# Where would South Africa be today if there'd been no Nelson Mandela? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [December 5, 2013, 10:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/where-would-south-africa-be-today-if-thered-been-no-nelson-mandela/675613 "2013-12-05T22:57:53Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 3\ **Page:** 5
**Author:** ![Really\_Not\_All\_That\_Bright](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/e8c25b/32.png) [@Really\_Not\_All\_That\_Bright](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Really_Not_All_That_Bright)\ **Post date:** [December 11, 2013, 2:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/where-would-south-africa-be-today-if-thered-been-no-nelson-mandela/675613/81 "2013-12-11T14:58:02Z")
> [@MrDibble](#): > > Firstly, of course they were random people on the internet, but they often said things like “This is the first thing I disagree with you on” or “I support 99.9 % of the things you say” - clearly these aren’t portyraying themselves as long-time Cruz opponents. So I think it’s fair to call them “supporters” … _unless_ you’re alleging a non-TP conspiracy to make Cruz look bad? > > Secondly, the bit I bolded is kind of the point - doesn’t matter if there were or were not Cruz supporters, they definitely are the face of the TP to the mainstream. And that face is ugly. I don’t disagree that the TP looks from the outside like a bunch of old white racists - or worse, young white racists. I have no idea what it looks like from the inside. But you can find idiots in any group. There are admittedly Tea Party leaders who use dog whistle language, but it would be a stretch to say the sort of people denouncing Mandela are a majority or even a significant minority. ---
**Author:** ![Chen019](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/f19dbf/32.png) [@Chen019](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chen019)\ **Post date:** [December 16, 2013, 5:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/where-would-south-africa-be-today-if-thered-been-no-nelson-mandela/675613/82 "2013-12-16T05:09:44Z")
Apartheid probably would still have ended due to sanctions. Mandela gets credit for his forgiveness and efforts at reconciliation, but it’s still the rape and murder capital of the world, plus you have a [genocide watch looking at the case of white afrikaaner farm murders](http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/arnold-ahlert/the-gruesome-reality-of-racist-south-africa/). One child is raped every three minutes in South Africa and three children are murdered every day. > [@](#): > > In chapter one, “Crime, the Beloved Country,” we are introduced to twelve-year-old Emily Williams. At 7:00 one school day morning, Emily and her mother went to Emily’s friend’s home to pick her up for school. But they didn’t expect to stumble into the middle of an armed robbery in progress. As a result, little Emily was murdered. Not unlike many others, her family subsequently fled the country. > > Then there is twenty year-old Rene Burger, a medical student who was abducted from the parking lot of the hospital where she was attending classes. The three men who kidnapped her would soon take turns raping her at the point of a knife. > > We are also told about Noah Cohen, a boy whose father, Sheldon, had been waiting in his car for his son to finish soccer practice. The younger Cohen left practice just in time to witness the elder get shot to death in cold blood by three thugs. > > Perhaps the most disturbing of victims with whom Mercer acquaints us is “Baby Tshepang.” “Tshepang,” she explains, “means ‘have hope.’” In 2001, when she was just nine months old, Tshepang was raped and sodomized by a twenty-three year old man. Whether it is the elderly or infants, children or adults, Jews or Christians, professionals or students or farmers, attacks against whites defy age and class in post-apartheid South Africa. > > Mercer concedes that while “case studies do not a rule make,” she is quick to note that “you’d be hard pressed to find a family in democratic South Africa whose members have not been brutalized.” This includes her family. Also, it looks like it may go the way of Zimbabwe with [farm confiscations](http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/arnold-ahlert/the-gruesome-reality-of-racist-south-africa/) and the disastrous results that had: > [@](#): > > Yet according to Johan Burger, a senior researcher with the Pretoria-based Institute for Security Studies’ crime and justice program, white farmers’ concerns are legitimately “special.” He reveals that it is now twice as dangerous to be a farmer in South Africa than a police officer. The overall murder rate in the nation is 31.9 per 100,000 people, 30 times that of Great Britain. For police it’s 51 out of 100,000. For farmers, who are overwhelmingly white, the rate soars to 99 out 100,000. Burger rejects the notion that such a rate constitutes genocide–even as he concedes that many murderers ”take out their hatred for all those past wrongs, and show who’s in control now.” > > …There is also a movement, much like the one that occurred in Zimbabwe, to confiscate white farmers’ land. Julius Malema led the charge, saying all whites are criminals, and that his ANC Youth League members were going to take all the land back without compensation, unless farmers relinquish 80 percent of it. At a conference in 2011, Malema reiterated his plans, contending that the nation’s ”willing buyer, willing seller” program, aimed at redistributing 30 percent of white-owned land to blacks within the first five years of the country’s democracy (a deadline later shifted to 2014, and then to 2025), wasn’t working. ”You can never be diplomatic about willing-buyer, willing-seller. It has failed. You have not come with an alternative,” said Mr. Malema at the time. “We are giving you an alternative; we must take the land without payment.” > > That is a recipe for famine, as revealed by Rural Development and Land Reform Minister Gugile Nkwinti. In 2009, he told Parliament that more than half of the farms purchased for black farmers, at a cost of $891 million in government outlays, had either failed or were “declining.”… > > It is a post-liberation effort that remains alarmingly on track to emulate all the other historically blood-soaked efforts by Marxists, who invariably need an enemy at whom to direct their anger. White African farmers are that enemy. Pieter Mulder, leader of political party FF Plus and South Africa’s deputy agriculture minister, who was focused on the excesses of Julius Malema a year and a half ago, nevertheless offered an inadvertently prescient statement about his country’s future. After noting that Malema and his ilk were attempting to take the country “back to the period before 1994 when violence and even the possibility of a civil war was part of the South African debate” he revealed why such forces remain seemingly unstoppable. ”We don’t have a Mandela that stands up and says: ‘This is wrong,’” he warned. ---
**Author:** ![MrDibble](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mrdibble/32/114_2.png) [@MrDibble](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MrDibble)\ **Post date:** [December 16, 2013, 1:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/where-would-south-africa-be-today-if-thered-been-no-nelson-mandela/675613/83 "2013-12-16T13:50:07Z")
> [@Chen019](#): > > Apartheid probably would still have ended due to sanctions. Mandela gets credit for his forgiveness and efforts at reconciliation, but it’s still the rape and murder capital of the world, plus you have a [genocide watch looking at the case of white afrikaaner farm murders](http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/arnold-ahlert/the-gruesome-reality-of-racist-south-africa/). So do you plan on spamming[every South Africa thread](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=16933209&postcount=37)with this bullshit? Because it gets a little tiresome having to keep refuting it. > [@](#): > > One child is raped every three minutes in South Africa …is a made-up statistic by racist White Trade Union Solidarity…, Not that the real numbers are much better (60/day out of a pop of 50 million is horrific.), but c’mon, how long do you think you can get away with using these fictional stats? > [@](#): > > and three children are murdered every day. Appaling, yes. Not completely unexpected given the 45/day murder rate overall, but yes, horrible. And yet,\*\* that murder rate is still better than it was under apartheid\*\*, when, I think it’s important to note, it was also the fucking government killing kids. So what, **Chen** , is your point? > [@](#): > > Also, it looks like it may go the way of Zimbabwe with [farm confiscations](http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/arnold-ahlert/the-gruesome-reality-of-racist-south-africa/) and the disastrous results that had: This dance again? It didn’t work out[nearly 4 years ago](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=12123241&postcount=40), what makes you think you’re any more likely to have this [bullshit](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit#Distinguished_from_lying)believed this time? Quite frankly, you should stop reading racist [right-wing\*](http://www.frontpagemag.com/about/about-fpm/) sites that feed into your own fantasies of what South Africa is like. And you should, especially, stop spreading that bullshit here, every chance you get. \*Seriously. Their tagline is “Inside Every Liberal is a Totalitarian Screaming to Get Out”. It’d be funny as parody if they weren’t so dangerously nuts at spreading lies. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/where-would-south-africa-be-today-if-thered-been-no-nelson-mandela/675613.md?page=4)