Casualty of crisis: A woman places a candle where a man fatally shot himself at Syntagma Square this month. He left a note that police said linked his suicide with the country's financial woes. Picture: Petros Giannakouris / AP Casualty of crisis: A woman places a candle where a man fatally shot himself at Syntagma Square this month. He left a note that police said linked his suicide with the country's financial woes. Picture: Petros Giannakouris / AP
When a 77-year-old man shot himself in the head at Syntagma Square in Athens a few weeks ago, the story became a sensation internationally, both in its individual and collective sense. Here was a professional man in an economically and socially devastated country that made headline news on major international TV stations and on social media networks.
It was a conscious human and political act of resistance against consecutive Greek governments and economic elites. The parallels with the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi in Tunisia were striking. This was a cry against greed, avarice and corruption.
Inevitably, hundreds of social networks and media commentators offered their own psychological explanations – “experts” dissected the “messages” and all spectrums of the political divide called him their own. This is the fate of the dead. They cannot defend themselves against the experts.
In a country that has been at the crossroads of history, unarmed against the weapons of mass destruction of the World Bank and the European Bank, the media had an important role to play.
The media constructed the man as a product of a society in desperation, the creation of a situation of “urgent necessity” in a country in economic crisis. This context necessitated massive retrenchments in the public sector, wholesale privatisation of all public assets, and the use of excessive violence of the police special forces against peaceful demonstrations.
These are the “solutions” recommended by the EU, the international financial media and Goldman Sachs, followed in line by other such agencies that categorise societies, countries, economies and people according to a set of stringent criteria.
Hence the mainstream public opinion and media deal, in most cases, with issues that create “hard and necessary” measures that will hopefully lead to “a better future”.
The question that remains is exactly who is this better future for? Is it for the majority or a small group of people and institutions that control the material, financial, manufacturing and other economic sectors of society?
It is the majority that has to bear the burden of these necessary steps, so its nationalist fervour needs to be promoted and enhanced to the maximum.
In most cases such strategies pay off, but in other cases there are uprisings and human sacrifices that change the direction of historical process.
As South Africans we need to be very careful of elite attempts to stir us into a nationalist fervour that will tie us to leaders, while blinding us to the fact that they are becoming rich while the masses get poorer. We also need to be proud of the exceptional journalism that we have seen recently, for instance around the case of police crime intelligence head Richard Mdluli, and do our utmost to preserve and strengthen the role of a truly independent media in our society.
There is no doubt that without an independent and questioning citizenry, and without a free press, the fruits of the heroic struggles against apartheid and colonialism will be reversed.
There are some instances where the ruling party operates like an advertising agency, using repetition of slogans that belong to the past.
This does not mean that we need to erase history – on the contrary, we must make it a compulsory subject at schools. But we need to avoid the efforts to underestimate our people.
History should be taught as a way of examining the past critically, not as propaganda for a ruling party. Our people understand the challenges of the present and the future.
It is always politically advantageous for ruling economic and political elites to speak to emotions rather than material and social realities. A careful reading of the seminal analysis of African politics and society, the late Claude Ake’s Revolutionary Pressures in Africa, written in 1978, will attest to such an assertion.
Appealing to the emotions of the nationalist majority associated with the utmost glorification of true historical struggles is a classical strategy of psychological brainwashing aimed at ensuring the continuity of historical and present conditions.
The question is: Can the subconscious dominate the new socialisation patterns of the young post-1994 generation Model C education and the culture of accumulation? Desires, fears, failure and success, behaviour and habits are not stagnant entities – they change, sometimes for the best, sometimes for the worse.
How can we not understand that social and class inequalities are becoming wider because of the present realities of our educational system?
It is simply dishonest to keep blaming the legacy of the past for inequalities and injustice.
Every day our society reinforces and worsens inequality. We need an educated, critical and informed citizenry. The education system is failing us, and badly.
But the media can, as we have seen recently, play a key role in keeping us informed and open to debate. We must defend them.