Stakhanovites, Stalin and Apartheid converge

Aleksei Stakhanov, mined 102 tons of coal in less than 6 hours (14 times his quota and spawned the Stakhanovite movement, which spread over other industries of the Soviet Union. Pasha Angelina was glorified as the first Soviet woman to operate.

The Soviets organized a wide network of industrial trainings and created special courses for foremen of socialist labor. In 1936, a number of industrial and technical conferences revised the projected production capacities of different industries and increased their outputs. They also introduced the Stakhanovite competitions within factories and plants, broken down into periods of five days (пятидневка, or pyatidnevka), ten days (декада, or dekada) and 30 days (месячники, or mesyachniki). The factory management would often create the Stakhanovite brigades or departments, which reached a stable higher collective output.

Now we have as example of a modern Stakhanovite Police Constable Diederik Coetzee, aged 48, has been acclaimed in the MSM press and TV today, and by his senior officers in Nottingham for making 309 arrests in 10 months, compared with an average 9.5 arrests per year by the police forces in England and Wales.

Coetzee has already surpassed the previous British record of 305 arrests for a single year with 2 months still left.

"It's a joy getting up each morning for work. For me it really is a way of life”.
Paradoxically a South African with the same name has been examining Antipodean police activity elsewhere in the British Commonwealth. Nobel Prize-winning author JM Coetzee , now living in Australia, compares Prime Minister Howard’s controversial new anti-terrorism laws to apartheid-era human rights abuses in his native South Africa.

"I used to think that the people who created (South Africa's) laws that effectively suspended the rule of law were moral barbarians," Coetzee is reported as saying.

"Now I know they were just pioneers ahead of their time."

Preparing for a public reading from his famous 1980 anti-apartheid novel "Waiting for the Barbarians", Coetzee said South African security police in the 1970s could arrest and detain people without explanation "and do what they wanted" with them "because special provisions of the legislation indemnified them in advance".

"All of this, and much more during apartheid in South Africa, was done in the name of the fight against terror," said the fabled and reclusive 2003 Nobel laureate.

The Australian draft Anti-Terror laws would expand police powers to arrest and secretly hold suspects preventively, and impose penalties on reporters or members of the suspects' families who publicise their situation.

The draft laws say that if an arrested suspect is aged 16- 18 only one parent would be informed of the reason for his detention and they could be jailed for up to five years if they tell the other parent why the minor had been arrested.

This, says JM Coetzee mirrors the positioning apartheid-era South Africa.

"If somebody telephoned a reporter and said, 'Tell the world -- some men came last night, took my husband, my son, my father away, I don't know who they were, they didn't give names, they had guns', the next thing that happened would be that you and the reporter in question would be brought into custody for furthering the aims of the proscribed organisation endangering the security of the state," he said. (Glorifying terrorism ?)

Prime Minister Howard says, "I am confident the legislation has all the right balances and the right protections and the right safeguards."

Stakhanovites and Stalinist Police States converge …. again

Recent blogs on same topic here