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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: michael97123 who wrote (191121)	7/6/2006 3:01:49 PM
From: neolib	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

SA govt was racist to the core. Israel is not. If blacks inside of SA had the same rights as Arabs do within Israel, there would not have been a revolution there. And any rights violations in that scenario would have found an out of jail Mandela playing the role of Dr. King. (And conversely, if in the US, treatment of blacks in the South was national and not subject to change as in SA, MLK's movement would have had a violent component as well.) Rhodesia was not as racist as S.A. Indeed, blacks actually had about the same rights as whites, the method employed by whites to hold power was that voting was restricted to those who had achieved some level of education/wealth in a sliding scale: No education then XX wealth, 8'th grade & lessor wealth, etc... This effectively kept power in white hands UNTIL there would emerge an educated black middle class, which, the whites thought, would be a pro-democracy & law & order group. So it was even difficult for Rhodesian blacks to claim much discrimination, since the law did in fact look at everyone more or less equally. Think about affirmative action on university admission here in the USA. Is it good or not? To a degree, the white Rhodesians were just not enthusiastic supporters of affirmative action, they wanted the blacks to "earn" their power and show responsibility. I can only imagine how the SA situation traumatized you as a young white male who felt he had participated in some way in a great injustice. At the time, I drank the white Kool-Aid. What bugs me to this day, is that part of it was correct. Rhodesia was far better for all of its population than Zimbabwe is today, and I have no solution for it. How do you grant a culture rights and respect, when the culture (for whatever reason) under performs?