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.
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.
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Land ownership under apartheid limited Black ownership to just 7% of the country: https://www.cnn.com/2018/11/20/africa/south-africa-land-refo...