Total Onslaught: Apartheid's dirty tricks exposed, by De Wet Potgieter

Total Onslaught: Apartheid's dirty tricks exposed. Author: De Wet Potgieter. Zebra Press. Cape Town, South Africa 2007. ISBN 9781770073289 / ISBN 978-1-77-007328-9

Images from Total Onslaught: Apartheid's dirty tricks exposed. Author: De Wet Potgieter.

Total Onslaught: Apartheid's dirty tricks exposed, by De Wet Potgieter. It was American politician Hiram Johnson (1866-1945) who sagely observed: 'The first casualty of war is the truth.'

Preface

During the Vietnam War, his words constantly assailed the ears of the fighting generals, Richard Nixon and his cronies. Eventually, Johnsons wisdom became a curse for an American government stuck in the trenches of a dirty war, far from home. The people opposed it vehemently, and their leaders had no idea how to withdraw from it with honour. And then - lo and behold! - the South African government proceeded to imitate exactly what had caused the Americans to fail so dismally in Vietnam. The defence force and the police opted for the deeply flawed 'hearts and minds' policy that had proved useless as a means of gaining the support of the Vietnamese people and thus emerging as the victors in the war against the Viet Cong. A similar propaganda war, based on unctuous lies and disinformation in order to win the favour of the black population and subtly turn them against the ANC in South Africa and SWAPO in South West Africa (Namibia) did not work either. Furthermore, it cost taxpayers billions of rand over more than a decade. The old defence force's so-called ComOps activity (communication operations), also known as Bevkom, and the police StratComs (strategic communication operations) were essentially one and the same. Both were aimed at attacking the enemy psychologically by broadcasting disinformation and falsehoods all over the world, in order to confuse and spread panic in their ranks. At the same time, the idea was to whip up the support of the outside world by disseminating falsehoods about the enemy and thus discrediting him. It was a grey realm of lies and deception, in which false documents were fabricated to discredit the enemy and score points for the apartheid regime. In many instances, certain damning information about the enemy was withheld until it was strategically advantageous to release it, and thus achieve maximum success against the foe. Numerous sensational reports in newspapers and on television over the years were later exposed as nothing but blatant untruths. There was little or nothing that the ANC and SWAPO could do in retaliation against this campaign of disinformation and discreditation, as both were banned organisations whose voices could not speak through the South African media. After the unbanning of the ANC on 2 February 1990, however, their own lie factory became extremely productive, and the more vicious the psychological battle and war of words became in the run-up to the 1994 elections, the more the organisation churned out its own brand of disinformation and discreditation. One example of this was the coercion campaign designed to intimidate members of National Intelligence, the defence force and the police into coming clean about human rights violations and other horror deeds of the past. As a young journalist, I frequently encountered a jocular scepticism about the government's Total Onslaught theory and the Rooi Gevaar. There was no end to the jokes about being careful of Reds under the beds, communists skulking in the shrubbery. Total Onslaught was the brainchild of PW Botha and Magnus Malan. It was based on the teachings of General Andre Beaufre, the French strategist on whose theories the right-wing Organisation de l'Armee Secrete (OAS) built its terror campaign against the Algerian independence movement in the 1950s. Interestingly enough, Beaufre's military textbook, Strategy, was one of the prescribed works that students at the Military Academy in Saldanha were required to absorb. In the late fifties, a brilliant young South African military officer was also sent to Algeria by the South African Defence Force to gain experience under General Beaufre's tutelage. That officer, Magnus Malan, later became the youngest chief of the defence force in South Africa's history. [...]

This is an excerpt from Total Onslaught: Apartheid's dirty tricks exposed, by De Wet Potgieter.

Title: Total Onslaught
Subtitle: Apartheid's dirty tricks exposed
Author: De Wet Potgieter
Publisher: Zebra Press
Cape Town, South Africa 2007
ISBN 9781770073289 / ISBN 978-1-77-007328-9
Softcover, 15 x 23 cm, 344 pages, several bw and colour photographs