3/ I should also say that I'd spent a few lunchtimes in the bookshop near my office skimming FW's autobiography & doing some research into his background
After all, you don't rise to the top of the deeply racist National Party in the 1980's without being a bit of racist yourself
4/. So FW opens the floor to questions & sees me front of him, hand raised
He nods towards to me
"Mr de Klerk," I say calmly. "I was very interested reading your book, not so much by what you said, but by what you chose not to say"
On my lap I have a note with 6 bullet points.
5/. I proceeded to go through his ignominious 20 year political career, point-by-point
A career that spanned the Soweto uprisings & the 1980s State of Emergencies during which he'd forcefully supported apartheid
All of which he had somehow managed to omit from his autobiography
6/. As I went through each of my points I felt my anger build
By the time I got to the final one - the fact that FW de Klerk had known about the murderous activities of the Third Force which had continued right up until the day before the 1994 elections - I was shaking with rage
9/. FW de Klerk continued to be an apartheid apologist
Last year he told SABC that "the idea that apartheid was a crime against humanity was & remains an agitprop project initiated by the Soviets & their ANC/SACP allies to stigmatize white South Africans”
10/. Whilst FW de Klerk’s role in helping to end apartheid must be recognised, Mandela puts it well here in 1990
“The ANC ought never to have been banned. We ought never to have been sent to prison. The state of emergency ought never to have been imposed”
11/. POSTSCRIPT: Googling FW de Klerk's book tour, I found our clash was written up by his editor(!) in the @Independent!
"The first questioner, a very intense young man who was shaking like a leaf & seemed to have a set of notes, started denouncing FW"😂 independent.co.uk/arts-entertain…
12/. FW’s editor describes me here as a “nervous activist”
I wasn’t nervous. I was angry
Angry that this man was sitting in my local bookshop in London attempting to gaslight people into believing he & Mandela had stood shoulder-to-shoulder in the fight against apartheid
Eish!
13/. “Forgiveness liberates the soul, it removes fear....Reconciliation does not mean forgetting or trying to bury the pain of conflict, but working together to correct the legacy of past injustice” (Nelson Mandela 1995)
2/. From the start of the pandemic the govt had given #Palantir, a US spyware company with reported links to #CambridgeAnalytica, access to NHS health data
3/. Palantir worked on the NHS data store with #FacultyAI - a company with ties to Cummings
In 2020, @amnesty warned that Big Tech firms might use the COVID crisis to hoover up genomic data, obliterating the last frontier of privacy: our biological selves
1/. “It is the greatest mass-killing in recorded history; & it goes on daily, hourly, as regularly as the ticking of your watch”
Arthur Koestler’s 1944 essay expressing frustration at the failure of the world to acknowledge Nazi atrocities resonates today wethescreamers.com
2/ “There are a few of us…yelling at you in newspapers…Now & then we reach your ear…But it only lasts a minute. You shake yourself like puppies who’ve got their fur wet; then the screen again descends & you walk on, protected by the dream-barrier which stifles all sound”
#Gaza
3/ Koestler notes maniacs lose contact with reality so “perhaps it’s we, the screamers, who react in a sound & healthy way to the reality which surrounds us, whereas you are the neurotics who totter about in a screened fantasy world because you lack the faculty to face the facts”
“They got me!” Liz Truss tells far-right kingpin, Steve Bannon, before going on to explain that, to have effectively tackled “the deep state” that runs Britain & its institutions, she would have “needed a bigger bazooka”! #LizTruss #BritanniaUnchained
"I was just saying it like it is & that’s what people respect me for"(!)
Liz Truss’ compares her premiership to a one night stand & says she was just “fattening the pig” for slaughter & that she should have gaslit the public like Rishi Sunak is doing (!)
"I faced the most almighty backlash...from the usual suspects in the media” Liz Truss
“Truss's decline is simultaneously tragic & horrifying but the claim that the media conspired against her can't go unchallenged. There are front pages praising her to the rafters” @mrjamesob
As the 2nd module of the #CovidInquiry begins covering “core UK decision-making & political governance”, comes news that Rishi Sunak - like Boris Johnson - has also fail to fully comply with the order to hand his WhatsApp messages
“The govt needs get professional IT experts to recover these messages”
Charles Persinger who lost his wife & mother to #COVID, echoes the call of @CovidJusticeUK’s lawyers calling on the @covidinquiryuk to commission experts to retrieve Sunak & Johnson’s ‘lost’ WhatsApp messages
Twitter's new privacy policy takes effect on 29 September
It gives X the right to use your posts - including DMs - & all your data - including phone, email, biometrics (e.g. face scans & eye scans) to train their AI & to share with any partner X wants👇 twitter.com/en/privacy
“I do not accept that Twitter has deteriorated in any way since Elon Musk took over”
A week before Twitter’s change in privacy policy, some questions for @elonmusk
1. What biometric information will be collected & what are the intended uses?
How will X ensure that that the data of X’s 530 million users isn’t used for unlawful purposes? mashable.com/article/x-twit…