I never said they have no moral rights. I said that the expropriation of ill-gotten property is justified. Please don’t accuse me of racism, particularly in such a disingenuous fashion.
Uh-huh. Without going too deeply into this, Wikipedia says the following:
And what is the TAU?
It bears mentioning that Human Rights Watch has concluded that:
As usual, racism against blacks is overshadowed by false or exaggerrated stories of black crime, to the extent that reality is inverted. Just like blacks hurricane victims in New Orleans were called looters while bands of white supremacists roamed the suburbs, threatening, shooting, and murdering any blacks they came across.
It might not make any difference anyway. From what I’ve read on this board and elsewhere, Mugabe is now a figurehead for a military kleptocracy. You know how hard those can be to dislodge – look at Burma.
I’d even go a war further back than that. Desperate for manpower to keep feeding into the meat grinder that was WW1, Britain and France raised hundreds of thousands of troops from their colonies in Africa, India and Asia and for the first time used them not in some far flung part of the empire, but in Europe. Something was clearly going amiss when the colonizers were asking the colonized to help save them by fighting in France, and it didn’t go unnoticed. If you were to tell someone from Victorian era England that India would have 140,000 soldiers fighting in France and another 700,000 in the Mediterranean, or tell a Frenchman from the same era that 200,000 Senegalais would be fighting for them on France soil they’d look at you like you’d gone mad.
A combination of several factors: colonial past, communism in the 70s/80s, capitalism now (esp. the US, French and Chinese going after primary resources at the expense of locals), the twin evils of Christianity and Islam, AIDS, and generally denuded soils and shitty climates. Most of Africa straddles the equator and tropics and is* not* the ideal place for people to live. BUT Africa isn’t, in my opinion, doing worse than a lot of other places in Asia and South America. I’d definitely rather live in South Africa than China, or Burma, or Russia, or Colombia, or India. The global recession has hit South Africa very lightly, for instance.
Oh, *sure *- after 1500 years or so of never-ending warfare, you think 10 goddamn years of peace is the statistically significant bit. Oh, wait, there’s Chechnya, and Georgia. Bias much? The only “time between conflicts” were between World Wars and after the fall of Communism (although N. Ireland was still a warzone then), AFAICT. Hardly a good sample size compared to the death camps, the rape camps, the nuclear stand-off, the world wars, the civil wars, the terrorist attacks…the list goes on. Africa is just a slow starter - we’re new at this “Nation State” game, can’t expect us to leapfrog all the Western World’s “successes” in 20-30 years, now can you?
…because they’ve not had the time “between conflicts” - for instance, where’s the international military force in Darfur, comparable to the one in Kosovo? Where’s the Marshal Plan for Mozambique, after their civil war? Talk to me when there’s been 2 centuries of post-independence conflict, like France enjoyed post-monarchy.
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Further, “they did it too!” is not even an accepted argument in the playground, much less here I should think.
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*You *were the one claiming there was something different about Africa, when you use loaded terms like “particularly poor track record”. Don’t be surprised if I call you on it.
Any chance their various issues are a result of not being able to manage themselves successfully? Is it total victimhood of the otherwise innocent and capable? SA got a huge financial head start under the previous regime, racist though it was. The rest of sub-saharan Africa seems to have been at the mercy of the rest of world and the climate gods, in your scenario. I do note that what infrastructure there is for the modern world–transportation, educational systems, production, resource utilization…–seems to have been initiated and built by the same colonial past, comunists and capitalist outsiders (many of them Christians, Muslims and various other outside evil religions).
Do you have an estimate that Africa would be an equal player on the world stage by now had it not been for those infernal outsiders gumming up the continent? By way of comparison, China owns $800 billion dollars of the US debt and has a viable space program…India outsources their IT and Healthcare to “developed” countries to the tune of millions of dollars/year… stay tuned.
It also is compounded by the fact that the productive parts of SA sit mostly in the temperate zone, so are somewhat more immune to drought compared to wholly-tropical Zimbabwe. Despite all the finger-pointing at land reclamation (which *is *a big contributor) the biggest culprit in Zimbabwe right now is the drought, and has been for a few years.
Partly - but again, how are you going to seperate that out from colonial education systems, communist ideology and current capitalist incentives not to rock the boat?
Umm, no, the Whites handed over a huge deficit, actually. It’s been under the ANC that the revenue service has actually gone from deficit to surplus.
Not just climate - geology & geography have combined to make S-S Africa not a good place for e.g. commercial farming of grains.
No - if you got the sense of that from what I wrote, you’re reading it wrong. I think Africa as a whole is handicaped by its geography, and was always going to be at a disadvantage compared to Europe and the US. I subscribe in broad terms to the “Guns, Germs and Steel” reasoning for this. Colonialism and continued interference exacerbate this, but they aren’t the root cause.
If the colonial governments of Europe had been more humane and concerned about locals and built up more infustructure and educated the locals than the colonials would be less likely to break away and the world would be closer to unification. But even than decolonization has happened too fast and even South Africa has due to AIDS has it’s life-span decline to the mid 40s. And now the President of South Africa is a polygamist, anti-white, communist Robert Mugabe-wannabe who acts like a tribal chieftain rather than the President of a Westernized, civilized state. Not being racist here (for instance I think Nelson Mandela is a great man)
So what? Despite all those horrors and atrocities, they still managed to keep a semblance of order and economic stability. What is the major difference then?
Further, “they did it too!” is not even an accepted argument in the playground, much less here I should think.*You *were the one claiming there was something different about Africa, when you use loaded terms like “particularly poor track record”. Don’t be surprised if I call you on it.
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No I said that Africa as a whole has had a poor record in the modern period, and even by your own admission above, it has. Most of those countries have also been unable to recover or stabilize any sector of their government or economies for any meaningful length of time. Climatic changes certainly play a large role, but a competent government can work around those problems. It takes more than a few people to effect the sort of cultural shift that will need to occur for many of these countries to pull themselves out of the hole they are in. It will take one, if not several of the human factors to be resolved to enact change. If you note that in my first post in this thread, I pointed out that it was unreasonable for us to expect nation-state politics from the mess that was left by the colonial period.
That doesn’t excuse the current regimes from their responsibility to their peoples. That doesn’t excuse rampant cronyism and corruption. It doesn’t excuse abuse of military resources to fight old ethnic conflicts. It doesn’t excuse vast misuse of natural resources. That is not the actions of a “slow starter” It is the actions of non starter. Instead of whining, why don’t we try to figure out HOW to get some stability, education, security, and competency into the mix?
As far as SA, I was talking about the net wealth of nations, including infrastructure-related things such as modern cities, communications and industrial development; not necessarily annual budget. By measure of total annual deficit and national debt owed, the US is the poorest nation in the world.
On the (Jared) Diamond front: I remain unconvinced. Zimbabwe is an example of arable land undeveloped at a commercial farming level before colonialization; SA itself is an example of colonialization (or, at least, settlement by outsiders) creating what the indigenous crowd did not. There are countless examples of raw material development, tourism and financial centers that have been developed in countries without whatever it is that sub-saharan Africa is also lacking.
There is always someone or something to blame if you are in any position other than first. It’s my observation that the least productive thing is to fix that blame elsewhere and the most productive thing is to take personal responsibility. A topic for IMHO, perhaps.
The question is obviously complicated. The failures in Africa have many causes including insane boundaries and so on, but I think failure to involve the people in the government for a generation or more before handing over power is the main cause.
Let me recount some of the history of Barbados, a land that I love and that has a very stable govenment. This island has many advantages of which one is a high literacy rate since the 19th century. They had limited self-fule since the 1940s with a parliament modeled on the British and a British Governor who had the right to disallow acts of parliament (I have no idea if it was ever exercised). They developed political parties and a political system until around 1960. There was a short-lived Caribbean Federation, but by 1965 they were fully self-ruled. But the transition to self-rule was guided by the British governor. They respected him so much that after independence, when they could have chosen a native Bajan as Governor-General (that is, the queen’s representative to Barbados) they freely chose the old governor.
Of course, in Africa, the colonial powers resisted turning over power to the natives till they could no longer resist. The Bajans came to self-rule gradually and, although there was an Independence Day, the actual transion to self-rule was smooth and gradual.
Of course, if you read English–not mention British–history, all the civil wars, beheading of a king, wars of succession, etc., you realize that the transition to self-rule there was anything but smooth and took, literally, centuries.
As Gerhard Meisenberg points out here, one of the interesting things is that in the mid 20th century it was predicted that resource rich Africa would flourish with independence. Meanwhile it was expected that Asian countries and India would struggle with overpopulation. There was also an interesting comparison recently between Singapore & Jamaica, which were in a similar position 40 years ago:
Rindermann has found that the macro-social level cognitive competence is more important than economic liberty for the economic growth of nations (Rindermann, 2008a) and it is more important than wealth for the democratic development of countries (Rindermann, 2008b). And intelligence seems to be a sensible measure of development up to indicating failing societies.
That could be a factor here, as Meisenberg commented below:
Rindermann, H. (2008b). Relevance of education and intelligence for the political development of nations: Democracy, rule of law and political liberty. Intelligence, 36, 306-322.
‘The impact of smart fractions, cognitive ability of politicians and average competence of peoples on social development’ Rindermann et al
If Colonialism has nothing to do with anything, why is it that around the world former British colonies almost always are more prosperous and stable than, say, former French colonies? Can you really argue that Nigerians are just naturally smarter than the Benin to the left and Cameroon to the right?
It’s absolutely one reason. The British colonized to create markets for British goods. For that to work, they needed to create a middle class who could buy these things. So the British invested in education, transportation and other things that make markets possible. As a result, these nations were left with an educated bureaucratic class and thriving markets.
The French colonized primarily to gain access to natural resources. They basically mined the countries they were in, and did not invest much in infrastructure, relied on local warlords to keep order over areas they didn’t want to bother with, and created export-only markets. To this day French colonies are not surprisingly ruled over by warlords with export-only markets and little infrastructure.
Colonialism’s legacy is still with us today. Even in Cameroon, the two British colonized provinces are leaps and bounds more functional than the Francophone provinces. This stuff wasn’t long ago, and it still matters today.
Yeah. Dude. The Beligian Congo invented the whole cutting off hands for no reason thing. It’s widely understood as among the darkest periods of human history.
Yeah, thanks to massive amounts of money and most importantly, the careful cultivation of markets and democracy. That never happened in Africa! Instead, we killed off their democratically elected leaders and armed dictators, and we worked around the free market to get exclusive access to natural resources without having to deal with pesky comptetition.
If you look at the data from the ‘smart fraction’ paper, there top 5% average 118 (based on TIMSS & PISA data). That compares reasonably well with other European and Asian countries. See page 12 for the data across countries. From the discussion:
Actually, Zuma’s proving to be quite a capable, concilliatory president who has made some excellent ministerial choices, thankfully reversed the previous gov’s ridiculous AIDS policy and seems to be juggling the communists vs the radicals with some aplomb. This is surprising all of us, I can tell you!
No, even infrastructure-wise the White regime gutted parts of it just before '94, and even before then, the infrastructure was entirely built to suit the needs of a minority. The post-94 gov has done great strides in electrification and housing where the previous gov. couldn’t be arsed.
…and wholy unsuited for the commercial farming it then got. Droughts are endemic to the region.
Also, let’s not forget that the “commercial farming” being touted as such a model of success for White Zimbabwe was fucking tobacco. Great, maybe they should have switched to poppies…
