Recently, a prominant South African politician has said that white people are criminals for stealing the land from black people, and that white owned land will be expropiated with no compensation and given to black people. He said this alongside the president who did nothing to deny it.
The majority of the voting population seem to be in favour of this short sighted approach. Is South Africa destined to become Zimbabwe 2?
I think they should abandon all of the evil white man’s inventions, starting with air conditioning. Next, the telephone, the computer, the internet, the automobile, and so on and so forth. This man clearly has strong principles when it comes to his racial identity so he and his constituents would all be better off if they reverted to the lifestyle that they would have led if Whitey had never shown up at all.
And a very constructive response to kick off the debate there, Argent.
It’s a young hothead demagogue stirring up trouble. Zuma is presumably keeping quiet because his own background is hardly uncontroversial and it suits him to have the spotlight on someone else for a while. It doesn’t necessarily mean he agrees with Malema; it may just be that he find Malema to be a “useful idiot”.
The real question is whether a significant number of people agree with Malema. I’m sure there are legitimate grievances against historical landgrabs by whites, but one might hope that the example of Zimbabwe might temper any temptation to correct them via reverse landgrab. We shall see.
Uh… obviously Africans could have had all those things without Whitey’s colonizing. They have them in Asia.
Does not South Africa, largely thanks to Mandela, have a stronger sense of inclusive national identity than Zimbabwe ever did? Not to mention more white people?
I have been trying to find how the end of apartheid in 1994 effected the murder rate and the per capita gross domestic product in South Africa. If any one has that information, please post it here, or send it to me in a PM. I have read a lot of anecdotal information from disgruntled white South Africans, but that is biased.
Answer: No.
And Malema is a hothead, sure, but he’s on the level of Palin or the like - has a following, but roundly lampooned by everyone else. And that includes people in his own party.
Also, he’s not currently in any elected office.
And is currently on trial for racist statements, BTW.
Here’s GDP per capita data.
Murder data, not sure how you’d compare. The Apartheid govt wasn’t good at keeping records about township crime or its own murders. I shouldn’t doubt it’s gone up, but I can think of several reasons for that that can be tied to the end of Apartheid, such as increased availability of pretty powerful weapons, an entire population suffering from PTSD and the like…
Of course, this sort of thing was hashed out in thelast racist threadI recall Saffer starting…
MrDibble, could you give me an unemotional definition of the word “racist”, please.
South Africa has a much larger percentage of whites than Zimbawe or Rhodesia ever had. White flight has always hurt, whether it was Rhodesia, South Africa or suburbs in America.
Blacks were better off under the “rule” of whites in term of economics, but they never came close to equaling whites under white rule. Add to this they had little freedoms and no opportunity to raise themselves to the level of whites, made the system unwinnable
It doesn’t take a genius to figure out no one likes a game when they start out with the deck stacked against them. In other words you can play but you can’t win.
Africans also have the problem they want new technology but they also want their old heritage. The two things are not always compatible. You can’t live in huts, worship your tribal ancestors and have Internet, TV, modern medicine. OK sure you CAN have this, but if you try to do it, you’re slammed on by both sides. One side saying you’re not being true, or even insulting to old ways; while the other side is screaming it’s time to come into the 21st century and abandon the old ways.
As it stands in South Africa, some areas are a lot worse than others. The economic hub of the country around Johannesburg has seen a lot of crime increase and deterioration, but the other areas around Cape Town and Durbin, among others have been doing relatively well.
In other words you’re seeing subtle shifts from one part of the country to another, rather than the white flight and brain drain, to other countries all together. Kind of like in the USA when industry and service shifted from the Northeast and Midwest to the Southeast (Charlotte-Atlanta) and Southwest (Texas to Phoenix).
It’s unlikely South Africa will got the way of Zimbabwe simply because Zimbabwe is such a basket case. It didn’t get that way from neglect, it got that way because of horrible programs designed to kill off any chance of success.
Racist is the belief one race or ethnicity is inferior. There is a racist odour about the OPs.
As for South Africa, the fellow in question is fairly marginal and it appears to me that so far too much of the ANC power structure is invested in transition (and since they’ve seen their counterparts lifestyles crumble in Zim, probably taking note of that). I don’t know of opinion polls that say a majority of the black African population is favourable to the clown’s solutions, maybe a unfortunately large chunk of the frustrated slum dwellers in the Joburg industrial area, but nationally?
Real problem is turning around education, not easy to do, with lots of blame to be shared around.
I do not believe for one second that any race is inferior to any other.
I do believe that apratheid was disgusting and evil.
I am enclined to believe that if it SA was free much earlier on, it could be considered “1st world” by now. I think I made these points in the thread MrDibble linked to.
I also believe 2 wrongs dont make a right and that most white land owners alive today purchsed their property.
Your exaggeration of the influence and position of the person in question and prior posting given another impression. You might wish to reflect on that.
I am at a loss as to how one overcomes the massive education and training deficit in the black African and coloured populations, deficits put in place by explicit policy. True enough the township revolts also put in place a quite anti-schooling attitude in a certain generation, but I don’t see that the Apartheid regime was going to quietly change its mind before it did.
Or inherited the property from people who expropriated it, at the muzzle of a gun.
It’s not easy to work through the equity issues here, since I do believe that there needs to be a gradual transfer of assets (or growth of the pie), but lessons from elsewhere in the continent say that a sudden Africanisation would be horrible for all around. Affrimitive action programs on hiring and training are reasonable, although frustrating to young whites.
However, the human resources deficit is in my experience damned hard for firms to overcome. Massive dead weight loss on the economy that is massively hard to change. Unless Apartheid was stopped very early on, I don’t see South Africa being much more advanced than it is for that very reason. There are lost generations that effectively can’t be recuperated at reasonable cost.
This hasn’t been going on for awhile? 
Thank you for that link. Unfortunately, it is not adjusted for inflation, so the sharp rise after 2002 may be due to inflation. Also, the website says that in 2009 the per capita GDP in South Africa was $5,786. According to the CIA World Factbook, in 2010 the per capita gross domestic product for South Africa was $10,700.
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2004rank.html?countryName=South%20Africa&countryCode=sf®ionCode=af&rank=105#sf
On reflection, I concede I have given off a slightly racist odour.
I think it is the frustration/anger I feel toward people like JM manifests itself in many ways, looking for an outlet. I shall try to keep this in mind.
It is trivially easy to see that this is not the case: Per Capita GDP, 2000 Dollars; 15 seconds to google.
A longer time series here on 2005 dollars
A very fair response.
Someone who differentiates people into differently-privileged groups based on their outward appearance.
Such as someone who might, say, suggest that an entire group of non-mentally-handicapped adult human beings might not be as capable of participating in democracy as other, less melanin-bearing ones, for example.
NDD, i wouldn’t trust the CIA if they told me the sky was blue and water was wet. And even if I did, their figures just make the economy post-apartheid look even better.
There is no reason do distrust the CIA figures, they’re just aggregates of publicly available databases. Makes you look like a nutter to rail at the CIA encyclo, which doesn’t really have anything much to do with their intel.
Sure. Selective choosing of databases would *never *introduce any bias into the dataset:rolleyes:
I’m not “railing”, I just like getting my digs into the murderous shitfuckers when opportunity presents.
I know it looks like I was saying that I didn’t trust this data because it’s the CIA site. That’s poor phrasing on my part. I’m sorry, I should rephrase my reply to NDD as “I’m sure this data is all very nice and above-board and well-researched, but I have an allergy to giving my hard-won mouseclicks and eyeball time to anything remotely linked with those syphilitic dog-rapers in Langley. Please give a better reason to distrust the Google/World Bank data, other than that it doesn’t agree with the warty-pig-cock-fellaters’ numbers. Otherwise we’re just playing duelling cites”
Like I said, in this case the bias doesn’t hurt the data I already produced, anyway. I just fucking hate the CIA.