Quote: (11-04-2011 01:19 AM)Hooligan Harry Wrote:
You keep talking about putting the cart before the horse, but you are doing the exact same thing. You are suggesting there were actually alternative courses of action. There was no alternative. Apartheid or communism. Those were the choices.
Which would you have gone with?
No alternative? Really?
The threat of communism was only there because of racialism, which had created a fertile proletariat. Take the segregationist/racialist policies that had been promoted since the mid 19th century away(or mitigate them), and you have a much less fertile ground for communist agitation in your back yard. Blacks, having had access to some wealth, enfranchisement and opportunity would have benefited from capitalism and would have been a far less prime target for marxist promotion.
There is your alternative solution.
Instead, white South African leaders decided to continue feeding the beast they had created by further disenfranchising blacks via apartheid, giving blacks no legal way out of this situation. They just intensified the source of their own problems and eliminated all non-violent means of addressing it.
They created their own downfall in the process.
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Apartheid was instituted out of a fear of communism, NOT WHITE SUPREMACY. It was one of the worlds largest producers of gold and if it went democratic when Britain abandoned it it would have gone the same way as Cambodia.
So your argument was that white south africans had no choice but to continue maintaining a system that denigrated, subjugated and wholly disenfranchised the black majority because to be any more humanitarian would have resulted in a an instance of genocidal communism?
I don't buy it. Apartheid was a mere continuation of white supremacist policies that had been in effect for centuries in the country. They were not required to continue completely denying the humanity of an entire race of people.
They continued doing so because a) they were viciously racist and b) it was extremely profitable.
There was no nobility in Apartheid.
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The whole reason why Apartheid came into place was because of trade unionism and communism. Communisms popularity did not grow as a result of Apartheid and its patently false to suggest that.
Here is what I said:
Quote: (11-03-2011 11:47 PM)Athlone McGinnis Wrote:
Communism feeds off of the challenges faced by an oppressed proletariat. The entire ideology is designed to appeal to people who are subjugated by others and are angry about it. The anger of those people is its greatest fuel.
White South African leaders fed this fuel well before the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 (denial of black voting/social/economic rights goes back to the mid-19th century in SA, limits on non-white miners helped prevent spread of wealth in late 19th century SA boom towns, and the pass system's earliest predecessor was brought about in 1905-those are just a sliver of the many examples one can draw) by creating a series of racial policies designed to benefit whites at the expense of blacks, and mold the nation's black population into a group of second class citizens with no legal power whose manual labor would uplift a minority.
This, naturally, created a very large pool of downtrodden, subjugated, disenfranchised and angry people...perfect for fodder for communist ideology.
In other words, ample fuel for communism had been accumulated by Apartheid's predecessors in the prior century of South African history. White South African leaders had already deliberately created an angry, disenfranchised class of people, and thus made communist agitation a bigger issue during the cold war.
You now come in to defend apartheid as a necessary tool with which to combat communism, using this as justification.
What you completely overlook is the fact that the same practical ideology behind apartheid (legal subjugation and disenfranchisement of blacks, segregation, etc) is what led to the growth of that communist problem in the first place.
They were trying to starve a beast they had already been feeding for at least a century, and they tried to do it by feeding it with the same fuel it had grown up on (more legalized segregation, more disenfranchisement, fewer legal means of redress, etc).
This was, of course, a poor solution, and history has proven that by showing us the results.
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The current ruling party had a manifesto dating back to the 20's that was outright communist and still is to this day the basis for the ruling party. Read the ANC Freedom charter. This is a fact. Communism did not grow because of white domination in South Africa, it appealed to the poor of which there were many before South Africa was even independent. That is a point that really cannot be disputed Athlone.
The point that cannot be disputed is this: white domination South Africa is centuries older than Apartheid, which was a mere continuance of a much longer legacy of racial oppression.
THAT was the fuel for communism. All apartheid did was stoke it further by making said oppression more extreme and denying the oppressed any legal way out. The ANC only exists because of the systemic legal disenfranchisement that had existed in South Africa since the early 19th century, and to which apartheid was a successor. The ANC only began taking up the assault rifle and communist military instruction after being completely denied any legal means of redress and finally saw that there was no legal way to defeat apartheid (after which they formed the 'Spear of the Nation').
White South African leaders had plenty of opportunities to prevent the shitstorm from flooding their land, and they allowed them all to pass by.
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White South Africa had no choice and this is what people refuse to understand.
People refuse to understand this because it is a load of manure.
The entire argument is nonsensical.
We know Marxism relies on an oppressed proletariat. It MUST HAVE angry, oppressed people in order to thrive. There were plenty of these in post-colonial Africa (thanks to colonialism), which is why so many Marxist governments popped up.
Yet here you are arguing that enfranchising blacks or, at the very least, allowing them to own land, participate in skilled trades (ever wonder why there's a skills shortage in modern SA? 80% of the populace was denied access to skill development for the prior century, that's why), vote, attain quality education, hold office, earn a decent income/move out of poverty, and actually have some frikkin opportunity and social mobility in a land that is no less theirs than it was Europeans' would have actually made communism a bigger problem (even though it would quite clearly have limited the size of that angry, disenfranchised and dirt poor proletariat that marxism depends on in the first place)?
The entire claim is absurd. There is no conspiracy against white South Africans to deny them sympathy and understanding. What people are doing is seeing a load of crap and calling it for what it is.
From the very beginning, the fathers and grandfathers of the men who would later legislate apartheid were passing laws that limited black (and other non-white) physical mobility, land ownership, enfranchisement, social mobility and academic potential. They deliberately deflated non-white wages and limited their potential for career and academic advancement.
They gave non-whites(especially blacks) no choice but to be poor and disenfranchised, to be the very people that marxism most appeals to. They then proceeded to
block every single non-violent, legal pathway out of this oppression.
And then here you come trying to claim that this was the only way to prevent the spread of communism? That legislating a continuation of this behavior (which apartheid was) was the only option? That denying blacks and other non-whites basic human rights and any non-violent means of obtaining them would actually help stop the flow of communism?
This is patently absurd.
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You cant look at things in isolation if you wish to be impartial and fair, you have to look at the history of the place.
1 - The original inhabitants were decimated by both sub saharan invaders and europeans.
2 - The entire country was plunged into war after they discovered gold in the late 1800's
3 - The british invaded and placed local whites into concentration camps where more than a quarter of the population perished
4 - The british left in the last 40's leaving South Africa to fend for itself
5 - The trade union movement and communism had been growing since the 20's with the black majority supporting it.
Now ask yourself what choice whites in South Africa had after Britain pulled out. Ask yourself what real advantages most white south africans had when the country was only independent for a few years following destructive wars. Ask yourself what would have happened if South Africa had a democratic vote and never implemented Apartheid.
You wouldn't have had a bunch of gun toting militants agitating in your back yard for the next 30, 40, 50 years, and the proletariat they relied on for support would not have been nearly as large.
Their entire philosophy is based on hearkening back to oppression, reminding blacks of how they weren't allowed to vote, weren't allowed to accumulate wealth, and weren't allowed any opportunity for advancement. Where on Earth do you think the genocidal rage you see directed at whites now comes from? It did not exist in a vacuum-it came as a direct result of apartheid (and prior) era legislation.
When you treat people like crap and deny them any opportunity to change this, they come to hate you.
You can prevent this from leading to open militancy/violence by opening up a legal pathway for them to redress their grievances. This is what happened in the United States, and it is the reason why the actions of more militant African American groups like the Black Panthers are not only out of existence (much less running the nation and/or leading the formerly oppressed population as is the case in SA), but also were a footnote compared to the size and scope of the accomplishments made by the NAACP's protests and legal work.
American leaders, to their credit, realized the expediency of doing this and preventing instability. When you respect a group's humanity enough to give them a fair legal shake, they'll usually take it, with fewer instances of violence resulting. Blacks here are not openly advocating the slaughter of whites as they are elsewhere for this very reason-when presented with a non-violent way to enfranchise themselves, they took it. Plenty of racial tension still exists, but this beats the alternative.
Apartheid South African leaders, on the other hand, made a concerted effort to deny blacks any legal avenue through which to address their concerns. They were left with two options: remain broke, or fight. Blacks fought, and now you have the tensions you see today.
With apartheid, white South Africans handed the ANC and other militants ammunition on a silver platter by taking these conditions of oppression and not only continuing them, but making them worse, and giving them no other way out.
The ANC is not filled with geniuses and master politicians. All it needs to do is load the ammunition it has been handed and fire.
Jan Smuts saw this entire shit storm coming, which is why he advocated for the gradual opening of legal pathways for blacks to enfranchise themselves and actually attain a few basic human rights. This was not done merely out of the goodness of his heart (the man was no super liberal anti-racist crusader by any means), but he knew that continuing or strengthening segregationist/racialist policies would, in the long term, cause a lot of problems for South Africa, domestically and internationally.
The country did not listen. Hence, consequences.
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South Africa would have become a communist state and would have ended up just like Uganda or Cambodia.
I still do not see how allowing blacks basic human rights automatically equates to genocidal communism.
Usually, it is the other way around.
Giving blacks a taste of the benefits of capitalism (which was not done prior to 1990) would probably have helped things. Instead, the material benefits of capitalism were kept strictly in non-black hands by legal and martial force.
Is it surprising that many blacks began to see communism as their natural friend, and capitalism as their enemy and/or ally of the oppressor?
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Look at the US investigations during the 40's and 50's regarding communism at home. People were being jailed and convicted of treason in the USA. This was a real threat to the world at the time and South Africa was a country where the majority of the population were both uneducated and communist.
Ask yourself why the majority of the population was uneducated and communist.
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I also cant believe you are going to try and find some merit in differences methods and forms of slavery to make a point.
I don't really have to try. Those merits/differences are blatantly obvious to anyone who seriously studies the subject of history, which I actually do.
People with far more credibility, resources and mental horsepower than myself have been pointing those things out for decades. This isn't a secret.
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Fact is that Portugal and Spain were not hunting people with nets in deepest, darkest Africa. They were buying those people in slaver markets Africans themselves were running. Africans played as large a role in slavery as Europeans did and have been slavers since the dawn of time. They are hardly innocent victims here.
Chattel Slavery vs. Indentured Servitude.
Africans were operating on the latter systems. Europeans tied into it in order to feed the other.
That's the difference. Ignore it if it makes you feel better, but it isn't going away.
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I also cant believe you consider the institutional racism of the USA and SA as being worse than what we see in Rwanda or Uganda. Almost a million dead in Rwanda, yet in South Africa the ANC killed more people that the National Party did!
I am going to introduce you to a new term, and I'm going to quote my own work (derived from research done on the topic for a seminar) for the purpose:
Cultural Genocide:
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In 1944 Raphael Lemkin, a Polish lawyer of Jewish heritage known as the originator of the term “genocide”, provided an outline for the definition of his neologism in a work entitled Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress. He stated that genocide was designed “to signify a coordinated plan of different actions”, with the ultimate aim involving “the destruction of the essential foundation of the life of national groups”.
Objectives of such a plan would involve the systematic erosion of the “political and social institutions, of culture, language, national feelings, religion” and the “personal security, liberty, health, dignity and even the lives” of individuals within the group. Physical extermination, therefore, was an important but merely partial component of genocide, and far from an essential feature of the act.
At the 1947 meeting of the UN Economic and Security Council, Lemkin would argue that the explicit definition of cultural genocide included “all policies aimed at destroying the specific characteristics by which a target group is defined or defines itself”.
Though not all of Lemkin’s proposal would see inclusion in the final resolution, his work proved the most crucial progenitor to the later legal articulation of the crime of genocide in 1948, eighty percent of which would consist of nonlethal actions. In defining the acts of physical, biological and cultural genocide, Lemkin attaches no hierarchy to them, having coined the term ethnocide (now often used as an alternative description to separate cultural and physical genocide) as a synonym to his earlier innovation, genocide. Lemkin’s work makes clear that the destruction of a culture is every bit as egregious as the physical destruction and murder of a people, and should not be set aside as a lesser offense. An understanding of the cultural aspect of genocide as articulated by Lemkin is therefore crucially central to understanding the wider perpetration of genocide upon any given populace, as well as the true extent of the challenges they faced.
Citations:
Raphael Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1944), p. 79.
Ward Churchill, Kill The Indian, Save The Man: The Genocidal Impact of American Indian Residential Schools (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2004), p. 3.
There is a sample.
If you do not come to understand this now, then you will sooner or later: you are never going to be able to use equivocation ("look! that was worse!") to try and justify or minimize the impact of institutional racism to non-whites. Cultural Genocide (to which black south Africans, Native Americans, African Americans, and many others were subjected in modern times) is not considered a lesser offense than physical genocide. Legal and scholarly definitions of genocide
do not make this distinction, and neither do the people themselves. All forms are considered equally evil to them.
As you have seen in your country, people will lay their lives on the line to end cultural genocide (often embodied in the form of institutional racism) just as surely as they will any other kind. For them, there is no hierarchy between physical genocide and cultural genocide. One denies your life, the other forces you to live as an animal and not a human (and can in many cases also deny your life). This is a lose-lose.
For this reason when you try to justify institutional racism using equivocation in a discussion with peoples who are related to populations subject to it, you usually won't succeed in getting your point across. You are just going to piss them off a little more, like you're doing now.
That, in turn, will ensure that tensions do not disappear anytime soon.
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White Americans died to free the slaves over 150 years ago and they are still being reminded of how terrible they are.
Institutional racism in America ended with slavery?
I didn't know that...
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Exactly when is this shit going to stop? Is it ever going to stop or is the excuse simply too good to give up?
When you try to take actions of cultural genocide (again, embodied in the form of institutional racism) and paint them as mere "excuses", you contribute to the persistence of racial tension.
When institutional racism, the effects of institutional racism (which still persist in the US and SA), the arguments defending/justifying/legitimizing institutional racism and the people that make them disappear, the tension will stop.
As long as those things persist, so will the anger.
Multiracial societies with lower levels of racial tension than SA and the USA exist, so it can be done, but it will take time and understanding.
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I also want you to think about something. How can you realistically and justifiably hold Europeans today responsible for the actions of the people of the past?
1. Many still benefit immensely from those actions (ex: redlining, the G.I. Bill, FHA discrimination, etc). The actions of a past do not exist in a vacuum, and have a large impact even today.
2. Many, like yourself, still defend and/or attempt to imbue nobility into systems of institutional racism which, as far as I'm concerned, makes you a proponent.
Those who fit either of those categories are responsible, in my opinion.
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Slavery is a part of human history since the dawn of time, yet 150 years after we decide its wrong you have people holding everyone since the dawn of time accountable for something that was as common as taking a shit.
Do I need to go into the differences between different systems of enslavement/labor again and why people react differently to the American/South African variants, or are you going to take the time to read my prior post?
Those other societies you listed are not being hit up for reparations for the same reason nobody is bothering Italians in order to secure reparations for slavery in ancient Rome. They were fundamentally different systems and thus engender fundamentally different responses.
These distinctions are substantive and real. Nobody (not the Jews, not the blacks, and not the "MSM") is making them up as part of some daft conspiracy and nobody has to. They are obvious.