DOCUMENTARIES

Under African Skies: It says a lot about how wonderful I thought the music-making part of this story about Paul Simon’s Graceland, and his return to South Africa decades later, that I’m willing to forgive its less-than-stellar work on the cultural boycott of South Africa. It’s a debate about the responsibility artists owe politics that’s too heavily weighted in one direction. But the video footage of the recording sessions is amazing, as are the interviews with South African musicians about everything from what it was like to have this strange Paul Simon dude show up and want to work with them to what it was like to be able to go to Central Park without a pass.

The Invisible War: There’s nothing particularly stylistically innovative about Kirby Dick’s documentary about the epidemic of rape in the U.S. military. But the movie falls with the force of a sledgehammer, exposing as ineffective and dishonest the brass in the armed forces responsible for keeping women and men safe, and making it clear that an epidemic of sexual assault is hurting both men and women, and driving out of the armed forces exactly the people the Pentagon should most want to keep there.

The Atomic States of America: Based on Kelly McMaster’s memoir of growing up in a town on Long Island polluted by atomic runoff, the movie is the story of an agency captured by powerful interests and backed up by powerful presumptions of authority, and the ordinary citizens who have fought back against the industry they believe is poisoning their communities. I’d have been curious to hear more about how citizens in other countries that are more dependent on atomic energy than we are, but it’s amazing looking into our past romance of the peaceful atom—and thinking about what it means for our uncertain energy future.

Love Free or Die: Bishop Gene Robinson’s story has been told before, and the first openly gay Anglican bishop is hardly a retiring figure. But Macky Alston’s wonderful documentary isn’t just about him. It’s about the difficult process of organizing within the Anglican church, which shut Robinson out of the Lambeth Conference, to make it a more welcoming and affirming institution for the gay people who have kept faith with it. And the movie argues that a gay rights movement without the faith community is leaving power and influence on the table, and risks making gay people choose between love and faith.

The Queen of Versailles: Tons of ink and miles of film have been devoted to chronicling American excess in a recession age. But it’s hard to imagine that anything will do better than this story about David and Jackie Siegel, who built an empire selling time-shares to people who couldn’t afford them and then pushed themselves to the brink of financial ruin by building what would have been the largest house in America. Whether it’s expertly breaking down the housing crisis’ role in the crash or chronicling the horrifying wastefulness of the Siegel’s consumer spending, The Queen of Versailles is funny, biting, and utterly American.

FICTION

Keep The Lights On: This tender gay love story has two things going for it. First, it’s an unconventional romance that bucks the Hollywood insistence that the story ends when a couple gets together or decides to stay together. It’s tremendously refreshing to see a movie that chronicles the rise and fall of a relationship, insisting that just because two people can’t continue to be together doesn’t mean it’s a failure. Second, it’s a warm, funny, explicit look at what it means to be gay and in love in a post-AIDS era. The movie’s specificity, whether it’s the results of an HIV test, the documentary the main character Erik is working on, or changes in the hookup scene give the movie wonderful roots.

The Surrogate: The funniest, warmest sex comedy I saw at Sundance is also one of the better movies I’ve seen in a long time about disability, intimacy, and independence. John Hawkes, of Deadwood and Winter’s Bone fame, which will certainly escalate after this performance, is marvelous as Mark O’Brien (a real-life journalist), who decides that though he spends most of his life in an iron lung due to childhood polio, he’s going to lose his virginity. The acting is top-to-bottom fantastic, and the movie is a forceful rejection of the idea that folks with disabilities are asexual, humorless, or mere victims.

Red Hook Summer: The community of critics who liked this movie (as opposed to the ones who savaged it, I’d argue unfairly) is growing. But I wouldn’t be surprised if I remain in the minority in my adoration of this movie, which takes on everything from the black church to asthma rates in Red Hook in its exploration of a New York summer. Centered around three pivotal church sequences and an amazing performance by Clarke Peters, transcending his acting on The Wire, this is a gorgeous, moving, unrepentantly and uncompromisingly black movie, and whatever Hollywood thinks, better for it.

Compliance: A terrifying look at what our trust in the police and other authorities can lead us to do to each other, Compliance is based on a true story of a man who convinced restaurant employees to commit more than 70 incidents of harassment and assault by pretending to be a police officer over the phone. As fast-food outlet manager Sandra (Ann Dowd) searches, detains, and ultimately sets cashier Becky (Dreama Walker, who should get real notice for this) up to be sexually assaulted, the movie raises deeply uncomfortable questions about what we’d do in the same situations.

Beasts of the Southern Wild: Joyous, strange, frightening and loving, this beautiful movie is about everything from global warming to the appropriate psychological response to Hurricane Katrina. If you like apocalypses, dire beasts from the past, gorgeous landscapes, great music, and remarkable little girls as your protagonists, run, don’t walk. If there’s justice, this would be a Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon-type phenomenon, a wonder from another country within our own. A warning: once you’ve seen it, you may experience profound irritation at standard Hollywood fare for a period of time afterwards.

“I saw right then and there that Paul resisted the idea,” of at least notifying the African National Congress he was coming to South Africa, Harry Belafonte recalls of Simon’s reaction when Belafonte made that recommendation.”The power of art was supreme…and to go to any group and bed for right of passage was against his instincts.” Later, in one of the movie’s many celebrity endorsements, Simon says “I thought about writing political songs about the situation, but I’m not actually that good at it,” only for Peter Gabriel to come in to talk about how much more effective Graceland was than his own protest anthem “Biko.” And Simon says he’s resistant to the idea that art should be explicitly put at the service of politics. Politicians, he suggests, tell artists to “come and take the love and respect people have for you and transfer it to this candidate by your support. The artists are always treated as if they worked for the politicians.”

But I think there’s a bit of a false choice here that Under African Skies doesn’t quite acknowledge. Doing the ANC the courtesy of letting them know you’re coming to town isn’t the same thing as accepting approval to come on the condition that you write certain songs or do certain performances, and it wouldn’t have taken away from Simon’s ability to arrange for the Graceland tour to come to Zimbabwe or to sing the then-banned South African national anthem at those shows in a demonstration of racial unity. In the movie, Simon says he was viscerally disturbed by the racism he witnessed while recording in South Africa, including comments by engineers that the inability by black South African musicians to master part of a song was proof of their racial prejudices. Hooking up with anti-apartheid groups could have given Simon some context for what he was dealing with. There is a middle ground between seeking out information about what you’re confronting and how to behave respectfully and compassionately in a new situation, and turning yourself into an artist-for-hire to political parties. History has validated Simon’s approach to promoting the album and the artists involved, including anti-apartheid activist Miriam Makeba and Ladysmith Black Mambazo, who he brought to international prominence. But that doesn’t mean that it wasn’t possible for him to act in a more consultative manner at the time.

All of that aside, Under African Skies is just a fantastic making-of-the-album movie. There’s a ton of video footage available from Simon’s recording sessions in South Africa and of Ladysmith Black Mambazo’s reporting trip to New York (in one of the movie’s most heart-wrenching stories, the members of the group asked Simon where they had to go to get a pass that would permit them to visit Central Park during that journey). It’s amazing to see the music come together, to see the role that dance played in the recording process, and to see Simon’s wonder as he discovers something entirely new. And it’s a gift that so many of the South African artists involved could come back to discuss their memories of the collective creative process. In a particularly terrific moment, Lorne Michaels tells Simon before he and Ladysmith Black Mambazo go on stage to reveal their songs to the world “If it doesn’t work, we’ll just cut it.” What a wonderful thing for music that he was wrong.

This enormous plant was financed despite the fact that it will be built in an area that already exceeds dangerous levels of air pollution.

Perhaps the most troublesome aspect of these projects is the tremendous financial burden they pose to average South Africans. Large industrial users, who will secure the majority of the supply, have locked in Apartheid-era sweet heart deals that ensure the lowest electricity prices in the world, meaning the state-owned utility Eskom has no choice but to recoup the investment from average ratepayers.

In order to pay for Kusile, Eskom will seek an additional 25% rate increase on top of electricity prices that have already gone up 137% (mostly to finance Medupi). These skyrocketing rates are forcing poor households off the grid while doing nothing to provide electricity access to the 25% of South Africans who aren’t connected to the grid at all.

South Africa is the biggest carbon polluter in the entire continent of Africa, fueled by massive coal reserves. The dirty power has not led to broad prosperity, however. The nation has terrible income inequality, with a Gini index of 67 percent. The international subsidies for these mega-coal plants are only making the situation worse.

Sadly, these deadly investments are ignored by energy reporters, who instead follow the lead of fossil-funded politicians to explore the “scandals” of much smaller investments in clean energy projects.

Durban's beaches are choked with flood debris.

According to the South Africa Weather Bureau, 2.5 inches of rain fell last night in Durban, which had already recorded 8.2 inches for November, almost double its average.

Some beach-related activities of the United Nations climate conference have been delayed by a day.

This record-setting killer flooding is part of a long-term trend of climate change. Over a decade ago, climate scientists had already measured a significant increase in extreme rainfall on South Africa’s eastern coast, finding “increases of over 50% in the intensity of 10-year high rainfall events” from 1930 to 1990. A 2006 analysis found that global warming pollution will continue to increase overall precipitation and extreme rainfall events during the South African summer (December through February).

Heavy rains are expected to continue for the rest of the week.

I don’t know how much the movie will get into her foreign policy other than the Falklands — her policies on South Africa and Cambodia at the U.N. were less than admirable — or how it’ll assess her shutdowns of U.K. coal mines, a move to both break unions and get England headed towards renewable energy, but that may have simply been faster than was practical. The trailer certainly suggests that the movie will have a lot of psychology, whether Thatcher’s wrestling with her ambition and her sense of family responsibility, or asserting that the fight against sexism means she has the experience to know what the Falklands War will cost. And I’m all for portraying the impact of sexism, how women in positions of leadership have to structure everything from their haircuts to their position papers to protect themselves from its impact as much as possible.

But not everything is psychology, and not all political decisions are determined by what might be the dominant day-to-day conflict in someone’s life. I’ve felt this with Homeland, too, that as tempting as it is to reduce the roles people play in world-historical conflicts to personalities, ideology is powerful too.

Zuma: Climate Negotiations to be Stormy

The United Nations climate change negotiations set to take place in Durban at the end of November are going to be difficult, President Jacob Zuma warned on Monday.

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“We go to Durban with no illusion at all that it will be a walk in the park,” he told delegates at a meeting….

On what South Africa, which is hosting the giant event, expected from COP17, he said outcomes should be “balanced, fair, and credible, and one that preserves and strengthens the multilateral rules-based response to climate change”.

Further, they should be informed by the principles that had formed the basis of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change negotiations.

“These principles include multilateralism, environmental integrity, fairness … and the honouring of all international commitments and undertakings made in the climate change process.”

The Cancun Agreements had also to be “operationalised”, including the establishment of key mechanisms and institutional arrangements agreed to at COP16 in Cancun.

“The Green Climate Fund represents a centre piece for a broader set of outcomes for Durban. Developing countries demand a prompt start for the fund through its early and initial capitalisation.”

Airlines ready for next battle against EU carbon law

Twenty-six nations are expected to lodge a formal protest on Wednesday against a European Union law to make airlines pay for carbon emissions — adding to transatlantic tension on an issue that has triggered a tit-for-tat bill in the U.S. Congress.

Under EU legislation, from January 1 all flights to or from Europe will have to buy carbon permits to help offset their emissions under the EU Emissions Trading Scheme (EU-ETS) — the 27 member bloc’s prime tool for trying to curb the amount of carbon in the atmosphere.

Last week, in the U.S. Congress, where environmental issues have become a flashpoint between Republicans and President Barack Obama’s Democrats, the lower house passed a bill making it illegal for airlines to comply with the EU’s law.

On Wednesday this week, a council meeting of the International Civil Aviation Organization ICAO.L in Montreal, Canada is also expected to take up the airlines’ cause.

EU lawyers have said any decision by the ICAO council would not be legally binding, but could be a step towards a formal dispute procedure, in which the president of ICAO would mediate.

A copy of an ICAO council working paper seen by Reuters said the law, unilaterally passed by the EU, posed “major challenges and risks for aircraft operators”.

Durban diplomats jostle for position ahead of crucial summit

Diplomats have this week continued to stake out their positions ahead of the upcoming international climate change summit in Durban, South Africa next month.

Speaking to reporters following a preparatory meeting for the two week UN summit, NJ Mxakato-Diseko, South Africa’s ambassador-at-large for the conference, urged negotiators not to talk up the chances of a legally-binding agreement being reached.

The hosts remain optimistic that significant progress can be made on a number of fronts, with sources predicting agreements could be reached on climate financing, emissions reporting, and carbon trading.

However, there is a general consensus that a formal treaty will not be finalised and fears are mounting the talks will remain deadlocked on the crucial issue of whether to extend or replace the Kyoto Protocol.

Head of the UN climate change secretariat Christiana Figueres also warned this week that governments may struggle to make progress on commitments made last year to introduce mechanisms to provide up to $100bn a year of funding for climate-related projects from 2020.

“This is not the best time to be talking about finance, because all developed countries are in a financial crisis,” she told reporters, adding that governments needed to realise that the bulk of the new funding would not have to be released until later in the decade.

“The financial needs of climate, both for adaptation and for mitigation, are not short-term needs – they are long-term needs, and they need to be seen in that respect,” she said. “The financial crisis is a financial crisis that we have now, but that is not a long-term crisis for the next 20, 30 years.”

Australia CO2 scheme must be scrapped, opposition says

Australia’s main opposition party vowed on Monday to repeal a carbon pricing scheme expected to become law next month as a key plank for polls due by 2013, threatening to prolong uncertainty in energy investments.

“We will absolutely deliver on our mandate. So the first thing we’ll do is we’ll seek a mandate for repeal,” Greg Hunt, opposition climate change minister, said in an interview.

Labor Party Prime Minister Julia Gillard, who lags the opposition Liberal Party in opinion polls, has staked her minority government’s future on sweeping economic reform such as taxes on mining and carbon.

But voters have been concerned over industry fears the plan to tax carbon emissions will lead to higher costs and job losses, prompting Liberal Party leader Tony Abbott to announce a “blood oath” to repeal the scheme should his party and partners win the next election.

The government on Monday labeled the repeal pledge absurd, underscoring the divisive nature of plans to fight climate change by pricing carbon emissions in Australia, the United States and elsewhere.

Air China Operates First Biofuel Test Flight in China

Air China (CA) conducted the latest biofuel demonstration flight Friday, operating a Boeing 747-400 with Pratt & Whitney PW4000 engines partially powered by jatropha-based fuel.

The 2-hr. flight to/from Beijing (PEK) was the first biofuel flight operated in China. It was conducted in conjunction with Boeing and Pratt, and follows a growing number of biofuel flights operated worldwide (ATW Daily News, April 26).

PetroChina worked with Honeywell’s UOP to source and refine the fuel derived from jatropha grown in China. China National Aviation Fuel blended the biofuel with traditional jet fuel; the ratio was 50:50.

China’s National Energy Administration (NEA) and Boeing also announced an agreement “for further study of regional biofuel development,” Boeing said, adding, “The study results will help support future efforts to establish a sustainable aviation biofuels industry in China, and also form the foundation for an announced renewable energy agreement between the US Trade and Development Agency and the NEA.”

CA and Boeing said they are making plans for an international biofuel flight between the US and China, although “no specific timetable” has been revealed.

Liberals in Ontario to Review Clean Energy Payouts

Premier Dalton McGuinty’s Liberals are reviewing the hefty price paid to renewable energy producers who sell power to the grid under the feed-in tariff program.

Energy Minister Chris Bentley on Monday confirmed a long-expected look at FIT program will be led by deputy minister Fareed Amin in conjunction with the Ontario Power Authority.

“It has been enormously successful — 4,500 megawatts already contracted. Put another way, that’s 1.2 million homes,” Bentley said in an interview.

“We want to continue with a very strong, clean, green energy economy. We want it to be at the right price. This review will give us good information to make it sustainable over the long term.”

Amin’s review, which will be completed early in the new year, does not affect existing contracts with thousands of farmers and energy firms producing electricity through wind, solar, hydro and bio-mass generation.

With rates of to 80 cents per kilowatt hour paid for electricity produced by the sun — when nuclear-generated power costs about 4 cents — the FIT program was much debated during the Oct. 6 provincial election.

As I noted in my previous post on this controversy, I find it a bit curious that strident defenders of Israeli foreign policy take a harder line on Richard Goldstone’s apartheid-era conduct than does Nelson Mandela and the leadership of the African National Congress. It’s almost enough to make you think that some of these attacks on Goldstone are offered in bad faith, and are more motivated by dislike for his conclusions about Israeli conduct during the Gaza war than genuine concern about his past conduct.

Sasha Polakow-Suransky has more on this:

Rather than examining the historical record, Goldberg and Chait relied exclusively on the Yediot article in passing judgment on Goldstone’s early career. Their posts, and a more recent one by Ron Radosh, fail to acknowledge Goldstone’s crucial role in facilitating South Africa’s transition to democracy by chairing the investigative Commission on Public Violence and Intimidation from 1991-1994. Among other things, this commission exposed the apartheid government’s links to a so-called Third Force–made up of government security and ex-security operatives seeking to derail peaceful democratic elections.

The Goldstone Commission’s revelations outraged Nelson Mandela, leading him to conclude that F.W. de Klerk’s government had organized covert death squads. (For more on this topic, read the dispatches of British journalist John Carlin, the author of the book that became the movie Invictus.) Goldstone’s work earned him Mandela’s respect and, in 1994, South Africa’s first black president appointed Goldstone to the Constitutional Court–hardly the sort of honor the great moral icon of the 20th century would have bestowed on “a man without a moral compass,” as Goldberg calls him.

At any rate, the timing of this controversy is fortuitous because Polakow-Suransky has a book set to be released on May 25 called The Unspoken Alliance: Israel’s Secret Relationship with Apartheid South Africa. As South Africa found itself increasingly isolated on the international scene and Israel to a lesser degree was short on friends, Israel became South Africa’s most important source of weapons and “military intelligence officials from the two countries held annual intelligence-sharing conferences and South African military representatives came to the West Bank to view the anti-riot equipment the Israeli army was using against Palestinians.”

“When a woman didn’t enjoy it [sex], she leaves early in the morning. Those who had a nice time will wait until the sun comes out, request breakfast, and ask for taxi money.”

Disgusting.

But of course there are people with disgusting views in the world and they say disgusting things. But the story then takes an unexpected turn. Here’s Lori at Feministing:

And now, according to a recent ruling by the South African Equality Court, these words also legally constitute hate speech and discrimination, and will not be tolerated without legal ramification.

And she’s cheering this on:

The credit for this monumental victory belongs to Sonke Gender Justice Network, an amazing South African organization that supports men and boys to act against domestic and sexual violence. It was them who filed the lawsuit against Malema when they recognized the opportunity to make a public statement about the harm and destruction caused by rape culture.

This move took bravery. It also took strategic vision. The organization where I work, which has partnered with Sonke since 2008, has been anxiously awaiting this verdict since Sonke formalized their complaint in May, but we also recognize that the outcome wasn’t really the point. The very act of them filing the claim was such a powerfully symbolic feminist victory.

Like a number of commenters on Lori’s post, I think this is misguided. The “statement” that what Malema said is unacceptable is a good one, but the practical consequences of criminalizing political speech are very real and not likely to be beneficial in the long run. The boundaries of what kind of discourse about race and gender is or isn’t acceptable is being constantly contested in civil society and I think it’s naive to believe that the state is going to consistently police those boundaries in a consistently beneficial way. It’s very easy to imagine expansive powers to restrict speech being turned against marginal groups, radicals, or anyone who’s politically inconvenient. Especially in a relatively new democracy like South Africa it’s important to stick to liberal principles.

Ndesanjo Macha has a roundup of responses from a variety of points of view that makes me think this ruling may well be reversed on appeal.

I like to check in on Marty Peretz’s blog now and again, and what do I find but “The FT’s Devastating Critique Of Itself”:

Yes, I’ve been harping on the FT’s coverage of Israel. Perhaps, you haven’t agreed with my complaints. Well, read what the paper has to say about the subject this morning. The column is by the historian Andrew Roberts, and it’s a must read.

Andrew Roberts? The same Andrew Roberts who was the subject of Johann Hari’s excellent 2007 takedown in The New Republic? It seems so. Well Roberts, in addition to being an apologist for Boer War-era concentration camps and the Amritsar Massacre is really not the kind of friend Israel needs as it seeks to rebut allegations of similarity to apartheid-era South Africa:

In 2001, Roberts spoke to a dinner of the Springbok Club, a group that regards itself as a shadow white government of South Africa and calls for “the reestablishment of civilized European rulethroughout the African continent.” Founded by a former member ofthe neo-fascist National Front, the club flies the flag of apartheid South Africa at every meeting. The dinner was acelebration of the thirty-sixth anniversary of the day the white supremacist government of Rhodesia announced a Unilateral Declaration of Independence from Great Britain, which was pressingit to enfranchise black people. Surrounded by nostalgists for thisracist rule, Roberts, according to the club’s website, “finished his speech by proposing a toast to the Springbok Club, which hesaid he considered the heir to previous imperial achievements.”

The British High Commission in South Africa has accused the club ofspreading “hate literature.” Yet Roberts’s fondness for the Springbok Club is not an anomaly; it is perfectly logical toanybody who has read his writing, which consists of elaborate andhistorically discredited defenses for the actions of a white supremacist empire–the British–and a plea to the United States to continue its work.

I half-suspect the FT’s editors of playing some kind of elaborate prank here. Surely Israel deserves better than this.

I didn’t want to make too much out of District 9‘s political message since “racism is bad” is really not the most challenging theme in the world, but David Sirota’s appreciation of the film did get me thinking about one thing that I thought was nicely done:

Even more important than the visuals, though, is the plot. By setting the movie in South Africa, the refugee camp/anti-alien racism is a powerful allegory about the universality of oppression. One of the film’s most powerful messages (and there are a number of messages in this movie) is that even groups that have been oppressed can themselves turn into oppressors. In the movie, South Africa’s black population is just as anti-alien as its white population. In real life, we have plenty of examples of the same kind of thing. As just one of many examples, in Israel, some (but certainly not all or most) Jews – despite their own history experiencing oppression – express extremely racist views about Arabs.

Something that I noticed watching the movie was that District 9‘s version of South Africa seemed pretty free of racial tensions. There was a tendency, as in real-world South Africa, for whites to disproportionately occupy high-status social and economic roles. But class dynamics weren’t explicitly racialized, and nobody said anything related to black-white (or, for that matter, anglophone-afrikaaner) tensions. Instead, the introduction of Prawns and, to a lesser extent, Nigerians into the dynamic apparently helped build a greater sense of human and South African solidarity. That kind of thing isn’t the prettiest element of human nature, but it rings pretty true—broadening the circle of tolerance often entails identifying a new “other” against which the new, broader “we” can be defined.

COPE, despite the hopes it inspired, fell flat – taking just under eight per cent of the vote, while the DA took almost 17 per cent and won control of the Western Cape. The fact remains that South Africa has not yet emerged from the era of national liberation politics. The Congress Party, which led the anti-colonial struggle in India, was not seriously challenged nationally for the first 20 years of independence and it did not lose control of the parliament until 1977. It was in the same year, three decades after the establishment of Israel, that voters there shocked the nation’s founding elite by electing the Likud opposition for the first time.

South Africa has not yet reached the stage where, as Johnny Copelyn puts it, “the previous order is so far in the background that it is no l­onger a compelling explanation for the problems people have”.

That said, there are also a bunch of countries that never emerged from the phase of initial domination by the liberation political party. Thus far, though, despite much hand-wringing related to Jacob Zuma I haven’t seen any real indication that democratic institutions don’t continue to exist in South Africa. The ANC just continues to have an extremely strong grip on the public imagination.

There’s been some hand-wringing for a while ever since Jacob Zuma consolidated his position as next leader of the African National Congress. Zuma has a variety of unsavory characteristics, including serious charges of corruption and even rape, and poses some risk that South Africa will slide off its promising path of democracy and relative prosperity.

At the same time, though South African politics isn’t something I follow closely, I had a vague sense that it might in some ways be a good thing. Zuma’s ascension led to some of his rivals in the ANC leaving to form their own political party, the Congress of the People (COPE), which raised the prospect of giving South Africa a credible, black-led opposition party. That would, it seems to me, be a very healthy development since the ANC’s structural supermajority, no matter how well-deserved, presents a constant temptation to abuse of power and so forth. But when the elections results came in, COPE proved to be a huge bust. Eusebius McKaiser and Sasha Polakow-Suransky have an interesting article in The New Republic laying out some of the reasons why.

Jonathan Zasloff writes about a national liberation movement that didn’t resort to indiscriminate killing to achieve its goals:

The ANC maintained a strict policy of nonviolent protest for nearly 50 years, until the 1961 Sharpeville Massacres. Even after the founding of Umkhonto We Sizwe, the vast majority of its targets were government installations and military outposts. Its record was hardly perfect, including the infamous “Magoo’s Bar Bombing” and similar incidents in the mid-80′s, but overall, the ANC was highly disciplined and refrained from hitting civilian targets. Indeed, Umkhonto We Sizwe started a landmine campaign in the mid-80′s, but ended it because of too many civilian casualties. Overall, the South Africa Truth and Reconciliation Commission concluded that the rare soft target attacks were the outcome of either misunderstandings or rogue operators among MK agents.

And of course there’s the civil rights movement in the United States. And it’s worth emphasizing here the extent to which strict adherence to non-violence was important to helping the movement Martin Luther King led to get what they wanted. When people who you regard as being “on your side” start killing people for what you deem a reasonable cause, you tend to look on the killing in an understanding light. But when you don’t regard those people as “on your side” then things like firing rockets at populated areas or dropping bombs on schools begins to look monstrous. And when you’re faced off against monsters, the last thing you want to do is give them any room to breath. The white south resisted desegregation pretty fiercely, but resistance would have been much fiercer if the civil rights movement had been killing tons of people and stoking fears that empowering blacks would lead to massacres.

Much the same applies to the South African situation. At a certain point, it became clear to the apartheid leaders that there system was untenable. But they were still more interested in the upholding the interests of white South Africa than in abstract considerations of justice. The fact that ANC behavior didn’t imply that the organization was led by cold-blooded killers made it much easier to contemplate handing power over to them. In Israel, decline in political support for wild “Greater Israel” notions has been swamped by the way Israeli discourse has become dominated by fear that any easing up on the Palestinians will endanger Israeli lives — a fear that’s hard to assuage driven by how violence-obsessed the Palestinian movement has been.