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This is very good rebuttal. I didn't even consider the gerrymandering that went on in the 40s. You've exposed a blindness I didn't know.

> the cartoon good-vs-evil polemic you were no doubt exposed to

I was a child before apartheid was abolished. And growing up in the US I knew it was wrong and knew any government that supported it was wrong. It seems the BDS campaigns were effective on small kids of that time. Honestly, who would justify apartheid.

But based on the casual conversation with a few South Africans of that era I knew some actively benefited from it. A memorable one being with a soon retired office manager and ex SA military who had some ideas on what he would like to do to Nelson Mandela. How things were better before the ANC took over; kind of "the trains running on time" mindset.

I went to school in the US. We were told slavery was unpopular but politically immovable. We were also told the civil war wasn't about slavery. Turns out it was popular and the war was absolutely about slavery. So it does color my opinion when others tell me something unethical was unpopular but politically immovable.

Speaking as an older adult male from the south of the United States, I'm afraid one of my eyebrows was creeping upward while I read this. It's not the first time I have seen this kind of argument.

Don't get me wrong, I am sure the vast majority of South Africans, English and Afrikaans, are decent enough people. It's really just that the "it wasn't all of us, it was those really bad people over there" is a part of the whole Lost Cause thing. Sorry.

So anyone living under a corrupt/violent regime are guilty of that regimes actions? Neat.

[flagged]

I never thought I'd see an impassioned defense of apartheid South Africa on Hacker News. But here we are.

So the question is, did "a whole lot" of white people uphold a system of white supremacy in South Africa? Literally the only honest answer is, "Of course they did."

"Although the majority of whites supported apartheid, some 20 percent did not." That's from Wikipedia as cited below. If you have an actual source to support your absurd claim that the majority of white South Africans opposed Apartheid, I'd love to see it. The gerrymandering you mention at great (distracting?) length could have been real, and would have had nothing to do with upholding apartheid, which had the support of about 80% of voters.

Literally the entire state apparatus was dedicated to supporting apartheid, particularly the police (which kept non-whites from moving freely in their own country without passes), the courts (which punished non-whites for transgressions against the white state), and the military (which violently attacked and killed non-whites who could not be controlled by the police and courts). And all this in a country that was never more than 20% white in modern times.

> I understand details are tough and cloud the cartoon good-vs-evil polemic you were no doubt exposed to.

In the case of apartheid, good vs evil is exactly what it is. The white apartheid government, which had the support of 80% of white voters, was evil. And all the specious detail about gerrymandering won't make that go away.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apartheid

In the TAs defense the National Party ran on a platform of apartheid in the 1940s did lose the popular vote but won the parliament through gerrymandering.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1948_South_African_general_ele...

Not only that, but the National Party were so rabid that in 1948 D.F Malan - their new prime minister - proposed in an actual parliament speech to deprive white English-speaking citizens of the vote.

God alone knows how they were going to enforce that in a completely multi-lingual society.

Strange times. A warning to us all.

At the risk of exposing myself to some more sanctimonious insults, let me complete the half-told story here by showing - with the requested sources [1] that when white South Africans were actually offered a truly level-field, one-man-one-vote referendum as to whether to end Apartheid in 1990…

the vast majority (> 80%) of eligible whites turned out and voted 68% in favour - with the gerry-mandered districts in my original post voting 85% in favour.

Thus supporting my original explanation that a cynically engineered voting system is incredibly advantageous to the incumbent and needs far fewer supporters than is often believed to maintain the status quo over a long period.

Sadly, some people just stopped thinking after the Spitting Image jingle.

And since its a mandatory part of the weird I-never-thought-I'd-see kubuki theatre on HN: to remove all possible doubt, Apartheid had no redeeming characteristics, was a completely evil idea, and only a fucking moron would defend it. Sigh

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1992_South_African_apartheid_r...

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.

---

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...

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.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

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.

Some citations can be found in the 'support for apartheid' section here: http://www.brandonhamber.com/publications/Journal%20A%20Stat...

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?

a) surely you are familiar with error bars?

b) where did you think that 30% went?

I would be astonished if the poll said otherwise.

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.

> At the risk of exposing myself to some more sanctimonious insults

Please leave out the victim rhetoric, which is a very tired and worn tactic; it's just personal attacks in reverse. Nothing in the GP was an insult. If you have a point to make, say it.

>the vast majority (> 80%) of eligible whites turned out and voted 68% in favour - with the gerry-mandered districts in my original post voting 85% in favour.

This stat seems to support teacherdan's point. Even at a time where it had become clear that the apartheid system could not continue (regardless of whether or not people supported it in principle), almost a third of whites votes to maintain it. In other words, a whole lot of white people supported apartheid right up to the bitter end, and that is one of the reasons that it was possible for it to continue for so long.

Also, the referendum appears to have been in 1992, not 1990.

> Even at a time where it had become clear that the apartheid system could not continue

If North Korea can continue apartheid sure as hell could have. If you're willing to kill all the people to keep your power you won't need to. Compare, Stalin, Lenin, Gorbachev, Deng, Fidel.

That's a comparison I hadn't thought of. But the difference is that North Korea shares a border with its patron state, China, which is also a global super power.

While South Africa had the support of the United States, it was thousands of miles away from the US, and surrounded by Black African-run states that were hostile to it, particularly Mozambique and Angola. South Africa did not have the resources to run a North Korean-style police state.

North Korea has never been as rich per capita as South Africa was at the beginning of the apartheid regime and South Africa had nuclear weapons a long time before North Korea did. If they had wanted to keep the US out they could have, never mind African militaries. The nearest military that isn't obviously inferior was in Israel.

s/1990/1992/ - thanks.

Of course a hell of a lot of people supported it - most of them now long dead. [This mandatory prelude is so tedious]

However, as I have shown, clearly not enough that the ruling National Party were prepared to trust their own people with continuing to vote for it. An the 1992 referendum proved their suspicions to be correct!

Hence the outrageous - from the start - manipulation.

If you think banal voting manipulation isn't as big a deal as the evil that lurks in mens' hearts then ask yourself - now that Iran has an Islamic democracy (they do hold elections) how does the current/next generation ever return to a secular democracy via the ballot - if that is what they want?

As as in Apartheid South Africa, enormous effort has been made by the initial true believers to prevent it from ever happening.

I could be wrong.

That's all fine, I just don't think it really refutes the point that "It takes a lot of people contributing to uphold it [Apartheid]."

>An the 1992 referendum proved their suspicions to be correct!

Well, sort of, except the National Party was campaigning for a 'Yes' [to end apartheid] vote.

> Well, sort of, except the National Party was campaigning for a 'Yes' [to end apartheid] vote.

I'm not sure how that minimised anyone who then voted "yes, I'm glad you are finally proposing that - its what I want"? Odd line to take.

But the Apartheid National Party did a lot stranger things than that - after a quick rebrand - they decided to merge with the ANC!

As I said - a complicated place.

As you’ve noted yourself, the government had a large amount of control over the media and the political system as a whole. It would be disingenuous to identify this as the primary factor in the maintenance of the apartheid system (as you have in several of your posts) and yet deny that it had any meaningful influence on the referendum result. The striking fact is that even with the party that introduced apartheid campaigning to repeal it, almost a third of whites voted to keep the system. And as others have pointed out, this was at a point in time where SA had become a pariah state and it was abundantly clear that apartheid could not continue – even to many dyed-in-the-wool racists who had no objection to it in principle.

I never know what the next step in these conversations is meant to be: a nation of people did a really bad thing. They - or their children their grandchildren clearly changed their mind when first given a real, unrigged vote.

Now it only happened because the evil party told them to and the world was forcing them to? So what ? They haven't really changed deep down? And the proof is somehow the absolute strangers in the minority who didn't change their mind?

I am going to have to call a halt to my participation here as: to quote teachrdan - is absurd.

The motivations behind people’s votes rather obviously do matter if your are attempting to use these votes as evidence of a particular attitude towards the apartheid system.

The best that can be said is that once the imminent collapse of apartheid became obvious to almost everyone, a clear (but not overwhelming) majority of white people voted to get rid of it.

To me these facts are obviously inconsistent with the narrative that apartheid was an unpopular policy that persisted only because of gerrymandering and other electoral shenanigans. One can also look at polling and surveys to reach the same conclusion.

I was a child of that transition, and part of a family that worked and fought for that transition. Don't decry the efforts that led to it having the broad support it did. Did some people want to remain in the past they'd been conditioned to? Sure. Some East Germans did too. They're victims alike, but not in proportion. Wanting to consider the nature of the people as evil, we end up applying the fundamental attribution error, but on a group, which is far worse.

The point is not that no progress had been made by the 90s. The point is simply that we must acknowledge the complicity of large numbers of white South Africans in the apartheid system, and acknowledge that many crucial components of apartheid (such as a the ban on interracial marriage) were popular policies. Outside of revisionist historical circles, this isn't a remotely controversial point.

Ultimately I defer to the comprehensive TRC report. Here is an apt quote from the introduction to volume 4:

>An important debate with which the Commission had to wrestle was, as has been fully discussed in the chapter on The Mandate, how to paint the backdrop against which such human rights violations occurred. Without some sense of the “antecedents, circumstances, factors and context” within which gross violations of human rights occurred, it is almost impossible to understand how, over the years, people who considered themselves ordinary, decent and God-fearing found themselves turning a blind eye to a system which impoverished, oppressed and violated the lives and very existence of so many of their fellow citizens.

>It is an old question: one that is asked of any country that undertakes acts so foul that the world openly condemns it. It is a question that has been answered in different ways, for such is the nature of historical debate. However, what is clear is that apartheid could only have happened if large numbers of enfranchised, relatively privileged South Africans either condoned or simply allowed it to continue.

White people are a minority in the country. Given an opportunity to change the story, the overwhelming majority of them supported that, and were willing to hand over power. [1] It was obvious that would mean a black majority government, and they still did it.

The government lied to everyone, and some believed it. You'd seemingly like to make a villain out of all white South Africans, but that's not helpful in any way - many, like myself, were born into apartheid and struggled against it. So were my parents - they had no part in making those laws, and yet were born before the Union was established. It's easy to miss what it's like to try to counteract a regime - you and your loved ones will suffer. The populace did not wield the power of transformation itself, it was international intervention that allowed it to happen.

Were some complicit? Yes, obviously. Did many know? Probably. Was it the majority that supported a status quo for some time? Yes, but not without being manipulated. It was standard education that there were 'grades' of people for most of the 19 and early 20th centuries, and in South Africa this was redoubled. Narratives like 'black people are the result of the snake and eve' were common. I've spoken to many older people who are horrified at what they believed. It's incredibly hard to escape a bubble when it's all you hear. State TV, state sanctioned news, international sanctions mean you didn't ever hear how SA was seen internationally. The TRC was asking people to recognise what it saw, and what many others saw - that evil is banal, and within us. It deliberately did not pursue further actions against those that were not directly involved in harm, or who ordered it.

You have taken 'large numbers' and seem to have interpreted it quite liberally to mean 'the majority', and then further concluded that there is then some obvious flaw in their moral character. I could say the same of the US forever wars and destabilisation, but would it help? To accuse and paint with that shame every citizen?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1992_South_African_apartheid_r...

>Was it the majority that supported a status quo for some time? Yes, but not without being manipulated

It seems we are in agreement on the basic point. Bear in mind that at the beginning of this thread, throwaway210222 appeared to disagree with this point, and this is what I was responding to.

> You'd seemingly like to make a villain out of all white South Africans

> ... and then further concluded that there is then some obvious flaw in their moral character.

You're persistently reading things into my posts that I just haven't said. I haven't made any comment on the moral character of white South Africans as it's irrelevant to my point.

I really think that if you read through my posts again without the preconception that I'm trying to paint all white South Africans as inherently evil, you might find that you don't actually disagree substantially with any of what I'm saying.

As another poster put it, we must avoid the comforting fantasy that a system with millions of victims could have involved only a handful of perpetrators. The perpetrators were no doubt morally complex human beings like the rest of us, not evil caricatures. However, that does not mean that the fact of their participation in the system can simply be swept under the rug. Nor can the referendum vote – indeed an indicator of enormous progress – be used to show that the apartheid system did not enjoy wide support among whites in the preceding decades.

I'm not looking for a comforting fantasy, I'd just like to not phrase things in a way that implies that a group identity perpetuated something that clearly many or most didn't agree with, vocally, and with their ballots. I've just noted that your comments seem quite insistent on trying to find that a group holds fault, but that's the very thing I'm stating is not logically valid. Did every German want what happened over the middle of the 20th century? No-one thinks that it wasn't 'the Germans' who did things - but thinking that's 'German nature', or that we should 'remember that was Germans!' is massively offensive to those who tried to resist, and I believe, just a leaky abstraction. Sometimes trying to cast your net around an abstraction, your definitions can lose more utility than you gain with the abstraction. Instead of 'white' - I could point at colonial descendents[1], the Boer, or Christians being the most racist group and racially motivated in that period - in the aggregate, it would be mostly correct, but in the application, it misleads and misinforms. What does "Remember the WHITE perpetrators did this!" achieve when we're a generation past when we proved that wasn't true? I'm after a more refined viewpoint that doesn't play with identity politics, but instead realises that power and disinformation are capable of growing in any soil. The banality of evil is the lesson, not attempting to racially classify people.

[1] Not all white people here are 'colonial' like you'd imagine - see the Highland clearances https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highland_Clearances

I think at this point you are responding based on your perception of the motivation behind my comments, and not actually disagreeing with the substance of what I’m saying. I have already stated that I’m not trying to blame all white people or all white South Africans as a group, or say that they are inherently evil.

I don't think there's malice, nor believe I know your motivation - the discussion has been civil from my view.

My singular observation has been that you seem to repeatedly wish to project a view that asks the audience to treat a group with suspicion and doubt. Based on their race and origin.

I think that's spurious, and as it applies to me and just about everybody I know, I know it to be patently false. My first-hand account also seems to be of no value.

A direct parallel would be like me propagating something negative or disparaging about Jews as a whole, due to my feelings about Palestine. I wouldn't do that, and I expect the same courtesy. Group biases are discrimination, and discrimination generally leads to collective punishment. None of these are good things, nor do they make better people of anyone.

Racial categories are relevant to a historical understanding of the apartheid regime for the obvious reason that the regime itself divided society along racial lines. For example, only white people could vote in the referendum you’ve referred to. If you are bothered by statements such as “many white South Africans supported apartheid” (even though you appear to acknowledge that they’re true?), then you should blame the apartheid regime for the relevance of this racial category, not me.

It is obvious that not all white South Africans thought alike and that many opposed apartheid to varying degrees. It is also obvious that the vote to repeal apartheid was an enormous step forward. As I’m sure you’re aware, nothing I’ve written contradicts this.

That the regime divided people on racial lines was what we were upset with, because they weren't applicable or useful.

I think trying to bring it back to "white people" when they overwhelmingly voted not to do that is disingenuous.

> I never thought I'd see an impassioned defense of apartheid South Africa on Hacker News. But here we are.

Good news mate - you still haven't.

But nice try