Of course not. There must be plenty of black farm hand-equivalents in the area who work for the white owners. Give the farms to them.
That’s where Mugabe went wrong - he took the farms from the (real) African farm hands and gave it to his buddies. Mugabe is a flaming d-bag who screwed everything up; his cause of reclamation was initially quite good.
Problem is you got a farm that is basically land taken from the natives.
Suppose some evil savage black invader (being facetious here) rapes and kills your wife, hangs you from a tree, and sells your kid into slavery, while taking your farm from you. How long do you propose this land remains in someone else’s hands before it is no longer fit to be recovered?
How long do you propose? Shall all of the Americas be returned to the original immigrants from Asia? Shall all of Europe have its maps redrawn? Hand Japan back to the Ainu?
Some things can and should be fixed; some can’t and shouldn’t. In general, I’ll accept living memory as a fair enough dividing line.
I assume then that you support the Jews of Israel forcibly annexing the West Bank from the Arabs, as this land was once called Judea and Samaria and it was originally a Jewish kingdom.
I assume you are also OK with Manhattan being forcibly seized by the Native Americans who it was “bought” from.
I assume you are OK, also, with Rhodesian expatriates going back to Rhodesia with a small mercenary contigent and forcibly taking back the land that was once their families’ from the blacks who Mugabe gave it to after murdering and raping the whites who lived there who had in fact been there since 1899.
Yes and I’m sure this will be done without any corruption on the part of the government. Plus farm labour and farm management are two different animals and what if the farm labourers wish to work under a reasonable wage from the owner?
South Africa is a reasonably well-functioning democracy. It is also full of people who are not exceptionally stupid- they can see the difference between Botswana and Zimbabwe. It’s absurd to think that people would abandon all of that sheerly out of spite. It’s not like Zimbabwe were a variety of cold war alliances are at play- North Korea, for example, is not going to be a player. It’s a totally different situation.
I’ve got plenty to learn, but from what I know now, it seems that South Africa is genuinely trying to craft a modern country out of the mess they’ve got. People want this to work. There are serious tensions and the vast inequalities make it difficult, but people want to get this figured out and move forward towards a bright future.
If larger land reforms happen, it probably will not be a matter of redressing past wrongs, but rather about addressing the fact that large numbers of people are on unproductive land. This is a very real problem- imagine if the US had a large percentage of its populations living on reservations. It’s not sustainable, people need to have some access to a way to make a living besides migrant labor (which brings a host of social problems due to the breakdown of community.) Even without fairness or unfairness, when you’ve got a chunk of your population geographically consigned to poverty, you’ve got to find a way to fix that.
Do you realise that the Bantus (the people reffered to as Black) did this to the Khoekhoe and San (the natives that were there before them).
I said “Dutch” as in, descendents of, or* Afrikaners* because I didn’t know if Afrikaners would be understood as such.
This is what happened in the 1900s?
and can you quote the right person?
Sarcasm? :dubious:
Now that I’d strongly argue against.
Like I said – and others aren’t seeming to get – is land restitution is different than land redistribution. What the government wants now is land redistribution. That’s based on skin color.
Except it doesn’t always work that way! frustrated Just because you work on a farm does not mean you know how to run a farm. How many of these farms have gone by the wayside?
No, but most Israelis don’t want the West Bank. They want to be done with it and ‘divorce’ that relationship.
I don’t support Palestinian claims of returning to old neighborhoods in Jerusalem, either.
But I wasn’t talking to you, I was talking to Le Jacquelope.
You seem like one of the few people here who actually recognizes South Africa for what it is - a complete disaster - instead of idealizing it as a glorious paragon of multiculturalism and an African “success” story which supposedly proves how much better off everyone is without evil Whitey running things.
But this is a public message board and not PMs or the bathroom, so I interrupted. 
I was actually responding to you because I could see the counter-argument. 
eta: imho, what makes the country function in a way that ensures the best possible outcome without institutionalized discrimination is probably the best way to go. this is not the best way to go.
Post-Apartheid South Africa isn’t a complete disaster. Apartheid South Africa was the disaster (Rhodesia too); that’s why both were utter failures and eventually collapsed. Currently South Africa does have some very big social problems they need to conquer (large part due to Apartheid era racist social engineering), but I don’t see South Africa collapsing either politically or economically.
That’s simply just fantasy.
Seriously, how is it a complete disaster? America is still dealing with the legacy of state-based slavery 150 years after the war that ended it. Slavery of this kind (albeit of a less extreme kind) only ended in South Africa less than 20 years ago. It’s early days yet to claim that the free South Africa is a complete disaster, or for that matter, a paragon of multiculturalism. Give it a bit more time.
Complete disaster? Have you even been there?
South Africa is very far from being a complete disaster, it’s actually a fairly decent place all things considered, although I do see more risks than many.
Uh yeah mate, Dutch is Dutch, Afrikaaner is Afrikaaner.
Quite, but this is Jacqui, eh? I mean his threads speak for themselves. Why people engage him and the Commie escapes, but…
I guess … for emerging markets, it’s not a horribly functioning one, but until real multipartism emerges, I would nuance this more.
Sorry this is pure idiocy.
You have a queer American graduate school view with excessive belief in a specific rational cost-benefit analysis from a macro perspective, that people send countries off the cliff out of stupidity. It isn’t so.
Zim went off the cliff because of Mugabe and that was WELL after the Cold War.
Narrow interests, and jockeying for power can send countries down the rabbit hole right quick, regardless of whether they have a well trained, rational elite. See Ivory Coast for fuck’s sake. Their elite were and are largely among the most urbane and well trained in all West Africa, and the country went bloody nuts.
Demogogues like our featured man can, under the right circumstances send places into dark spots right quick and our OP is right to be worried. Your argument - not the first time trotted out - is abstraction.
Yeah, many do.
Some do not.
Some want to grab what they can.
Some don’t believe that it can be worked out.
Others are very short term thinkers or are very bounded thinkers and think they can have the cake and eat it too.
If those people can build enough momentum, they can take power - can happen in any country with fragile democratic traditions and unbalanced power sharing traditions. Germany post WWI, South Africa, Ivory Coast, whatever.
LOL, Rhodesia was a disaster? Are we living on the same planet? The place was an economic powerhouse. It was the “breadbasket of Africa.” It exported food to the rest of the continent! Rhodesia did not “collapse”, it was bullied and sanctioned to death by Britain and America.
Over 30 percent of all pregnant women in South Africa are AIDS-infected. It is the rape capital of the planet. It’s a fucking disaster.
Hell in the end even Apartheid South Africa pulled support, Rhodesia was a political and economic failure for all who could see it; majority rule was the only logical end.
Social problems like rape and a high AIDS rate are serious issues, but unlike during Apartheid times, democratic South Africa is working to fix problem issues (like a legitimate government would) like providing free HIV drugs to expecting mothers so that their children can be born healthy.
This is the difference between failed states and others.
It was, it was quasi fascist, racist and held black Africans in grinding inferiority for the mere colour of their skin.
Excusing it with partial presentation of economic data - shall leave it to others to rebut - and running on about UK and USA bullying them is nothing better than excusing Nazi Germany about being “hemmed in” while rambling on about the wonderful things they did with the trains.
Ok, then by your definition, post-war America until the Civil Rights movement was also a disaster.
Look, I’m not trying to advocate Rhodesia’s system of racial inequality. But I think sometimes people make it out to be more severe than it actually was. There were commissioned black officers in Rhodesia’s army and educated blacks in universities (I think I recall reading that the majority of students in the University of Rhodesia were black.) And blacks had a pretty high standard of living there, arguably better than they had in South Africa.
The answer was to give the Rhodesian state time to work out its racial issues just like the United States did just ten years prior to Rhodesia’s dismantling - instead the state, which was stable and economically sound, was just torn town and replaced with black rule right away, which quickly became not black rule but Robert Mugabe rule.
Of course not! Give it back to the Phoenicians that the Jews took it from.