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144 | denis beckett<br />
government”. eskom converted an article I wrote on nuclear<br />
energy into a booklet and then took a series in frontline.<br />
The ads were cancelled and the manager who had booked<br />
them, chuck Thal, was reprimanded for bringing eskom into<br />
disrepute. In a single month admiral evert Groenewald of<br />
Submarine command saw (a) Frontline identified at Defence<br />
college as a weapon of creeping communism, and (b) a memo<br />
from Defence Headquarters commending a Frontline article.<br />
This article travelled far and wide in the military. It was by<br />
Helmoed-römer Heitman, who in his cool logical manner set<br />
out a series of reasons why conscription was a good thing.<br />
Heitman was an editor’s delight, like andrew Kenny. If either<br />
said they were producing on Tuesday week, on Tuesday week the<br />
piece arrived with zero spelling errors, zero sloppy literals, and<br />
zero waste of words. Both of them stirred the pot, Heitman on<br />
military and police and Kenny on energy and much else. Neither<br />
were journalists – Heitman owned the car parks on cape Town’s<br />
foreshore and Kenny was an engineer. Neither could be bulldozed<br />
into writing anything. They wrote when the spirit moved them<br />
and when it moved them it moved them good.<br />
Heitman’s conscription article changed more minds than<br />
any article I ever knew. Now, it may be old news that armies<br />
behave better if they’re full of people who don’t want to be<br />
there. Then it was retch news, especially to pale persons with<br />
teenage sons. My own son was 6 months old and I felt the retch<br />
too, and terrible grim chill at the prospect that when he was 18<br />
in 2003 we might still be fighting off majority rule.<br />
It wasn’t surprising that the army swiped that piece, but they<br />
might have done it decently, or even merely legally. This wasn’t<br />
a case of making a copy for a friend; they printed thousands. I<br />
could have sued them; should have. Instead I sent a friendly<br />
letter. They didn’t have the grace to reply.<br />
Heitmans and Kennys notwithstanding, Frontline had said<br />
let there be one-person-one-vote, and that was the ultimate<br />
shibboleth of unforgiveable leftism. The righty onslaught<br />
rolled on and weirdly on. an Indian cafe owner in Middelburg
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