• AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldB
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    1 year ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:


    The world of nations is riddled with zones – city states, havens, enclaves, freeports, hi-tech parks, duty-free districts and innovation hubs – and they define the politics of the present in ways we are only starting to understand.

    By 2012, Canary Wharf housed more bankers than the City of London, but it was also a privatised space where the usual rights of assembly and protest did not apply and was completely reliant on investor interest from undemocratic states like Qatar and China.

    Born in 1948 into a conservative Afrikaner family, Louw had helped found the Free Market Foundation, a thinktank that saw South Africa’s “tragedy” as the mismatch between its rhetoric of pro-capitalism and anti-communism, and the reality of what they saw as “creeping socialism”.

    In the supposed “laboratory experiment” of free markets in Ciskei, investors were offered a deal too good to pass up, as the state paid the wages of their employees, subsidised 80% of the cost of their factory rentals and billed them for no corporate taxes.

    They prophesied a variety of coexisting political forms, including a canton called Workers Paradise where “everyone was issued with a copy of Mao’s little red book” and racial segregation was reinstituted because Black and white leftist radicals “refused to mix with each other socially”.

    When Mandela spoke from a balcony in Cape Town partially covered with a red Soviet flag, people pressing in and lifted up on shoulders and arms to see him, his message was clear and unambiguous: “Universal suffrage on a common voters roll in a united, democratic and non-racial South Africa is the only way to peace and racial harmony.” The next month, the Ciskei government of Lennox Sebe was overthrown in a coup, with a crowd chanting: “Viva ANC!


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