A brilliant strategy unfolds
AT LAST a glimmering of enlightenment. At last I begin to understand what this International Youth Festival being organised by the National Youth Development Agency is all about. Let us not be parsimonious with a niggardly R29 million allocation. Let us give them what they want.
The thing is a function of the World Federation of Democratic Youth, an organisation founded in London in 1945 in the immediate aftermath of World War II. The World Federation went on to support the communist coup d'etat in Czechoslovakia in 1948, then various escapades by the Soviet Union elsewhere in Eastern Europe. It supported the North Koreans when they invaded South Korea in 1950.
Certain pages on the internet are unkind enough to describe the World Federation as having been a KGB front organisation in the days of the Soviet Union – but that is neither here nor there. The key lies in the slogan adopted after a phase of self-examination and introspection following the collapse of communism. The World Federation has now emerged - as its website cheerfully tells us – as "an anti-imperialist left-wing organisation."
Don't you see? The World Federation of Democratic Youth is the relic of an age that has passed. But it's absolutely in step with Comrade Julius – nationalisation of the mines, tirades against the wicked capitalists and colonialists – who is set on creating in South Africa some sort of Jurassic Park of the anti-colonial, anti-capitalist struggle; a socialist Disneyland where visitors can come from overseas to experience the rhetoric, the sloganeering, the anti-imperialist anger. And find that – just as in East Germany – nothing works.
Retro-experience is a powerful impulse in world tourism. People will flock to our shores just to experience the nostalgia of it.
Capitalist lackeys … Yankee-imperialist running dogs … bean soup tigers… This is absolutely brilliant! Unique in the world!
Give 'em all the money they want, I say.
Bitter is better
MY OLD war correspondent/foreign correspondent colleague, Derek Taylor (who hails originally from Down Under), disputes my version of the free beer promised by an Aussie brewery to every Australian citizen 18 or older, should the national cricket side win back the Ashes from England.
"Your traumatising distortion of the patriotic brewery offer to stand a celebratory beer to every member of the Australian nation's drinking classes - when we extract the Ashes urn from the Brits at the end of this Test series - cannot go unexposed," he says.
"The free beers offered are not Foster's Lager (a pale, whey-faced imitation of real beer) but Victoria Bitter or Victoria Best Bitter and the offer/wager was first announced in the Melbourne newspapers this week.
"It would take up most of the Mercury's columns for me to describe in accurate and exhaustive terms the spiritual, nourishing and taste-bud glories of VBB and so I will say no more except that my lawyers are now employing local Brazilian heart transplant experts to establish the extent of cardiac damage your report has, however unintentionally, caused me to suffer.
"At the moment I can only say that your damages consist of your getting the next round."
What a pleasure. I think the story is that the patriotic brewery involved produces beer in various Australian states, under different names. In New South Wales it's Foster's Lager; in Victoria, it's Victoria Best Bitter. And, of course, it's very different beer.
Whatever, chuggalug – that's if they can win the Ashes!
Aussie good life
THE ABOVE recalls the lyrical celebration of the Australian good life by Barry McKenzie, hero of Barry Humphries's cartoon strip in Private Eye magazine many years ago.
I was down on Bondi pier with a tube of ice-cold beer
And a bucketful of prawns upon my knee;
I swallowed my last prawn,
Had a technicolor yawn
And I chundered in the old Pacific sea …
Korea
CURRENT events on the Korean peninsula must trigger a few memories for the aforementioned Derek. He was technically involved as a combatant in the Korean War of 1950 to 1953 because he'd been called up for national service in the Royal Australian Air Force about a week before hostilities ended.
Or is it the Crimean War I'm thinking about?
Tailpiece
"I GOT kicked out of the chef school."
"Why?"
"My dog ate my homework."
Last word
Laws are like sausages. It's better not to see them being made.
GRAHAM LINSCOTT
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