Free Wages of Rebellion by Chris Hedges

“the movement,” predicting that the ruling National Party government would not last six more months in power—a prediction that was off by three decades. Kasrils became Arenstein’s driver. He chauffeured the lawyer to various safe houses around Durban. He met others also being hunted by the police.
    Kasrils returned to his job, but at night he drafted and printed leaflets for the underground movement calling for the release of all detainees, the lifting of the state of emergency, and a democratic government for blacks and whites. He painted anti-apartheid slogans on walls at night. He eventually committed himself totally to the struggle. Turning his back on his job, his class, his government, and his race, Kasrils joined the South African Communist Party and the African National Congress. He became a founding member, along with Nelson Mandela, of Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), or Spear of the Nation, the armed wing of the ANC. Kasrils became a rebel.
    Such a decision to engage in open defiance, abandoning all that is safe, familiar, and secure for a precarious life of resistance, is often triggered by a singular traumatic experience. Lenin was radicalized when his older brother, Aleksandr Ilyich Ulyanov, was executed after being involved in a plot to assassinate the Czar and he began to read his dead brother’s radical books. 6 The trip taken by the twenty-two-year-old medical student Ernesto “Che” Guevara—like Kasrils and Lenin, a member of the middle class—into the poor backwaters of South America allowed him to place himself in the shoes of the oppressed. Such conversions have more to do with the heart than the head. Empathy isthe most important asset. Guevara, like Kasrils and Lenin, would use his empathy to justify violence—a dangerous transformation when all action, even murder, becomes acceptable in the name of the coming utopia. But the sentiments engendered at the moment of conversion are real. Albert Camus said that no rebellion can take place without this “strange form of love.” 7
    When I met with Kasrils in New York, he spoke of an incident in 1984 involving a South African death squad led by the notorious killer and former police colonel Eugene de Kock. De Kock was the commanding officer of C1, a counterinsurgency unit of the South African police that in the 1980s and 1990s kidnapped, tortured, and murdered hundreds of anti-apartheid activists and ANC leaders. He and his hit squad had recently assassinated three of Kasrils’s ANC comrades. Kasrils tracked de Kock, nicknamed “Prime Evil”—and now serving a life sentence in South Africa—and his squad of killers to a motel in Swaziland. Kasrils organized a group of ANC insurgents to gun down the members of the hit squad. De Kock and his men had left, however, before Kasrils and his armed group burst into the room where they had been. I asked Kasrils whether, should the situation be repeated today, he would organize an armed group to kill de Kock and his henchmen.
    “I see this as similar to the French Resistance and the resistance in Europe against the Nazis,” he said. “So, you know there were the battles in the open, but most of the battles were by stealth. I don’t think there’s anything morally wrong in the battle of stealth against power when you are engaged in a war. They had killed, murdered in cold blood, three of our people in Swaziland. You’ve got to take harsh decisions at times, and this is in the context of an ongoing war there.… I put it within the context of a revolutionary war.”
    Nevertheless, he said that “when I look back and I meet some of these people who we fought before, and I hear from them how they knew someone who died, I wish that that person didn’t have to die.”
    Kasrils served as the commander of the Natal Regional Command and in 1964 underwent military training in Odessa in the Soviet Union. As a leader in the MK, Kasrils carried out sabotage and bombings of state infrastructure and industrial