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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just putting this thought somewhere, perhaps somebody can point me towards a thinker who has expressed this before: I feel, rather than liberals being unable to see systemic problems as being systemic at all, instead liberals see the individual as systemic (usually in enemy countres), and the systemic as individual (usually in their own or allied countries). So if a bad thing or things happen in an enemy country then that's because that's a fundamental part of their system, whereas if bad or bad things happen in their own country, those are just unfortunate little things that don't taint the wider society
For example, when faced with problems of low wages in America, rather than taking a wide-scale approach they might be like "Well, if you work hard then you can get promoted to better positions and make more money," which obviously doesn't address the fact that if everybody tried to do this then there would be nobody to work the bad but necessary jobs. But when faced with individual stories of people being repressed in Bad Countries like Russia or China or the DPRK, like via the stories of dissidents, then their individual experiences are magnified and generalized to become a systemic part of that Bad Country.
You're on to something. They do generally seem to essentialize people from bad country - there are no individuals in Russia, China, or the Dprk, everyone in those places is either an evil authoritarian communist or a victim of the regime. And often it seems they think both to be the case.
There's some loose comparison to the fundamental misattribution error in psychology to be found there but I feel like I'm only grasping at one end of a thought thread.
Probably tangentially related to Orientalism ?