The overturning of apartheid in Africa can really be compared to the French Revolution.

Replacing l'Ancien Regime with a revolutionary government was a disaster, with consequences still felt today. And like Louis XVI, perhaps France's most moderate and liberal King to date, the Apartheid of the late 80's and early 90's was increasingly mild. Things were changing for the better on their own. And in the end, one system ended and was replaced by the other without much bloodshed. For a moment there, the future boded very well for SA.

Now modern South Africa is in big, big trouble, and the racism is turned on its head, and whites are at the receiving end. This is clear in everything from murder rates to legislation. It's 350% more deadly to be a white farmer than to live in San Pedro Sula, the world's most lethal city. Charity organizations are forbidden from helping destitute whites, of whom there are now more than 400,000 in SA, unable to compete for jobs, and unable to leave.

This is not the ideal Mandela fans are praising, yet in this debate they are silent on these issues or seek to justify them with references to past white oppression, as if two wrongs makes a right.

RIP Morgan Freeman

Hoax

Quote: (12-06-2013 11:30 AM)bodmon Wrote:  

RIP Morgan Freeman

Hoax.

Nelson Mandela was on the US terror watch list until 2008.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/7484517.stm

Quote: (12-06-2013 09:29 AM)ElJefe Wrote:  

the Apartheid of the late 80's and early 90's was increasingly mild.

I am curious how many here have actually been to South Africa. Apartheid never really went away, A lot of businesses you can not even enter if you are a Black man.

very interesting and bizarre country along with its little cousin Namibia.

Quote: (12-05-2013 10:05 PM)kosko Wrote:  

How would you built South Africa if you were Mandela in 1993-1994?

The path from revolutionary to actually running a bureaucracy is not always an easy one. Mandela did the best he could with the cards that were dealt to him. Its amazing that South Africa hasn't turn into The Congo with all the racial tension still going on. Also, 20 years is just not enough time to determined whether SA experiment will succeed or not. I am sure people had its doubts about the US 20 years post independence.

The easy way out would have been for Mandela to go all Toussaint Louverture and just start condoning the mass slaughtering Whites but that really wouldn't have been constructive plus the whole point is not to replace White supremacy with Black Supremacy but to have the most equitable system possible i.e. equal treatment under the law. However, I do believe he should have tried and then seized the property/pensions of Afrikkans officials and their Black collaborators responsible for the most egregious human rights abuses.

RIP

Quote: (12-05-2013 09:55 PM)Starke Wrote:  

Quote: (12-05-2013 09:34 PM)j r Wrote:  

Again, maybe I'm wrong, but it sounds like you guys are saying, "eh apartheid, it wasn't that bad."

If you think that freedom is just some subjective meaningless thing, thats fine. I can't relate though. I place a pretty high value on freedom.

Freedom in this case is subjective.
Blacks in South Africa have freedom in a nominal sense, but economically and politically speaking, 99% of them (basically anyone not related to the ruling families) have no true freedom at all.

Mandela brought 'freedom' to SA in the same way that Obama has delivered 'Hope & Change' to the US.
Both nice, personable, photogenic dudes, but essentially spokesmodels for interests far less palatable.

Freedom in this context means "self-determination" to me. We can talk about the crime rate, AIDS, brain drain and what not, but freedom of self-determination has a value far beyond any measurable good. I'm sure Americans would rather have more social ills but have the freedom to determine their own destiny than have stability yet live under Chinese rule. Nobody wants to be ruled by people who aren't even native to your land.

Freedom hasn't worked out well for Haiti either, but I'm sure they'd rather be poor and have self-determination than live under the stability of French colonialism.

Quote: (12-06-2013 09:29 AM)ElJefe Wrote:  

the Apartheid of the late 80's and early 90's was increasingly mild. Things were changing for the better on their own. And in the end, one system ended and was replaced by the other without much bloodshed.

With all due respect this is a laughable statement. In the 1980's P.W. Botha's government sought to include Coloreds and Asians in the Parliament, while categorically denying Blacks an opportunity to participate. The thought process was to essentially get the support of those said groups and thus have a numerical advantage that ensured that Blacks would stay subjugated. Needless to say this failed miserably. As a result, riots and strikes increased rather robustly over the decade and helped ensure that Botha's government would become an international pariah over this period.

The 90's ultimately were a face-saving exercise within the Apartheid government since foreign investors pulled out, inflation shot through the roof, the currency collapsed and like I said earlier the international community shunned the administration. It was here that Mandela was released. So in actuality, the Apartheid government did themselves in with a policy that backfired miserably and thus they saw the writing on the wall. Things were not naturally getting better over this period as you suggest.

Quote:Quote:

Charity organizations are forbidden from helping destitute whites, of whom there are now more than 400,000 in SA, unable to compete for jobs, and unable to leave.

This is a lamentable state of affairs, as there is indeed a large swathe of Whites that have been discriminated against and locked out of the government purely for being White as it seems. In fact, Asians and Coloreds(mixed race) are also struggling mightily in overall financial performance as well.

Code:
Source: South African Institute of Race Relations

You will find that the bolded is simply not correct and is detailed in a video below about the racism against Whites and how the government has essentially reversed Apartheid in many instances rather than abolish it.

Quote:Quote:

yet in this debate they are silent on these issues or seek to justify them with references to past white oppression, as if two wrongs makes a right.

Ironically, you are doing the same thing in your entire post, by finding instances of where Whites are suffering when in fact everything you cite has happened to the opposite side on a equal or larger scale. At no point in your post did you reference the struggles of Blacks or of other classifications during or after Apartheid. This is including the mixed race Coloreds(as the are called) and Asians, that largely do not get the benefit of the governments affirmative action policies as well. No one in this thread is rejoicing because some Whites struggling under this current administration as you seem to be suggesting.

Quote: (12-06-2013 11:33 PM)speakeasy Wrote:  

Quote: (12-05-2013 09:55 PM)Starke Wrote:  

Quote: (12-05-2013 09:34 PM)j r Wrote:  

Again, maybe I'm wrong, but it sounds like you guys are saying, "eh apartheid, it wasn't that bad."

If you think that freedom is just some subjective meaningless thing, thats fine. I can't relate though. I place a pretty high value on freedom.

Freedom in this case is subjective.
Blacks in South Africa have freedom in a nominal sense, but economically and politically speaking, 99% of them (basically anyone not related to the ruling families) have no true freedom at all.

Mandela brought 'freedom' to SA in the same way that Obama has delivered 'Hope & Change' to the US.
Both nice, personable, photogenic dudes, but essentially spokesmodels for interests far less palatable.

Freedom in this context means "self-determination" to me. We can talk about the crime rate, AIDS, brain drain and what not, but freedom of self-determination has a value far beyond any measurable good. I'm sure Americans would rather have more social ills but have the freedom to determine their own destiny than have stability yet live under Chinese rule. Nobody wants to be ruled by people who aren't even native to your land.

Freedom hasn't worked out well for Haiti either, but I'm sure they'd rather be poor and have self-determination than live under the stability of French colonialism.

All that libertarian mantra looks great on paper doesn't it? But not so when applied to the planet we inhabit.

Would you rather be a native of controlled totalitarian states such as UAE, Saudi etc. and enjoy high quality of life, high income, safety.....or be 'free' to shit where you eat in Haiti, Puntland or Soweto?
Someone who dies from malnutrition, AIDS or murder doesn't have all that much freedom.

Quote: (12-07-2013 12:01 AM)iWin Wrote:  

Ironically, you are doing the same thing in your entire post, by finding instances of where Whites are suffering when in fact everything you cite has happened to the opposite side on a equal or larger scale. At no point in your post did you reference the struggles of Blacks or of other classifications during or after Apartheid. This is including the mixed race Coloreds(as the are called) and Asians, that largely do not get the benefit of the governments affirmative action policies as well. No one in this thread is rejoicing because some Whites struggling under this current administration as you seem to be suggesting.

I think you drew the wrong message from my post.

What I'm saying is that it's not clear that people, no matter their color, are better off today than under apartheid. Not so much here, but everywhere else people are rejoicing as if some kind of golden age has come over SA, when it's not clear that black and white (heh) or coloreds are better off today than before... at best the muddiest gray, with very dark storm clouds on the horizon. In some ways yes, in many ways no.

Quote: (12-06-2013 11:33 PM)speakeasy Wrote:  

Freedom in this context means "self-determination" to me. We can talk about the crime rate, AIDS, brain drain and what not, but freedom of self-determination has a value far beyond any measurable good. I'm sure Americans would rather have more social ills but have the freedom to determine their own destiny than have stability yet live under Chinese rule. Nobody wants to be ruled by people who aren't even native to your land.

Freedom hasn't worked out well for Haiti either, but I'm sure they'd rather be poor and have self-determination than live under the stability of French colonialism.

I don't think freedom and economic impoverishment must be opposites. It's much more useful to recognize that Europeans, on average, have higher levels of human and social capital than other ethnicities and therefore are, on average, a desirable element in society. This is just a factual observation and the positive externalities would hopefully rub off on the rest of the society.

It seems to me the problem becomes acute when, because of their stronger endowments, Europeans succeed in amassing wealth and capital in societies where they are the minority, they become the object of envy of the those who are less successful. This is totally natural. This envy exists even without ethnic diversity. But ethnic diversity, especially one as stark as white and black, adds a powerful visual metaphor to the differences that span class and race, and becomes a useful tool for more hateful forces to mobilize supporters. In the opposite spectrum, having amassed wealth and power, Europeans would then be able to engage in more rent-seeking behavior to enshrine their higher status in the legislative framework, such as under apartheid or as one often sees in Central America.

In that sense, I think Mandela was a very astute statesman in managing a situation that could so easily get out of hand. Unfortunately, I have limited faith in his successors.

The economy has actually grown and the country has become richer since the fall of apartheid. This report from Goldman Sachs shows how the economy has more than doubled: http://www.voanews.com/content/south-afr...86309.html

So while they have problems, they've still gotten richer and stopped treating the majority population as second class citizens.

Quote: (12-07-2013 09:59 AM)Celtic Wrote:  

The economy has actually grown and the country has become richer since the fall of apartheid.

Mandela was crucial in turning SA into a free market economy.

This is a great article in the Economist about him, warts and all.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/baobab/20...on-mandela

Quote:Quote:

WHO was the greatest of the statesmen of the 20th century? Discard the mass murderers such as Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong; set aside the autocratic nationalists like Gamal Abdel Nasser and the more admirable but probably less influential anti-communists like Vaclav Havel; then winnow the list to half a dozen names. On it would perhaps be Mohandas Gandhi, Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt, Charles de Gaulle, Jack Kennedy and Nelson Mandela. For many people, in many lands, the most inspirational of these would be the last, who died on December 5th, aged 95.

Mr Mandela’s heroic status is a phenomenon. For years his fame was largely confined to his own country, South Africa. He did not become widely known abroad until his first trial, for high treason, ended in 1961. Though acquitted, he remained free for little more than a year before being convicted on sabotage charges at the Rivonia trial, which began in 1963. During his long subsequent confinement, more than 17 years of which were spent on Robben Island, a wind-scorched Alcatraz off the Cape coast, little was heard of Mr Mandela and nothing was seen of him. When he emerged from captivity on February 11th 1990, no contemporary photograph of him had been published since 1964; the world had been able only to wonder what he looked like.

He was by then 71 years old, and barely ten years of semi-active politics remained to him. Nonetheless, more than any other single being, he helped during that decade to secure a conciliatory and mostly peaceful end to apartheid, one of the great abominations of the age, and an infinitely more hopeful start to a democratic South Africa than even the most quixotic could have imagined 20 years earlier.

A pattern of paradox

That someone who had been in enforced obscurity for so long could exercise such influence suggests a remarkable personality. Personality alone does not, however, explain the depth of the outpourings of affection he met on his later travels, whether touring Africa, greeting 75,000 fans in a London stadium or sweeping down Broadway in a motorcade festooned by more ticker tape, it was said, than had ever fluttered onto a New York street before.

Mr Mandela was a celebrity, and this is an age that sets a high value on any kind of fame. When every pop star is “awesome”, reality television makes idols out of oafs and “iconic” is so freely applied that it has become meaningless, it would be absurd not to see in the lionisation of Mr Mandela some of the veneration that came to attend Princess Diana: the world needs heroes, or heroines, and will not always choose them wisely. In Mr Mandela, though, the need for a hero was met by the real thing.

Like most great men, even apparently simple ones, Mr Mandela was complex and often contradictory. He had granite determination: without it, he would have left prison years earlier, just by agreeing to renounce violence or make some other concession. Yet he was by nature a compromiser and a conciliator. In the 1950s he would often argue for restraint against more headstrong colleagues, and throughout most of his life he fought to keep his movement, the African National Congress (ANC), non-racial, though at times he had reservations about Indians and much stronger feelings about whites. When he came to accept the principle of armed struggle, his strategy was not to seize power by force but rather to make the government negotiate. And when, in turn, the government eventually yielded, Mr Mandela showed neither bitterness nor vindictiveness, but an astonishing capacity for forgiveness and conciliation.

He was a guerrilla, the commander-in-chief of the ANC’s armed wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe, which, as the “Spear of the Nation”, was supposed—however implausibly—to lead an armed insurgency, organise an invasion by sea and bring the government to its knees. It was this commitment to armed struggle that made Margaret Thatcher shun the ANC and dismiss it as “a typical terrorist organisation”. But that was always too simple a view. Chief Albert Luthuli, the president of the ANC from 1952 to 1967, though not a pacifist, was a staunch believer in non-violent resistance, as at the outset was Mr Mandela.

Mr Mandela changed his mind only reluctantly, insisting at first on sabotage that would involve no casualties (liberation without bloodshed) rather than direct attacks on people. When he did come round to guerrilla warfare, it was partly because he concluded that the government’s increasing repression left no other way to bring about change (“The attacks of the wild beast cannot be averted with only bare hands”), partly because he feared that the ANC would lose out to more militant rivals, notably the exclusively black Pan Africanist Congress.

His views about communism were less evolutionary. In the 1950s he had pictures of Lenin and Stalin on the walls of his home in the Johannesburg township of Orlando. He was influenced by Marx and made common cause with the Communist Party of South Africa; his writings then were full of sub-Marxist drivel. And he continued to the end to hold in deep affection such people as Joe Slovo, the chairman of the party, who was to him “dear comrade, dear brother, dear friend”, but to his opponents the “KGB general”.

Mr Mandela insisted he was not a communist, though. He saw the ANC’s bond with the communists as a link with the only group that would treat Africans as equals and as a natural alliance with his enemies’ enemy. He showed no desire for Soviet models, often speaking admiringly of British institutions, even to the point of calling the British Parliament “the most democratic institution in the world”. Moreover, he was consistent both in the 1950s, when the ANC was debating its objectives, and 20 years later, when the aims of the “liberation movement” were under discussion, in holding that the movement’s great statement of principles, the Freedom Charter adopted in 1956, was not a commitment to socialism but “a step towards bourgeois democracy”.

A more blatant conflict of principles and practice could be seen at the end of Mr Mandela’s life in his attitude to countries like Cuba, Libya and Syria. For years he had fought to place human rights at the centre of the ANC’s political philosophy, and as president he even sought to define his country’s national interest to include “the happiness of others”. With characteristic courage, he openly criticised Sani Abacha, a brutal and egregiously corrupt dictator of Nigeria in the 1990s, thus breaking the lamentable code that no African head of government criticises another African head of government. But would he likewise condemn Fidel Castro or Muammar Qaddafi? No. These men had long supported the anti-apartheid cause and, for Mr Mandela, gratitude to loyal friends trumped all other considerations. The Americans were appalled.

This episode involved a straightforward clash of principles, in which one triumphed: “To change Mandela’s mind about a friend is virtually impossible,” said Ahmed Kathrada, one of the seven others sentenced to life imprisonment with him at the Rivonia trial. Other apparently out-of-character actions were more easily explained by Mr Mandela’s general adaptability, which may have been forced upon him by his separation from his family as a child. At first he was looked after mainly by his mother and then, after the age of ten, when his father died, by the regent of the Thembu, one of a dozen Xhosa-speaking groups, who accepted him as a ward. If this disturbed upbringing bred a capacity for accommodating to events, it often served him well, but it sometimes made his behaviour hard to predict.

Mr Mandela was, for example, a patrician, almost aloof young man. Some of his colleagues considered him remote, even authoritarian, with a strong sense of proper behaviour. But that did not mean he was conservative or socially stuck in the mud. It was Mandela who, to the dismay of some of his fellow prisoners, was prepared to regard tolerantly the angry young members of the Black Consciousness Movement when they started arriving on Robben Island in the mid-1970s, preaching a gospel of black exclusiveness. Later, when the townships were in turmoil, he was to be consistently conciliatory towards discontented youth.

Some of his own children might not have agreed, or perhaps they would have said that his efforts to understand other people’s children were an acknowledgment of his failures with his own. For the contradictions and paradoxes in his views and politics were matched in his character, and nowhere was this more evident than in his relations with his family.

His first son, Thembi, had become estranged from his father several years before his death in a car crash in 1969 (a daughter had died at nine months in 1948). Thembi had sided with his mother, Evelyn, when Mr Mandela divorced her in 1958 after a marriage of 14 fairly unhappy years. His brother, Makgatho, failed to live up to his father’s expectations and moved away; he died of AIDS in 2005. Maki, Evelyn’s surviving daughter, remained on better terms but also felt neglected.

Trouble and strife

Matrimony proved just as difficult as fatherhood. At the age of 22 he had run away to Johannesburg to escape a marriage arranged for him by his guardian, the Thembu regent. Three years later, in 1944, he would marry Evelyn, the first cousin of his lifelong friend Walter Sisulu. A nurse, she bore him four children, but was drawn more to religion than politics, and politics was by then his all-absorbing concern.

Winnie, his second wife, whom he married in 1958, came to share his political cause, but from the first realised that “he belongs to them”, the public. This was a complaint of the children too, as Mr Mandela himself confessed. He was, one told him, “a father to all our people, but you have never had time to be a father to me.”

Despite his devotion to the courageous Winnie—in his 1994 autobiography he would publish for the first time some of the poignant letters he had written to her from Robben Island—the second marriage also failed. Winnie suffered almost all the blows that apartheid had in its arsenal: banishment, imprisonment, remorseless harassment. But suffering did not ennoble her: just the opposite, and in the end she did her utmost to humiliate her husband. He was wounded, but also guilt-ridden, conscious of his failings with his wives and his children. Not until he married a wary Graça Machel, widow of Mozambique’s first president, on his 80th birthday did Mr Mandela find enduring wedded fulfilment.

In love, at least, the private man was the very opposite of the public. Mr Mandela inspired affection among millions he had never met and, among those he had, few failed to remark on his extraordinary ability to empathise and in return command respect. Most striking among these, perhaps, were his political opponents, especially Afrikaners, the descendants mainly of the country’s early Dutch settlers.

One of the first was P.J. Bosch, the prosecutor at his 1962 trial (for leaving the country illegally and incitement to strike), who before his sentencing asked to see him alone, shook his hand and wished him well. That was not exceptional. Throughout his career, he would be sharing his food with his police escort (after arrest in 1962), helping warders with their essays (also 1962), and earning the respect of their Robben Island counterparts by speaking to them in Afrikaans, which he studied assiduously. Later, summoned from prison to take tea with President P. W. Botha, he would show that he could charm even one whose defence of white supremacy had earned him the name of “the crocodile”. And then, when he was at last released, came the grand gestures of reconciliation: the honouring of the Boer-war guerrilla, Daniel Theron, as an Afrikaner freedom-fighter; the donning of a Springbok rugby shirt, hitherto a symbol to blacks chiefly of white nationalism; and the visit to Betsie Verwoerd, widow of Hendrik, the uncompromising architect of apartheid.

Some manifestations of empathy were harder for him to make. When he came out of jail the subject of sex was awkward for him. Whether that was because he had been behind bars for most of the 1960s sexual revolution, or because the many years of isolation had made him unused to female company, or because some element of reserve had remained in his character since childhood, is not clear. But he plainly found it difficult to overcome, most seriously, by his own admission, in his reluctance as president to take up the issue of AIDS. Eventually, he did so, however, openly siding in 2002 with the campaigners who were fighting for wider provision of drugs in the face of President Thabo Mbeki’s cranky resistance. A lesser man might have chosen to stay silent.

Modesty, humility, vanity

Mr Mandela startled ANC colleagues when, at 33, he announced that he looked forward to becoming South Africa’s first black president. Yet he did not expect rewards; even when he was a figure of world renown he was modest, and seldom took his authority for granted. Time and again in jail he would refuse privileges if they were offered to him but not to other prisoners. He complained, for instance, about having to wear shorts, one of the ways in which the government humiliated and emasculated black prisoners, but rejected the long trousers he was then given—until two years later when the authorities agreed to let his colleagues wear them too.

He was proud, it is true, to be a member of a royal family, as a descendant of Ngubengcuka, one of the Thembu kings from whom he took the traditional name, Madiba. Yet he disdained to behave like some African “big men”, always being embarrassed on Robben Island that he received more visits than other prisoners, one of whom saw only three visitors in 15 years. As a free man in the 1990s, he chose to live in suburban comfort rather than palatial luxury in Johannesburg, and in the holidays returned to Qunu, where he had spent the happiest days of his childhood, to build a house based on the design of his quarters in the Victor Verster prison that had held him during his final years of captivity. He encouraged no cult of personality. Grandiose museums, reverential monuments and statues were alien to him.

But flash suits, white silk scarves and a physical-fitness regimen at least partly designed to maintain a boxer’s muscular physique were not. He was no stranger to vanity, and would make good use of his appearance. In his youth, his looks and smart suits had done him no harm among female admirers. He was then considered more at ease with women than with men. Later, when he donned a kaross, a traditional Xhosa leopard-skin cloak, to appear in court, he knew it would “emphasise the symbolism that I was a black African walking into a white man’s court.” This proved electrifying.

It suited the ANC to make a messiah, and if necessary a myth, out of Mr Mandela, first to galvanise the masses at home, then to keep spirits up during the long years of repression, military impotence and political hopelessness. It could have ended badly. The mythic figure whose defiance so captured the public imagination—Prisoner 466/64 on Robben Island—could have turned out to be a broken man or a paper hero. Instead, he proved to be a remarkably effective politician.

Mr Mandela made political mistakes. The decision to abandon non-violence lost the ANC some support abroad, put no real military pressure on the government and, most seriously, diverted the movement’s energies from the task of organisation at home, which was essential if strikes, boycotts and civil disobedience were to be effective. Mr Mandela, who had set so much store by strengthening the ANC, a small and weak organisation when he joined it, might have foreseen that.

But without him the transition to majority rule would almost certainly have been a bloody shambles. First, he decided in 1985 to ask for a meeting with the minister of justice, Kobie Coetsee, who had become interested in his case. Mr Mandela did this without telling his colleagues, let alone seeking their approval, since he knew it would not have been given. But, as he later explained, “There are times when a leader must move ahead of his flock.” He then played a vital role in ensuring compromise during the negotiations that preceded the constitutional settlement of 1993-94 and the election that followed.

He alone could sway opinion for or against the acceptance of agreements, which was crucial in the case of the constitution, greeted by many ANC supporters with disappointment. He alone could assuage the fury of the crowds after Chris Hani, a popular ANC hero, was murdered by a right-wing Afrikaner. He was also central in securing the support of General Constand Viljoen and thus the Afrikaner far right. Later he was equally influential in the creation of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, when a different man who had been through the same experiences might have been calling for war-crimes tribunals.

In place of retribution

Mr Mandela did not single-handedly end apartheid. The collapse of communism, yoked to African nationalism by white opponents, played a part; so did international sanctions, domestic economic pressures, non-ANC internal resistance and the person of F.W. de Klerk, president from 1989 to 1994, whom Mr Mandela did not treat altogether well. But Mr Mandela’s symbolic role was hard to exaggerate.

His greater achievement, though, was to see the need for reconciliation, to forswear retribution and then to act as midwife to a new, democratic South Africa built on the rule of law. This was something only he could do. He gave hope to millions of Africans and inspired millions of others elsewhere, but if his successors in government have been less admirable, and if his example has not been followed in countries like Zimbabwe, that should not be surprising. Heroic though he was, he did not have the messianic powers some attributed to him, nor could others be expected to match his capacity to hold high principles, to live by them and to use his moral stature to such effect. Circumstances, after all, could hardly suit everyone so well. Hard though much of his life had been, Mr Mandela lived long enough to see his work through. That gave him his great achievement, and the story of his long walk to freedom a happy ending. And the modern world loves a happy hero even more than a tragic one.

My favourite writer is Peter Hitchens (the brother of Christopher Hitchens).

I knew he would have an interesting take on Nelson Mandela's death. He always does. He has an interesting take on everything.

This is what he has to say:

Quote:Quote:

A great tidal wave of syrup swept across the surface of the Earth as soon as the death of Nelson Mandela was announced. I am sure Mandela himself would have been embarrassed by it. One of the many good things about him was his modesty. Another was his genuine forgiveness of those who had wronged him.

May he rest in peace. It is those who overpraise him who are my targets here. He simply was not the perfect being they claim.

He chose to adopt the path of violence. He did not have to. Apartheid South Africa was a political and moral slum, but many fought it without resorting to gun or bomb.

And it is not just nasty, reactionary me making this point. Amnesty International, that great campaign for silenced and imprisoned voices of liberty, took up a then-peaceful Mandela’s case in 1962. But after his turn to violent tactics, the British group reluctantly decided that he could no longer be called a prisoner of conscience.

For years the African National Congress has used Mandela as window-dressing. It’s not a nice organisation. Its armed wing, Spear of the Nation, is notorious for its brutality.

The ANC was dominated at every level by the South African Communist Party, the most rigidly Stalinist movement outside North Korea, and grovelling supporters of Kremlin repression.

This is the real point of the whole exaggerated Mandela cult. Anyone looking at the world in the second half of the 20th Century could see that the harshest and cruellest regimes on the planet were Left-wing ones, in Moscow, Peking and Havana. But the fashionable Western Left will never admit that. They are interested only in ‘Right-wing’ repression and secretly think that Left-wing oppression might actually be justified.

That is why there was nothing like this fuss on the death of another giant of human liberation, Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Solzhenitsyn was at least as great as Mandela – and, in my view, greater.

He never wielded anything more deadly than a typewriter, yet he brought down an Evil Empire, with all its concentration camps, tanks, guns and bombs. But when he died in August 2008, I don’t recall hours of eulogies on the BBC, or his face on every front page. Ask yourselves why.

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2...-nuns.html

This guy has something to say!

Quote: (12-07-2013 09:59 AM)Celtic Wrote:  

The economy has actually grown and the country has become richer since the fall of apartheid. This report from Goldman Sachs shows how the economy has more than doubled: http://www.voanews.com/content/south-afr...86309.html

So while they have problems, they've still gotten richer and stopped treating the majority population as second class citizens.

Very illuminating. What you just posted completely proves that Mandela was an abject failure.

Quote:Quote:

However, the report is not all positive. It points to the struggling education system, a consistent unemployment rate that has hovered around 24 percent, and 70 percent of the unemployed being under age 34. There are also stark racial inequalities in terms of income, with 85 percent of blacks poor, while 87 percent of whites are middle to upper class.

In other words, the wealth of South Africa has grown but only because the whites there have become much richer. This is in spite of the fact that White South Africans have lost about 500K population since the end of apartheid.

Meanwhile, the blacks continue to live in terrible conditions and are by and large unemployed. Mandela did nothing for the blacks except attempt to pacify blacks through social welfare schemes.

It failed, and now that whites aren't running the country there isn't any effective law enforcement to get rid of crime. So the wealthy whites live in gated prison-like communities while the poor blacks and poor whites are at the mercy of criminals, which explains why the rape, murder, and theft are off the charts.

Finally, the argument that blacks are more free is false since political corruption in South Africa today is 100x worse than it was under apartheid. Under apartheid black communities could still enact their own laws for their own lands, and the whites would help them enforce those laws (unless they violated the basic constitution). Thus South Africa Blacks were better off under apartheid.

As usual, everything the mainstream left-wing media posts on this subject is 100% opposite of the truth.

As usual, American Blacks get race hustled into believing false things that blinds them to truth and justice for their own people.

As usual, poor blacks gets the shit end of the stick and people delude themselves into believing they are actually better off, since they are being represented by a person "of his own color" and therefore they must automatically be better off.

Also, the argument that South Africa blacks were being denied their rights doesn't make sense, since the white South African blacks were there first and only let in the black immigrants under the pre-condition that they would abide by White laws.

The true natives of South Africa were very sparse, nomadic peoples that today make up less than 2% of the population. As usual, the actual natives get no say in the government.

The story of South Africa is just another story of how communists came to power, and start sapping the countries wealth for their own gain at the expense of everyone else.

I predict that whites will continue to leave South Africa, or face extermination, and the rest of the country will sink into third-world hellhole status. Yet another tombstone in the graveyard of communist nations.

@Samseau - is there a typo here? I am a little bit confused by the term 'white South African black'

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Also, the argument that South Africa blacks were being denied their rights doesn't make sense, since the white South African blacks were there first and only let in the black immigrants under the pre-condition that they would abide by White laws.

Anyway - I find this really interesting. It was something I mentioned wanting to know more about in one of my earlier posts.

In the West we are sold the idea that the Dutch settlers conquered South Africa and enslaved them under apartheid.

But if the truth is that the country was practically entry - and then the whites only allowed the blacks to immigrate there on condition that the abide by the rules of apartheid then the situation takes on a different meaning.

I am not saying what the Dutch settlers did was right. But it is not a settled matter in my head. If you have a country and then agree to let people come live with you - it seems reasonable that you have to respect their way of life. No matter how harsh it is.

Or am I missing something? This seems an important issue. And I would love to learn more about the debate surrounding how populated South Africa was before the Dutch settlers arrived. And if this was the key principle behind why the white settlers tried to justify apartheid?

Our country - our rules. That is quite a strong slogan to campaign on.

Indeed - one of the main reasons that Switzerland is not a member of the EU - is because they do not give immigrants the same rights as they do to the natives who were born there.

This is the key reason behind them not wanting to be part of the EU.

I am no expert on South Africa (or Switzerland) - so the above is just some stuff I have come across at random. I have yet to study this area yet.

So a friend forwarded this on whatsapp -

Quote: (12-08-2013 08:39 AM)cardguy Wrote:  

In the West we are sold the idea that the Dutch settlers conquered South Africa and enslaved them under apartheid.

But if the truth is that the country was practically entry - and then the whites only allowed the blacks to immigrate there on condition that the abide by the rules of apartheid then the situation takes on a different meaning.

Wrong. Why surmise such blatant untruths before actually taking a moment to read about the history of SA and Nelson Mandela? You owe it to yourself if you seek to understand truths about that period of history.

News flash: Whites are not native to South Africa. Black people are: most notably the Zula, San, Xhosa, and Khoikhoi, among others, that make up the vast majority of the South African people. All of the black leaders since Apartheid have descended from these groups.

The native blacks fought numerous wars with the invading Dutch colonial settlers. Eventually, the whites passed a thoroughly racist "Native Land Act" to consolidate their wealth and power. Read about it here.

Also, I noticed you posted a Peter Hitchens article that you said you liked. Did you like it because it was contrarian in light of the effusive praise other media outlets - both right and left for that matter - have bestowed upon Mandela? Otherwise, I don't see how you could possibly attest to its worth given your own admission that you don't know much about Mandela or South African history. I suggest you actually read up on those topics and then form your own views before your regurgitate the opinions of others. It's one thing to do that when discussing light topics such as pop culture but another when talking about historical figures and events.

The National Review (a right wing publication), which notably ran smear campaigns against Mandela going back to his time in prison - while also supporting Apartheid - published an opinion piece by Delroy Murdock who once was opposed to Mandela due to misconceptions about him and his alleged devotion to communism, only to turn around and admit ignorance.

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My friend James Deciuttis once asked me very directly, “Are you ever wrong?” It was not asked with bile, but very straightforwardly, as if asking if I ever had visited Spain.

I told James that if he referred to my writing, speaking, and political activism, I have made many bad calls and misjudgments. I can look forward to a brand-new year of them in just 28 days. In one particular case, however, I really blew it very, very, very badly. But I was not alone.

Like many other anti-Communists and Cold Warriors, I feared that releasing Nelson Mandela from jail, especially amid the collapse of South Africa’s apartheid government, would create a Cuba on the Cape of Good Hope at best and an African Cambodia at worst.

After all, Mandela had spent 27 years locked up in Robben Island prison due to his leadership of the African National Congress. The ANC was a violent, pro-Communist organization. By the guiding light of Ronald Wilson Reagan, many young conservatives like me spent much of the 1980s fighting Marxism-Leninism — from the classrooms of radical campuses to the battlefields of Grenada, Nicaragua, and El Salvador, both overtly and covertly. Having seen Communists terrorize nations around the world while the Berlin Wall still stood, Mandela looked like one more butcher waiting to take his place on the 20th Century’s blood-soaked stage.

The example of the Ayatollah Khomeini also was fresh in our minds. He went swiftly from exile in Paris to edicts in Tehran and quickly turned Iran into a vicious and bloodthirsty dictatorship at the vanguard of militant Islam.

Nelson Mandela was just another Fidel Castro or a Pol Pot, itching to slip from behind bars, savage his country, and surf atop the bones of his victims.

WRONG!

Far, far, far from any of that, Nelson Mandela turned out to be one of the 20th Century’s great moral leaders, right up there with Mahatma Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He also was a statesman of considerable weight. If not as significant on the global stage as FDR, Winston Churchill, and Ronald Reagan, he approaches Margaret Thatcher as a national leader with major international reach.

Mandela invited the warden of Robben Island prison to his inauguration as president of South Africa. He sat him front and center. While most people would be tempted to lock up their jailers if they had the chance, Mandela essentially forgave him while the whole world and his own people, white and black, were watching. This quietly sent South Africa’s white population a message: Calm down. This will be okay. It also signaled black South Africans: Now is no time for vengeance. Let’s show our former oppressors that we are greater than that and bigger people than they were to us.

As Morgan Freeman and Matt Damon beautifully dramatize in the excellent film Invictus, Mandela resisted the ANC’s efforts to strip the national rugby team of its long-standing name, the Springboks. Seen as a symbol of apartheid, Mandela’s black colleagues were eager to give the team a new, less “white” identity. Mandela argued that white South Africans, stripped of political leadership and now quite clearly in the minority, should not be deprived of the one small point of pride behind which they could shield their anxieties.

Mandela then championed the team. He attended its games and rallied both blacks and whites behind it as a national sports organization, rather than an exclusive totem of South Africa’s white minority.

Mandela’s easy manner, warmth, and decency shone through and gave South Africans a common point of unity amid so many opportunities for division.

(As an American, it would be nice right now to have a leader who could bring our nation together, rather than pound one wedge after another into our dispirited population.)

Mandela’s economic record deserves deeper analysis later. However, for now it is worthwhile to remember that he came to power in 1994, less than half a decade after the Iron Curtain collapsed and the triumph of scientific socialism was exposed as a cruel and hollow fantasy. Rather than follow that vanquished model, Mandela looked to economic growth as the path his nation should follow. Among other things, he sold off stakes in South African Airways, utilities, and other state-owned companies. While some wish he had gone further, this was a far cry from the playbook of Marx and Lenin.

So, I was dead wrong about Nelson Mandela, a great man and fine example to others, not least the current occupant of the White House.

After 95 momentous years on Earth, may Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela rest in peace.

@Hencredible Cassanova - I appreciate your response. Interesting stuff. I have an open mind on issues like this - and just want to try and look at both sides. I hate racism - so I am not doing so because of any sympathy with the Afrikanners. More that I am interested in what justification they came up with - in their own minds - for trying to suppress the blacks in Africa.

Colonialism is a tricky subject. Do you propose handing back America to the Native Americans for instance?

As for Peter Hitchens. He is a bit of a contrarian. You can predict what angle he will take 99% of the time since he is always trying to swim against the tide. I actually think he is wrong alot of the time. But at least I know he will be interesting. And will give me new points to consider. Personally that is what I look for in a good journalist/writer.

Lastly - to take on of Peter Hitchens' points. It is interesting that Amnesty International withdrew their support or Nelson Mandela. That alone is pretty interesting. But it isn't reported elsewhere since Amnesty International are heroes to the Left. As was Nelson Mandela. So - any conflict betweent he two is unreported by most of the media (who are pushing a leftist agenda).

Being a contrarian is not a bad thing. Since there is no such thing as a fair and balanaced media. The media is always trying to push a certain agenda. So - to consciously trying to oppose that all the time is quite a useful position to take.

----------------

Anyway - with all that said. I am no expert in this area and I will follow up your links. I don't think there is anything wrong in discussing an issue when you admit ahead of time you haven't fully researched that area. Since - people can take that into account when they read what I wrote. And it allows me the opportunity to learn from others (such as yourself) who are more knowledgable than me.

I appreciate your response.

Quote: (12-08-2013 11:23 AM)cardguy Wrote:  

Colonialism is a tricky subject. Do you propose handing back America to the Native Americans for instance?

That's a flawed analogy. For one, South Africa was a British colony just as the US was one. Therefore, in a sense, black South Africans and the white American settlers are more similar, the latter being oppressed by the English monarchy.

Native Americans weren't "colonized" by the white American settlers; they were simply annihilated to the point where they are now just a very tiny fraction of the country's population.

South Africa has always maintained an overwhelming black majority.

I recommend you read up on the dispossession of native lands in South Africa and subsequent laws that only granted 7% of the country's territory to the black majority for land ownership.

I walked by the t.v. this morning and an ABC anchorman said Mandela was Mount Rushmore rolled into one. Its amazing just how politically correct our society has become, and useless the media is. I wish they'd hurry and bury him so something else will be all over the news.

Quote: (12-08-2013 08:39 AM)cardguy Wrote:  

@Samseau - is there a typo here? I am a little bit confused by the term 'white South African black'

Typo. The word white shouldn't be there.

Quote:Quote:

Quote:Quote:

Also, the argument that South Africa blacks were being denied their rights doesn't make sense, since the white South African blacks were there first and only let in the black immigrants under the pre-condition that they would abide by White laws.

Anyway - I find this really interesting. It was something I mentioned wanting to know more about in one of my earlier posts.

In the West we are sold the idea that the Dutch settlers conquered South Africa and enslaved them under apartheid.

According to wikipedia, there are two sources of black population:

Quote:Quote:

Firstly slaves and politically banned people were imported from Indonesia (Java and Sumatra). These slaves and their descendants, including the ones who intermarried with the Dutch, became known as the Cape Coloureds and Cape Malays. Over time, the Khoisan, their European overseers, and the imported slaves mixed, with the offspring of these unions forming the basis for today's Colored population.

The second was from diamonds:

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The discovery of the Kimberley diamond mines unleashed a flood of European and black laborers into the area. Towns sprang up in which the inhabitants ignored the separation of whites and blacks. The Boers expressed anger that their impoverished republics had missed out on the economic benefits of the mines.

So, in terms of moral evaluation, what do we have?

- Racist whites who founded the settlements brought in slaves
- Former black inhabitants were barbarians and unable to adapt to European way of life, and perished in a similar way as the American Indians
- The slaves were freed once British rule took over the Dutch, and the British declared equality between races
- Dutch separated from British and established their own colonies, and fought frequently with native Black tribes
- Then diamonds were discovered and a huge flood of labor came

There is no disputing the racism of the early white inhabitants. Some it came from distrusting the local black population, other was white supremism.

When the British came to Cape Town after the Dutch had lost their power in Europe, it created conflict between the existing Dutch and new British.

When the two groups finally stopped warring, they setup a policy at the expense of blacks:

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With the founding of the South African Union in 1910, the British colony and the independent Boer Republics were united. A modern "democratic" state was formed. in which only the white population could execute the right to vote.

The black people were subjected to a policy of concealed expatriation. Through the Native-Land Law of 1913, first 7.5 percent, and later 13 percent of the land in South Africa was declared reservations for blacks. No white person was allowed to purchase land there and, vice versa, no black was allowed to buy land in the remaining 87 per cent of the territory of the Union. So the foundation of the disastrous policy of Apartheid was laid. In the sixties, the black settlement areas were declared autonomous Homelands. For the Xhosa people these were the Homelands of Ciskei and Transkei. Only after the first really free elections in South Africa in 1994 was the Homeland policy abolished, after which the areas were integrated into the new provinces.

Thus when evaluating apartheid, there are two major considerations:

- It was racist
- Without the whites there wouldn't have been anything for the blacks to have in the first place.

I am always a fan of the saying, "there are no good guys in history," and this also appears to be the case. While the whites were racist, most of the blacks would have never been there in the first place (for the minerals and farming) without white culture. The blacks were simply adopting and taking what the whites created, while the whites were exploiting blacks for cheap labor.

Both sides were extremely hostile to each other. The hostility started between natives and white settlers and continued even with the black immigrants who came for labor or as slaves. This isn't much of a human rights issue, and it obscures the true nature of the conflict between two warring groups for control. It really is (was? still is?) a race war.

Quote: (12-08-2013 02:27 PM)Aliblahba Wrote:  

I walked by the t.v. this morning and an ABC anchorman said Mandela was Mount Rushmore rolled into one. Its amazing just how politically correct our society has become, and useless the media is. I wish they'd hurry and bury him so something else will be all over the news.

Millions of people the world over, in many different countries and societies, consider Nelson Mandela one of the greatest moral examples in human history. This belief extends beyond those expressed in media reports in your own country. As I've mentioned before, Mandela is widely revered as an international icon of humanity. The event of his passing is being covered incessantly in the media of countries the world over, and for good reason. You'd be hard pressed to find a place on the planet where this story isn't being documented.

Thanks for that. Smart stuff.

I really need to go away and read up on this. It seems really interesting.