Metal Reviews

Thanks, correction duly noted.
At any rate, the Eqyptians weren't what we call sub-Saharan blacks today, as black ethnocentrists claim, anyway.
Just something I always found amusing.

Guy is a douche, but this made me giggle.

http://rt.com/news/pope-francis-capitalism-tyranny-324/

http://unbisnet.un.org:8080/ipac20/ipac ... %21horizon

so the only NOs were from the UK, the US, and... Portugal? wtf?

also pretty much every abstaining country was part of the developed world. wonder what the real sentiment was at the time regarding Mandela and the ANC.

I wish more communist terrorists would die.

It is hardly surprising how post-Apartheid black on white crime in S. Africa has been ignored by the mainstream press. The wiki article on Afrikaners has a bunch of gory details on farm attacks if you are so inclined to read more.


And thanks for posting that UN vote link, Az, interesting stuff.

apparently there were more votes at the time concerning this issue, to which Portugal responded differently. i am a bit drunk now and can't bother, but will check back tomorrow.

the prime-minister at the time was Cavaco Silva (a social-democrat when the president was the socialist Mário Soares), who is currently the president, so this has caused some controversy in Portugal.

regarding black-on-white crime, the Financial Times posted a favourable article on Mandela's actions at the time, and certainly we can't compare South Africa's post-apartheid economic success to the disaster in Zimbabwe. again, when i sober up tomorrow.

Because these crimes would have nothing to do with how once post-apartheid was ended, without legal segregation, a vast gap of income and wealth was instated by structural adjustment policies that left the once excluded incredibly poor? And crime would obviously have nothing to do with economic conditions.

An article by an ANC activist on Mandela's error in selling out the poor to the IMF:
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfre ... atal-error

Thanks for the article trapt. When one puts apartheid's ugly historical memory next to those income gaps it makes the farm attacks and subsequent mass white emigration very explainable. The narrative from all these sunny Mandela tributes of course leaves little room for tales of gross poverty, racial violence, and a country far from realizing the developmental dream.

You do know that Idi Amin and other black rulers like Mugabe have institutionalized policies that forced whites and other ethnic groups out of their countries and given their businesses over to blacks and given blacks positions of power in their government entirely, right? Guess what they failed and tens of thousands of people either died, or were displaced and or killed by political infighting and of course the businesses failed because the Africans had no idea what they were doing. Are you going to blame the ghosts of the evil Apartheid system, evil white people, or Boers when the even decades after apartheid those third world morons run themselves into the ground?

But of course its never the fault of the people, its always blamed on some past event decades ago whose consequences are magically never ameliorated over successive generations. Face it these people fundamentally do not know how to run a country,and will blame any instance of history to obfuscate from the fact they're idiots.

Give Mandela his due; he brought a fractured country together and was willing to give up power - unlike, say Mugabe. That the ANC is very centralised and closed-off to normal folk, and that the country has problems (eg the massacre of those miners a while ago) can't all be put on his shoulders. What people of all political stripes fail to realise is that no-one is perfect, and it's possible to be sad that a fairly good political leader is gone (although he had a good innings at 95!) without having to dredge every failure up.

Historical memory makes the actions people take explainable, it doesn't necessarily make them justifiable, and obviously not when Afrikaner farmers are being forced to drink boiling water.

Most studies I've read say it takes a couple generations to forget and forgive things, and that assumes the society isn't actively trying to remember injustices, whether perceived or real. Look at historical memory in Palestine, in Eastern Europe versus Russia, in Japan/Korea/China, and so and so forth. All these are just examples where history from the 1940s is still being disputed.

In the United States the legacy of World War II and the Cold War still applies today: would disastrous campaigns like the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan have taken place had the USA not 'won' both wars and been exceptionally great? I don't know, Vietnam certainly made Americans war-weary in the 1980s, and the case has been made that the USA did not intervene in Syria because of failures in Iraq and Afghanistan. The point is memory is used everywhere for all sorts of purposes by all different kinds of politicians. The legacy of Apartheid will loom large in S. African society for decades to come, just like it probably would anywhere else.

Super astute comment.

You do know that those countries of black folks were colonized by white folks and forced to labor in extracting their own resources that would be sold in order to create wealth for the white folks? Wealth that was essentially siphoned off from their homelands and into the banks of Europe. Handing those companies over to black folks might make sense, but when the companies' financial assets are still in Europe and you're given a company what the fuck are you supposed to do with it. Of course, it will fail. Not to mention how those companies were often profitable due to their near slavery-like treatment of their workers. But yeah colonialism existed.

Like ebd said, these actions aren't justifiable in most case, but finding explanations goes a long way.

Such is life. The Africans were too retarded to utilize their own resources, you either use it or you lose it. I have no sympathy for the post-Colonial mentality that idiots pedal for Africa, Apartheid has been over for years now and your insane fucking logic doesn't apply when Africans gut and kill their own people to the tune of millions ever since the White man left. Let me repeat it for you since you seem daft, there are no whites in control of the vast majority of the governments I mentioned. So called benevolent leaders that were elected by their own people betrayed their own people and killed them in tribal conflicts. Will people like you still be blaming Apartheid, Colonialism, 100 years from now when Africans are still living in huts and hunting Gazelles with spears? They're not intelligent enough to run their own countries, they were probably better off during apartheid. At least there weren't plagues of rape, they weren't hacking each other with machetes, and they weren't dying off because of starvation and AIDS.

Completely incompatible analogy. For one we were dragged into those wars from the powers that be, Germany posed no threat to the United states and the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan were just two mere conflicts from decades of Us subterfuge against varying Islamic groups/tribes and even Soviet elements. Not to mention the fact that Islam hates everything else, and even if we weren't there in the first place the Jihadi mentality would still hate us for supporting Israel, our oil interests, and for being the "Great Satan". Africans want to hold on to apartheid it gets them the sympathy ploy and millions in aid that goes to corrupt governments, from impressionable dunces. Even long after Europe is gone they still suck the dick of the IMF and depend massively on foreign aid, from which they would undoubtedly descend into tribal warfare and kill each other if the US and Europe didn't prop them up.

Also why should the Afrikaners be blamed for the actions of their ancestors? They live in cloistered communities, and are kept there largely due to the fact that they are forced to segregate due to the fact the blacks would kill them. Did the succeeding generations perpetuate some bullshit "oppressive system" against them? Did they force them to kill each other and take child soldiers in armed conflict after armed conflict in largely fragmentary alliances from warlords/ex politicians? No and fucking no. Keep blaming Apartheid though, lol

Germany declared war on the USA on December 11, 1941, so whether Germany truly threatened the USA at the time, while debatable, is a moot point. If you are making an isolationist argument against what FDR was doing with Churchill to lead the USA to war, well go ahead, it is a fair argument.

Anyway, the outcome of WWII and the Cold War is my point, the idea of America's golden age (We beat Hitler, and we'll beat Stalin too!) led many leaders to envision American destiny as the world policeman and guarantor of 'world freedom'. Look to G.W.Bush's speech declaring the war on terror--he invokes the word 'freedom' 14 times http://www.history2u.com/bush_war_on_terror.htm--and I (and many others) would argue this idea of free American society was formed in contrast to totalitarian Nazi Germany and then the Cold War USSR. American would defeat two 'Evil Empires' and would now confront the third evil empire, the terror empire, and this thinking influenced people like Bush to overreach in American power with wars. If you want to subscribe Iraq and Afghanistan to CIA plots or the need to feed the American military-industrial complex, go ahead, but I see Bush and his top advisors view of the world as playing an important role, and that worldview was inherited from presidents like FDR or Ronald Reagan whom fought earlier Evil Empires for the idea of Freedom.

Of course these Afrikaners shouldn't be blamed for the past, where has anyone said otherwise? I brought up the attacks on these farmers because they are largely ignored, and in many cases Afrikaners have felt no other option but to leave the country, a country which is, or was at least, theirs too.

The point is everyone remembers, or misremembers in many cases, historical events, especially traumatic ones. Whether Apartheid, or World War II ethnic cleanings in Eastern Europe or China, or Cold War American triumphalism over the USSR, or American desire for revenge after 9/11. And it takes a while for people to forgive or forget. Not a good sign for the Afrikaners still in South Africa.

Too retarded? Why would they extract resources at such a rate that would mutilate their own people for a mode of production that they hadn't reached yet? Those resources had no value to them. That doesn't make them someone else's. That's like saying "oh you're not hungry right now? Well, I'm going to eat all the food in your fridge because you're not eating it at this very moment. Use it or lose it!" Do you actually understand global politics and basic ethics through the lens of a playground bully?

They kill their own people according to arbitrary borders established by Western countries that place certain (sometimes conflicting) tribal groups under the same state rule, often times resulting in the dominant group utilizing the state to justify slaughter of their own (now internal due to Western bureaucratic moves of drawing lines on a map) enemies. Or you have groups battling over the possibilities of wealth that we've left behind. Like when one ethnic group is given control of an old colonial company and ignores other groups in their region. The hopes of wealth lead to tribal conflict, often a deflated hope as those companies can't really run at the levels of efficiency colonialism/slavery/western wealth made possible. Or those countries have no internal infrastructure, roads are built from the industry to the port solely for the purpose of resource extraction, built by Western foreign companies. The countries are often straddling two historical eras of modernity and pre-modernity kinda forcing ethics out of the picture as they try to assimilate or try to remain planted in the past. Or you have people heavily impoverished due to colonialism and of course when you're broke with no skills and given a knife you're going to go road warrior on that shit and steal from others.
Yes, Western European nations did establish local leaders to manage their colonial affairs. Historical fact. Yes, leaders were often elected to represent two conflicting tribal groups and fucked the one over in preference for their own, which can be directed back to how the nation-state which we imposed on Africa doesn't reflect their contested tribal divisions.
When you spend four hundred years, 400 years!, ravaging a country for its resources, capturing and selling its people (even if blacks did it to other blacks, they were doing it at the incentive of Western gold), raping its women, destroying its culture and values, working its people to death in mines, forcing folks to flee their home or enter into all-out guerilla war in order to defend the last vestiges of life they had, the folks might need more than 100 years to recover. And neo-colonial efforts like having folks still mine diamonds or metal for iphones might hamper that recovery in the process. And hell, because I don't believe in a necessary progress, Western nations might have fucked those countries, those populaces up to the point that there is no recovery possible. Especially as we continue to intervene.

Just a few points amongst some of the socialist silliness you've written down, trapt:

1) Without "arbitrary borders established by Western countries" you'd still have African tribes violently raiding each other, and massive inequality. Do you truly believe Africa was a utopia before the white man came?

2) You speak of slavery as if the white man invented it, and only the white man is capable of feeling greed, grow up. North Africans and Arabs were doing it to blacks well before Europe clawed its way out medieval times, and if you really want to drag it all the way back to Roman Empire heritage...

Conflicts would happen. I'm not saying Africa was land of milk and honey, but borders and constitutions of nation-states gave particular groups a new weapon: state violence. State violence, in terms of military suppression and structural discrimination, is a much more extreme weapon than a gun.

Slavery existed prior to 17th-19th century chattel slavery. However, chattel slavery was exponentially worse than any form of slavery that one might have faced in ancient Greece, for instance. The advent of slavery to justify and rationalize the institution radicalized the entire process. It is not even comparable to prior forms. Africans and Arabs weren't utilizing science to excuse their slavery. Romans enslaved according to military victories not the inherent propensity to be enslaved within their foes.

Well if you ask the victims I'd wager they wouldn't see the difference in severity between state violence and tribal violence, they'd be more concerned with the magnitude. I don't have any material to back this up besides some Jared Diamond stuff (and he's more of a biologist than a historian) and I'm not going to head off into wikipedia for this, but in my assessment of the pre-colonial African situation, stronger tribes with despotic chieftains dominating weaker tribes through for example occasional raiding doesn't seem too different from what you described. It's military suppression, just not very organised. I'm getting the feeling you're bending the argument to suit the needs of your habitual anti-statist, white guilt stance.


How is chattel slavery any worse than slavery in Antiquity? Africans or Arabs weren't utilising science to excuse their slavery, exactly, but they rather used religious excuses, or worse, no excuse was needed. Never mind the Ottomans who annually enslaved tens of thousands of Balkan inhabitants to be distributed among their mines and harems and the like. And Romans didn't just enslave according to military victories, but freely dealt in slaves with neighbouring peoples in return for various goods and treaties. However, all this will probably fall on deaf ears with you, though, as you said that the European-organised slave trade is incomparable to anything and thus unique in history. It's this kind of dangerous revisionist thinking that has made the Jewish Holocaust into a unique event while a couple of million Armenians are handily forgotten.

But speaking of revisionism: Mandela was such a saint, wasn't he?

43 regional state governments in the USA have officially called what happened to the Armenians a genocide (thankfully including my own), but the national United States government refused out of deference to the Turkish government over fears it would interfere with American deployment in the Middle East. Israel has also declined thus far to label it as such over fears of hurting ties with Turkey, reasons similarly cited by the UK national government. Shame on all of them.