[yarvin9]

It's easy to find South Africans "holding forth" etc. For example: [0].

"The number of black people who believe life was better under South Africa's apartheid regime is growing, according to a survey published yesterday... In a rebuke to the African National Congress government, more than 60 per cent of all South Africans polled said the country was better run during white minority rule."

Yes, that's from 2002. Everyone who thinks the ANC has improved since 2002, please raise your hand.

While I didn't click on this thread to banter about details, details like this matter in a way - because South Africa is a real country and not a story or a song. In the real country, pressure from nice white people who live in America helped replace one one-party government, the Nationalists, with another, the ANC.

If the ANC governs South African blacks better than the Nats, the nice white people did a good thing for South African blacks; otherwise, they did a mean thing. Surely this is true whatever the names of the parties, the skin colors of the government bureaucrats, etc, etc, etc.

The possibility that, while listening to "Biko," singing "Free Nelson Mandela," and generally having a grand old time, our nice white people actually damaged the lives of actual real people (eg, there are 500,000 rapes a year in ANC-governed South Africa) does not seem to occur to our collective progressive consciousness. It seems much easier to express "guilt" about our 17th-century ancestors than to consider the possibility that we, ourselves, actually caused real harm.

[0] http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2002/12/12/1039656168811.h... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_violence_in_South_Africa

[sudioStudio64]

You aren't trying to say then that the colonial powers assumed control of Africa to stop rape?

If I'm doing a wrong thing should I stop doing that wrong thing even if someone else might do something wrong after I quit?

[dropit_sphere]

>You aren't trying to say then that the colonial powers assumed control of Africa to stop rape?

We should be thankful that they didn't. Who knows how they would have screwed it up?

No, the mechanism is a happy accident of nature, that people take care of the things they own. A country with a bunch of rape going on is a disorderly, unsafe country, which is bad for business. It may grate against your idealism (as it does mine!) that the right things often come about for the "wrong" reasons, but I think the parties concerned would greatly prefer it to the wrong things happening for the "right" reasons---as things are now.

[sudioStudio64]

I get that social order was produced in colonial Africa, but you kind of have to ask...for whom? To say that there was strong social order for Africans is probably a stretch. The crimes against them were probably legal in a lot of colonial areas. So while they had fewer public works that were rusting it was probably legal for certain parties to commit rape even at the height of colonial Africa.

Rape maybe one extreme...it was certainly the case that crimes perpetrated by Africans were punished differently.

Same thing for the Southern US ...there were some slaves that chose to stay with their masters, but most of them were ok with the hunger and joblessness that came with emancipation.

Is the question in the end something like...Is a safe and orderly society under a tyranny the same kind of good as self determination in the face of lawlessness? Which one is the greater good? Is that even a meaningful question?

(Keeping in mind, I guess, that these kind of beard scatcher's are the hallmark of liberal western privilege.)

Cheers.

[bk81]

>most of them were ok with the hunger and joblessness that came with emancipation.

How do you know?