Quote: (12-19-2016 11:35 PM)Thomas the Rhymer Wrote:
Having had to endure the South African education system in the 1980's, and having had to learn all that rubbish about Afrikaner history at school, I would just like to mention that the idea that they overcame great adversity is mostly mythology and propaganda.
That's not to say that it's not hard core to get in your wagon and live off the land while you travel off into the wilderness, but they really built up a lot of substance where there was none. The skirmish at Blood river, for example, became some sort of epic battle that confirmed the Afrikaners as God's chosen people (I learned at school that the Afrikaners were God's chosen people, so it must be true, right?).
They failed as a power-holding group due to their group allergy towards manual labour. Apartheid was primarily a system for exploiting black labour at an artificially lowered price, the racial supremacy thing was just to get the useful idiots on board (if it was really about race, why did the Apartheid government build massive black-only hospitals with state of the art maternity wings? The Apartheid government basically sponsored the mass production of black people, because more black people meant more cheap workers, dooming white people to becoming an ethnic minority when once white people were about 50% of the South African population). Unfortunately, it also made them dependent on black labour for their wealth, meaning that one black labour could organise effective strikes and labour sabotage, that the entire system they had made for themselves would fall. So rich Afrikaans guys decided to preserve their wealth and give up power. This left a lot of the useful idiots in the Afrikaner middle classes dazed and confused, and angry.
As a collective, if they had been willing to do their own dirty work, their own laundry, their own gardening, their own farm work, their own mining, their own labour, then they would still be in power. They would have herded black people into reservations, and like the Americans and the Australians, and have built up an entire country without them.
But they didn't, because they wanted someone to do their work for them while they relaxed.
Sure, it's a stereotype and it's unjust to apply it evenly to an entire ethnic group, but they failed as a collective, because they wanted things to be easy and sumptuous and free from hard work for themselves, which ironically only gave them the opposite things. Life is funny like that.
The history of the Afrikaners shares many similarities with the Spartans and the Slave-owners of the US south. They all shot themselves in the foot by depending on cheap sources of labour rather than just doing the job themselves.
An absolute truth bomb here, worth sharing with a few Afrikaans friends.