[cybert00th]

"Here's What You Need to Remember: Men like Denard but perhaps a little less theatrical—many of them South Africans—took the next logical step. They founded businesses with boring-sounding names but a deadly purpose: to fight Africa’s nastiest conflicts on behalf of corrupt, inept governments, and for profit"

I'm heartily sick and tired of the way white South African men are portrayed as the 'new bogeymen'.

Each country has its good and bad men (and women for that matter), and if you could do a census I can almost guarantee the distribution would follow the usual Bell curve.

Get your facts first, then you may distort them as you please.

PS: I'm a white South African male

[dang]

Of course it's frustrating to encounter condemnations of anything one identifies with, but by fulminating aggressively* on an inflammatory topic, you broke the site guidelines badly and predictably set off a wretched, hellish flamewar. Please don't do that on HN. We're trying for something different than internet default here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

* I'm sure you didn't mean to be or experience yourself as posting aggressively. The problem is that there isn't much difference between "defensive" and "aggressive". Mostly we experience ourselves doing the former and other people experience us doing the latter. Everyone functions this way, which is how we get flamewars where everyone feels like the others (a) started it, and (b) did worse.

[yardie]

Could this be a generational issue?

I've met many pre-Apartheid white, South Africans who immigrated to London. And, wow, the racist shit they would say about black South Africans. Many found their racist attitude simply wouldn't fly in cosmopolitan London so they fled back to South Africa or Australia.

Of the younger generation many were too young to fully comprehend apartheid or denounce it entirely.

> Each country has its good and bad men (and women for that matter), and if you could do a census I can almost guarantee the distribution would follow the usual Bell curve.

South African apartheid was a giant state apparatus. It takes a lot of people contributing to uphold it. While no one likes to think they were in the bad guy group I'm thinking the bell curve is going to look like a slope given the testimony from T&R records.

[throwaway210222]

> It takes a lot of people contributing to uphold it [Apartheid].

Actually it really, really didn't.

Students of history will know that National Party (which assembled Grand Apartheid and ruled from 1948 to 1994) merrily gerrymandered the entire country on a scale seldom seem.

1. liberal (more English) areas like those near Durban were magically made part of conservative (more Afrikaans) farming areas hundreds of kilometres away. A good example is the affluent enclaves of Kloof and Hillcrest in Durban were somehow part of the [at the time] extremely conservative Voortrekker town of Greytown a mere 150km away;

2. a further law deemed that the rural votes in each such Frankenstein voting district counted 100%, the distant urban votes a mere 75%

3. this happened everywhere and ensured a massive majority for the National Party in every province;

4. there was by design - and in the most literal sense - no way for the white population to vote themselves out of Apartheid. It was so successful that for many years their was only ONE liberal opposition member of parliament [Houghton, Johannesburg].

I understand details are tough and cloud the cartoon good-vs-evil polemic you were no doubt exposed to. I guess one does get more dopamine from wild sweeping statements that reinforce and display your own ignorance and bigotry. I wouldn't use my real name either in posts like yours.

For the casual observer: let this be a cautionary tale when gerrymandering is attempted in your own democracy.

[PS. Southern Rhodesia - now Zimbabwe - had a different, but equally effective voting mechanism to suppress the growth of a liberal opposition. For another day ]

[yardie]

This is very good rebuttal. I didn't even consider the gerrymandering that went on in the 40s. You've exposed a blindness I didn't know.

> the cartoon good-vs-evil polemic you were no doubt exposed to

I was a child before apartheid was abolished. And growing up in the US I knew it was wrong and knew any government that supported it was wrong. It seems the BDS campaigns were effective on small kids of that time. Honestly, who would justify apartheid.

But based on the casual conversation with a few South Africans of that era I knew some actively benefited from it. A memorable one being with a soon retired office manager and ex SA military who had some ideas on what he would like to do to Nelson Mandela. How things were better before the ANC took over; kind of "the trains running on time" mindset.

I went to school in the US. We were told slavery was unpopular but politically immovable. We were also told the civil war wasn't about slavery. Turns out it was popular and the war was absolutely about slavery. So it does color my opinion when others tell me something unethical was unpopular but politically immovable.

[mcguire]

Speaking as an older adult male from the south of the United States, I'm afraid one of my eyebrows was creeping upward while I read this. It's not the first time I have seen this kind of argument.

Don't get me wrong, I am sure the vast majority of South Africans, English and Afrikaans, are decent enough people. It's really just that the "it wasn't all of us, it was those really bad people over there" is a part of the whole Lost Cause thing. Sorry.

[zizee]

So anyone living under a corrupt/violent regime are guilty of that regimes actions? Neat.

[mcguire]

[flagged]

[teachrdan]

I never thought I'd see an impassioned defense of apartheid South Africa on Hacker News. But here we are.

So the question is, did "a whole lot" of white people uphold a system of white supremacy in South Africa? Literally the only honest answer is, "Of course they did."

"Although the majority of whites supported apartheid, some 20 percent did not." That's from Wikipedia as cited below. If you have an actual source to support your absurd claim that the majority of white South Africans opposed Apartheid, I'd love to see it. The gerrymandering you mention at great (distracting?) length could have been real, and would have had nothing to do with upholding apartheid, which had the support of about 80% of voters.

Literally the entire state apparatus was dedicated to supporting apartheid, particularly the police (which kept non-whites from moving freely in their own country without passes), the courts (which punished non-whites for transgressions against the white state), and the military (which violently attacked and killed non-whites who could not be controlled by the police and courts). And all this in a country that was never more than 20% white in modern times.

> I understand details are tough and cloud the cartoon good-vs-evil polemic you were no doubt exposed to.

In the case of apartheid, good vs evil is exactly what it is. The white apartheid government, which had the support of 80% of white voters, was evil. And all the specious detail about gerrymandering won't make that go away.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apartheid

[yardie]

In the TAs defense the National Party ran on a platform of apartheid in the 1940s did lose the popular vote but won the parliament through gerrymandering.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1948_South_African_general_ele...

[throwaway210222]

Not only that, but the National Party were so rabid that in 1948 D.F Malan - their new prime minister - proposed in an actual parliament speech to deprive white English-speaking citizens of the vote.

God alone knows how they were going to enforce that in a completely multi-lingual society.

Strange times. A warning to us all.

[throwaway210222]

At the risk of exposing myself to some more sanctimonious insults, let me complete the half-told story here by showing - with the requested sources [1] that when white South Africans were actually offered a truly level-field, one-man-one-vote referendum as to whether to end Apartheid in 1990…

the vast majority (> 80%) of eligible whites turned out and voted 68% in favour - with the gerry-mandered districts in my original post voting 85% in favour.

Thus supporting my original explanation that a cynically engineered voting system is incredibly advantageous to the incumbent and needs far fewer supporters than is often believed to maintain the status quo over a long period.

Sadly, some people just stopped thinking after the Spitting Image jingle.

And since its a mandatory part of the weird I-never-thought-I'd-see kubuki theatre on HN: to remove all possible doubt, Apartheid had no redeeming characteristics, was a completely evil idea, and only a fucking moron would defend it. Sigh

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1992_South_African_apartheid_r...

[teachrdan]

You are obviously invested in the false narrative that most white South Africans always secretly opposed Apartheid, and it was just the work a few bad men who somehow kept millions of Black South Africans oppressed for decades -- conveniently, to the material benefit of the white minority.

It's your choice to believe something so stupid. But to propagate this racist myth of Hacker News is a profound act of intellectual dishonesty at best.

Your proof that most white South Africans opposed apartheid is that the 1990 referendum came out in favor of ending it? This vote took place after it was clear that apartheid had no future. The ANC (main black freedom party) was increasingly organized and powerful, while years of economic sanctions had taken their toll on the economy.

You claim that a majority of whites opposed apartheid the entire time. Then how could the system have persisted for decades?

> to remove all possible doubt, Apartheid had no redeeming characteristics...

This is a cheap trick performed by the right. They denounce an unjust system while minimizing anyone's participation in it. It's oppression without any oppressors. This is how the United States lionizes Martin Luther King while downplaying the white politicians and bureaucrats (like head of the FBI J. Edgar Hoover) who persecuted him every step of the way.

You may not be defending apartheid per se. But you are certainly defending millions of white South Africans who supported, enforced, and benefited from apartheid for decades, all at the expense of the overwhelming non-white majority. The fact that being reminded of their misconduct bothers you so much should tell you something.

---

Land ownership under apartheid limited Black ownership to just 7% of the country: https://www.cnn.com/2018/11/20/africa/south-africa-land-refo...

[dang]

Personal attacks and ideological warfare are not ok on HN and will get you banned here, regardless of how wrong someone else is or you feel they are. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for—it's basically the equivalent of both pouring fuel and setting a lit match to it. As a result, we got a hellish flamewar. Other people did the same thing, of course, That doesn't make it ok.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

[eslaught]

I want to be convinced, but your posts don't help.

Three posts up, your only citation was to Wikipedia, claiming 20% of whites were against apartheid. But the paragraph in Wikipedia itself doesn't cite anything. I hope I don't need to say: Wikipedia is not in and of itself a source. Either they need to cite some sort of an underlying source, or you do.

The post I'm immediately replying to has one citation to a source about Black ownership of land. That's not what's under dispute here.

Can you provide some actual sources substantiating the claim of what percentage of whites actually did (or did not) support apartheid? Otherwise your posts are pure rhetoric.

[throwaway210222]

Hi techrdan - can you lighten up on the insults. I'm really trying to discuss a topic with a teeny, tiny Overton window and I don't deserve you continued efforts to caricature me as a racist.

> Then how could the system have persisted for decades?

- surely I have explained at least one mechanism - in your words - "in distracting long detail";

- another one was to make sure no white kid ever learnt a black language. Most kids in the areas I spoke about above learnt French as a third language - not Zulu or even Hindi. This was deliberate;

- they went to enormous lengths to destroy any common knowledge of Sofiatown and it was a rejection of that the races could never live together. To show you what it meant: they renamed it "Triuph";

- they high-jacked the dominant protestant religion (ask Reverend Beyers Naude)

- in the mid 1980s the imposed a state of emergency that controlled all TV and news.

- any yes, like many places in the early mid 20th century - there were indeed a lot of racists.

But I suspect form the tone of your comments you aren't really asking in some good faith pursuit of knowledge of a complex place. I suspect you are rather employing a common rhetorical device to actually assert there "there other is no possible explanation - other than simple pure evil bigotry - for how it could continue for so long. And anyone who I feel doesn't agree with this is a bigot".

Its not cool and its not consistent with the site guidelines.

So let's discuss briefly the other Apartheid state - Northern Rhodesia. Here the whites-only voting was first-past-the-post as per the UK mother ship.

In all of the elections about 40% of the white population regularly voted against Ian Smith in just about all the districts. They won exactly ZERO seats in parliament.

40% is not "a few" people.

Voting structures matter and they get high-jacked. Look after yours.

[wolverine876]

> At the risk of exposing myself to some more sanctimonious insults

Please leave out the victim rhetoric, which is a very tired and worn tactic; it's just personal attacks in reverse. Nothing in the GP was an insult. If you have a point to make, say it.

[foldr]

>the vast majority (> 80%) of eligible whites turned out and voted 68% in favour - with the gerry-mandered districts in my original post voting 85% in favour.

This stat seems to support teacherdan's point. Even at a time where it had become clear that the apartheid system could not continue (regardless of whether or not people supported it in principle), almost a third of whites votes to maintain it. In other words, a whole lot of white people supported apartheid right up to the bitter end, and that is one of the reasons that it was possible for it to continue for so long.

Also, the referendum appears to have been in 1992, not 1990.

[barry-cotter]

> Even at a time where it had become clear that the apartheid system could not continue

If North Korea can continue apartheid sure as hell could have. If you're willing to kill all the people to keep your power you won't need to. Compare, Stalin, Lenin, Gorbachev, Deng, Fidel.

[throwaway210222]

s/1990/1992/ - thanks.

Of course a hell of a lot of people supported it - most of them now long dead. [This mandatory prelude is so tedious]

However, as I have shown, clearly not enough that the ruling National Party were prepared to trust their own people with continuing to vote for it. An the 1992 referendum proved their suspicions to be correct!

Hence the outrageous - from the start - manipulation.

If you think banal voting manipulation isn't as big a deal as the evil that lurks in mens' hearts then ask yourself - now that Iran has an Islamic democracy (they do hold elections) how does the current/next generation ever return to a secular democracy via the ballot - if that is what they want?

As as in Apartheid South Africa, enormous effort has been made by the initial true believers to prevent it from ever happening.

I could be wrong.

[throwaway210222]

> I never thought I'd see an impassioned defense of apartheid South Africa on Hacker News. But here we are.

Good news mate - you still haven't.

But nice try

[boomboomsubban]

I've always assumed that most white South Africans who tried to emigrate are the ones who profited heavily under apartheid and are unwilling to live under multiethnic rule. Basically the most racist of the bunch.

[yardie]

That's not what I understood. Once the new government formed there was a quite a bit of economic instability. White South Africans who benefited heavily under the old apartheid regime saw their career and economic prospects shrink and used their old commonwealth connections to migrate to the UK, Canada, and Australia. They didn't enjoy living with apartheid but they weren't going to sacrifice their comfort so that black South Africans would get a fair shot. The government had instituted some affirmative action measures and quite a few took that as a cue to leave.

[boomboomsubban]

I'm not really seeing how what you say is different from what I said, except that you don't think they were racist for it. But then how do you explain the extreme racism you experienced from those emigrates?

[schrijver]

You’re reading too much into it… that there were many South African mercenaries is a historical fact, they’re not stereotyping any population in that sentence.

For what it’s worth, in the popular consciousness outside of SA, the white South African as a bogeyman probably peaked a long time ago, I would say around 1989 — when Lethal Weapon 2 was released with South Africans as the bad guys.

[hedgehog]

There's some basis. Executive Outcomes was in its day one of the premier private military contractors and formed largely out of outgoing military who served the regime. Any time a big organization gets downsized those people need to find jobs, at the same time there's a robust market for arms-length labor to take on dangerous and politically risky work. The US has probably been #1 for the last 20 years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Outcomes

[panzagl]

I guess you could nitpick as to how many of them were from Rhodesia instead of South Africa proper. But South Africans have certainly made a cottage industry out of bush war memoirs, so it's hard to be too nitpicky.

[knodi123]

> Men like Denard but perhaps a little less theatrical—many of them South Africans

So if all of the men being discussed had a hat with a propellor on it, we should be careful to avoid saying so, because there are also innocent unrelated men who wear propellor beanies?

If a disproportionate ratio of those men are all from the same relatively small demographic in a relatively remote location, it should not be off-limits to notice that.

[animal531]

I'll counter this as another white South African male and say that no one globally is portraying South African white men as any kind of new bogeyman.

After the fall of apartheid the new democratically voted for (black) government came into power, meaning that the old government, military, police, municipalities etc. faced pressure in replacing all the previous white employees with new black employees.

That meant that those white people needed to start finding new jobs. For your general office worker from a municipality or a low level policeman that meant transitioning to something else, such as generic office job, learning new skills such as using computers etc.

But for your extreme specialists, for example from the Army Special Task Force, they often had advanced training and skills which they didn't want to trade for an entry level position somewhere. That meant translating those skills into something new, such as (mainly) local security companies (to combat the new rise in crime in the country); but also as contractors such as named in the article.

Even the article itself isn't focused on condemning the individual contractors, it's merely stating that the creation of these private armies are raising hard questions around their use, liability and who they need to be accountable to.

[ninja3925]

FYI: I didn't read the racial taint in the sentence.

[Ancapistani]

> the way white South African men are portrayed

I’m at least aware of the issues with SA, but I must point out that the article didn’t say that they were white. Without knowing more about the people involved, I certainly didn’t make that assumption.

[cutemonster]

Me neither. And there's so many people, I wouldn't generalize from what some mercenaries did, to the population in general (those who look like the mercenaries). Id think almost no one does?, and that you're over reacting, @cybert00th?

(Otoh I didn't know that a SA white bogeyman was a thing, so what do I know.)

[LurkingPenguin]

> I'm heartily sick and tired of the way white South African men are portrayed as the 'new bogeymen'.

New boogeyman? The malign influence of whites in Africa is not a new phenomenon. The statement you took issue with is true.

Of course, nobody reasonable would suggest that all whites in Africa, or that all white South Africans, are bad people, but it's disingenuous to dismiss historical facts about what white people have done in Africa on the basis that it hurts white people in Africa's feelings.