"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.
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.
* 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.
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.
> 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 ]
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.
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.
"Most southerners didn't own slaves" is another popular argument from Confederate apologists.
SA is in a hard place, with the US having used all the good rationalizations over the last 150 years, as well as the example of how Germany dealt with its Nazis.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Also note the striking statistic in the abstract: "...over 40% of those surveyed think apartheid was a good idea, badly executed." And this was a survey conducted in 1996.
Genuine question: why as a HN reader - so probably quite scientific - why is it "striking" to you that after learning on this very forum of referendum where you found out that 30% voted to maintain Apartheid, a mere FOUR years later a poll finds 40% holding a similar position?
You've broken the site guidelines so badly and so repeatedly, not just in this hellish flamewar but before that as well, that I've banned this account.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with.
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.
> 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.
>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.
> 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.
That's a comparison I hadn't thought of. But the difference is that North Korea shares a border with its patron state, China, which is also a global super power.
While South Africa had the support of the United States, it was thousands of miles away from the US, and surrounded by Black African-run states that were hostile to it, particularly Mozambique and Angola. South Africa did not have the resources to run a North Korean-style police state.
North Korea has never been as rich per capita as South Africa was at the beginning of the apartheid regime and South Africa had nuclear weapons a long time before North Korea did. If they had wanted to keep the US out they could have, never mind African militaries. The nearest military that isn't obviously inferior was in Israel.
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.
As you’ve noted yourself, the government had a large amount of control over the media and the political system as a whole. It would be disingenuous to identify this as the primary factor in the maintenance of the apartheid system (as you have in several of your posts) and yet deny that it had any meaningful influence on the referendum result. The striking fact is that even with the party that introduced apartheid campaigning to repeal it, almost a third of whites voted to keep the system. And as others have pointed out, this was at a point in time where SA had become a pariah state and it was abundantly clear that apartheid could not continue – even to many dyed-in-the-wool racists who had no objection to it in principle.
I never know what the next step in these conversations is meant to be: a nation of people did a really bad thing. They - or their children their grandchildren clearly changed their mind when first given a real, unrigged vote.
Now it only happened because the evil party told them to and the world was forcing them to? So what ? They haven't really changed deep down? And the proof is somehow the absolute strangers in the minority who didn't change their mind?
I am going to have to call a halt to my participation here as: to quote teachrdan - is absurd.
The motivations behind people’s votes rather obviously do matter if your are attempting to use these votes as evidence of a particular attitude towards the apartheid system.
The best that can be said is that once the imminent collapse of apartheid became obvious to almost everyone, a clear (but not overwhelming) majority of white people voted to get rid of it.
To me these facts are obviously inconsistent with the narrative that apartheid was an unpopular policy that persisted only because of gerrymandering and other electoral shenanigans. One can also look at polling and surveys to reach the same conclusion.
I was a child of that transition, and part of a family that worked and fought for that transition. Don't decry the efforts that led to it having the broad support it did. Did some people want to remain in the past they'd been conditioned to? Sure. Some East Germans did too. They're victims alike, but not in proportion. Wanting to consider the nature of the people as evil, we end up applying the fundamental attribution error, but on a group, which is far worse.
The point is not that no progress had been made by the 90s. The point is simply that we must acknowledge the complicity of large numbers of white South Africans in the apartheid system, and acknowledge that many crucial components of apartheid (such as a the ban on interracial marriage) were popular policies. Outside of revisionist historical circles, this isn't a remotely controversial point.
Ultimately I defer to the comprehensive TRC report. Here is an apt quote from the introduction to volume 4:
>An important debate with which the Commission had to wrestle was, as has been
fully discussed in the chapter on The Mandate, how to paint the backdrop against
which such human rights violations occurred. Without some sense of the
“antecedents, circumstances, factors and context” within which gross violations
of human rights occurred, it is almost impossible to understand how, over the
years, people who considered themselves ordinary, decent and God-fearing found
themselves turning a blind eye to a system which impoverished, oppressed and
violated the lives and very existence of so many of their fellow citizens.
>It is an old question: one that is asked of any country that undertakes acts so foul
that the world openly condemns it. It is a question that has been answered in
different ways, for such is the nature of historical debate. However, what is clear
is that apartheid could only have happened if large numbers of enfranchised,
relatively privileged South Africans either condoned or simply allowed it to continue.
White people are a minority in the country. Given an opportunity to change the story, the overwhelming majority of them supported that, and were willing to hand over power. [1] It was obvious that would mean a black majority government, and they still did it.
The government lied to everyone, and some believed it. You'd seemingly like to make a villain out of all white South Africans, but that's not helpful in any way - many, like myself, were born into apartheid and struggled against it. So were my parents - they had no part in making those laws, and yet were born before the Union was established. It's easy to miss what it's like to try to counteract a regime - you and your loved ones will suffer. The populace did not wield the power of transformation itself, it was international intervention that allowed it to happen.
Were some complicit? Yes, obviously. Did many know? Probably. Was it the majority that supported a status quo for some time? Yes, but not without being manipulated. It was standard education that there were 'grades' of people for most of the 19 and early 20th centuries, and in South Africa this was redoubled. Narratives like 'black people are the result of the snake and eve' were common. I've spoken to many older people who are horrified at what they believed. It's incredibly hard to escape a bubble when it's all you hear. State TV, state sanctioned news, international sanctions mean you didn't ever hear how SA was seen internationally. The TRC was asking people to recognise what it saw, and what many others saw - that evil is banal, and within us. It deliberately did not pursue further actions against those that were not directly involved in harm, or who ordered it.
You have taken 'large numbers' and seem to have interpreted it quite liberally to mean 'the majority', and then further concluded that there is then some obvious flaw in their moral character. I could say the same of the US forever wars and destabilisation, but would it help? To accuse and paint with that shame every citizen?
>Was it the majority that supported a status quo for some time? Yes, but not without being manipulated
It seems we are in agreement on the basic point. Bear in mind that at the beginning of this thread, throwaway210222 appeared to disagree with this point, and this is what I was responding to.
> You'd seemingly like to make a villain out of all white South Africans
> ... and then further concluded that there is then some obvious flaw in their moral character.
You're persistently reading things into my posts that I just haven't said. I haven't made any comment on the moral character of white South Africans as it's irrelevant to my point.
I really think that if you read through my posts again without the preconception that I'm trying to paint all white South Africans as inherently evil, you might find that you don't actually disagree substantially with any of what I'm saying.
As another poster put it, we must avoid the comforting fantasy that a system with millions of victims could have involved only a handful of perpetrators. The perpetrators were no doubt morally complex human beings like the rest of us, not evil caricatures. However, that does not mean that the fact of their participation in the system can simply be swept under the rug. Nor can the referendum vote – indeed an indicator of enormous progress – be used to show that the apartheid system did not enjoy wide support among whites in the preceding decades.
I'm not looking for a comforting fantasy, I'd just like to not phrase things in a way that implies that a group identity perpetuated something that clearly many or most didn't agree with, vocally, and with their ballots. I've just noted that your comments seem quite insistent on trying to find that a group holds fault, but that's the very thing I'm stating is not logically valid. Did every German want what happened over the middle of the 20th century? No-one thinks that it wasn't 'the Germans' who did things - but thinking that's 'German nature', or that we should 'remember that was Germans!' is massively offensive to those who tried to resist, and I believe, just a leaky abstraction. Sometimes trying to cast your net around an abstraction, your definitions can lose more utility than you gain with the abstraction. Instead of 'white' - I could point at colonial descendents[1], the Boer, or Christians being the most racist group and racially motivated in that period - in the aggregate, it would be mostly correct, but in the application, it misleads and misinforms. What does "Remember the WHITE perpetrators did this!" achieve when we're a generation past when we proved that wasn't true? I'm after a more refined viewpoint that doesn't play with identity politics, but instead realises that power and disinformation are capable of growing in any soil. The banality of evil is the lesson, not attempting to racially classify people.
I think at this point you are responding based on your perception of the motivation behind my comments, and not actually disagreeing with the substance of what I’m saying. I have already stated that I’m not trying to blame all white people or all white South Africans as a group, or say that they are inherently evil.
I don't think there's malice, nor believe I know your motivation - the discussion has been civil from my view.
My singular observation has been that you seem to repeatedly wish to project a view that asks the audience to treat a group with suspicion and doubt. Based on their race and origin.
I think that's spurious, and as it applies to me and just about everybody I know, I know it to be patently false. My first-hand account also seems to be of no value.
A direct parallel would be like me propagating something negative or disparaging about Jews as a whole, due to my feelings about Palestine. I wouldn't do that, and I expect the same courtesy. Group biases are discrimination, and discrimination generally leads to collective punishment. None of these are good things, nor do they make better people of anyone.
Racial categories are relevant to a historical understanding of the apartheid regime for the obvious reason that the regime itself divided society along racial lines. For example, only white people could vote in the referendum you’ve referred to. If you are bothered by statements such as “many white South Africans supported apartheid” (even though you appear to acknowledge that they’re true?), then you should blame the apartheid regime for the relevance of this racial category, not me.
It is obvious that not all white South Africans thought alike and that many opposed apartheid to varying degrees. It is also obvious that the vote to repeal apartheid was an enormous step forward. As I’m sure you’re aware, nothing I’ve written contradicts this.
Some immigrated to avoid military service for the Apartheid regime.
I despise Apartheid though perhaps we should point the finger less at our predecessors and act on similar oppression today.
When there is significant evil in our societies, is it enough to say I didn't support it? Or are we obligated to put a stop to it? The latter is a harsh, demanding judgment, but that doesn't mean it's not true.
Tacit opposition is no different than tacit support.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.)
> 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.
> For example, do you feel it's appropriate to blame race
Where did I "blame" race? And for what?
People who are white have done horrible things in Africa. People who are black have done horrible things in Africa. It is, however, a simple fact that the people who are white came to Africa from other places.
Looking at the history, I don't think it's difficult to make a strong argument that, on the whole, the arrival of white Europeans on the continent has hurt the (black) people who were already there more than it has helped them.
That's not blaming white people for all that ails Africa. It's also not disingenuously dismissing the malign influence white Europeans have had on the continent.
Again, let's look at the statement the OP took issue with and suggested was racist:
> 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
Please don't play dumb. You accused, and I quote, "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."
> People who are white have done horrible things in Africa.
Please don't play dumb. You know very well your racist comment was a blanked accusation targeted at entire ethnical groups.
If you are honestly interested in learning about the crimes against humanity committed within the scope of imperialist agendas, you'll learn very well that the root cause is very specific. If on the other hand you're just invested in mindlessly spewing racist comments then you should really take a look at what you are doing.
You've been breaking the site guidelines so badly and so frequently—not just in this hellish flamewar, but elsewhere too, and quite egregiously—that I've banned this account.
Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with.
> Please don't play dumb. You accused, and I quote, "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."
That statement itself isn't "blaming" white people for anything. It's merely stating that it is not reasonable to avoid not-so-pretty aspects of the history of white Europeans in Africa on the basis that some white people in Africa (and Europe) don't want to discuss them.
> You know very well your racist comment was a blanked accusation targeted at entire ethnical groups.
What is the accusation? You conveniently left out the next sentence:
> People who are black have done horrible things in Africa.
As I stated, you can't blame white people for all that ails Africa. But it's also disingenuous to dismiss the malign influence white Europeans have had on the continent. To pretend that racism wasn't a fundamental part of the belief systems of white European imperialists is simply absurd.
White European imperialists believed themselves superior to the people in the lands they conquered, and they engaged in concerted efforts to convince the people they oppressed of their inferiority to the white Europeans as well. Are you totally ignorant of the widely-promoted and widely-held notion that Africans were barbarians incapable of governing themselves and were better off as slaves?[1]
Cecil Rhodes (know who he is?) himself wrote:
> I contend that we are the finest race in the world and that the more of the world we inhabit the better it is for the human race. Just fancy those parts that are at present inhabited by the most despicable specimens of human beings what an alteration there would be if they were brought under Anglo-Saxon influence, look again at the extra employment a new country added to our dominions gives.
Now, I'm not suggesting that we "cancel" the Rhodes Scholarship, but would you find it racist to talk about the fact that Cecil Rhodes was a racist?
Also, I think you meant "ethnic" groups, not "ethnical" groups.
> If you are honestly interested in learning about the crimes against humanity committed within the scope of imperialist agendas, you'll learn very well that the root cause is very specific.
It seems to me you're preferring to talk about "imperialist agendas" without talking about who the imperialists were. Pray tell, who were the imperialists?
You broke the site guidelines badly and egregiously in this hellish flamewar. We ban accounts that do that.
I'm not going to ban you for this because I'm not seeing it consistently in your history. But if you do it again, we will. Seriously not cool.
It also looks like you're mostly using HN to argue about ideological and politically inflammatory topics, which is not the intended use of this site. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit more to heart, we'd be grateful. The idea here is curious conversation. Not battle, and certainly not flamewar.
(UK based) About 18 months ago, poor promotion prospects and minimal yearly wage increases brought me to the point where I realised I was punishing myself waiting for things to improve.
So I polished my LinkedIn profile and made myself visible to recruiters.
I'll soon start a new job with double my current salary and none of the daily grind of the current one. The Great Resignation has served me well.
Congratulations. How long ago did you start looking? Did it take all 18 months to find a new position or did you find some as soon as you started looking?
July 2020 and I had my first interview in August (unsuccessful), then another in April (also unsuccessful) until I was offered the one I'll start soon.
Education is key here - we the tech-savvy, need to make more of an effort to educate those less so, on how to remove files from their devices that could prove compromising in the future.
Naturally, I understand that what I've just said isn't the whole answer, but I really do think it's a good place to start.
> Despite this, Tanzania’s cybercrime unit said that NCII cases are few and far between, with the head of the Cybercrime Unit, Joshua Mwangaza insisting it is not in the country’s culture to send “porn pictures.”
What does "hacking of secure devices" even mean? A device that can be successfully hacked is by definition not secure.
If you want to tackle this issue, get the pornography legislation done with, prosecute distribution of images without consent (with safeguards not to stifle legitimate journalism) and educate people not to create their own kompromat - a nude picture that has not been made cannot be leaked.
Indeed, but I'm not really holding my breath that Uganda is going to change its laws any time soon. Not much you or I can do about this, so education is the next best thing that can make a meaningful difference.
Both of these are true of course. People need to be aware of the dangers online, and learn how to protect themselves from scammers and other predators. But punishing the victim is utterly ridiculous.
This (title editing) is by far the worst aspect of how HN moderates. I don’t think they’ve especially misrepresented the article here, but they routinely remove “how” or “why” or numbers to produce titles that wildly misrepresent what’s behind the link. I understand the reasoning behind the rules but it’s long overdue for some adjustment.
They’re intended to make titles less clickbaity, I think in the spirit of leveling the “curious discussion” playing field.
But the heuristics aren’t great, it’s like the world stopped at listicles and Clickhole is the oracle. I’m not necessarily opposed to the notion of curating link titles, but I honestly think it’s too high volume and produces the opposite of what’s intended.
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