Julian Walker recounts the 1986 Johannesburg limpet mine attack on Child Welfare’s office, where double-glazing and street noise likely muted the explosion’s impact. Drawing parallels to U.S. debates on armed resistance after René Good and Alex Pretty’s murders, he weighs paramilitary tactics versus disciplined protest—like strikes—as countermeasures to state violence and ICE actions, amid fears of martial law. Personal memories, including his mother’s vague recollections and Jackie’s (a warm butch lesbian) connection to the bombing site, frame the discussion, while Walker hints at deeper ties to apartheid-era South Africa and Northern Ireland’s conflict history. [Automatically generated summary]
The first thing she noticed, says my mother, is that the conference room table lifted up off the floor and everything went quiet.
She and eight colleagues were in a meeting at their Rissick Street office on the third floor.
This is Johannesburg, 1986, and she worked at that time for a non-profit called Child Welfare, a social work NGO who tried to protect the rights and well-being of children, caught in the crossfire of apartheid's brutal political and economic oppression while still giving the appearance to the authorities of working within their racially segregated structure.
First came that odd moment of the table lifting up several inches, accompanied, she says, by an immense feeling of pressure in the room, and then the huge sound of an explosion blooming from a restaurant across the street.
Now, such impressions are inevitably filtered through shock, so who knows what else lifted or how high.
It was probably less than a second between that sound wave vibration and then the sound itself hitting.
But she described it as time slowing down and that uncanny sense of the table hovering for an inbreadth of total silence before the chaos.
I recognize this kind of altered time perception myself.
Perhaps you do too.
For me, it's a memory of a bad car accident.
The windows in the office block did not shatter.
It was something of an anomaly for such a warm climate, but they were double-glazed.
Probably, she speculates, because they faced a street usually busy with traffic noise.
They were, for that reason, also never open.
I'm Julian Walker, and today I'll be reflecting on where we are in America right now and what happens in societies where citizens form paramilitary groups in order to further their political goals.
That topic exists, of course, in the context of what happens in societies where state violence via policing reinforces oppression and can at times take the form of militias created to be loyal only to an authoritarian despot.
In the wake of the broad daylight street murders of René Good and Alex Pretty, questions of how resistance to ICE and Trump should proceed now include discussions around armed protest and organizing self-defense groups as a radical flank to protect at-risk communities and activists.
Others are calling for a mass movement of disciplined peaceful protest, strikes, and focused political organizing around the midterm elections, which may be at risk of not even happening if the administration can make a case for martial law based on violent riots or something like shootouts between protesters and ICE agents.
I think we've arrived at a really dangerous crossroads, and it makes me think about South Africa and Northern Ireland and even Gaza, all places with legacies of decades-long political armed struggle.
Today, I'll mostly talk about my home country of South Africa and briefly touch on Northern Ireland.
There'll be more to come in future installments.
Many in my own camp today who decry the accelerating slide toward authoritarianism and even fascism in America say that taking up arms has historically been the only antidote.
Other left-of-center voices echo research that shows otherwise.
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My mother was the first to stand up and rush to those double-glazed windows to see what had happened.
But in recounting the story to me, this was just last week, she paused right there.
It's odd, you know.
She said, I know it was a limpet mine in the wimpy bar, but I seem to have formed no memories I can access right now of how the street looked after the bomb went off.
I think I've blocked it out.
Her colleague and friend Jackie was in the meeting.
I remember her as this wonderfully warm and quietly down-to-earth butch lesbian who gave me my first guitar lesson, in which I learned to play Suzanne by Leonard Cohen.
You know, Suzanne takes you down to her place near the river.
She visited our home often.
My mom says Jackie also has patchy memories of that day, but that when they've talked about it, she always emphasized how they'd had lunch together at that same Wimpy Bar the day before the bombing.
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