Shareen Singh

Cosmopolitan South African for social justice - use my independent voice to write to speak to shout - equalize.

[Zwelinzima Vavi @Zwelinzima1]

In all the years we were there, the ANC always spoke first, either after lunch on the first day or first thing in the morning of the second day. The SACP generally spoke on the afternoon of the second or third day

[Shareen Singh @ShareenSingh8]

The more I think about it, the more I realise that growing lawlessness and violence in SA need leadership with some authoritarianism - I am talking about a China-type Tiananmen Square. But something has to give. Things are out of control.

[Shareen Singh @ShareenSingh8]

@RediTlhabi They see nothing wrong with this. They see nothing wrong with the widening gap between rich and poor. This is the system, the capitalist norm.

[Ounka @OunkaOnX]

This is the clearest breakdown of Israeli apartheid you'll hear:

"Two laws from 1950 show this: 750,000 Palestinians driven out were not allowed to return - but me, a British Jewish person, has the right to go live on that land"

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

I am a member of the Norwegian Nobel Committee.

There are five of us. Five people, appointed by a parliament most of the planet could not find on a map, who decide, once a year, which human being the world has agreed to call good.

I know. I know. I think about it on the tram.

We meet in a building on Henrik Ibsens gate, a street named after a man who wrote almost exclusively about people discovering they are frauds, which nobody on the committee finds funny except me. There is a room with a long table and the portraits of the dead laureates looking down, Mandela, the Dalai Lama, a great many earnest men in spectacles, and one portrait we do not discuss, which is Kissinger, 1973, awarded while the bombs were still falling, after which two of our predecessors resigned and the satirist Tom Lehrer said political satire was now obsolete. We keep him on the wall. A reminder. Every family has the uncle.

It is October in Oslo, which means the sun gives up around four in the afternoon like a civil servant, and it rains the particular Norwegian rain that isn’t quite falling, just hanging there, judging you. I arrive with wet shoes. I always arrive with wet shoes. There is coffee, because this is Norway and there is always coffee, we drink more of it per person than almost anyone alive, and someone’s wife has sent kanelboller, the cinnamon buns, and we sit, five Norwegians, damp, caffeinated, sugared, and we decide the moral standing of the entire species.

Let me tell you how it actually works, because the world imagines a cathedral and it is, I promise you, a book club with a mandate.

287 nominations this year. 208 people, 79 organizations. Anyone can nominate, that’s the secret nobody understands: a professor, a parliamentarian, a former laureate, so the “nominee” list is meaningless, it’s a suggestion box, and every autumn some congressman nominates his own golden retriever and the press writes “SHORTLISTED.” Nobody is shortlisted. There is no short list the public ever sees. There is us, and the coffee, and the rain, and the portraits, and a Norwegian stubbornness that is older than the prize itself.

We read reports. The institute’s advisers write them, thick dull documents, and we argue. Our chairman told the BBC once that in the final meeting “there is a high temperature.” High temperature, for a Norwegian, means someone slightly raised an eyebrow and then apologized for it. We don’t do high temperature. We do a long silence, and then Kristin says “well,” and everyone knows exactly what “well” meant, and it’s settled. That’s our shouting. “Well.” You’d have to be raised here to hear the violence in it.

Now. This year. I will not say the name, because we never say the name, but you know the name.

A certain head of state wanted this prize the way a child wants a thing in a shop window, which is to say loudly, and in public, and with the full belief that wanting it was itself the argument. He said he deserved it. He said he’d ended eight wars, a number that grew most times he said it, like a fish. He had other heads of state phone us. Israel’s prime minister posted it on the internet, “Give him the Nobel.” The leaders of Cambodia and Pakistan announced they’d nominated him, as though announcing it were part of it, as though we tally mentions. A man flew around the globe collecting endorsements for a Norwegian committee the way you’d collect signatures for a petition to the council about a noisy dog.

And here, uff da, is the detail I treasure, the one that makes me smile into my coffee. The nomination deadline is the 31st of January. He took office on the 20th. So for all the phone calls, all the posts, all the gilded lobbying, the only nominations that could possibly count for this year’s prize were filed in the first eleven days of his term, before he had, by his own arithmetic, ended a single one of the eight wars. He campaigned all year for a prize whose window had shut while he was still hanging up his coat. We didn’t have to reject him. The calendar did. We just watched. Norwegians are very good at watching. We have long winters.

People think we sit there weighing his deeds. We don’t. That’s the thing I can’t make the world understand. We’re not grading his homework. We don’t owe anyone the prize for a ceasefire, however real, however loud the announcement. “He made peace” is not a sentence that ends in a medal, the way he believes it does, the way he believes every good thing ends in his name on it. The will of a dead Swede says the prize goes to whoever did the most for fraternity between nations. A dead Swede, I should add, who made his entire fortune inventing dynamite and selling arms, and spent his last years horrified at his own obituary, which called him a merchant of death, and so bought his way to immortality as a man of peace. The whole prize is one guilty arms dealer’s attempt to launder his name. We are, all of us, administering a dead man’s public relations. I find this clarifying. It keeps me humble. It should keep everyone humble, and it keeps, by my count, no one humble at all.

So who did we give it to?

An eighty-five-year-old woman. A judge. Born in Durban, under apartheid, granddaughter of a Tamil man who came to South Africa as indentured labor, a bus driver’s daughter from the poor Indian quarter, who became the first non-white woman to run a law practice in her province, who defended Mandela’s people when defending them was dangerous, who sat on the Rwanda tribunal and the court at the Hague, and who, at eighty-five, is right now a judge weighing whether a genocide is a genocide. When we told the world, our chairman said the rule of law “underpins the system we have set up to ensure peace,” and that “peace requires justice.” She wasn’t even in Oslo. She was in Nuremberg. In courtroom 600. The actual room where they tried the Nazis. You cannot stage that. God staged that, and God, it turns out, is a better satirist than any of us.

She did not phone us. She did not post. No prime minister demanded it for her on the internet. She had, as far as our deliberations are concerned, the one qualification the loud man could never manufacture, which is that she wanted the work and not the medal. The medal finds those people. It flees the ones who chase it. This is not a rule we wrote. It’s just the only pattern the hundred-odd years of our mistakes has ever shown.

The reaction from across the ocean was immediate. His spokesman posted that we “place politics over peace.” Ja. Perhaps. We’re five damp pensioners in a rainy city; of course it’s political, it was always political, it was political when we gave it to a sitting American president nine months into his first term for the promise of things he had not yet done, and we have been quietly embarrassed about that one for fifteen years, so believe me, we had a particular reason this year to prefer a woman with fifty years of verdicts behind her over a man with eight wars in front of him and a deadline already behind him.

Here is what he will never understand, the thing I’d tell him on the tram if he ever took one. We are the one prize he cannot buy, cannot post his way to, cannot have a friendly dictator phone in for him. Not because we’re incorruptible, nei, we’re as vain and wrong and human as the portraits on our wall. But because the entire point of the thing, the only power a small cold country’s book club has ever held, is that it goes to the person not performing the wanting. The moment you demand it, you’ve proven you don’t understand what it’s for, and proving that is itself the disqualification. He ran the most expensive campaign in the history of the prize and the campaign was the reason. He was never losing to Navi Pillay. He was losing to the concept.

It’s dark now. Four o’clock dark. The buns are gone. Kristin said “well” an hour ago and we all went home. I’m on the tram with my wet shoes, and somewhere across the water a very powerful man is explaining to a camera that the prize is rigged, that we’re corrupt, that he’ll win it next year, and he genuinely might, we’re only five idiots and we’ve been wrong before, Kissinger is still on the wall.

But not this year. This year an old woman in Nuremberg, in the room where the law once stared down the exact kind of man who thinks wanting a thing loudly enough should make it his, got a phone call she didn’t ask for.

That’s the job. We don’t reward the man who ends the war and announces it.

We reward the woman who spent fifty years deciding what a war was.

He’ll never see the difference. That’s rather the whole point of him.

Takk for i dag. I have to change trams.

[Shareen Singh @ShareenSingh8]

This is the hard truth. Please do listen - it is told unfiltered.

[Yanis Varoufakis @yanisvaroufakis]

Fox News and some Zionist sites are accusing me of having played a part in last Saturday's Global Palestine Alliance London rally. Yes, I did. Proudly. A tiny part. I wish I had played a larger one. But I was in Athens and could only send this video - whose text I past below in the interests of full disclosure. Read/watch and judge:

Greetings from Athens to the UK Alliance for Palestine. Kudos to all of you for continuing to mobilise against our generation’s greatest crime, our generation’s genocide in Gaza and the systematic state-backed ethnic cleansing and ruthless land seizures in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

As I have said before, if this were the 1930s, we would have only one moral duty: to defend Jewish people from the Nazis. Today, we again have only one moral duty: to defend Palestinian people from Israel.

Friends, I am not going to finish this message of solidarity by caressing your ears. I am going to do the opposite. At the risk of upsetting you, I am going to suggest that we stop congratulating ourselves. So far, we have failed. The genocide, the ethnic cleansing, the white-washing of this century’s greatest crime is continuing despite our efforts.

Our governments remain utterly complicit. Even when they do some windowdressing, like Andy Burnham sanctioning exports from the Occupied Territories (as if Israel will brand them as such!), they only do it to ENSURE that there is no trade and arms embargo against Israel to force Israel to cease and desist from its genocidal practices. What PM Burnham has done was to take the wind out of our sails by lulling the majority into thinking that there has been a change when there hasn’t been.

Look at the way the media are still at it. Copying the playbook that demonised and vilified Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party, for ‘insufficient support of Israel’s genocide’, they are applying the same playbook today against Zack Polanski and the Green Party.

Wherever we look – if we are honest – we see the evidence of our movement’s failure to dent Israel’s determination to complete its genocide and of our political and economic system’s to lend the Apartheid state a hand.

I know: Many of you are tired, after years of campaigning often at high personal cost. But now is not the time to feel the fatigue. Now is the time to do more. To do better. To end genocide, ethnic cleansing and land seizures across Palestine. To make it possible to imagine – not just as a slogan – a Palestine free of Apartheid.

[Shareen Singh @ShareenSingh8]

Jacinta's minion, you are wasting your time. I am ignoring you.

[Hopewell Chin’ono @daddyhope]

She was right!

[Shareen Singh @ShareenSingh8]

@RediTlhabi Netanyahu adds a new dimension to what it means to be deranged and a lie with a straight face.

[Shareen Singh @ShareenSingh8]

March and March followers are vile and violent - in language and action. Ignore them.

[Shareen Singh @ShareenSingh8]

@vlok_andre Vote for new leaders more aligned with this century's challenges and the future. I see what is happening in the US now - and it shows that it is possible.

[Shareen Singh @ShareenSingh8]

@NeilColemanSA Gwede is a disgrace not just to Cosatu but to the government. The sooner labour unions realise that neither Gwede nor Ramaphosa nor Godongwana, former unionists in the GNU, are not on their side - the side of the working class- the better.

[Shareen Singh @ShareenSingh8]

@easibility @curingdercums2 Shame - if you read - you would see who the biggest critics are - black journalists and analysts. FACTS matter.

[Shareen Singh @ShareenSingh8]

This was made with Grok - lazy idiots do that. They should know by now that I won't shut up - none of their feeble efforts rattles me. Clearly, my posts bother them, and that is the intention.

[South African AF @garlzee]

@ShareenSingh8 @News24

[Shareen Singh @ShareenSingh8]

FACT: Successive governments have been slack and have let the population down. Deal with the government. I draw the line at VIOLENCE. Using lies and organising campaigns that involve violence is acceptable. Lawlessness is everywhere - mostly by South Africans -GBV- do we blame foreigners? Corruption- should we blame foreigners? March and March supporters will not be better off, but the leaders will continue their comfortable lives. Same as the Zuma twins - more than 300 people died, jobs were lost, and there was massive destruction - their comfortable lives were not affected. Protest peacefully, vote useless parties out...

[Shareen Singh @ShareenSingh8]

Jacinta's people - you are wasting your time - your vulgar posts are not even read.

[Shareen Singh @ShareenSingh8]

I am not a madam. I am an ordinary person with a name who understands how the government has failed South Africans. Violence is never an answer - negotiations, peaceful protest, civil society action, voting out those who do not deliver...Lawlessness is everywhere - more violence that comes with Jacinta and her husband's campaign is unacceptable; it also comes with lies. She and her husband will not struggle like the people who have become pawns in her personal agenda. She will rise up with government tenders... and leave her supporters behind.

[Shareen Singh @ShareenSingh8]

Great history lesson by Mthombothi. Gandhi was a fallible human being, but passive resistance is what many came to adopt. The violence of SA today is our national disgrace. Vigilantism, GVB...All of us need to say NO to Violence and work towards non-violence.

BARNEY MTHOMBOTHI| Why an Indian woman thanked me for Mahatma Gandhi https://t.co/XIcOjKeiOm

[Shareen Singh @ShareenSingh8]

Joel Pollak is a disgrace, and so are his friends, including Helen Zille. Terms like "WOKE " and " critical race theory - a US construct) were brought into our politics by Zille. We do not know how Pollack influenced Helen. But the SA Institute of Race Relations, where Zille spent her sabbatical, has swung right and now aligns with the far right.

[Shareen Singh @ShareenSingh8]

Durban’s uneasy calm: Can the state keep a lid on anti-immigrant violence? https://t.co/GdHCaG35f3

[Shareen Singh @ShareenSingh8]

I wish Cosatu could reflect on 1994- sending unionists to parliament? Did they add value, or did they merge into the ANC? How many have become upper-class today - some embarrassingly super wealthy - some used union investment companies to become super wealthy. @matthewparkscpt

Divided Cosatu faces critical congress as some of its own members question readiness https://t.co/fBDbx6V8jJ via @news24

[Julian Rademeyer @julianrademeyer]

How a narrow court ruling was distorted to fuel a week of anti-foreigner rage online | @dailymaverick | "Paid influencers and accounts with high buzzer scores, which repeatedly amplify the same few influencers, are prominent in the network and have been a mainstay feature of the anti-foreigner movement ever since its launch in April 2020, giving it an outsized presence within our national psyche that it does not fully deserve." https://t.co/XeinrzErg1

[Shareen Singh @ShareenSingh8]

Yep! And this govt watches - no one gets called to ~Parliament to account. The worst is how a Brit becomes a low-level estate agent and gets his resident, or whatever status he holds, under a DA Minister, even though it is known that he was one of the founders of this despicable organisation. Phil Craig also supports Lex Libertas, a defender of apartheid Israel.