The Big Read: King, prince and the Blade

Readers are spoilt for choice in finding proof for the Henry Kissinger quip that "even paranoids have real enemies".

The worst-kept secret in town - the details on the "spy tapes" released last week into the tender clutches of DA leader Helen Zille and her attorneys - contain a viper's nest of intrigue and counter-intrigue.

Perhaps more scum will emerge from the cauldron of intrigue and counter-intrigue as the forces of vanquished King Thabo and vengeful Prince Jacob ransack state institutions in a battle for power that makes any episode of Game of Thrones or House of Cards appear unimaginative.

But in the realm of conjuring up enemies for attack, real or delusional, last week's prize winner is the estimable Minister of Higher Education Dr Blade Nzimande, who doubles as the South African Communist Party's general secretary.

In the best traditions of this elderly organisation, he has held the post uninterrupted for the past 16 years - not as long as the leadership dinosaurs he admires in Cuba or North Korea, but far longer than any local political leader, bar Mangosuthu Buthelezi of the IFP.

Nzimande also moonlights in another role - chief keeper of the flame for our somewhat beleaguered President Jacob Zuma. It was in this role that Blade sharpened the machete, so to speak, and attempted to thrust it into the arteries of the local media.

His knife job was aimed at those members of the fourth estate not yet on the same page as the local versions of Pravda, of whom - in the form of the Gupta media (both print and television) and the SABC - I thought there was no shortage.

Not according to Comrade Blade at any rate. According to reports, this is what he said at Progressive Professionals Forum, the platform created by dethroned chief spin doctor of the government, Jimmy Manyi.

He said: "There is a very big offensive against our government with the president as a special target. There are sections of the media where they have told themselves that they want a regime change in this country and the president is the main target."

Happily for South Africa, Blade is a communist of a democratic disposition. Otherwise there would be no end to where the international ghosts of the movement he leads locally could take him.

I have just read the monumental historic work Bloodlands - Europe between Hitler and Stalin by the Yale University historian Professor Timothy Snyder.

You can understand why there are no self-proclaimed Nazis in the world today. But after reading, in meticulous detail, how Joseph Stalin used mass starvation, purges against peasants, mass shootings, liquidation of Kulaks and other enemies, real and imagined, and bloodily bending the Ukraine to his iron will, it is difficult to believe there are still communists around. Snyder estimates Stalin's pre-World War 2 "butcher's bill" to be around four million people.

Doubtless Zuma and his government are being hounded by forces outside the extensive reach of the state and its many supporters.

But it is doing a pretty fair job of creating its own bad PR.

In the same week that Nzimande was fulminating about regime change plots being conjured up in Rosebank and other suburban media headquarters came word that the Pretoria city council had thoughtfully decided to rename one of its streets after Mao Tse-Tung, the Chinese despot whose great love of peasantry saw some 45million Chinese peasants die in just the four years of the "Great Leap Forward" between 1958 and 1962.

Frank Dikotter, the Hong Kong-based historian who has studied this period, describes it with understatement as "one of the worst catastrophes the world has ever known".

His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama has never murdered anyone and preaches a gospel of universal understanding. I regard the 40 minutes I spent in his company back in March 2006 as one of the more remarkable encounters of my life.

The bone-crunching six-hour road journey from Kashmir to his exile home in Dharmsala was perhaps the most worthwhile journey of my life. He told our entourage that his faith was simple: "My religion is kindness."

But not kind enough for Mao's successors, who regard him as a "dangerous splittist", not to be received by any friend of Beijing.

Thus, he was for the third time in as many years denied a visa to visit South Africa. Our foreign policy decision-making appears to have been outsourced to Beijing, at the same time as the president visited Moscow, which in recent times has violated both the sovereignty and borders of its neighbour Ukraine and stolen its territory. Talk about regime change, and Zuma is spoilt for choice.

For Nzimande, the enemy outside, real or imagined, is always an easier target than looking in the mirror.