conflicts. In this time, anarchism was on
the upsurge. Besides the BMC in Johannesburg and Soweto, the Black Action Group
(BAG) in Motsolaedi and the closely linked PCMP, the Zabalaza Action Group (ZAG) and Zabalaza Books in Umlazi and Durban, as well as ABC-SA, there was
the Shesha Action Group (SAG) in Dlamini,
Soweto. By this stage, the BMC had left the WLM, and was focusing on the APF.
Comrades from these groups had met at various
actions and marches, and a decision was taken, following meetings, notably in
Dlamini, to form a new Zabalaza
Anarchist Communist Federation (ZACF) on May Day 2003 to federate the existing groups
and consolidate the rising movement. Influenced by the (Brazilian) especifist and (Irish) Platformist traditions, the aim was to build anarchist influence in, primarily, the unions and the new social movements. Zabalaza became the ZACF paper. The existing collectives continued to operate, although united in a federation. In theory, the ZACF was Platformist, although the reality was more complex, as people joined through existing collectives with varying approaches. It adopted extensive Position Papers, committing it to a focus on the black African working class, to anti-imperialism, to non-racialism, to fighting for gender equality and against racism and national oppression, to defense of immigrants etc., drawn from those of the WSF. These are archived at http://zabalaza.net/organise/theoretical-positions-of-the-zacf/.
I was a founder member and helped draft the ZACF Constitution
which states that it “considers itself the heir of the anarchists and syndicalists of all colours who built the first black and Indian trade unions in SA from 1917, as well as inspired by the massive union and neighbourhood rebellions of South Africa in the 1980s.” The ZACF, like the BMC before it, affiliated to the APF, as did the Motsoaledi Concerned Residents (MCR) initiated by BAG and PCMP comrades in 2005, while a SAG member was actively involved in the APF’s (illegal) “guerrilla electrician” reconnections of an estimated 25,000 township households cut-off from electricity by the state. Meanwhile ZACF became part of ILS-SIL, as successor of the BMC.
The ZACF Treasurer’s and my own records over the
following seven years until 2009 show I personally contributed funds of more
than R24,000/year, a large part of my income (US$3,5420/year at the October
2003 rand:dollar exchange rate) to the ZACF’s township projects and its ABC-SA
defence funds, while its meeting minutes will show I spent most weekends with
my black comrades in their township homes and projects, balanced against time
doing prisoner support work and writing.
In 2004, I travelled to Rwanda for the commemoration
of the 10th anniversary of the “Hundred Nights Genocide” that had
killed around 800,000 people in 1994. Let me stress that I have never claimed
to have visited Rwanda in 1994, a “claim” invented by AK Press agents Alexander
Reid-Ross and Joshua Stephens). As indicated above, I was at that time not a
senior journalist nor a war or conflict journalist, and South African
developments were my beat, with 1994 a watershed year for the country. But the
memorials I saw in Rwanda in 2004, the testimonies, the horrible legacy of
massacre shocked me deeply, as had the events in Gautemala and the Holocaust
memorials at the Paris cemetery. In Rwanda I visited the killing fields in
Butare where the shattered corpses of a thousand children, women and men are
preserved in lime in the twisted postures in which they died – an intensely
sobering experience that reaffirmed my intention to understand the drivers of
genocide, and to grapple with memory and massacre.
As a ZACF delegate, I took
the opportunity while in Rwanda to distribute French anarchist materials such
as Courrant Alternatif and Combat Sindicaliste in Kigali. Meanwhile, I was serving mostly as the Federation’s
International Secretary (there is no such post as “internal” secretary, despite
what Reid-Ross and Stephens claim in their first chapter), and driving its
establishment of ties with anarchists in Swaziland (where a semi-clandestine ZACF
section was established), and in Zimbabwe, Kenya, Morocco and further afield.
I continued to write for Zabalaza, now the ZACF journal. My anarchist writings over
1997-2003 included:
Workers’
Solidarity Vol.3 #2, Johannesburg,
Second Quarter, April-June 1997:
-
Swaziland: General Strike for Democracy
Workers’
Solidarity, Vol.4 #1, Johannesburg,
First Quarter 1998:
-
Swaziland: Phambili Basebenzi!
- The ANC
and the South African White Right in Mozambique
Workers’
Solidarity, Vol.4 #2, Johannesburg,
Fourth Quarter 1998:
- Zambia:
“Democratic” Politicians get Fat as the Workers Starve
-
Lesotho: Was it Revolution?
-
Right-wing “social movements for unemployed”
- Bad
Boys’ Club: the “Non-Aligned Movement” and Mass Murder in the Third World
Zabalaza #1, Johannesburg, April 2001:
-
Zimbabwe: Land Invasions and Lessons for the Working Class
Zabalaza #2, Johannesburg, March 2002:
- The
Black Bloc: a Disposable Tactic
-
Religious Fundamentalist Regimes: a Lesson from the Iranian Revolution
1978-1979
-
Obituary: Hamba Kahle Wilstar Choongo!
Zabalaza #3, Johannesburg, August 2002:
- From
Protest Movement to Social Revolution: Deepening the Roots of the
Anti-Capitalist Movement
-
Revolutionary Joburg
- SA
Anarchists Go Global (on joining the ILS)
Zabalaza #4, Johannesburg, June 2003:
- Fat-cat
Nationalism vs. the Ultra-Hungry
- Latin
American Voices: Leny Olivera
In this period, my journalistic writings on the white far right and the overlapping milieu of former apartheid security forces apparatchiks, my articles, all very unsympathetic, included:
ThisDay:
- Pretoria, 2003 (the state bugs right-wing radio station to monitor hate speech)
- Baghdad, 2003 (demands to keep a leash on SA mercenaries working abroad in defiance of the law)
- Guinea, 2004 (coup plotters linked to Guinea's national security director)
- Kwazulu-Natal, 2004 (convicted right-wing criminals standing in National Elections)
- Pretoria, 2003 (apartheid spies still working for government and private contractors)
- Potchefstroom, 2004 (the release of Terre'Blanche and the decline of the AWB into a "Christian cultural organisation")
- Pretoria, 2004 (former apartheid foreign minister Pik Botha doesn't grieve the demise of the New National Party)
- Harare, 2004 (Equatorial Guinea coup plotters jailed in Zimbabwe)
- Johannesburg, 2004 (mercenary recruitment centre may have been a scam)
Not to mention stories like:
Sunday Times:
- Kareedouw, 2001 (the persistence of apartheid Group Areas planning in small SA towns)
- Parys, 2003 (“vanished” Bushmen still survive, living rough as migrant farm workers)
ThisDay:
- Johannesburg, 2003 (Auschwitz commemoration: "Jews outlived the Nazis")
- Windhoek, 2003 (Germany apologises for Herero Genocide)
ThisDay:
- Pretoria, 2003 (the state bugs right-wing radio station to monitor hate speech)
- Baghdad, 2003 (demands to keep a leash on SA mercenaries working abroad in defiance of the law)
- Guinea, 2004 (coup plotters linked to Guinea's national security director)
- Kwazulu-Natal, 2004 (convicted right-wing criminals standing in National Elections)
- Pretoria, 2003 (apartheid spies still working for government and private contractors)
- Potchefstroom, 2004 (the release of Terre'Blanche and the decline of the AWB into a "Christian cultural organisation")
- Pretoria, 2004 (former apartheid foreign minister Pik Botha doesn't grieve the demise of the New National Party)
- Harare, 2004 (Equatorial Guinea coup plotters jailed in Zimbabwe)
- Johannesburg, 2004 (mercenary recruitment centre may have been a scam)
Not to mention stories like:
Sunday Times:
- Kareedouw, 2001 (the persistence of apartheid Group Areas planning in small SA towns)
- Parys, 2003 (“vanished” Bushmen still survive, living rough as migrant farm workers)
ThisDay:
- Johannesburg, 2003 (Auschwitz commemoration: "Jews outlived the Nazis")
- Windhoek, 2003 (Germany apologises for Herero Genocide)
2. Later Activism, Research and Writing: 2004-2013
In 2004, I went to Aotearoa/New Zealand as a ZACF
delegate, met with the Anarchist Round
Table (ART) and spoke to anarchists in Christchurch, Dunedin and Wellington
about progress on the research that would become Black Flame. In 2005, I handed the manuscript (now called CounterPower) over to van der Walt, who
overhauled it, and took care of subsequent revisions. The now-substantially
revised and expanded work went to AK Press on 18
January 2006. AK Press then requested that CounterPower
be split into two volumes: for the first one, we went back to the older name, Black Flame. These and other requested
revisions were undertaken by van der Walt in 2006 and 2007, with copies of
volume one sent for peer review 6 December 2006. The first proofed chapters
came AK Press on 28 June 2007, with the first iteration of the publication sent
from AK Press on 1 November 2007.
Meanwhile, while van der Walt played the key role in working on Black Flame / CounterPower from 2005, I worked on what was now volume two, called
Global Fire (a play on Black Flame). Van der Walt was
recognised as the primary author of Black
Flame, while I was to be the primary author of Global Fire.
In November 2004, I was hired as one of three group
special investigative writers for the Independent Newspapers group (along with
Chiara Carter and Angela Quintal), with my home newspaper being Saturday Star in Johannesburg, the
country’s largest-circulation Saturday newspaper. Initially under the
editorship of Brendan Seery of Zimbabwe, I had three fields of focus, or
“beats” as we journalists call them: the first was defence, intelligence and
African affairs; the second was science, culture and heritage; and the last was
extra-Parliamentary politics (social movements, trade unions, and the
ultra-left and far right).
It was in the latter capacity that early in 2005, I
asked Seery if I could use my work computer to create a false profile on the
international white supremacist site Stormfront as it maintains a South African
section that I wanted to monitor to keep my finger on the pulse of what the
white right here was talking about; it’s not intensive work, just what
journalists call a watching brief. Seery agreed and the fact that he now, as an
editor on a very busy newspaper that produces five editions a day cannot
remember such a verbal agreement of a decade ago does not dispel the fact that
I went undercover using an office computer – the usage of which was monitored
by a multiracial IT department who would have alerted Seery if they had found
me doing anything unauthorised and in breach of our code of ethic; and membership
of a racist website would definitely constitute a cause for disciplinary action
unless it was authorised, as mine was. Investigative journalism requires
playing one’s cards close to one’s chest, so the only person who I informed
about my undercover work was my editor, Seery.
Why act undercover? There was no way, given my
public profile as a member of the extreme left that I could openly access the
white far right in South Africa, which is deeply anti-communist and views
anyone white person who supports people of colour as a race-traitor. Undercover
investigative journalism, was, in my view, also the necessary method to be used
to infiltrate the radical white right and networks in South Africa in the 2000s
that journalists could not normally reach: in case anyone has forgotten, there
was an ongoing treason trial of the white right Boeremag terrorist group at the time, following a spate of bombings
of black targets, and the movement was high on the list of those being watched
by the ANC government. The radical white right closed ranks against the press
and outsiders at the time. The notion that such groups could have been
investigated without subterfuge at this stage is ill-informed.
Note that this undercover work was only a tiny portion of the journalism that I
did for Independent Newspapers. Still, I compiled detailed notes on the far
right and on former apartheid apparatchiks, especially death-squad operatives.
It also needs to be noted that in 2008 I left print journalism, and moved into
journalism training (see below for why), so not all of the material I compiled
could be used at the time, and my journalistic output generally declined. I am,
admittedly, also a bit obsessive in compiling data, with an eye on later use,
and some of the material I initially compiled for newspapers has since fed into
Drinking with Ghosts (2014), A Bitter Taste of Almonds (2015) and
some drafts of Global Fire (ongoing).
Last (as I will discuss in the next section), my writing output in all areas
declined substantially in 2009-2011 due to illness, burn-out, personal losses
and my new jobs in training. The vast bulk of posts at online forums like
Stormfront were in the period corresponding to my work as a full-time
journalist and writer. I made some sporadic posts outside this period to keep
my finger on the pulse.
My articles on the far right, which overlaps with
former apartheid security forces apparatchiks, including death-squad operatives
are quite extensive, and for this period include:
Saturday Star:
- Pretoria, 2005 (SA Secret Service chief claims his agency foiled the Equatorial Guinea coup)
- Johannesburg, 2005 (64 freed Equatorial Guinea mercenary suspects face a grilling at home)
- Pomfret, 2005 (the dumping ground for Angolan 32 Battalion vets that became a breeding ground for mercenaries)
- Baghdad, 2005 (easy money lures SA men to work as mercenaries in Iraq)
- Johannesburg, 2005 (ex-President PW Botha's lunatic fringe comes home to roost)
- Windhoek, 2005 (no prosecutions for apartheid SA's worst war-crime, the murder of 200 SWAPO POWs)
- Ovamboland, 2005 (disinterring the mass graves of SWAPO operatives in Namibia)
- Johannesburg, 2006 (neo-Nazi thug threat to Soccer World Cup in SA in 2010)
- Pretoria, 2006 (the apartheid CCB plot to assassinate Rev Frank Chikane)
- George, 2006 (Ghosts of apartheid haunt George: PW Botha dies and leaves a conflicted legacy)
- Nelspruit, 2007 (Scott-Crossley, the man who threw a black worker to be eaten by lions, languishes in jail)
- Johannesburg, 2007 (revisiting the Cassinga battle/massacre: recognising colonial terror)
- Cape Town, 2007 ("Charge me if you dare" says FW de Klerk on his apartheid past)
- Johannesburg, 2007 (De Klerk was at Caprivi Trainees meeting)
- Musina, 2007 (white right-wing farmers wand Zimbabwean refugees detained in camps)
- Pretoria, 2007 (former Police Minister Adriaan Vlok rats out top apartheid cop)
- Johannesburg, 2007 (new study links the apartheid murders of the Smit couple to Swedish PM Olaf Palme)
- Pretoria, 2007 (Adriaan Vlok denies he drew up apartheid death squad hit-list)
- Vlakplaas, 2007 (healing the nations wounds at former death squad HQ, Vlakplaas)
- Pretoria, 2007 (former apartheid agent fingered in Palme's assassination)
- KwaZulu-Natal, 2007 (after a long battle, an AWB farmer finally agrees to sell farm to his black neighbours)
- Pretoria, 2007 (missing apartheid Security Branch files "a paper Auschwitz")
Not to mention stories like:
ThisDay:
- Mueda, 2004 (remembering the Mueda Massacre by Portuguese colonial troops in 1960)
Saturday Star:
- Cape Town, 2005 (row over the retention of Khoekhoen and Bushman bones by Iziko Museums)
- Johannesburg, 2005 (Zimbabwean refugees tortured at home and humiliated in exile in SA)
- Johannesburg, 2005 (Burundian whistle-blower illegally deported by SAPS faces grave danger at home)
- Johannesburg, 2005 (column on free speech: "nothing nice about fanaticism")
- Johannesburg, 2005 (feminine forebears of freedom: on the 50th anniversary of the Freedom Charter)
- Bloemfontein, 2006 (Basotho woman activist kidnapped and interrogated by the police)
- Johannesburg, 2006 (in Africa we are all one big family: on the Human Genome Project)
- Johannesburg, 2006 (how Bulgaria prevented the Nazis from deporting their Jewish neighbours to the camps)
- Johannesburg, 2006 (attacks on Somalis are put down to jealousy and racism)
- Johannesburg, 2007 (refugees flee persecution - then face xenophobia)
- Pretoria, 2007 (column: Who can join Mbeki in saying "I am an African"?)
- Harare, 2007 (echo of Pol Pot in Mugabe's wasteland)
- Johannesburg, 2007 (on racist violence and the many other victims of the Nazis)
- Johannesburg, 2007 (court victory for 140,000 asylum-seekers)
It should be abundantly clear from the above that I did put much of
the material gathered to good use: claims to the contrary are false. In order to
establish my online persona, I openly admit – as I have before – that I made
distasteful racist statements online, invented events, and groups to try
ingratiate myself with the members of the online radical right (foreign readers
should note that the South African white right is ultra-conservative,
anti-communist, and deeply Christian: skinheads are not welcome, nor would
“third position” left/ right blends. To the extent it has a “look,” it is that
of a conservative, beefy middle-aged white settler farmer wearing khaki and
shorts – and not a tattooed youth subculture as predominates in North America
and Europe).
I completely disassociate myself with the Stormfront
statements made under my false persona: they are completely at odds with my
real views, deeply offensive, and making made me feeling unclean. Against claims that they represent my real
views, must be weighed all of the articles and work I did that damaged the
white right through public exposure (see above and in the following sections).
I have readily admitted to using false personas online for my journalistic and
activist investigations, including to Reid-Ross, and on social media, following
AK Press’s initial statement denouncing me. The operation was distasteful but part and parcel of the undercover work.
To claim that these abhorrent statements constitute
my true feelings on race and politics is disingenuous, and totally at odds with
all of my published work of the past
quarter century. It is by cherry picking my works, taking quotes out of
context, getting facts wrong, and ignoring all contrary evidence, including the
actual content of all four of my published books, and relying on faceless
sources and hearsay, that Reid-Ross and Stephens paint the caricature that they
have painted. That said, it is just not reasonable to suggest that a member of
the white right would spend his time, money, and energies in mostly black
protest movements, as I have done.
In my initial response to AK Press – written the day after I read
their slanderous accusations and a full 16 days before they provided any
“proof” of their libel (Two Swallows Don’t
Make a Summer, 27 September 2015 https://www.facebook.com/AKPress/posts/10156169461510249
) – I also stated clearly: “Most of
my posts were pretty neutral in tone,” but “I
did have to take an essentially racist stance in order to fit in and not arouse
suspicion.” (emphasis added). In the hands of Reid-Ross and Stephens, this is misquoted to
set up a straw-man: “Schmidt describes his posts on Stormfront as ‘pretty
neutral in tone,’ we found them to be consistently otherwise.” The fact is that
I never denied the posts were “essentially racist” or even “fascist”: obviously
they were, for the simple reason that was exactly the point if I was to create a
viable fake persona. But I emphatically deny that they represent my true views
and politics.
Without these online statements I made as a
journalist, using an invented persona, being taken as literally true,
Reid-Ross, Stephens and AK Press have very shaky grounds for their claims
against me. They have to rely heavily on claims by largely faceless, anonymous
sources. In professional journalism, anonymity is used great care, especially
when it involves serious allegations as well as pejorative and disparaging
statements about individuals, and cannot form the core of a defensible case.
This is because anonymity allows people to make damaging statements without any
consequences to themselves, and without other journalists being able to check
the validity of the statements, whether the sources are in a position to
credibly make the claims, whether the sources were misquoted or asked leading
questions, and whether the sources were misled (see for e.g. http://ethics.npr.org/category/g-transparency/#3-anonymous-sources).
Anonymity is not granted to sources by journalists
as a matter of course, but is mainly used to protect sources especially
whistleblowers from credible threats to their persons, families or livelihoods.
In these cases, unless anonymity is granted the information needed would not be
accessible. But not one of these sources is in any danger whatsoever from their
involvement in AK Press’ “investigation.” (This concern for sources did not,
however, stop Reid-Ross and Stephens from posting clear pictures of the faces
of three of my women friends sourced from a Facebook page of mine, in the
initial posting of part 2 at https://medium.com/@rossstephens/about-schmidt-how-a-white-nationalist-seduced-anarchists-around-the-world-chapter-2-1849e232b943#.ll5bi8b6y – their faces have since been blocked out but
reposts of the original version can still be found online).
A further attempt, by Reid-Ross and Stephens, to
show that the online rightwing personas I created for my investigation, were
the “real” me, involves claiming I sometimes posted personal details on far right
sites. They claim, in their second chapter, that my
Stormfront persona was in “lockstep with Schmidt’s public life when examined in
closer detail” (https://medium.com/@rossstephens/about-schmidt-how-a-white-nationalist-seduced-anarchists-around-the-world-chapter-2-1849e232b943#.chtxjtcs2). The fact of the matter is that most everything I
wrote about “myself” there was invented nonsense,
although sometimes I extrapolated from reality in order to give credence to the
false persona.
To try prove the contrary, Reid-Ross and Stephens rely on a
selective use of evidence, skip over contradictions and indulge in some
amateurish psycho-analysis, part of a larger pattern of speculation and
mind-reading that appears across their chapters: “Stormfront seems to have
functioned for him as a forum for a kind of soul searching, where he sought to
identify problems holding him back from securing a romantic partner or some
other variety of success” etc. (https://medium.com/@rossstephens/about-schmidt-how-a-white-nationalist-seduced-anarchists-around-the-world-chapter-2-1849e232b943#.chtxjtcs2).
Since they do not know me, and have not met me, have not apparently
even been to South Africa, and are not qualified shrinks, it would be
astounding if they could prove this: the reality is that analysis is complete
nonsense. But it serves the obvious
rhetorical purpose of a personal attack, which surely has no place in any serious
journalism, let alone comradely anarchism. “Seems,” “likely” and “plausible”
are terms that pepper that the articles, along with efforts at mind-reading
about my “real” motives. Here, speculation, not facts, are at play. Meanwhile,
the two authors play dangerously fast and loose with dates, for example,
referring to a Stormfront post of 22 December 2012 as appearing “last year”
i.e. 2014, and another from 2012 as “created less than a year ago” i.e. 2014 or
2015 (e.g. https://medium.com/@rossstephens/about-schmidt-how-a-white-nationalist-seduced-anarchists-around-the-world-chapter-2-1849e232b943#.1urggh3ue).
Why have a photo on Stormfront? I wanted to show I was a real
person. My aim was not “anonymity,” as Reid-Ross and Stephens keep asserting,
but the creation of credible false persona that would allow monitoring,
infiltration and investigations (see https://medium.com/@rossstephens/about-schmidt-how-a-white-nationalist-seduced-anarchists-around-the-world-chapter-2-1849e232b943#.hi0gkinik
). Reid-Ross and Stephens
display a sore misunderstanding of the demands of undercover investigative
journalism: spending a year with the Hells’ Angels to research his book Hell’s Angels did not actually make the
journalist Hunter S. Thompson a Hells’ Angel, after all; and when journalist Nellie
Bly checked herself into a mental asylum as an inmate to expose conditions, no
one claimed subsequently that she was really mentally ill.
I also need to be clear that I never once met in
person with any of the Stormfront members or other right-wingers nor gave any
actual support or benefit to any white supremacist individual, project or
organisation. In 2005, in fact, I was involved in founding the
multilingual international anarchist news and analysis website Anarkismo, www.anarkismo.net, and often served as the ZACF’s delegate to the Anarkismo
editorial committee. I increasingly threw myself into historical research and
ideological work: for example, in 2005, I wrote the pamphlet Five Waves: A Brief Global History of
Revolutionary Anarchist Communist Mass Organisational Theory & Practice,
a historical overview of five key anarchist positions on how the militant
minority relates to the proletarian masses (this would later form the core of
what became Cartographie de l’anarchisme
révolutionnaire). I also established links with the underground anarchist Edris network in Tehran and Persepolis, Iran, which I was supposed to
visit in 2005 though the trip fell through, and maintained relations with
Iranian exile anarchist-communist Payman Piedar, founder of the Farsi-language Nakhdar journal (Nakhdar comes
from the Farsi for Na Khoda/Dolat/Rahbar, or No God/State/Master).
In
2008, I wrote with the assistance of Bulgarian anarchist veteran Jack
Grancharoff the first in my Anarchist-Communist
Mass-line series, Bulgarian Anarchism
Armed, the first of a series of pamphlets analysing anarchist-communist
mass organisational praxis (the Bulgarian text was published in Portuguese in
Brazil and the next in the series will be on the Uruguayan movement); and in
2008, I wrote a comparative analysis of the transitions in South Africa and
Chile, PW and Pinochet: the Dictatorial
Roots of Neoliberal “Democracy” in
South Africa and Chile, which would in part become the introduction to Drinking with Ghosts.
In
2006 as you may have picked up on, I was involved in the Human Genome
Project, not merely writing about it as a journalist, however, but participating
as a guinea-pig: I was one of five Independent Newspapers journalists who
submitted our DNA for testing by Project scientists who had established the
brilliant Origins Centre on human ancestry and indigenous Africans at the University
of the Witwatersrand. As a man, both my mitochondrial DNA and Y-chromosomal DNA
could be tested and the results were fascinating and were published in Saturday Star: while the maternal line
of mitochondrial tests produced a rather slender set of markers that showed I
am in part descended from Basques, Tuscans and other Europeans – but included
two Mongolian matches – and the paternal line of Y-chromosomal tests produced
682 identical matches, including 134 Germans, 89 Spaniards, 66 Portuguese, 35
Colombians (including blacks, no doubt the descendants of slaves), 28 Italians,
25 Argentines (including one Guarana native), 23 French, 23 Belgians, 18
Brazilians (including one Pardo creole), as well as two Basques, two indigenous
Bolivians and a lone Buryat – a Mongol from the shores of Lake Baikal; my bona
fide African matches embraced all the peoples of Mauritius: white creole,
mixed-race Métis, black Malagasy, and Malabar Tamil.
I
have no white “race pride” or racial separatist commitments. As stated in my Saturday Star article after the tests, that
“I was ‘coloured’ and not ‘white’ was a fact that I’d come to accept more than
a decade ago” as a result of discovering that my paternal great-grandmother was
Belizean and presumed by family lore to have been Mayan.” The full text of the Saturday Star article which detailed my
test results was included in a painting by Cherylee Powell that has hangs in my
lounge to this day. Hardly the sentiments or actions of a white supremacist!
Top, Cherylee Powell’s painting
on my mixed genetic heritage, 2006, that features the pull-quote “Despite the
allure of the exotic, the plain truth is I am more mongrel than Mongol.” Centre, with girlfriend Tanya, 2007.
Bottom, Georges Saad of al-Badil
al-Shuyu’i al-Taharoui (ABAT), wearing my gift of a Zabalaza T-shirt, Lebanon, 2006.
At
the same time, however, my marriage to Shelomi fell apart. I remain in contact with her to this day and view her as one of the
most wonderful women I’ve ever met. A little over a year after our July 2006
divorce, however, I was dating Tanya, an African of Indian descent.
The years 2004-2007 saw me report from several
war-zones and post-conflict societies: Rwanda in 2004, the Democratic Republic
of Congo in 2004 and 2005; the “Summer War” in Lebanon in 2006 – which was
terrifying for the Israeli use of over-the-horizon aerial and naval
bombardments – and the Darfur War in Sudan in 2007, the latter two of which I
wrote about in the articles Eyewitness
Lebanon – In the Land of the Blind:
Hezbollah Worship, Slavish Anti-imperialism and the Need for a Real Alternative (anarkismo.net, 2006, online at: www.anarkismo.net/article/3651), and Blood, Water and Oil: Fallacies of the Darfur
War (anarkismo.net, 2007, online at http://www.anarkismo.net/article/5584).
During the war in Lebanon, which I travelled to via Egypt, Jordan and Syria, my
first experience of the Middle East, as bombs fell all about us in Beirut, I
was able to meet with Georges Saad, one of the militants of the
anarchist-communist al-Badil
al-Shuyu’i al-Taharoui (ABAT), and establish relations
between ABAT and the ZACF.
The article Eyewitness Lebanon grappled with how
anarchists should conduct anti-imperialist work without simply following local
nationalist movements. Engagement with these issues has a long tradition in the
historic anarchist movement, as I have shown in several pieces. They did not
arise from the 1990s in the USA, as Reid-Ross and Stephens suggest, when they
say that “Anarchism as a movement was becoming, from the 1990s forward,
inextricably bound up with a self-reflection around issues of oppression that
intersected with the economic grievances at the core of the alter-globalization
movement,” when it supposedly started to give “greater space and agency to
struggles led by people of color … Police brutality … Immigration” ( https://medium.com/@rossstephens/about-schmidt-how-a-white-nationalist-seduced-anarchists-around-the-world-chapter-5-a6ae0f471e9e#.f7ma8ngwn ). This story only
makes sense if most of the history and politics of anarchism, not least in the
Global South, and its central role in struggles against national and racial
oppression is left out – only in this way can “anarchism’s development” to
embrace these issues be seen as new, or read in a US-only context. This is precisely the sort of narrow North
Atlanticist thinking (“Eurocentric” would be an exaggeration, since most of
Europe itself is left out), that is challenged in much of my writing – and by
the praxis of groups like the ZACF, the Awareness League in Nigeria, ABAT in Lebanon, and
others.
Reid-Ross and Stephens do correctly note in their fifth chapter that the
Lebanon article at anarkismo spurred a debate – but they miss what the debate
was about. They make much of the fact that I was criticised by a Lebanese-based
journalist called Simon Assaf for some arguments (https://medium.com/@rossstephens/about-schmidt-how-a-white-nationalist-seduced-anarchists-around-the-world-chapter-5-a6ae0f471e9e#.f7ma8ngwn). But they leave out
the fact that Assaf wrote for the British Socialist
Worker, and that his criticisms (some of which, by the way, I conceded in
the Comments section on Anarkismo) were part of a larger debate between
anarchist-communists like myself and al-Badil al-Shuyu’i al-Taharoui, classical Marxist
strands, including that of Assaf and Socialist
Worker, and the more purist (or “ultra”) views of left-communists on the
question of national liberation. Reid-Ross and Stephens are also correct that
there were other “unfavourable comments,” but they just fail to indicate these
were largely by other Marxists, who took positions different to mine, and by
left-communists who oppose all national liberation movements in principle. And,
of course, many comments agreed with my views: this is not mentioned in chapter
five. Finally, Reid-Ross and Stephens leave out the core of my article: the
importance of national liberation and class-based revolution in the Middle
East, which are hardly the positions of a radical white nationalist.
It is important to note here that 2006 saw the
start of a rough period for the ZACF – as well as for social movement
coalitions like the APF. Levels of activism were declining across the country.
Many of the new social movements were facing serious problems. COSATU remained
a powerful force, but got swept up into internal ANC politicking, and swept
along by the tide that saw the Jacob Zuma ANC faction eventually oust the Thabo
Mbeki ANC faction at the party’s December 2007 congress. This led directly to
COSATU withdrawing all criticism of the state, and throwing its energies into
helping the ANC win the next general election.
In the ZACF, the PCMP was struggling, the
anarchist-initiated Motsoaledi Concerned Residents (MCR) had been captured by a
rival ANC-aligned group, and the numbers of BAG activists were falling. The SAG
had withered away, one of its leading figures moving to a Marxist group working
in the Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee (SECC), a key APF affiliate. By
mid-2007, activists like Nyalungu and van der Walt left the ZACF, the former
now pursuing a degree (I assisted with paying his fees).
In December 2007, the ZACF transformed itself
from a federation of collectives into a unitary organisation with stricter
membership requirements based on individual recruitment, and the Swaziland
section became an autonomous and separate group, although still linked in
practice to the ZACF and its militants through political and personal ties, For
example, I maintain contact with these black comrades to this day. Technically,
the Zabalaza Anarchist Communist Federation
was dissolved and replaced by the Zabalaza Anarchist Communist Front, but the new organisation had the
same assets and political line and members (except the Swazis, now a separate
but linked group) – just a revised structure, as reflected in its constitution.
The original ZACF model had been designed to
bring together existing groups, but had serious limitations, and these
contributed to the problems in the organisation. Recruitment of members was a
bit ad hoc, as ZACF collectives had
different expectations and processes. In theory, the ZACF before December 2007
was a tight Platformist organisation, but in reality was much looser. In
response to claims by Reid-Ross and Stephens that I was involved in “purging black
militants,” the fact is the ZACF never “purged” any black member even after
it’s restructuring (see the contrasting claim in https://medium.com/@rossstephens/about-schmidt-how-a-white-nationalist-seduced-anarchists-around-the-world-chapter-1-1a6fa255b528#.z0qb55ahx).
The only person ever formally asked to leave the organisation was a young white
man. However, the late 2007 restructuring did not solve all the ZACF’s
problems, and it declined further in 2008 (see below).
In 2008, after 19 years as a field journalist,
I secured my dream job: Africa correspondent for Independent Newspapers’ seven daily
and seven weekly titles. I negotiated with foreign editor Peter Fabricius that
I would not merely cover political summits and conflict in Africa, but cover
the continent in all of its aspects, including social events such as Carnival
in Angola, and all its scientific and technical innovations. I was very excited
to begin – but to my utter dismay, the post was frozen by the company’s
cost-cutting accountants.
Disillusioned, I resigned from Saturday Star and began training
journalists across the African continent for a private agency frayintermedia,
run by famous coloured feminist Paula Fray (who remains on my CV by agreement
as a key character reference), and which conducted pan-African work on the
ground in countries such as Kenya and Botswana. As a result, I worked on
establishing new black community newspapers such as Penelopele News and mentored established township newspapers such
as Alex Pioneer whose editor Patricia
Hlungwane remains a close friend. In 2008 and early 2009, I worked for the International
Women’s Media Foundation (IWMF) in Mali – just about my favourite country
in the world – as well as in Uganda and Zambia, training journalists on
reporting on the critical role of women in African agriculture.
In February 2008, as a result of my
international liaison work, the first edition of Afrique sans chaines
(Africa without Chains) was published by the anarcho-syndicalist CNT-France,
as part of a joint project with the ZACF to produce intelligent anarchist
analysis of African struggles. The journal was published over the following year
until April 2009 and I still sorely regret that it no longer exists. In the
same period, I established the African Anarchism page on Facebook as a
ZACF project to promote African anarchist perspectives and to encourage active
engagement in the multiracial working class struggles of the day; still run by
the ZACF, it has 550 members today.
Top, the October 2008
edition of Afrique sans chaines. Bottom, with girlfriend Eve, 2009.
But
as progressive movements declined, reactionary forces surged: in April 2008, a
rash of so-called “xenophobic” violence swept over South African townships – including
areas the ZACF and our associated APF and other radical social movements had
been involved in for years. The grim result was 62 black people, both
foreigners and locals, murdered by ethno-chauvinist vigilantes, and 100,000
people displaced. The public burning to death of Mozambican immigrant Ernesto Nhamwuave, gruesomely captured on video, sent shockwaves across the world. But after years of state repression, the social movements were in
disarray (the Landless People’s Movement was imploding fast, and the APF was in
decline, dissolving in 2011).
I
was seriously tormented by our failure to prevent what under the 1949 UN
Convention on Genocide equated to genocide. The slaughter of our African
sisters and brothers also provoked an intensely gloomy introspection on the
part of the left more generally: how had we, so closely connected with these
communities as we were, failed to prevent this horror? Even a section of the APF was implicated in
some attacks, which the left viewed as “pogroms” or “xenophobia,” depending on
the analysis. By mid-2008, I was shocked and unhappy. I had left behind my
treasured job as a pan-African journalist, my divorce was through, my
organisation, the ZACF, was struggling and shrinking, and the unions and new
social movements in which we had placed such hope were failing at their basic
communal ethics.
During
the 2008 Pogroms, I wrote a deliberately provocative but sometimes badly
formulated internal discussion document which I submitted to the ZACF in July,
called Politico-Social Dynamics of the
South African Anarchist Movement. The
document was never ignored by ZACF, as implied by Reid-Ross and Stephens, nor
do I endorse it today. There was a lengthy debate on it in December at the
ZACF’s 2008 Congress, the organisation’s annual policy-making plenary. The
minutes make it explicitly clear that I rejected some of my formulations:
“MI [myself]: I wrote this during the chauvinistic
killings and was disillusioned by the involvement of social movement activists.
Having re-read it this week, the paragraph on the inability of many black
activists to grasp logical process strikes me as bordering on racism.” I
stand by that position today, too. And the same Congress did not adopt any part
of Politico-Social Dynamics of the South African Anarchist Movement. The full Congress, and I myself,
repudiated the discussion document and it did not become part of ZACF policy.
But
in using cherry-picked extracts from the document (the aforementioned “paragraph on the inability of
many black activists to grasp logical process” that I later thought was “bordering
on racism”), to justify the claim that I was a racist or
infiltrator, Reid-Ross and Stephens miss out on the core issue the document
raised: why had the ZACF failed, in five years, to build a significant black
core membership as we had managed to previously achieve with the WSF? The
organisation, in its decline, had become largely white, or as I put it, it “lost
its last black members in **Swaziland**, reducing it from a biracial
‘international’ organisation to a white ‘national’ organisation.”
Reid-Ross
and Stephens completely misrepresent this sentence, asserting I put “’national’
in quotations to connote white South Africans who share a common ‘culture’” (https://medium.com/@rossstephens/about-schmidt-how-a-white-nationalist-seduced-anarchists-around-the-world-chapter-1-1a6fa255b528#.z0qb55ahx).
This is a bizarre and self-serving reading, at odds with the facts. I simply
meant that the ZACF was now “national” in the sense of being solely South
African, as opposed to “bi-national” as previously, when it was both South
African and Swazi, and that it had obviously declined by 2008 to a small, white
group. I used the inverted commas around “nation” to signal an anarchist
distance from the very concept of the “nation,” and have certainly never called
“white South Africans” a “nation,” which they are not. (Since Reid-Ross and
Stephens are unclear on what the white far right in South Africa actually stands
for, it could be mentioned it aims, not at an independent white nation, of all white ethnic groups, but at an independent “Afrikaner / Boer nation,” slightly over 60% of the whites – yet embracing only the
conservative Calvinist / Christian Identity element of that group).
The
conspiracy theory of ZACF history Reid-Ross and Stephens then provide –
“Schmidt had been there every step of the way” in turning the ZACF into a white
group – will not fly. It was precisely the decline of the ZACF in 2008 into a white
group that I objected to! And the theory just does not make sense. Since I was
a founder-member of the ZACF why would I (if I was indeed the nefarious
character they claim) be so active in building the ZACF into a majority-black
group, as it was until sometime in 2007, in recruiting black members and in
working with black comrades? If my aim was a “white anarchist movement,” I
could presumably have achieved this easily enough by not helping found the ZACF
at all. Why would I do all this work, in BMC, ABC-SA, and ZACF, only to then
“purge” the very people I had helped recruit? And of all places to infiltrate
in South Africa, a group like the ZACF would be at the very bottom of the South
African white right’s list, way below even the much-reduced PAC or AZAPO.
I
also never argued for a “racial divide in the Federation in 2003,” as they
claim, but simply that the leading “frontline” collectives of the ZACF should
be the BAG, SAG and ZAG, all of which were primarily black working class groups
facing the fists and fines of the state on a daily basis. This meant that the
BMC, Zabalaza Books and ABC-SA collectives should provide support services for
these frontline groups. It was a functional distinction in support of black
working class and poor struggle’ nothing more, nothing less. There was no
deep-laid infiltration plan on my part, expressed in “purges” (which never
happened) or a white nationalist project (which was never proposed and never
existed).
What
I grappled with in Politico-Social
Dynamics of the South African
Anarchist Movement was the
question of how to build a united, broad working class movement in a divided
and wounded society like South Africa, with its awful history. I do not want to
defend every line of a document that I wrote eight or nine years ago, in a
period where I was heading for burn-out, and I as I said I repudiated the
document in 2008 – as did all of my ZACF comrades.
It
was very flawed but it was not a “white nationalist” manifesto, and it argued not
for a whites-only organisation, but rather critiqued why it was that the ZACF
was in reality a small white group, “presumably temporarily” only. The document
stressed social, not biological, factors, such as the decapitation of the black
working class movement by co-option into the new state, and the disastrous
education system inflicted on the black working class; and it also stressed
that white cultures in South Africa were as authoritarian as any others, and
that white nationalism was divisive.
The flawed and repudiated 2008 document did
not have a way forward. And at the 2008 Congress, for example, I stated: “We need to recognise the [racial]
divide and work to bridge it, but without coming in like white knights with
graven tablets of wisdom, and without creating dependency.”
Top, at a refugee camp in El Fasher, Darfur, Sudan, 2007, with, left to
right, Jean-Jacques Cornish of Radio
France International, our guide, and Izak Khomo of Channel Africa. Bottom, with rural farmers outside Bamako, Mali,
2008.
It is also worth noting that
after the 2008 Pogroms, and before and after the 2008 ZACF congress, I threw
myself into ABC-SA (ZACF) work within the social movement’s Campaign Against Xenophobia, that in
this period my article on the 1976 Soweto Uprising in a book edited by Holger Marcks
& Matthias Sieffert, Die groβen Streiks: Episoden aus dem
Klassenkamp (Unrast, Münster, Germany) was published, continued to do solidarity work with
my Swazi anarchist comrades, and as an aside, that over two years in this period, I was dating Eve, an African of Indian descent; we remain close friends today.
Also, over March to December
2008, I facilitated with Press Ombudsman Joe Thloloe a series of monthly Journalism Dialogues on topics such as
how the media covered race after the Skierlik Massacre of blacks by a young
white gunman, and on whether tabloid journalism fueled hate-speech and the 2008
Pogroms, and on the tensions between free speech and hate speech; as a result,
I was interviewed on 14 radio programmes about these issues. (At no point, let
me note, was I interviewed on “FM radio with Lucien van der Walt” as claimed by
Reid-Ross and Stephens: we have never done a joint show. See https://medium.com/@rossstephens/about-schmidt-how-a-white-nationalist-seduced-anarchists-around-the-world-chapter-3-7d288d84b170#.u1gjwg7wr).
In
early 2009, I increased my work on defending black African migrants by running
workshops on health and migration for the International Organisation for
Migration (IOM) in South Africa and Zambia (meeting again with Malele
Dodia), and in July 2009, I delved further into my migrant-defence work,
running workshops in Johannesburg and Durban for the UN’s International
Labour Organisation (ILO) on assisting activists and journalists understand
human trafficking; my ILO work continued into 2010 (today the chief of CNN’s
anti-trafficking Freedom Project has agreed verbally that I may be called on to
consult to them from time to time on trafficking in Africa).
None of this work even comes
close to fitting the image of my work and views that Reid-Ross and Stephens
have created. None of it indeed is even mentioned in their articles. Like the
vast bulk of my writings, activism and activities, it is completely absent from
their tracts. None of this material is particularly hard to locate: contacting
the ZACF would have probably led to minutes being provided; my various online
CVs and career descriptions also indicate these activities; and, if asked about
them directly, I would certainly have explained them in depth.
In
late 2009, however, I temporarily retired from active political work in the
ZACF as a result of the collective stresses of my divorce, and of my war
correspondence in the DRC, Darfur and Lebanon. I would later (January 2011) be
diagnosed by a psychiatrist as suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder
(PTSD). That Reid-Ross and Stephens question whether my experiences were
serious enough to cause PTSD is completely irrelevant, as well as malicious,
and they are not qualified to judge, unlike the psychiatrist who diagnosed me
(see https://medium.com/@rossstephens/about-schmidt-how-a-white-nationalist-seduced-anarchists-around-the-world-chapter-3-7d288d84b170#.u1gjwg7wr
).
At
the time all I knew was that I was burned out and was no longer able to work at
meetings and on the streets as required by the pretty demanding ZACF membership
rules, so maintaining close personal and political ties with its members, I
left the organisation I had co-founded, but leaving the demands of the
townships behind gave me far more time to do research and writing in support of
the anarchist movement.
In
2009, the first, theory, strategy and tactics, volume of van der Walt’s and my
two-volume Counter-power project, Black Flame: The Revolutionary Class
Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism, Counter-power Vol.1 was published in the United States by
AK Press to mostly positive critical comment from the academy and from the
organised labour press – in fact, Black
Flame became a political science set-work in several South African and
United States universities, and has also been used in trade union education and
anarchist courses. It has also spurred substantial debates around the world.
Critics have argued that it is heavily centred on class struggle and workers’
and peasants’ movements (we do not deny that), although they have praised its
focus on the Global South and on the sweeping coverage of anarchist and
syndicalist history and theory it provides.
But
of course, Reid-Ross and Stephens have to skip over this substantial key text
(as with the bulk of my activism and writings), since it just does not bear
out, in any way, the image of me that they wish to paint. Translated into
German, it was published in 2013 by Edition Nautilus (Hamburg), Black Flame has also been translated into
Spanish and was set be published by Virus Editorial (Barcelona), and is being
translated into French to be published by AL Éditions
(Paris). Further translations in planning include Portuguese, Mandarin, Greek
and Arabic. After holding launches in South Africa with van der Walt, I
launched Black Flame in Guadalajara, Mexico,
in 2009 where I had been invited by the Tecnológico de
Monterrey to train a multiracial class of journalism
and foreign affairs students in conflict reporting.
Once
Black Flame was published, I threw
myself into fleshing out Counter-power
Vol.2, tentatively named Global
Fire: 150 Fighting Years of Anarchism and Syndicalism, which details
the ideological and organisational lineages of anarchist movement history
globally over the past fifteen decades. A massive work expected to be at least
twice the size of Black Flame when
finally published, it is the most comprehensive overview of the international
anarchist movement yet produced in any language. A YouTube video of a talk I gave in Canada on Black Flame in 2010 is available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vq8BGp1a3io (the final part is missing).
Bear
in mind that it has taken 15 years of work – without a cent being paid in
advance by AK Press of our own time and expense to do this research. Let me
stress here, too, that serious political works do not generate masses of money:
they are undertaken, at great personal expense in time and money, and the
royalties, such as they are, could not support an individual. These works are
not undertaken for cash, but from personal and political commitment. Publishers
like AK Press do not fund them with research grants or support: they proofread
and advise on the manuscript, and then publish.
In fact, my annual earnings from Black
Flame are less than half what I spent on my contributions to the ZACF’s
township projects.
By
2009, the Global Fire manuscript
already had a thematic a section in the post-war era that related to new
claimants to the title of anarchist, including tendencies calling themselves
“anarcho-primitivist”, “post-anarchist” (sometimes called “neo-anarchist”), and
“national-anarchist”. Some of these existed in the initial drafts of Black Flame Also, but were transferred
to the second volume. On the first two tendencies, it was easy enough to read
journals like Three-Eyed Goat and Fifth Estate which were mailed in hard
copy to the ZACF, or to read materials produced by the likes of Crimethinc
online, or to engage with “post-anarchist” theorists like David Graeber.
Top, a poster for a Libertære Socialister Black Flame study group in Denmark.
Bottom, with members of my conflict-reporting class in Guadalajara, Mexico, 2009.
But
the third claimant to the title of anarchist, “national-anarchism,” was
presumed by most anarchist commentators to be a dangerous entryist form of
neo-fascism. This current was viewed with great alarm in Western anarchist
circles, although it now seems clear that it is a very marginal force.
Certainly we never encountered any such formations in South Africa, where, as
indicated, anything smacking of the left is complete anathema to conservative
as well as hard right whites.
But
given all the hullaballoo, I decided to find out more, extending my
infiltration work beyond the white radical right in South Africa to try and
research so-called “national-anarchism.” At that stage it was a new tendency
and its writings were slender, and, if critics’ claims were to be believed, its
writings and public statements were not a reliable guide to its true project. So
I set up two false Facebook accounts, one purporting to be that of a woman of
Ukrainian descent living in South Africa and another that of a Namibian man,
who were interested in “national-anarchism”. Under such guises, I befriended
the key “national-anarchist” theorist, the English former National Front
fascist Troy Southgate. This was an expansion of my journalistic work on the
far right, already mentioned, which I continued although writing for newspapers
was no longer my primary work. I wanted
to hear from the horse’s mouth, so to speak, what the movement was really
about, rather than rely on secondary texts by its critics, or on slick
propaganda by “national-anarchists” themselves.
My
fake couple’s personas set up a completely imaginary South African
“national-anarchist” Facebook group called “Black Battlefront” (this, let me
stress, was a private joke: the name was that of a Japanese anarchist group of
the 1920s, alluded to in my books, but something I presumed, correctly, no
white supremacist would pick up). In order to make the group seem real, I
fleshed out a policy statement called the “Creed”
which “I” (or rather, my invented personas) used to “prove” (bogus) credentials,
posted on a blog called “Strandwolf” which got just about zero traffic.
Of
course the Facebook and blog pages used symbols of the radical right (this is
not some astounding fact uncovered by Reid-Ross and Stephens): they were after
all intended to provide a portal for me to investigate “national-anarchism”
undercover, and not a portal for “national-anarchists” to recruit anyone. I
deliberately brought some elements into the Creed
that no white right-winger in South Africa would easily accept: a multiracial separatist Cape home to
Coloured, indigenous and white residents. The traditional demands of the white
far right are for a separate all-white Afrikaner/ Boer Volkstaat in the centre of the country, involving the old Transvaal
and Orange Free State which were conquered in 1902. I would never accept any
secessionist project, black or white, which did not create a multiracial
territory with equal rights for all, as I made clear to
Reid-Ross in a lengthy interview, first on Facebook chat then email, that ran
from June to August 2015: see 20 July 2015). In other words, the false
organisation was designed so that no real South African right-winger would
accept it; a fact that I knew would be lost on Southgate and his cohorts.
Instead
the obvious aim of this activity, which did not take very long, was just to get
“national-anarchists” to open up to me. It must be stressed that as a fake
organisation, “Black Battlefront” never had any actual meetings or events let
alone members, though people like Southgate joined its Facebook page; its
“National Congress,’ reported online, was a complete fiction; the non-existent
group naturally made no attempt to proselytise anyone and had only a tiny group
of online “friends,” most of them in the USA and Europe.
If
it was, as Reid-Ross and Stephens claim “a focal point for a ‘racially aware’
cell within the anarchist movement,” why would this “cell” be public and why
would it not actually be based “within” the actual South African anarchist
movement? What were its supposed activities? This statement by Reid-Ross and
Stephens about the “cell” is pure speculation, and, as before, their
speculation ended up with inventing the worst possible interpretation (For the
“cell” argument: https://medium.com/@rossstephens/about-schmidt-how-a-white-nationalist-seduced-anarchists-around-the-world-chapter-2-1849e232b943#.n6gkftdiq).
Some
sense of my evolving thinking on so-called “national-anarchism” can be found in
my lengthy 2012 review of Maia Ramnath’s two excellent books on South Asian
libertarian socialism (South Asian
Anarchism: Paths to Praxis, online at www.anarkismo.net/article/23404).
Here I argued that Mohandas Gandhi’s romantic socialism, with its stress on
ancient and seamless “Hindu” culture, was similar to today’s
“national-anarchism” in that it mixed calls for decentralism, national
separatism, and a return to an authentic and homogenous village community. I
also suggested that so-called “national-anarchism” just did not fit entirely
neatly into the “fascist” model: “national-anarchism”
was “misdiagnosed” “as fascist,” but its stress on “radical decentralism,
anti-hegemonic anti-statism (and often anti-capitalism), with a strong
self-determinist thrust that stresses cultural-ethnic homogeneity with a
traditional past justifying a radical future” was “hardly ‘fascism’ or a
rebranding of ‘fascism,’ for what is fascism without the state, hierarchy and
class, authoritarianism, and the führer-principle?”
This analysis may be correct, or it may not be. A good deal depends
on how we define “fascism” (an extremely controversial issue in the academy),
for example, and this not helped when anarchists and others slap the “fascist”
label on anything they disapprove of. But, in suggesting that this analysis was
some sort of apologia for so-called “national-anarchism,” Reid-Ross and Stephens
come close to insisting that anyone who does not accept their own view of the relationship between “national-anarchism” and
“fascism” is themselves a fascist or “crypto-fascist.” That is a very slippery
and dangerous slope to get on, and it closes down real debate by using labels. That
I argued that so-called “national-anarchism” could not be entirely reduced to
fascism is not the same as defending this current, or denying that it has a
lineage in the radical right.
In fact, the same review article expresses my disagreements with
both Gandhi (for example: “Gandhi’s libertarianism leads easily into right wing
romanticism,” while Gandhi’s Sarvodaya
heirs accept “archaic rights and privileges, traditional village hierarchies
and paternalistic landlordism”) as well as “national-anarchism” (described as a
“strange hybrid of recent years” that shares the same
problematic “völkisch” leanings as Gandhism). But by cherry-picking quotes from
the review article, and forcing them to fit their story, Reid-Ross and Stephens
misrepresent what I said (see https://medium.com/@rossstephens/about-schmidt-how-a-white-nationalist-seduced-anarchist-movements-throughout-the-world-chapter-4-8ff357d222e3#.58498hn0w).
A further example of their manipulative gutter journalism is
provided in the same chapter. Reid-Ross and Stephens state that they contacted
Ramnath sometime in 2015, and showed her “a sample of his [my] Stormfront
activity,” leading Ramnath to say of my review article: “Now, when read in the
light of this new information, it’s just gross.” Her statement was then quoted.
The two authors never indicated to Ramnath the context and debate over the “Stormfront
activity,” nor my side of the story: their version was presented as
self-evidently true, and through this sort of leading questioning, they set up
a situation practically guaranteed to alienate Ramnath from me.
Further examples of questionable journalistic methods can be seen in
the lengthy interview I had with Reid-Ross from June to August 2015: a full
copy will be published on this site. At no stage did Reid-Ross indicate that he
was in fact working on an expose of me: instead he stated (17 June 2015) “Hi
there, I'm researching National Anarchism for a book I'm writing for AK Press …
There are a lot of opinions on National Anarchism, and I wanted to follow up
with you … to chat about aspects of nationalism, anarchism, and ideology.”
Later: “Thanks very much for all your work writing and organizing to spread
anarchy and better the world. Thanks again for your contribution in this
interview, which will go a long way in putting together the pieces on
anarchism, class struggle, and race for my forthcoming book and possibly an
article” (24 July 2015). Obviously this misrepresentation also meant I was not
given a right-of-reply since no charges or claims were levelled against me
until AK Press made their initially entirely unsubstantiated statement on 25
October 2015. My request (27 July 2015) to “be given the opportunity to read
the relevant parts of your text before publication” and “negotiate a rephrasing”
of parts if I felt I had been misunderstood or had not expressed myself clearly
was also completely ignored.
Important parts of the interview were completely left out: for
example, I stated clearly (23 July 2015) that so-called “national-anarchism”
was “a neo-fascist entryist tactic… an ideological Trojan horse,” proceeding
from an “original neo-fascist impulse.” I added that that the “gut feeling
among anarchists and neo-anarchists is, however, that such N-A enclaves are
racist and not merely ethnic, and in this their instincts are totally correct:
in the final assessment, N-A is a racist
(anti-POC [People of Colour]) as well as a racial
(ie: race-defined) romantic countermodernist movement with ‘a traditional past
justifying a radical future,’ and this totally incompatible with both
revolutionary classical anarchism and radical neo-anarchism.” In another
answer, I also drew a distinction “fascism” proper, and its “neo-fascist”
derivatives, which have some but not all of its features, with
“national-anarchism” an example of “neo-fascism” that moves away from reliance
on the state as its vehicle (24 June 2015).
Reid-Ross stated in his correspondence to me that this was “quite
adroit, and I think your clarifications regarding your Ramnath piece deserve to
see some light” (24 June 2015). Of course they have not seen “some light,” for
the obvious reason that my hostility to so-called “national-anarchism” and my
linking it to “neo-fascism” would not fit the claims made by Reid-Ross and
Stephens. Also left out of the material cited from the interview were my
unequivocal statements on my core politics, stressing mass-based class struggle
and revolutionary classical anarchism as outlined, for example, in Black Flame and Cartography (e.g. 25 July 2015), as opposed to racist so-called
“national-anarchism.” That too did not fit the straw-man argument.
But this commitment to class struggle and anarchism, including
anarcho-syndicalism and Platformism, is of course, the position I have taken in
pretty much every book or political article I have written over the last
20-plus years, and lies at the heart of my militant work. But it does not fit
Reid-Ross’, Stephens’, and AK Press’, preconceived notion that I has some sort
of Machiavellian infiltrator of the anarchists, and is discarded in place of a
caricature. Confirmation bias, only seeing what fits what the investigator
wants to find all along, and not dealing with compelling but contradictory
evidence, is what marks their interventions.
I readily admitted in Two
Swallows Don’t Make a Summer – before Reid-Ross and Stephens published the
first of their series of accusations –
that I did not initially admit the false Facebook profiles either to
Reid-Ross when he asked me (nor to the ZACF of which I was no longer a member
when the matter was raised) as I had made no preparations for myself to be
outed as having done such undercover work. This has now been given as evidence
of proof of my guilt as a “national-anarchist” infiltrating the anarchist
movement – and not, as my huge body of anarchist work clearly suggests, the
other way around! This is merely Reid-Ross’s unbalanced interpretation and does
not constitute any sort of proof that I am a “fascist” or
“national-anarchist”.
Reid-Ross and Stephens also suggest my undercover work was not in
line with “basic journalistic standards” (https://medium.com/@rossstephens/about-schmidt-how-a-white-nationalist-seduced-anarchists-around-the-world-chapter-2-1849e232b943#.g8d1zwb1e).
But what then can be said of the “basic journalistic standards” of Reid-Ross
and Stephens themselves, with their selective quotations and cherry-picking,
leading questions, misrepresentation of the aims of an interview,
pseudo-psychology and speculations and mind-reading, heavy reliance on faceless
sources, and failure to grapple with mountains of evidence contradicting their
claims? If I had at least some
justification for undercover work (for example, investigating dangerous
right-wing currents that were, in the 2000s, involved in a treason trial for a
bombing campaign against blacks in South Africa), what possible justification
would they have for misrepresenting themselves to me?
Much has been made of the length of time I spent on investigating
both the white right (Saturday Star,
2005-2007) and “national-anarchism” (Global
Fire, 2009-2013), yet neither probe was a full-time engagement, but rather
sporadic and drawn out investigations that, given my immense other workload
which you will see a part of in this text, did not enjoy primacy. It was a
small fire I kept burning, but amidst an exhausting work schedule, serious
personal difficulties and ongoing progressive political commitments. Even so,
as I have indicated, I did produce materials on these topics. My
narrow targeting of theorists like Southgate, and non-proseletising attitude
towards Black Battlefront shows that my real aim was to gather information on
the “national anarchists”, not to advance their cause.
At this time, my anarchist writings also included a very
clear critique of anarchist revolutionary praxis versus retro-tribalism,
whether of a “national-anarchist” or other sort, in which I drew on Brahim Fillali
of Morocco: Nostalgic Tribalism or Revolutionary Transformation?, Zabalaza #9, Johannesburg, South
Africa, September 2008, online at http://www.ainfos.ca/08/sep/ainfos00306.html.
Top, working on the street in Jeppestown, Johannesburg, interviewing
African migrants for the Reporting on Xenophobia, Diversity and Migration
workshops, 2008. Bottom, a French newspaper article on Brahim Fillali with the
headline A libertarian journalist faces
an employer’s mafia.
Also
in this period, in 2009, I planned the Holding Politicians
Accountable pre-election training and seminar sessions which comprised
political landscape debates between 80 participants, journalism master-classes
and a broadcast SAfm radio debate between political party policy-makers
committing their parties to take a stand against xenophobia in their election
campaigning, and in the same year, co-planned and facilitated a
series of Reporting on Xenophobia,
Diversity and Migration workshops in four townships in Gauteng, South
Africa, for community journalists for the Open Society Foundation (OSF). Out of
this came the anti-xenophobic article Sharpening the Pangas: Understanding &
Preventing Future Pogroms (Zabalaza #11, Johannesburg,
September 2010): http://zabalaza.net/2010/12/08/sharpening-the-pangas-understanding-and-preventing-future-pogroms/. And the Portuguese-language
edition of Bulgarian Anarchism Armed,
Anarquismo Búlgaro em Armas: A
Linha de Massas Anarco-Comunista (Faísca Publicaçiões Libertarias, Brazil),
was published in 2009.
Other anarchist writings of
this period of 2004-2009 include:
Zabalaza #5, Johannesburg, May 2004:
- A Makhnovist
in Africa: Shalom Schwartzbard (reprinted in Jewish
Affairs, Vol. 59, No.4, 2004)
-
Fire-ants & Flowers: Revolutionary Anarchism in Latin America, republished as one of the articles in A
Reader on Especifismo, Adam Weaver (editor), 2009, online at:
Zabalaza #6, Johannesburg, April 2005:
- The
President from the Skies v. the Auntie who says “No!” (extract from report on Social Movements congress.
Full version online at: www.nu.ac.za/ccs/default.asp?3,28,10,1472 )
- Doing
the Liberation Lang-arm: Africa and South Africa after African “Socialism” (extract from interview of ZACF – Jonathan Payn,
Steve Dhlomo and Siyabonga Mgenge – by Black
Flag, UK)
-
Swaziland: a Bitter Taste to the Sugarcane (with
Mandla Dlamini, a Swazi ZACF member)
- ABC-SA
protests the murder of CIPO-RFM activists
-
Anarchism, Alternative Unionism & Workers’ Struggles in Iraq (further notes)
Zabalaza #7, Johannesburg, December 2006:
-
Collective Bargaining by Riot: Election Day in South Africa
- The
Anti-Liberation Movements (editing of and
introduction to the talk by veteran Jewish anarchist Alan Lipman)
-
Swaziland After the Bombings (with
Mandla Khoza)
- The New
American Imperialism in Africa
- Is
China Africa’s New Imperialist Power? (with Lucien van der Walt)
Zabalaza #8, Johannesburg, December 2007:
- Now is
the Winter of our Discontent: SA Public Sector Strike Stokes the Fire of
Popular-Class Unity and Reveals “Communist” Weakness (written jointly for The Northeastern Anarchist #13, New York City, USA, April 2008)
- Blood,
Water & Oil: Fallacies of the Darfur War
- A New
Guantanamo in Africa?
-
Misrepresentation of Self-Management in the Caribbean (Introduction with Lucien van der Walt, and a few
footnotes)
Zabalaza #9, Johannesburg, September 2008:
- Only the Kenyan People can Heal
the Rift in their Society torn by Squabbling Elites,
introduction to the piece by Juliana Omale-Atemi
Zabalaza #10, Johannesburg, March 2009:
- The Jacob Zuma Cargo Cult and
the “Implosion” of Alliance Politics
- A Bitter Taste to the Sugarcane (introduction to the Zabalaza Books pamphlet of the same name)
- The Anarchist Movement in North
Africa 1877-1951 (with Lucien van der Walt)
- Jalan Journal: a New Asian
Anarchist Voice is Born, introduction to the Jalan
Journal founding statement
- Something Smells Different in
Cuba, introduction to the May 2008 piece by the
Movimiento Libertario Cubano, Cuban exile, France/Spain/Mexico/Venezuela
- ABC-SA Footnote to Against
Political Terror in Russia, We Mobilise! by Alternative Libertaire, France/Belgium
- Channeling Obamania, introduction to the piece Change
We Need: an Anarchist Perspective on the 2008 US Election by NEFAC USA.
Zabalaza #11, Johannesburg,
September 2010
- Death and the Mielieboer: the Eugène Terre’Blanche
Murder & Poor-White Cannon-fodder in South Africa
- Industrial & Social
Foundations of Syndicalism, extract of (De)constructing
Counter-power talks given in Canada, March 2010
- Massacre as a Tool of the
African State [on the September 2009 massacre in Conakry and
Guinea’s first democratic elections]
- Short-changed: Egyptian
Struggle for Democracy Founders on Obama’s Stinginess
Online articles I wrote in this period included:
The
Sulphurs of Santiaguito: Reflections on the Guatemalan Civil War (originally written in 2003, looking back on the
tail-end of the war in 1996), anarkismo.net, 2007, online at: www.anarkismo.net/article/8345
Power,
Politics and Identity in South African Media, review of the Human Sciences Research Council book
by that name, Focus #51, Helen Suzman Foundation, Cape Town, South Africa, 1
September 2008, online at: http://www.hsf.org.za/resource-centre/focus/issues-41-54/focus-51
PW & Pinochet: the Dictatorial Roots of
Neoliberal Democracy in South Africa and Chile, anarkismo.net, 2009, online at www.anarkismo.net/article/13598
As will be evident, I wrote a lot. Some of my
views have changed over time, and sometimes I got things wrong. That is the
reality of evolving as a human being and anarchist. But to pick out, of all
this work, including books like Black
Flame, selective, decontextualised sentences from a few pieces, completely
misrepresents the scope and coherence and themes of my work as a writer and a
militant.
3. Recent Activism, Research and Writing: 2010-2015
In
late 2009 and early 2010, I travelled to Zambia (meeting with Malele Dodia
again), Tanzania, Malawi, and Botswana, conducting workshops called Poverty, Food Security & Social Protection for journalists and activists for the Regional Hunger and Vulnerability Programme (RHVP) on
the importance to poor people of social protections such as a basic income
grant, concluding with a workshop in South Africa. In January 2010, I was
appointed Managing Director of frayintermedia (which post prevented me
rejoining the ZACF should I have wished).
In
early 2010, I was invited on a speaking tour of Canadian universities and
activist social centres on the Counter-power
project, during which I met with militants of Common Cause (CC) of Ontario, Union Comuniste Libertaire (UCL) of
Quebec and the Organización Popular
Anarquista Révolucionaria
(OPAR) of Mexico, and attended immigrant dignity
protests. The talks were well-received by anarchists, “post-anarchists”, left
communists and working class people in my audiences. As I always try to do when
I travel, I stayed with local activists to get a better idea of their daily
struggles and to cement our friendships. I was asked as a
result of my Black Flame presentation
in Montreal to write a pocket history of the global anarchist movement as part
of a series to which Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn and David Graeber had already
contributed, that was a substantial revision of Five Waves.
Left, Zimbabwean Foster
Dongozi (right) delivers
the keynote address at the founding of the Professional Journalists’
Association of South Africa (ProJourn), Johannesburg, 2010. Right, meeting with
Canadian and Mexican anarchists – Common Cause and Organización Popular
Anarquista Revolucionaria (OPAR) – in Toronto during my 2010
Black Flame tour of Canada.
In
March 2010, five years after the collapse of my former trade union, the SAUJ,
and after two years of broad negotiations and consultations, I founded the Professional
Journalists’ Association of South Africa (ProJourn) that at its launch was
endorsed by all the main media organisations in the country and addressed by
Foster Dongozi, president of the Southern African Journalists’ Association
(SAJA). With a directly-democratic Constitution based exactly on the ZACF
Constitution, a non-voting Oversight Board of veteran journalists of all
colours, and a multiracial voting Secretariat of which I remain the
Administrative Secretary, ProJourn today has a support base of more than 3,280
journalists from all cultures, has engaged in numerous initiatives including
starting the transnational Ulu Club for Southern African Conflict
Journalists and making submissions to the Press Freedom Commission, and is
today a member organisation of the Alliance of Language and Media Practitioners
(LAMP), a media industry lobby on professional standards and working conditions.
In early 2010, I also ran a workshop in Namibia for HIV-AIDS non-governmental
organisation Desert Soul, assisting journalists on how to report on the
pandemic.
This
was to prove a very tough period for me, however, as in mid-July 2010, I was
rushed to hospital, dying of meningitis. I narrowly survived, but as a parting
gift, the virus provoked a major seizure which bent me in half backwards,
breaking my spine in five places. Over July-August, I slipped in and out of
consciousness in hospital; it was not at all clear that I would live. When I
was finally released in a wheelchair, wearing a back-brace, I was taken care of
for two months by friends and of mine, and my memory is patchy. The medication
used seems to have affected my moods, and while some days I functioned well, on
others I was not. I mention this it intersected with my (as yet) undiagnosed
post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and personal burn-out. I would forget
basic things, and what I did from one day to the next, and vacillate between
grand plans and personal disorganisation. I tried to keep up with my work, and
though I posted under my false identities on Stormfront and Facebook in this
period, but I do not really remember it very well, possibly as a result of
lesions on the brain caused by the seizure. I became moody, depressed and
aggressive at times.
The
fact that my accounts of what happened in this period are inconsistent, is
simply because my memory of it is patchy and poor. (Reid-Ross and Stephens of
course charge me with lying, and make light of my illness and state, although
they stop short of claiming my illness and trauma were fabricated: https://medium.com/@rossstephens/about-schmidt-how-a-white-nationalist-seduced-anarchists-around-the-world-chapter-2-1849e232b943#.1urggh3ue).
As one example, because I could not remember some postings, I thought my
Stormfront account had been hacked, although I suppose I did make those posts:
whatever their content, however, I naturally (and yet again) repudiate such
comments and stress I was playing a role, as an undercover journalist.
When an actress plays Lady Macbeth, the audience understands that the
actress is not in real life an instigator of murder, so why is it so hard for
AK Press and its two agents to accept my undercover roles for what they were? It
is grossly unfair of Reid-Ross and Stephens to now suggest these comments
reflect my true character and state of mind at a time when I suffered massive
memory loss, or mock the trauma I went through. I believe I am correct in
assuming that neither are neurological professionals and have had no access to
my medical records, so neither is in any position to comment, from afar, on my
illness and trauma.
During 2010, I wrote another article of which
Reid-Ross and Stephens have made much political capital. This was “Death and the Mielieboer:
the Eugène Terre’Blanche Murder & Poor-White Cannon-fodder in South Africa” which appeared after editorial peer-review in
Zabalaza and at anarkismo.net, online
at www.anarkismo.net/article/16353.
The article stressed that
South Africa in 2010 was dangerously racially polarised, a not terribly
controversial point: the country’s persistent, deep racial divisions and fears
of a breakdown into all-sided violent conflict are a central of not always
openly stated theme in its politics. The death of Terre’Blanche took place in
the context of a court case against elements of the ANC, centred on
now-expelled figure Julius Malema, for “hate speech.” The case centred on a
song with a chorus usually translated as “Kill the Boer,” the court ruling that
the song was, in fact, “hate speech.” In South African law, to put it another
way, blacks can indeed be racist and their hate speech has the potential to
incite racial violence.
My article made another
main argument: most whites were working class, many poor, and that while this layer
had been privileged (like all whites ) under apartheid, it had also served as
“cannon fodder” for the white ruling class in its oppression of black people.
This despite the fact that rural Afrikaners, many blacks and most coloureds
share an almost identical culture (10-million home-language speakers of
Afrikaans are black, and about 3-million each for whites and coloureds).
Polarising South Africa on racial lines, as figures like Terre’Blanche and
Malema did, helped divide the working class, and turn it against itself, in
much the same way as the anti-immigrant 2008 Pogroms, spurred by ruling class
propaganda and miserable social conditions, had led to clashes within the
working class.
Reid-Ross and Stephens,
however, presented this article as a right-wing tract, in their third chapter.
They noted, first, that certain right-wing websites carried the article, or
extracts from it. But that does not make the article right-wing: I have no
control over who cites or reproduces my work – and it they totally ignored the
fact that, as with their own practice, the right-wing site simply cherry-picked
paragraphs they liked, ignoring my anti-racist argument. Besides, the article
was also and in fact far, far more carried widely on anarchist and left-wing
blogs, boards and lists, something not mentioned by Reid-Ross and Stephens.
I specifically denied in the article that there was a “white
genocide” in South Africa, and linked farm killings (like that of Terre’Blanche
by farm labourers) to class issues, in a statement that Reid-Ross and Stephens themselves cited: “’It's not that there is a 'Boer Genocide' (as
yet) as many on the far right already proclaim’ claimed Schmidt, ‘but some
powder-keg combination of race and class is killing our white farmers at an
alarming rate’” (https://medium.com/@rossstephens/about-schmidt-how-a-white-nationalist-seduced-anarchists-
around-the-world-chapter-3-7d288d84b170#.3aqv35ixm). A few lines down, however, the two writers flatly
contradict themselves, now claiming that I was
arguing that “Boer genocide” was taking place. With this straw-man firmly in
place, they quickly moved on to list a series of appalling radical rightists
and white supremacists, like the murderer Dylan Roof, who claimed there was a
“white genocide.” This sets up guilt-by-association, linking me to people with
whom I have nothing whatsoever in common. The same method is used in chapter
five to bring up the names of everyone from Alexander Dugin to the Golden Dawn
(see https://medium.com/@rossstephens/about-schmidt-how-a-white-nationalist-seduced-anarchist-movements-throughout-the-world-chapter-4-8ff357d222e3#.qf5ym485s).
Reid-Ross and Stephens also
misattributed to me the statement that the ANC “is stoking angry ‘black
genocidaires’”: this statement, claim and quoted text do not appear anywhere in
the Terre’Blanche article. (In chapter five, they would also claim I saw “ANC
frontman, Jacob Zuma … as the main perpetrator of ‘white genocide,” a complete
fabrication as I have never said anything of the sort, let alone in this
article: see https://medium.com/@rossstephens/about-schmidt-how-a-white-nationalist-seduced-anarchist-movements-throughout-the-world-chapter-4-8ff357d222e3#.qf5ym485s ).
But back to chapter three:
Reid-Ross and Stephens went on to dispute my statement in the 2010 article that
“the murder rate of white farmers is four times higher than the rest of the population—in
a country with the highest murder rate in the world of any country not at war.”
They stated that “Schmidt's claim that Afrikaner farmers are being slaughtered
at four times the average rate was rejected even by Genocide Watch, the only
human rights group that has entertained claims of genocide.”
Unfortunately for Reid-Ross
and Stephens, there is no such refutation at Genocide Watch, and the link they
provide to the Genocide Watch website (http://www.genocidewatch.org/southafrica.html) does not link to any such statement: the citation is
fictitious in other words. The figure of “four times higher” is also not
“Schmidt’s claim” but from the reputable Institute for Security Studies (ISS)
in South Africa which reports that “it is more than twice as dangerous to be a
farmer than a policeman in South Africa, and a farmer or someone working on a
farm is almost four times more likely to be murdered than the average South
African” (https://africacheck.org/2013/11/06/why-it-is-more-dangerous-to-be-a-farmer-than-a-policeman-in-south-africa/). That 40% of
victims in these attacks are farmworkers (as Reid-Ross and Stephens correctly
note) does not refute this, since this means that white farmers (comprising a
tiny minority within the 10% white minority) comprise a massive 60% of victims.
That the land question plays into farm killings is not a controversial point
either.
In attacking me, Reid-Ross and Stephens continue with their deeply problematic use of sources. They dispute
claims that South Africa was dangerously polarised in 2010, saying that “In
their July 12, 2012 report, Genocide Watch listed the situation in South Africa
as ‘polarization,’ two stages away from actual genocide.” Note that I did not
cite in my article this organisation, whose assessment of South Africa is quite
different to mine. But Genocide Watch’s analyses, far from confirming Reid-Ross and Stephens, in
fact contradict their claims and are worth mentioning as an example of how
Reid-Ross and Stephens use sources. Stage 5, “polarization,” on the scale used by Genocide Watch, is a situation where “Extremists drive the groups apart. Hate groups broadcast
polarizing propaganda.… Extremist terrorism targets moderates …” (http://www.genocidewatch.org/aboutgenocide/8stagesofgenocide.html).
Note also that Reid-Ross and Stephens cite a mid-2012 Genocide Watch statement
to challenge a 2010 article, and skip over a key statement on the page they
cite (http://www.genocidewatch.org/southafrica.html), in which Genocide Watch stated
it had put South Africa “back” to Stage 6 on the 14 August 2012, the same as in 2010, and this is the “preparation”
stage before the “extermination” stage: "Victims are identified and …
Death lists … drawn up … Members of victim groups are forced to wear
identifying symbols… expropriated … segregated” etc. (http://www.genocidewatch.org/aboutgenocide/8stagesofgenocide.html).
Reid-Ross and Stephens seem to have spent rather more
time on this article of mine than I did, because it involved, for me, only a
brief interlude in an awful year. In late 2010, though I
was barely recovered, while I was walking my dogs at Emmarentia Dam, I heard a
gunshot – first the muzzle report, then the bullet whizzed past my ear, then it
struck the shrubbery behind me. As an experienced war correspondent by this
stage, I knew exactly what I had heard. But I hadn’t seen anyone fire the shot
and had no idea what it could be about, though investigative journalism is
dangerous work and one does make enemies. Searching my mind for someone who
would have cause to kill me, I remembered the two neo-Nazis who my stories had
helped jail back in 1997; I called contacts of mine in Durban and they
confirmed the men were now free, and, in defiance of a court order that they
never again be allowed to own firearms, had bought illegal arms. I realised the
University of Johannesburg had on their website a transcript of a talk I had
given there in which I had named the men and discussed the case. I asked the
university to remove the men’s names from the text. Three brushes with death in
as many months – the meningitis, breaking my spine, and a possible assassin –
put enormous stress on me.
But
I needed to get back on my feet and make a living and as a result of my
interest in restorative justice in transitional societies, and based on my
experience covering South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), I
was invited by the International Centre for Transitional Justice (ICTJ)
to conduct training for journalists in the Solomon Islands in the South Pacific
on covering their own TRC, convened after a bloody war between the islands of
Guadalcanal and Malaita – and to speak to the TRC commissioners about how to
engage the journalists. I managed to pull this off, and felt inspired to get my
life back on track.
Top, visited by anarchist
comrades in hospital while still contagious with meningitis, 2010. Bottom, wearing
my back-brace, with my conflict-reporting class of journalists in the Solomon
Islands, South Pacific, 2010.
Shortly
afterwards, I was appointed by the board of the Institute for the
Advancement of Journalism (IAJ), chaired by veteran anti-apartheid
journalist and Press Ombudsman Joe Thloloe, as the IAJ’s executive director; by
agreement, Thloloe remains on my CV as a key character reference. My staff was
an eclectic mix of all of South Africa’s many creeds and colours, and yet we
got on exceptionally well: I would serve there for the next four and a half
years, modernise and professionalise the Institute and drive its expansion of
work into the African continent: we subsequently worked on the ground in countries
such as Botswana, Egypt, Malawi, Madagascar, Mauritius, Morocco, Tanzania, Zambia,
and Zimbabwe and worked with journalists from all of Southern Africa plus
Nigeria, Rwanda, and elsewhere – and I was directly involved with exiled
Ethiopian journalist Girma Tesfaw Fantaye in attempting to set up a research
and human rights monitoring hub in Uganda for exiled Horn of Africa journalists
from Ethiopia, Eritrea, Sudan, South Sudan, and ex-Somalia. Again, hardly the
work profile of a “fascist” or “white nationalist.”
In
January 2011, I was diagnosed as suffering from PTSD and started what was to be
two years of psychological counselling which in its final year included
prescribed “happy pills” because the prescribed opiates I took as pain
medication for my broken spine made me depressed and aggressive. But my
depression took a deeper dive when in May 2011, my friend and former Saturday Star photographer Anton Hammerl
was killed outside Brega in Libya by pro-Gaddafi forces (I had staged a
candlelit vigil for his safe return at a time when we thought he had merely
been captured).
Then,
in early 2011, the ZACF became aware of the Stormfront profile which I had
maintained for purposes of my research. I had left the ZACF in April 2010,
having dropped out of active work in 2009 (see above). I was not a member, but
ZACF nonetheless investigated the allegations and rumours that were now being
made against me – the same allegations now published, years later, by Reid-Ross
and Stephens. I was grilled, on a range of issues, and the ZACF decided to
accept my explanations of my undercover journalism. It must be stressed that as
I was no longer a ZACF member, and the ZACF up until that date had no idea of my
undercover work, and so the organisation bears no responsibility for my
actions.
At
that point, I did not inform the ZACF about my false Facebook profiles (a
non-disclosure I have admitted in Two Swallows Don’t Make a Summer, 27
September 2015 https://www.facebook.com/AKPress/posts/10156169461510249). My reasoning, rightly or wrongly, was this:
in the previous year or so, a woman activist had confessed to me that for three
years she had been paid as a National Intelligence Agency (NIA) plant to
monitor the radical social movements in general. She was not specifically
tasked to monitor the ZACF, and had not been part of it, but the ZACF was part
of the scene that included formations like the APF that she had monitored. She
had since parted from NIA on bad terms, wracked with guilt over her duplicity.
I felt then I could not reveal her name, and that, with our comrades (the
radicals, not just the ZACF) under watch from the state, the fewer people
including the ZACF that knew about my research into the far right the better.
I
still will not reveal her name as it would then expose her former targets – including
close comrades of mine – to unwarranted harrassment that has nothing to do with
AK Press’ allegations. Some may question my decision not to name a former spy,
but I trust in the truth of her repentance. In contrast, Reid-Ross harassed a
veteran activist who had infamously been grievously tortured by the South
African police – demanding to know if she had been the spy! This is precisely
the sort of harm I wish to avoid. It is very revealing of Reid-Ross’ and
Stephens’ underhanded approach that at no
point in their investigation have they ever approached the ZACF – not even
to warn them of a supposed infiltrator in their midst!
In 2011, I organised the first of
a series of IAJ public policy Sparks
Seminars on the topic of hate speech – with special reference to the
“corrective rape” and killings of township lesbians, and subsequent seminars
over 2011-2014 covered issues as diverse as human rights and genocide in South
Sudan, press freedom in South Africa, and land restitution to dispossessed
blacks in South Africa. Later
that year, I attended a networking partners meeting of the International
Institute for Journalism (IIJ), now part of the Deutsche Welle Akademie, in
Berlin, at which I befriended fellow journalism educators from Senegal, India,
Ghana, and elsewhere – in particular becoming very close to Ledrollen Manriquez
of the Peace & Conflict Journalism Network (PECOJON) in the
Philippines to whom I remain deeply indebted for sharing their excellent work
on journalism safety and conflict reporting training which I incorporated into
my own. I toured the sombre memorials to the Holocaust and to victims of the
Gestapo, being delighted to see that the place where Hitler’s corpse was burned
is an unmarked and pretty playground for children. I was also able to meet with
a ZACF member living in Berlin who set up a meeting with militants of the
anarchist Mötmakt organisation from Norway and we visited a local hangout
of the Freie Arbeiterinnen- und Arbeiter-Union (FAU).
After
Berlin, I made a trip to France, met in Paris with Alternative Libertaire (AL)
historian Guillaume Davranche for my self-funded multimedia project The People Armed: Anarchist Fighters
Verbatim (which AK Press had
agreed to publish – again with no advanced fees being paid; as an international
project that requires face-to-face interviews, it is entirely self-funded). I
also met in the south of France with sole surviving member of the Spanish Confederación Nacional del Trabajo’s (CNT’s) Interior Directorate
which was detailed with assassinating General Francisco Franco, Octavio
Alberola Suriñach, and his anarchist partner Ariane Gransac Sedori. The meeting
was facilitated by veteran Scottish anarchist and would-be Franco assassin
Stuart Christie who I consider a friend and who kindly wrote the introduction
to Black Flame; I interviewed
Alberola on video for The People Armed,
met with the local of the CNT-France and was wonderfully assisted for my
research into the anti-Franco resistance by their archivist, and also met with
the local of the Coordination des Groupes Anarchiste (CGA). I sadly did
not manage to meet with veteran Algerian liberation fighter Léandre Valéro of the Mouvement Libertaire du Nord Africaine (MLNA) of
1947-1957 at his home just outside Paris (he died a month later, robbing The People Armed of its sole African
interviewee), but on my exit via Paris again, I befriended the sister of
Algerian anarchist protest singer Lounès Matoub who was assassinated in 1998 by Salafist fascists.
Later
that year, fellow journalist Pathiswa Magopeni and I were selected to attend a Clive
Menell Media Fellowship at Duke University in the USA, during which trip we
became firm friends, partying in the wonderfully multicultural environment of
New Orleans. On that month-long visit I had the opportunity to write what
became Cartographie de l’anarchisme
révolutionnaire (Lux Éditeur, Montreal, 2012); its English edition was
published as Cartography of Revolutionary
Anarchism (AK Press, Oakland, 2013) and I have now substantially rewritten
it for a Spanish-language edition to be published in Argentina.
Left, anti-racist and
anti-fascist stickers that I photographed at a FAU local in Berlin, 2011.
Right, with Ariane Gransac Sedori and Octavio Alberola Suriñach in France, 2011.
At
the conclusion of the fellowship during which I paid my respects to the US Holocaust
Memorial Museum in Washington DC and purchased the book Hitler’s Black Victims, I made a side trip at my own expense to New
York City where I visited the Occupy Wall Street sit-in, and stayed with
anarchists in Harlem and Brooklyn such as the wonderful anarchist author and
thinker Wayne Price, formerly of the defunct North Eastern Federation of
Anarchist Communists (NEFAC), and his talented folk-singer wife Anne. It
was wonderful to be accepted by black folk in Harlem as a fellow African.
In
January 2012, I was to have attended a Thomson Reuters Foundation (TRF) conference
in Morocco, after which I planned to meet with veteran Moroccan anarchist
Brahim Fillali at his home in the foothills of the Atlas Mountains, but sadly
the Moroccan Embassy did not issue my visa in time. In early 2012, I was
invited to Stockholm, Sweden, to attend the General Assembly of the International
Cities of Refuge Network (ICORN) www.icorn.org,
which is an international network of cities and regions providing safe haven
for persecuted writers, journalists and editorial cartoonists (today, also
musicians and visual artists). There, I networked and made friends with ICORN
exiled “Guest Writers” from around the world, in particular with leading
Iranian feminist Parvin Ardalan, Algerian poet Noufel Bouzeboudja, Moroccan
pro-democracy activist and journalist Zineb El Rhazoui, and Kenyan poet Philo
Ikonya. I remain close friends with all of these people today; all of them are
aware of and flatly reject AK Press’s
allegations against me.
During
this trip, I spoke at length to comrades of the Sveriges Arbetaren Centralorganisation (SAC) about their return to their anarcho-syndicalist roots, was
interviewed for their newspaper Arbetaren
on my anarchist research, visited anarchist locals, and met with ex-guerrillas
from Sweden and the Federación Anarquista Uruguaya (FAU) for The People Armed and
for Uruguayan Anarchism Armed. On my
return to South Africa, in conjunction with the South African PEN writers’
guild, I established the South African
Cities of Refuge Project (SACRP), the aim of which is to convince the
cities of Cape Town and Johannesburg and the university towns of Stellenbosch
and Grahamstown to sign on to ICORN as cities of refuge. Also in 2012, I was
scheduled to give an address on Anarchist
Revolutionary Models: Argentina and South Africa at the St Imier International Anarchist Gathering
in Switzerland, but sadly did not have the funds to attend; the ZACF sent a
coloured delegate, however.
Top, photographed for the
SAC’s Arbetaren, Stockholm, Sweden, 2012. Bottom, ICORN guest writer Parvin Ardalan of Iran speaks at Stellenbosh
University, South Africa, as guest writer Ramy Essam (right) of Egypt listens,
during the South African Cities of Refuge Project tour I organised, 2015.
In
April 2013, on the basis of my innovative historical framing of the anarchist
movement in Cartographie de l’anarchisme
révolutionnaire, I was invited to Paris to be interviewed at length for a
new documentary on anarchist history, Ni
dieu ni maître (Temps Noir),
directed by veteran Bolshevik Patrick Barbéris and scripted by the anarchist Tancrède Ramonet.
I also met with Alternative Libertaire (AL) militants from France and Morocco
and with an anarchist from the Dominican Republic where the movement is
newly-established, paid my respects as I always do when in Paris at the
monuments to the Communards, to victims of Nazi concentration camps, and to
Nestor Makhno, and participated in the anarchist May Day march, being delighted
to see how the CNT-France had noticeably gained many members of colour
since my last May Day march with them in 2000.
In
June 2013, I was invited by the Union of African Journalists (UAJ) to
observe its training workshops in Cairo, Egypt, and for the UAJ, I conducted a
conflict journalism course for journalists from Egypt, Ethiopia, Uganda,
Senegal, Mauritania, Madagascar, South Africa, Zambia and Zimbabwe. During this
trip, I made contact and attempted to meet with anarchist militants of the
local Libertarian Socialist Movement (LSM) but was unsuccessful.
Shockingly, two weeks after my trip, military staged a successful coup.
In
late 2013, based on my record of more than a decade of research into the
anarchist movement, I was invited to become a Council member of the multilingual
international Institute for Anarchist Theory and History (IATH), based
in São Paulo, Brazil, https://ithanarquista.wordpress.com/.
ITHA describes itself as “an international, multilingual research body that
aims to encourage, collect and disseminate historical and theoretical research
on anarchism – free, horizontally federated direct democracy – plus research on
theoretical and methodological conjuncture issues realised from a libertarian
communist perspective, as well as primary sources of material produced by the
anarchist movement from its inception in the 1860s until today.”
In
2014, I toured Aotearoa/New Zealand, speaking at the Wellington Anarchist
Bookfair on IATH’s research under the title How
Anarchists Build Counter-power and at the Museum of City and Sea on After Mandela: The Implosion of ANC Alliance Politics?, and Australia,
speaking at Melbourne’s Victoria Trades Union Hall, and at the Sydney Anarchist
Bookfair, on IAITH’s research, meeting along the way with my hosts such as Rebel
Press and the Melbourne Anarchist Communist Group (MACG). On this
tour, I made a point of interacting with Maori, Aboriginal Australian, and
Torres Straights Islander activists to learn about their struggles and compare
them to those of the Bushmen in Southern Africa, insights I shared with my
friend, Namibian indigenous-rights activist Delme Cupido, on my return, which
interactions gave me background understanding for a new book I was writing that
had a significant focus on Bushman experiences.
Top, my pan-African Union
of African Journalists (UAJ) conflict-reporting class taking a tour, and bottom,
with one of my Egyptian students in front of the burned-out Mubarak Hotel in
Tahrir Square, Cairo, Egypt, 2013.
In 2014, I was invited by ICORN to
attend its General Assembly in Ljubljala, Slovenia, where I renewed my
friendships with ICORN Guest Writers and organisers from across Africa and the
Middle East and established new relationships with Latin American activists
wanting their cities to join the network. At the Assembly, I presented on
progress in getting South African cities on board ICORN: in particular, the
City of Cape Town had offered us a Guest Writer residence’ I was also invited
to present on How Anarchists Build
Counter-power at the University of Ljubljana by the Federacija za Anarhistično Organiziranje (FAO). Shortly after my
return, my younger brother Tauca was killed in a motorcycle accident, which threatened to see a return of my PTSD.
In August 2014, I attended the wedding in
Portugal of one of my closest Angolan friends, Paula Roque, and took the opportunity to travel to Spain where I
because of the holidays, I was unfortunately not able to meet with the Confederación General del Trabajo (CGT), the largest of the organisations arising out of the historic CNT, which has a strong focus on working in African countries such as Morocco, but
I did meet in Barcelona with an anarchist local and spoke to them about IATH’s
research and about the looming vote on Catalan independence out of which came
an opinion piece on the double-edged sword of separatism, The two faces of global separatism, Daily Maverick, Johannesburg, 22
September 2014, online at: http://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2014-09-22-the-two-faces-of-global-separatism/
This
is another of the small number of my articles that Reid-Ross and Stephens actually cite, and in which
they again sift for “evidence” of my supposed sinister right-wing views (https://medium.com/@rossstephens/about-schmidt-how-a-white-nationalist-seduced-anarchist-movements-throughout-the-world-chapter-4-8ff357d222e3#.qf5ym485s). But the article itself, published in the mainstream
press, is straightforward enough: I argued that one “face” of global separatist
and national autonomy movements was progressive, and sometimes included a
radical, even revolutionary edge, represented by movements such as that in the
Basque country and Catalonia. The other “face” was that of separatist movements
descending into blood-letting and “fratricidal war.” I did not see elements of
the former face in South African separatist movements, and added that such
movements had, in any event, no real traction.
But undeterred by what
appears on the page, Reid-Ross and Stephens insist on seeing coded support for
an Afrikaner or white Volkstaat in
the article. They claim, for example, that my aside that some Afrikaners might
feel sympathy for Scotland’s autonomy, because “many Scots fought on the side
of the Boers against the British Empire a century ago,” is “an obvious attempt
to reveal some potential pan-secessionist solidarity for mutual advancement of
Boer and Scottish secession.” Since the article at no stage speaks in favour of
“Boer secession,” this is far from “obvious.” Then they claim I see “promising
developments” when I mention two obscure white South African splinter movements
that call for some sort of secession. Wrong again: I state these secessionist
currents had “died on the vine.”
Reid-Ross and Stephens then
claim that my mention of the ridiculous attempts of the obscure Front Nasionaal to invoke UN law
constitute an “appropriate inroad toward separatism.” By that logic, their
mention of fascist writers like Julius Evola in their own articles must make
them supporters of fascism. They then state that since I used the term Vierkleur and the term soutie, my article “obviously manifests
his prejudices toward [sic] a Boerestaat.”
That is a nonsensical inference, not least because the Vierkleur is the only name the old Transvaal flag has ever had.
Then it’s back to false attribution: for example the spurious attribution of
the “national-anarchist” catch-phrase “pan-secession” to me by Reid-Ross and
Stephens is an obvious attempt to link me to so-called “national-anarchists”
who use the phrase. The problem is that I do not use this phrase, but the
result is again guilt-by-association.
So, where there’s a will, there’s
a way: it seems clear that Reid-Ross and Stephens are
not willing to let facts stand in the way of a good story. For example, they
leave out that in May and June 2014, I
staged launches in Johannesburg and Cape Town respectively for the South
African Cities of Refuge Project (SACRP): in Johannesburg, Norwegian
documentary film-maker Beate Arnestad presented her film Silenced Voices on exiled Sri Lankan journalists, and in Cape Town,
French film-maker Marion Stalens presented her film Silence or Exile on ICORN Guest Writers in exile; the latter launch
lead to a meeting between an ICORN/SACRP delegation and the City of Cape Town
at which the city offered the SACRP a house as a Guest Writer residence.
In late 2014 I had hoped to visit the United
States on work for a narrative journalism summit and use the opportunity to do
presentations on IATH’s research to members of the new Black Rose Anarchist
Federation (BRRN), which had in some cities replaced the old NEFAC, as well
as to conduct interviews for The People
Armed but as a non-profit, the IAJ was unable to raise funds for the trip.
Top, with ICORN guest
writers from Africa, and bottom, poster for my How Anarchists Build Counter-power talk, Ljubljana, Slovenia, 2014.
In
November 2014, my third book, a retrospective on my reportage regarding the
long shadow of apartheid on democratic practice, covering the years 1960-2014, Drinking with Ghosts: the Aftermath of
Apartheid’s Dirty War (BestRed,
Cape Town, 2014), hailed by veteran anti-apartheid editor Max du Preez as “the
best reporters’ notebook I’ve ever read,” was published to acclaim. It was
launched by Rian Malan, author of his famous self-interrogation of his
Afrikaner family’s role in colonialism and apartheid, My Traitor’s Heart, and was long-listed for the 2015 Alan Paton
Award, South Africa’s annual non-fiction award (and trust me, you can’t achieve
that list with a racist text!).
My
fourth book, by the same publisher, an analysis of the continued conditions of
exclusion in South Africa over the 21 years of democracy, 1994-2015, A Taste of Bitter Almonds: Perdition and
Promise in South Africa has just been published in November 2015. Controversial
black polemicist Eric Miyeni, author of O,
Mandingo! The Only Black at a Dinner Party, has said of it: “Michael Schmidt will challenge you in this book. He will enlighten you too. You will want to embrace him for going so far out on a limb with his truths. You will also want to punch him in the face for some of those revelations, and draw blood. There is, however, one thing you will never do. You will never say of this man: ‘Michael Schmidt never was any good as a writer.’ He gripped my attention… and never let it go.”
Both
books are written with an anarchist sensibility, and display an inherently (and
in the latter, explicit) anti-racist stance. In fact, I argue in A Taste of Bitter Almonds, using
examples from my own family history showing that we were in part descended from
freed Bengali slave Anna de Koning, that all South Africans are related by
blood, that we are all in effect “coloured”. I also make it clear that despite
their multiracial origins, my ancestors engaged in colonial depredations such
as the enslavement of people of colour, and go further to suggest that it is
likely that they were involved in the 19th Century Genocide of South
Africa’s First People, the Bushmen. Here is a podcast of a radio interview on Drinking with Ghosts http://whammedia.co.za/drinking-with-ghosts/
and here, a podcast of my first radio interview on the contents of A Taste of Bitter Almonds which make my
attitudes to race, class – and the delusional white right-wing – explicitly
clear: http://paulgpereira.podomatic.com/entry/2015-11-13T02_19_24-08_00.
The back-stories of some of my journalistic
writings on the far-right that were published in Drinking with Ghosts include:
- Durban, 1989 (the Chesterville Four inquest reveals the SAP's Section C-10 death-squad – “Vlakplaas”)
- Durban, 1996 (on the failed “Trial of the Generals” for the KwaMakutha Massacre)
- Durban 1996 (I cover the TRC Amnesty Hearing of Vlakplaas commander Dirk Coetzee and his henchmen)
- Pretoria, 1999 (I masquerade as a priest to find hear patients of biochemwar chief Dr Wouter Basson)
- Jeffries Bay, 1999 (I trace & interview the man accused of murdering 200 SWAPO POWs)
- Chiredzi, 1979 (French Legionnaire witnesses Dr Basson doping guerrillas)
- Pretoria, 2002 (photojournalist Sydney Seshibedi and I gatecrash Basson's acquittal party)
- Cape Town, 2013 (claims of chemwar use in Angola during Dr Wouter Basson HPCSA hearing)
- Pretoria, 2013 (on Dirk Coetzee’s death, I remember meeting his gangster friend Rashied Staggie)
- Cape Town, 2013 (Dr Basson is convicted by his professional body of weaponising drugs)
- Johannesburg, 2014 (death squad commander Eugene de Kock is being considered for parole)
- Durban, 1996 (on the failed “Trial of the Generals” for the KwaMakutha Massacre)
- Durban 1996 (I cover the TRC Amnesty Hearing of Vlakplaas commander Dirk Coetzee and his henchmen)
- Pretoria, 1999 (I masquerade as a priest to find hear patients of biochemwar chief Dr Wouter Basson)
- Jeffries Bay, 1999 (I trace & interview the man accused of murdering 200 SWAPO POWs)
- Chiredzi, 1979 (French Legionnaire witnesses Dr Basson doping guerrillas)
- Pretoria, 2002 (photojournalist Sydney Seshibedi and I gatecrash Basson's acquittal party)
- Cape Town, 2013 (claims of chemwar use in Angola during Dr Wouter Basson HPCSA hearing)
- Pretoria, 2013 (on Dirk Coetzee’s death, I remember meeting his gangster friend Rashied Staggie)
- Cape Town, 2013 (Dr Basson is convicted by his professional body of weaponising drugs)
- Johannesburg, 2014 (death squad commander Eugene de Kock is being considered for parole)
Left, Drinking with Ghosts, centre, one of my direct ancestors, freed
Bengali slave Anna de Koning, about whom I write in my new book, at right, A Taste of Bitter Almonds, in
furtherance of my argument that all South Africans are genetically and
culturally interrelated.
And relevant stories that have been published in A Taste of Bitter Almonds include:
- Durban, 1997-1998 (my story on the drive-by shooting of black stevedores results in the neo-Nazis going to jail)
- Bloemfontein, 2003 (I interview in court the neo-Nazis accused of plotting to bomb the Gariep Dam)
- Ventersdorp, 2010 (the Eugene Terre’Blanche murder and the demise of the AWB)
- Modimolle, 2007 (the strange support for the Boeremag terrorists and the popularity of the De La Rey song)
- Pretoria, 2013 (judge hands down long sentences for high treason to Boeremag)
- Durban, 1997-1998 (my story on the drive-by shooting of black stevedores results in the neo-Nazis going to jail)
- Bloemfontein, 2003 (I interview in court the neo-Nazis accused of plotting to bomb the Gariep Dam)
- Ventersdorp, 2010 (the Eugene Terre’Blanche murder and the demise of the AWB)
- Modimolle, 2007 (the strange support for the Boeremag terrorists and the popularity of the De La Rey song)
- Pretoria, 2013 (judge hands down long sentences for high treason to Boeremag)
4. My Work for the Anarchist and Pro-Democracy Movements Today
I
resigned from the IAJ at the end of February 2015 to take up freelance
journalism, research and consulting, but continued to consult to them for three
months. In May 2015, my SACRP work lead to my organising that the ICORN City
of Refuge of Malmö in Sweden send on a tour to Cape Town two Guest Writers,
my friend Parvin Ardalan of Iran, and famous Tahrir Square protest singer Ramy
Essam of Egypt. The visit included a free Essam concert, a visit to the
proposed Cape Town Guest Writer residence, meetings with anarchist activists,
with the University of Stellenbosch and the town’s mayor, and a proposed
partnership with the South African Holocaust and Genocide Foundation.
At the time of writing this – November 2015 – I am preparing to present to an
international human rights conference to which I have been invited in Sweden on
refuge for persecuted academics, journalists and creatives on progress on
getting the City of Cape Town on board ICORN. ICORN’s head office is aware of
AK Press’s allegations against me, rejects them, and stands by my continued
involvement with their projects.
Meanwhile,
A Bitter Taste of Almonds has come
off the presses. I am also busy working with van der Walt on polishing the
second, narrative history, Counter-power
volume, Global Fire: 150 Fighting
Years of Anarchism and Syndicalism. I am refining a new book proposal
which I have now withdrawn from AK Press, with the draft title Black Crowbar: Anarchist Counter-power in
Theory & Practice, which draws together all the lessons of my last
15 years of research, integrates new research, and examines the theory and
praxis of statist versus anti-statist conceptions of how critical mass is
achieved in order to change society from the bottom-up – and the radical divergence between the
exercise of centralised corporate and state power, and that of decentralist anarchist
counter-power and self-management. Uruguayan Anarchism Armed remains an
active project. I am also putting together, along with a
former ANC exile, a book proposal to BestRed on untold stories of South
Africans’ fight for democracy.
Last year, a chapter by van der Walt and I was published in Felipe Corrêa et al’s Teoria e História do Anarquismo (Editora Prismas, Curitiba, Brazil), on defining the anarchist canon has already been published. This year, I also wrote the introductions to two new Latin American anarchist books which have just
been published: for Emilio Crisi’s brilliant and groundbreaking Revolución Anarquista en Manchuria 1929-1932 (Libros Anarres, Buenos Aires) on the barely-known
Korean/ Manchurian anarchist revolution; and for Felipe
Corrêa’s Bandeira Negra: rediscutindo o
anarquismo (Editora Prismas, Curitiba, Brazil),
on overhauling anarchist theory.
Two of the great new books
produced by ITHA members in 2014 and 2015 to which I have contributed text, at top,
I
am currently writing a fifth book, Isandlwana:
a Love Story, a collection of songs, paintings and
stream-of-consciousness writings on love, and am working on two multimedia
projects: The People Armed: Anarchist Fighters Verbatim (which
AK Press had agreed to publish before the current debacle and which I need to
note has been entirely funded by myself though it involves international travel),
which is a project of film and text verbatim interviews with post-war anarchist
guerrilla veterans from North Africa, the Middle East, Europe, Latin America
and the Far East; and Not Night, but
An Absence of Stars, a global online visual and verbal arts project
with Arab Lebanese writer Rasha Salti, focusing on forensic meditations on
massacre and memory. I also meet on a weekly basis with Zimbabwean activist
Taurai Mabhachi, co-ordinator of the Media & Technology Trust (MTT)
on its Radio Freedom project which aims to get at least 11 community radio
stations on-air in Zimbabwe – despite intense government resistance.
At
the time of writing this, I am refining a new book proposal which I have now
withdrawn from AK Press, with the draft title Black Crowbar: Anarchist Counter-power in Theory & Practice,
which draws together all the lessons of my last 15 years of research,
integrates new ITHA research, and examines the theory and praxis of statist
versus anti-statist conceptions of how critical mass is achieved by anarchists in
order to conquer power – and how these conceptions diverge radically between
the exercise of centralist corporate power and that of decentralist anarchist
counter-power. It is telling that as a key part of the Black Crowbar proposal, I was to have travelled to Rojava at my own
expense to analyse the libertarian communist social experiment there – and the
fight against Salafist fascism; in other words, I was prepared to put my life
on the line and at the least risk a return of my PTSD in the most deadly region
of the world for journalists for an anti-fascist AK Press Book without a cent
being paid in advance; perhaps that fact alone should have tempered their
enthusiasm to tar and feather me in furtherance of a whispering campaign by
nameless sources? Lastly, I am also putting together, along with a former ANC
exile, a book proposal on untold stories of South Africans’ fight for
democracy.
My writings of this period, 2010-2015 include:
The Kurdish Question: Through the Lens of Anarchist
Resistance in the Heart of the Ottoman Empire 1880-1923, anarkismo.net,
2010, online at:
Africa’s
Purchase of the French Presidency, anarkismo.net, April 2012, online at www.anarkismo.net/article/22573 , and on Pambazuka as How African Dictators Corrupt European
Politics, online at www.pambazuka.org/en/category/features/81461, with a shortened French
translation, Comment l’Afrique se paye la présidence française, Alternative Libertaire,
France, April 2012.
The
Wallpaper War: the United States a Decade After 9/11, anarkismo.net, June 2012,
online at www.anarkismo.net/article/23123
South
Asian Anarchism: Paths to Praxis, meditations on Maia Ramnath’s Decolonizing Anarchism: an Antiauthoritarian History of India’s
Liberation Struggle, AK Press, USA, 2011, and her Haj
to Utopia: How the Ghadar Movement
Charted Global Radicalism and Attempted to Overthrow the British Empire,
California World History Library, USA, 2011, anarkismo.net, June 2012,
online at www.anarkismo.net/article/23404
Keeping
the Public’s Interest at Heart, The Media, Johannesburg, South
Africa, January 2011
No
Compromise on Journalist Safety, The Media, Johannesburg, South
Africa, July 2011
Storming
the Bastille of the Bourgeois Media, Jozi Book Fair Catalogue: Issues in Debate,
Johannesburg, South Africa, August 2011
Believe
the strength in numbers of unbelievers, on the quiet but large atheist presence in South
Africa, Page 6, City Press,
Johannesburg, South Africa, 8 April 2012
Press
Needs Urgent Surgery, The Media, Johannesburg, South
Africa, May 2012
A little
of that human touch: journalists look at the process, reporters at the event;
we need more journalists, The Star op-ed on the Marikana
Massacre, Johannesburg, 30 August 2012
Bakunin’s Women: a partial review of Mark
Leier’s Bakunin: a Biography,
anarkismo.net, 12 November 2012, online at www.anarkismo.net/article/24259
Internet & Ideology: Against the Nationalist
Fragmentation of Cyberspace & Against "Astroturf Activism", anarkismo.net, 31 May 2013, online at www.anarkismo.net/article/2561
The
Sulphurs of Santiaguito, the muds of KwaMakutha: if Latin American countries
can successfully prosecute their murderous generals, why did South Africa fail?, Daily Maverick Johannesburg, South Africa, revised version of the 2003 article, 3 June 2013,
online at www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2013-06-03-the-sulphurs-of-santiaguito-the-muds-of-kwamakutha/
Nelson Mandela: Reappraisal of an Icon, anarkismo.net, 12 December 2013, online at www.anarkismo.net/article/26519
From Demonic Terrorist to Sainted Icon: the
Transfiguration of Nelson Mandela, Daily
Maverick, Johannesburg, South Africa, 13 December 2013, online at www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2013-12-12-from-demonic-terrorist-to-sainted-icon-the-transfiguration-of-nelson-mandela/
Nigerian Tragedy: should "Prophet" be indicted
for mass-murder?, Daily Maverick, Johannesburg, South Africa, 17
September 2014, online at: http://www.dailymaverick.co.za/opinionista/2014-09-17-nigerian-tragedy-should-prophet-be-indicted-for-mass-murder/
Migration: the push of landless poverty and the
pull of transnational trade, Daily Maverick, Johannesburg,
South Africa, 10 October 2014, online at: http://www.dailymaverick.co.za/opinionista/2014-10-01-migration-the-push-of-landless-poverty-and-the-pull-of-transnational-trade/
The neo-Makhnovist revolutionary project in
Ukraine, 5 December 2014,
anarkismo, online at: http://www.anarkismo.net/article/27678
Jacket Notes on Drinking with Ghosts, Sunday Times Books guest column, Johannesburg, South Africa, 2
February 2015, online at: http://bookslive.co.za/blog/2015/02/02/sunday-times-books-guest-column-jacket-notes-by-michael-schmidt/
The Forgotten Tradition of French Sovietism, a review of David Berry, A History of the French Anarchist Movement 1917-1945, anarkismo, 30 March 2015, online at: http://www.anarkismo.net/article/28039
Recovering Portugal’s mass anarchist history, a review of João Freire's Freedom Fighters: Anarchist Intellectuals, Workers, and Soldiers in Portugal's History, anarkismo, 30 March 2015, online at: http://www.anarkismo.net/article/28040
In search of early Italy's "lost" Bakuninist organisations, a review of Nunzio Pernicone's Italian Anarchism, 1864-1892, anarkismo, 27 May 2015, online at: http://www.anarkismo.net/article/28200
The Failed German Revolution of 1918-1919, a review of Richard J. Evans, The Rise of the Third Reich, anarkismo, 9 June 2015, online at: http://www.anarkismo.net/article/28253
Digging a little deeper in Darfur, The Star op-ed on South Africa’s failure to detain Sudanese President Omar el-Bashir for the International Criminal Court, Johannesburg, 17 June 2015, online at www.iol.co.za/the-star/digging-a-little-deeper-in-darfur-1.1872302
Lesotho: the hole in SA’s heart, The Star op-ed on South
African responses to continued unrest in Lesotho, Johannesburg, 10 July 2015,
online at http://www.iol.co.za/the-star/lesotho-the-hole-in-sa-s-heart-1.1883247
Unequal Siamese Twins, a review of Felipe Fernández Arnesto's The Americas; A History of a Hemisphere, Goodreads, online at: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26174413-the-americas
In this period, my very stern attitude towards so-called xenophobia was made explicit inn an article on a worrying return to immigrant violence in 2015, It's not a phobia, the crime is genocide. The Star op-ed, Johannesburg, 22 April 2015, online at: http://www.pressreader.com/south-africa/the-star-early-edition/20150422/282011850899291/TextView
Industrially, I remain Administrative Secretary of the Professional Journalists' Association of South Africa (ProJoun) and its project The Ulu Club for Southern African Conflict Journalists, and remain the convenor of the South African Cities of Refuge Project (SACRP) and curator of the Not Night, But An Absence of Stars project. I continue to write for Anarkismo as well as for the new pan-Affrican current affairs journal Ogojiii www.ogojiii.net
5. On the Remaining Spurious Allegations
Unequal Siamese Twins, a review of Felipe Fernández Arnesto's The Americas; A History of a Hemisphere, Goodreads, online at: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26174413-the-americas
In this period, my very stern attitude towards so-called xenophobia was made explicit inn an article on a worrying return to immigrant violence in 2015, It's not a phobia, the crime is genocide. The Star op-ed, Johannesburg, 22 April 2015, online at: http://www.pressreader.com/south-africa/the-star-early-edition/20150422/282011850899291/TextView
Industrially, I remain Administrative Secretary of the Professional Journalists' Association of South Africa (ProJoun) and its project The Ulu Club for Southern African Conflict Journalists, and remain the convenor of the South African Cities of Refuge Project (SACRP) and curator of the Not Night, But An Absence of Stars project. I continue to write for Anarkismo as well as for the new pan-Affrican current affairs journal Ogojiii www.ogojiii.net
5. On the Remaining Spurious Allegations
Having
dealt exhaustively with the substance of my life’s journalistic and anarchistic
output – which demonstrates very clear anti-racist, anti-fascist,
anti-imperialist and staunchly anarchist ethics – I now have to unfortunately
turn to gossip, supposition, and ephemera dragged up by my AK Press accusers in
trying to establishing what is in essence a juvenile sub-cultural argument
instead of a mature political analysis.
I
have to sigh deeply when an item of my jewellery is raised as a “proof” of
racism, but unfortunately for my accusers, the supposed Thor’s hammer (Mjölnir)
pendant is in fact an Icelandic “wolf’s cross,” the meaning of which is so
obscured it is not even known if this is pagan or Christian; I know of no
right-wing interpretations of it and simply bought it because I liked the
gargoyle-like face on it and have worn it for decades without it being of
concern to any anarchists I have met. AK Press seems to deliberately ignore
other items of jewellery that I wear constantly such as the Turkish ring on my
right hand – is this because a Turkish item does not fit their construct of my
“white nationalism”? (See https://medium.com/@rossstephens/about-schmidt-how-a-white-nationalist-seduced-anarchists-around-the-world-chapter-2-1849e232b943#.n6gkftdiq).
I
have NO racist tattoos. The sum total of all my ink is: my family and a radical
Chilean firefighter’s emblem (back); a Chris Achilleos siren and the slogan “No
Fate” (right shoulder); the names of two life-long women friends I love, one
Indian, written in Sanscrit, the other white, written in Elder Futhark (left
and right shoulders); an inverted Renaissance printer’s mark in red – this is not a runic tattoo (left shoulder); recreations
of the oldest tattoos known, of the Scythians from the 5th Century
BC – remember, science tells us the Scythians were a blend of peoples including
European and Asiatic so these cannot
be construed as racial tribal tattoos (left and right upper arms and elbows); a
naval anchor with the name of my brother Tauca who was killed last year (right
forearm); Anarchist Black Cross – South Africa emblem (left forearm); and the
line from the IWW song There is Power in
a Union, “Money speaks for money; the Devil for his own. Who comes to speak
for the skin and the bone?” (right forearm). All of these tattoos were done
well before AK Press started its investigation. See https://medium.com/@rossstephens/about-schmidt-how-a-white-nationalist-seduced-anarchists-around-the-world-chapter-2-1849e232b943#.n6gkftdiq).
Happily, I had not started my planned tattoo of the AK Press logo of a crossed
dagger and quill; I’ve changed my mind on that now – unless I have the dagger
drawn as if sunk in my back!
My
former house was a modest one, and does not fit the image either of luxury
painted by Reid-Ross and Stephens claim or the apocalyptic imagery I conjured
up in a Stormfront post in my bogus persona (see https://medium.com/@rossstephens/about-schmidt-how-a-white-nationalist-seduced-anarchists-around-the-world-chapter-1-1a6fa255b528#.m3riolrpy
and https://medium.com/@rossstephens/about-schmidt-how-a-white-nationalist-seduced-anarchists-around-the-world-chapter-2-1849e232b943#.chtxjtcs2).
I
took out a bank bond on the house in 2007 after my divorce in a peaceful, lower
middle class, predominantly coloured neighbourhood. When I could have lived
elsewhere, I lived there in complete harmony for five years with Giles and Mimi
Nojang, a Cameroonian couple, and their children, and before that with a
white/coloured couple; both the Nojangs and I often entertained guests there
from across Africa and abroad on a grand scale, such as my annual Dios del
Muerte parties and their frequent football parties. And as the shamefully nameless
sources of AK Press know well – because they have been house guests of mine – my
house was (and my current apartment remains) decorated with Bushman, South
African, Zimbabwean, Mozambican, Cameroonian, Senegalese, Malian, Tuareg, Kwakwaka'wakw, Hopi, Mayan, Aztec, Hawai’ian, Maori,
Aboriginal Australian, Nepalese, Indian, Chinese and Japanese indigenous art –
with no European art in evidence.
As
for the reference to the bar I hang out in, the Xai-Xai Lounge, AK Press
deliberately ignored the fact that this is a well-known multicultural bar,
owned by a lesbian couple and run by South African and Zimbabwean staff, where straights
and LGBTI people, former uMkhonto we Sizwe (MK) guerrillas, journalists
and musicians, locals and foreigners, and peoples of all colours and creeds
interact wonderfully: and this has been my watering-hole for the past 13 years.
In fact, lesbian friends such as Angela Meuwsen and Lynn Sterling at whose recent
wedding I was best man, and black ex-MK friends such as Mpho Kettledas and ex-ANC exile friends such as Crosby Nyembezi have laughed hard at AK Press’ allegations – and they have all bought
me many drinks there as a result!
As
for the bits and pieces of military clothing I sometimes wear, it is hardly
unusual for an anarchist to wear items of military surplus because of their
durability. I am not a collector but have odd items from South Africa
(including my late brother’s naval jacket), Angola, Australia, Brazil,
Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Russia, the USA, and the Zapatistas. As an
antimilitarist, I have never since I became a military objector worn again a
full uniform of any designation. I acknowledge that some items have caused
confusion: I removed the skull-and-bones badges from a modern black tank
commander’s pea-coat as people mistakenly thought it was WWII SS (remember
Zapatistas and Makhnovists have all used the skull-and-bones); and I have added
an anarchist black star and ABC badge to a recreation of a Spanish
Revolution-era black field cap of the anarchist Malatesta Battalion as it was
also mistakenly thought to be WWII German (though a Polish friend thinks it
looks Russian!). I admit that several years ago I wore to a fancy-dress party
an old Swedish military jacket made up to look like a WWII German jacket – the
theme of the party, hosted by a black-and-white couple, was “Evil Masterminds”;
though my outfit was obviously not convincing as someone else won the award for
best costume, this was ill-advised and I regret having done it. Nevertheless, I
have also worn women’s dresses to other costume parties and no-one accused me
of being a girl as a result!
Lastly,
the names of my dogs – which are tan-coloured mongrel SPCA rescues and not
purebred “White Swiss Sheperds” as alleged – are totally irrelevant; the
inference in AK Press’s attempted slur is that their names reveal me to be an
Odinist where as I am well-known to be an atheist; that a friend of mine named
her cat Chairman Meeow does not make her a Maoist! (See https://medium.com/@rossstephens/about-schmidt-how-a-white-nationalist-seduced-anarchists-around-the-world-chapter-1-1a6fa255b528#.u8gwu7yvn).
Left, a member of the
Malatesta Battalion wearing a black field cap with skull-and-bones during the
Spanish Revolution. Right, my friend Zona wearing my black Malatesta Battalion
field cap – with anarchist star and ABC badges replacing the skull-and-bones.
6. Conclusion
In summary, I have maintained a polite and comradely tone throughout my engagements with AK Press though this has not been reciprocated. Stacked up against a quarter of a century of intensive international anarchist networking, progressive activism, pro-democratic work and organising (especially within Africa) – that has included substantial anti-fascist, anti-xenophobic and pro-immigrant work – and a huge volume of research and writing, my accusers have my accusers have relied heavily on nameless and faceless sources (I believe there are in fact only two main sources), on cherry-picking quotes and on misquotations and fabrications, on speculation and amateur psychology and mind-reading, on the selective use of evidence, using only what seems to confirm their claims and ignoring the mountains of material that refute them, the Stalinist tactics of guilt-by-association, ethically dubious and sloppy journalism, in series of articles filled with factual errors and contradictions. They have created a straw man of circumstantial evidence that they beat to fit and painted to match their preconceived anticipation of my guilt, in a polemical anti-political character assassination that makes one wonder at the state of the American anarchist movement.
In a bizarre and
self-defeating conclusion to their lengthy series of articles, Reid-Ross and
Stephens conclude by stating that they cannot, after all, prove their core
claim, the very grounds cited by AK Press itself to withdraw my books from
publication: “Perhaps it’s too easy to say that Michael Schmidt was or was not
an [fascist] infiltrator … It offers less in the way of clean, convenient
conclusions from which we can stake some safe distance; more a rather pregnant
point of pause for collective self-reflection” (https://medium.com/@rossstephens/about-schmidt-how-a-white-nationalist-seduced-anarchist-movements-throughout-the-world-chapter-4-8ff357d222e3#.qf5ym485s).
Indeed. But this has not
stopped them from publishing five libellous pieces in their self-imposed mission to police and interrogate African anarchists like myself. AK Press has meanwhile stunningly failed to prove that any benefit of any sort accrued to the racist right. Where is the “national-anarchist” or “third position” presence I have generated? The texts, the books, the recruits? But on the other side, I have shown conclusively that I have produced scores of articles exposing the far right and the overlapping milieu of the former apartheid regime’s killers and their masters, articles that were surely not to their benefit, but to the benefit of an open, multiracial democracy. I have also, of course, written thousands of pages recovering the history of anarchism and syndicalism worldwide, especially in the Global South, especially amongst people of colour, and for decades fought for equality and the freedom of the working class, black as well as white. How the radical right could possibly benefit from, say, Black Flame, is the sort of question that AK Press simply cannot answer. It beggars belief that a member of the radical white right would spend decades working in the small, multi-racial, mainly black, South African anarchist movement, all the while helping edit anarchist papers, assists township organisers, do prisoner support work, serve as a shopsteward, train African journalists and expose the radical right in the press.
This would make me the most useless white supremacist or fascist ever, for I have demonstrably spent most of my spare time, much of my hard-earned money (and journalists earn poorly), organising, arguing, researching, and writing, for the anarchist movement and for nothing else that was not progressively pro-democratic and multiracial. In the process, I have deliberately sought work across Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, Europe and the Antipodes. To compound what white supremacists would see as the lynching offence of my “race-traitorship,” I hang out in gay bars and black squatter camps, promote the cause of radical black revolutionary prisoners, dance in coloured jazz clubs and pogo at the annual punk gig in Soweto, attend pro-Palestine marches and Holocaust remembrances (and believe me, the Jewish security details have done extensive background checks on me!), buy John Lee Hooker CDs and tickets to Skunk Anansi concerts, spent loads of money on building black township community libraries, have trained literally hundreds of editors and journalists of all cultures across Africa, Mexico, the Solomon Islands and the USA, work, party and holiday with people of all ethnicities. I challenge my accusers over the rest of their natural lives to work in half the African countries I have.
AK Press and will continue to fail, to produce any evidence whatsoever that I have ever met with or worked with a single right-winger for political purposes. The reason is simple: such meetings never occurred. If I was truly a fascist, where is the celebration by the fascist movement at their stunningly successful 23-year infiltration of the anarchist movement? Where are the results of that penetration, the fascist exposés of the secret minutes and plans of anarchist organisations? The recruits? I have never betrayed a single internal document to another organisation or to the public or engaged in long personal attacks in public, working instead with a wide range of progressive people. This is, I might add, very different to what my accusers have done, pillorying the ZACF – now a vibrant multiracial organization – leaking documents, opening up divisions in the anarchist movement, and promoting a witch hunt. None of this has done international anarchism any favours: any outsider viewing this affair must see the movement as a complete mess.
Who benefits? I imagine I can hear the white right, fascists and so-called “national-anarchists” snickering over how the anarchist movement is weakened as a result of a slander campaign, conducted in the manner and tone of a Stalinist show-trial, against one of organised anarchism’s theorists and historians.
I have tried to avoid raising the plaintive “but some of my best friends are black” defence, but mentioning the names of my numerous key comrades of colour over the decades has become unavoidable given the – for an anarchist outfit – deliberately anti-political nature of AK’s assault. And the fact is I have had at least one serious black girlfriend, three serious coloured girlfriends, four serious Indian girlfriends (one of whom I was engaged to, one of whom I married), six serious white girlfriends and some Jewish and Muslim girlfriends; if I harboured the intense distaste that white supremacists have for mixing with people of colour, surely my lovers would have picked this up?; rather, such sexual proclivities alone would have the white right reaching for their baseball bats. That said, the people of all colours mentioned here can speak in their own words regarding their relations with me; I carry no mandate to speak on their behalf.
So let me turn the question around: who benefits from Reid-Ross’s and Stephens’ slander against one of the most prolific anarchist theorists and historians working today? I can say, with certainty, who does not: the anarchist movement. Instead of the white right benefitting from my rather desultory and sporadic undercover engagements with it, work like mine has challenged the race-flavoured North Atlanticist bias in conventional movement histories, reinstating the leading role played by Latin American anarchism and by our militant forebears in Africa, the Middle East and Asia.
iIs it not unavoidably more likely that this work and all my associated writings derived from it benefits the anarchist movement itself? So when, in AK Press’s libelous words, “a white nationalist seduced anarchists around the world,” it appears I achieved this seduction by the cunning device of a huge output of anti-racist, internationalist, anti-fascist works over more than two decades on the global anarchist movement! Again I repeat that it is telling that at no point during its shoddy investigation did AK Press or its agents directly approach the ZACF – not even to warn them of a supposed infiltrator in their midst! This suggests a deeply uncomradely attitude towards a reputable anarchist organisation of 12 years’ standing – as well as an avoidance of a confrontation that might challenge their preconceived notions of my “guilt”.
As African writers, van der Walt and I have totally overturned convention – not because we want to substitute the global South for the North, but because we want to rebalance anarchists’ understanding of our history, theory and praxis in a truly transnational, internationalist and thus multiracial context. This work, while welcomed by the serious political science academy, organised anarchist movement and labour press.
I know that as a white-classified person in South Africa, I still today benefit from the aftermath of apartheid privilege, and I do not deny that I have sometimes gotten things plain wrong on race, class and other issues. But hopefully I’m learning, not to adhere to truly root out racism in myself on a daily basis, and to work in a wounded society. The deliberate direction of my chosen work, having had for decades a pan-African perspective that I was able as I became more senior to put into practice from Egypt to Mali, from Namibia to Uganda, from Darfur to Mauritius, has helped me in that quest, as has my innumerable interactions with activists from across the globe, some of them named in this text.
Lastly, I am humbled that in this awkward time of having such damaging things said about me, I have retained the loyalty of scores of anarchist comrades, activists as well as apolitical friends of all cultures. I am particularly indebted to those involved in the ICORN, Anarkismo, ITHA, Not Night, but An Absence of Stars, and Radio Freedom projects for unreservedly standing by me. It is that fact – and the realities of my multicultural life so far removed from my accusers’ assertions as to seem B-grade science fiction – that has meant I have lost no friends to AK Press’ slander, nor have I changed my lifestyle one bit. Rather I renew my endeavours to bring to the anarchist movement an internationalist – and thus necessarily anti-racist – view of its multinational history, theory and praxis.
And to repeat the LEGAL NOTICE: All Michael Schmidt’s legal rights to his reputation and works are reserved. This biography constitutes a full refutation of the defamation against Michael Schmidt by AK Press, its agents and sources, and no further correspondence will be entered into without the mediation of legal counsel.
This would make me the most useless white supremacist or fascist ever, for I have demonstrably spent most of my spare time, much of my hard-earned money (and journalists earn poorly), organising, arguing, researching, and writing, for the anarchist movement and for nothing else that was not progressively pro-democratic and multiracial. In the process, I have deliberately sought work across Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, Europe and the Antipodes. To compound what white supremacists would see as the lynching offence of my “race-traitorship,” I hang out in gay bars and black squatter camps, promote the cause of radical black revolutionary prisoners, dance in coloured jazz clubs and pogo at the annual punk gig in Soweto, attend pro-Palestine marches and Holocaust remembrances (and believe me, the Jewish security details have done extensive background checks on me!), buy John Lee Hooker CDs and tickets to Skunk Anansi concerts, spent loads of money on building black township community libraries, have trained literally hundreds of editors and journalists of all cultures across Africa, Mexico, the Solomon Islands and the USA, work, party and holiday with people of all ethnicities. I challenge my accusers over the rest of their natural lives to work in half the African countries I have.
AK Press and will continue to fail, to produce any evidence whatsoever that I have ever met with or worked with a single right-winger for political purposes. The reason is simple: such meetings never occurred. If I was truly a fascist, where is the celebration by the fascist movement at their stunningly successful 23-year infiltration of the anarchist movement? Where are the results of that penetration, the fascist exposés of the secret minutes and plans of anarchist organisations? The recruits? I have never betrayed a single internal document to another organisation or to the public or engaged in long personal attacks in public, working instead with a wide range of progressive people. This is, I might add, very different to what my accusers have done, pillorying the ZACF – now a vibrant multiracial organization – leaking documents, opening up divisions in the anarchist movement, and promoting a witch hunt. None of this has done international anarchism any favours: any outsider viewing this affair must see the movement as a complete mess.
Who benefits? I imagine I can hear the white right, fascists and so-called “national-anarchists” snickering over how the anarchist movement is weakened as a result of a slander campaign, conducted in the manner and tone of a Stalinist show-trial, against one of organised anarchism’s theorists and historians.
I have tried to avoid raising the plaintive “but some of my best friends are black” defence, but mentioning the names of my numerous key comrades of colour over the decades has become unavoidable given the – for an anarchist outfit – deliberately anti-political nature of AK’s assault. And the fact is I have had at least one serious black girlfriend, three serious coloured girlfriends, four serious Indian girlfriends (one of whom I was engaged to, one of whom I married), six serious white girlfriends and some Jewish and Muslim girlfriends; if I harboured the intense distaste that white supremacists have for mixing with people of colour, surely my lovers would have picked this up?; rather, such sexual proclivities alone would have the white right reaching for their baseball bats. That said, the people of all colours mentioned here can speak in their own words regarding their relations with me; I carry no mandate to speak on their behalf.
So let me turn the question around: who benefits from Reid-Ross’s and Stephens’ slander against one of the most prolific anarchist theorists and historians working today? I can say, with certainty, who does not: the anarchist movement. Instead of the white right benefitting from my rather desultory and sporadic undercover engagements with it, work like mine has challenged the race-flavoured North Atlanticist bias in conventional movement histories, reinstating the leading role played by Latin American anarchism and by our militant forebears in Africa, the Middle East and Asia.
iIs it not unavoidably more likely that this work and all my associated writings derived from it benefits the anarchist movement itself? So when, in AK Press’s libelous words, “a white nationalist seduced anarchists around the world,” it appears I achieved this seduction by the cunning device of a huge output of anti-racist, internationalist, anti-fascist works over more than two decades on the global anarchist movement! Again I repeat that it is telling that at no point during its shoddy investigation did AK Press or its agents directly approach the ZACF – not even to warn them of a supposed infiltrator in their midst! This suggests a deeply uncomradely attitude towards a reputable anarchist organisation of 12 years’ standing – as well as an avoidance of a confrontation that might challenge their preconceived notions of my “guilt”.
As African writers, van der Walt and I have totally overturned convention – not because we want to substitute the global South for the North, but because we want to rebalance anarchists’ understanding of our history, theory and praxis in a truly transnational, internationalist and thus multiracial context. This work, while welcomed by the serious political science academy, organised anarchist movement and labour press.
I know that as a white-classified person in South Africa, I still today benefit from the aftermath of apartheid privilege, and I do not deny that I have sometimes gotten things plain wrong on race, class and other issues. But hopefully I’m learning, not to adhere to truly root out racism in myself on a daily basis, and to work in a wounded society. The deliberate direction of my chosen work, having had for decades a pan-African perspective that I was able as I became more senior to put into practice from Egypt to Mali, from Namibia to Uganda, from Darfur to Mauritius, has helped me in that quest, as has my innumerable interactions with activists from across the globe, some of them named in this text.
Lastly, I am humbled that in this awkward time of having such damaging things said about me, I have retained the loyalty of scores of anarchist comrades, activists as well as apolitical friends of all cultures. I am particularly indebted to those involved in the ICORN, Anarkismo, ITHA, Not Night, but An Absence of Stars, and Radio Freedom projects for unreservedly standing by me. It is that fact – and the realities of my multicultural life so far removed from my accusers’ assertions as to seem B-grade science fiction – that has meant I have lost no friends to AK Press’ slander, nor have I changed my lifestyle one bit. Rather I renew my endeavours to bring to the anarchist movement an internationalist – and thus necessarily anti-racist – view of its multinational history, theory and praxis.
And to repeat the LEGAL NOTICE: All Michael Schmidt’s legal rights to his reputation and works are reserved. This biography constitutes a full refutation of the defamation against Michael Schmidt by AK Press, its agents and sources, and no further correspondence will be entered into without the mediation of legal counsel.
[ENDS]
