On this day in 2012, the Marikana Massacre took place when South African police fired on striking workers, killing 34 and injuring 76 in the most lethal use of force by the state in half a century.
The shootings have been compared to the infamous Sharpeville Massacre in 1960, when police fired on a crowd of anti-Pass Law protesters, killing 69 people, including 10 children. The Marikana Massacre took place on the 25-year anniversary of a nationwide strike by over 300,000 South African workers.
On August 10th, miners had initiated a wildcat strike at a site owned by Lonmin in the Marikana area, close to Rustenburg, South Africa. Although ten people (mostly workers) had been killed before August 16th, it was on that day that an elite force from the South African Police Service fired into a crowd of strikers with rifles, killing 34 and injuring 76.
After surveying the aftermath of the violence, photojournalist Greg Marinovich concluded that "[it is clear] that heavily armed police hunted down and killed the miners in cold blood."
Following the massacre, a massive wave of strikes occurred across the South African mining sector - in early October, analysts estimated that approximately 75,000 miners were on strike from various gold and platinum mines and companies across South Africa, most of them doing so illegally.
A year after the Marikana Massacre, author Benjamin Fogel wrote "Perhaps the most important lesson of Marikana is that the state can gun down dozens of black workers with little or no backlash from 'civil society', the judicial system or from within the institutions that supposedly form the bedrock of democracy."
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I don't support imperial hegemony or anything, but I'm genuinely baffled every day that MBS gets away with his shit. Like he should have just have gotten a fax saying "Listen Mac, You're a client state, you supply oil and we keep you in power. If you stop supplying oil we are sure there are others in your country who will" whenever he tried to do anything that doesn't fit the US agenda, and yet Biden keeps grovelling. What the fuck is that.
Aren't the two basically involved in proxy wars against each other?
Saudi Arabia has gone against the US in multiple ways recently, including flirting with ending the petrodollar. But I don't remember them being in a proxy war against each other, that would be incredibly audacious too since the US is currently supplying them for their war in Yemen.
I'm thinking in the sense that Saudis sponsor terrorists and so US anti terror is functionally a proxy war.
Half the terrorists the US condemns are sponsored by the US itself.