For how long can you blame the czars when they're no longer in power? And who does it serve?
It seems to me blaming the long gone czars mostly serves as a distraction from corruption in the successor government.
As long as their power structures still remain you can continue to blame them. However in the case of Russia, the Soviet Union pretty much hit the reset button on power and the elites of the Russia were thrown out.
AFAICT (I'm not very well versed in South African history), the elites of SA are the same and are largely inheritors of the pre-apartheid power structures. To me, any "solution" would have to address the deficiencies of the power structures that were setup 70-80 years ago.
This is the cognitive problem in a nutshell. If the power structures of the current government are the same as the old government, the problem lies with the current government.
If the new government does the exact same thing as the old government, the fact that the old government did it is not a defense
Why? Because the current government didn't hit a Soviet-style reset button?
Ironic that Mandela was so loved because he chose not hit the Soviet-style button. IMO he should have used all the political capital he had gathered to make some difficult decisions (not a reset, but major changes). Unfortunately for South Africa, he (and every subsequent ANC leader) just coasted, and here we are.
If the current president is taking bribes, They are at fault. The fact that the last government was also corrupt is not an excuse.
Going from no voting to every adult can vote is probably too much. Having elites create a parliament and make the foundation before full voting is how basically every well functioning modern democracy was formed.
IE, it didn't go from "no voting" to "every adult can vote". Millions of people voted in every single election from '48 onward.
There was a massive jump in voters in the first multiracial election of '94 (10+ million). But that's not the same as going from zero to full franchise.
Not sure how it should have been done, the old rulers were associated with apartheid so of course the population would want to replace them, but totally replacing a government in a single election and starting over from basically scratch doesn't seem to lead to good outcomes.
The years 1990-1994 could even be regarded as some type of unofficial transitionary government though.
To the credit of the '94 administration they did extend an olive branch to those existing pre-94 staff to remain/join their government. In fact FW De Clerk (president before Mandela) was Mandela's Vice President.
As a South African those early years of the ANC government still have a rosy tint as I still genuinely believe the ANC of that era (Mandela, maybe Mbeki to some degree) did try their best to move the country forward. The later Mbeki years and obviously JZ years are were things went backwards a few decades.
I'll argue that Mandela and Mbeki gathered up all that goodwill and did exactly nothing with it. Zuma was more publicly corrupt, but policy-wise, I don't think there was any daylight between him and his predecessors.
I suppose the gold standard for smooth regime change in Southern Africa would have to be Botswana. Don't know enough about their history to understand how they got it right when it was so bloody for all their neighbours.
[Recent history of Zimbabwe](http://imgur.com/a/VdQdD)
If a zinger or meme effectively and accurately communicates the message, why not?
>Like what is your point here?
This is your way of avoiding actually addressing what the "zinger or meme" in this case communicates, which is that life in Zimbabwe is immeasurably worse across the board since Mugabe took power.
Could you expand on this a bit? Why?
By the time Japan became a democracy, the people were already accustomed to functional and orderly governance.
Afterwards it became a one-party democracy to an unusual extent. I am not sure what could or should be made of that, other than perhaps that one should be wary of general theories of political development.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meiji_Constitution
> The Lower House, or House of Representatives was directly elected by all males who paid at least 15 yen in property taxes, effectively limiting the suffrage to 1.1 percent of the population.
That 1.1 percent was expanded over the years. Then after WW2 USA just needed to finalize the expansion and you got a well functioning modern democracy.
Fareed Zakaria is a proponent of this theory from the left: https://www.amazon.com/Future-Freedom-Illiberal-Democracy-Re...
Jonah Goldberg is a proponent of this theory from the right: https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/04/off-the-shelf-suicide...
Incompetence and corruption are likely the enemies of such progress that are incredibly hard to root out. A lack of competition in politics is also a problem. Sure, the current mega party sucks, but who's going to do better?
"Putin is trying to be a czar, this is bad and Putin is bad"
Vs
"Putin is good, everything wrong with Russia is the fault of those perfidious czars! Citizens are reminded that any criticism of Putin is illegal czarist sentiment, and to report all czarist sentiment to Putin's secret police. They know where to find you."
When South Africans realized their public funds were being looted by the Gupta family, and the latter paid PR firm Bell Pottinger to come up with a campaign to blame everything on white people ... that starts looking a little more like the latter situation.
>Russia was ruled by tyrannical czars for centuries before Communism - does that mean the actions of Communist leaders like Stalin were really the czars' fault?
Absolutely yes, a thousand times. Maybe Nicky wasn't responsible for the colors Stalin picked for his office walls, but most of the important, nation-wide decisions were obviously affected by how (dismally) Nicky ran things.
>For how long can you blame the czars when they're no longer in power?
I'd say a very long time, probably centuries. I'm sure there's a PhD thesis or other publication somewhere estimating how long each economic/social policy impacted the country. Note that this isn't the same as saying "meh, we found it like this, let's not do anything".
>And who does it serve?
Anyone who's interested in learning from history and not repeating mistakes from the past?
>It seems to me blaming the long gone czars mostly serves as a distraction from corruption in the successor government.
It seems to me blaming the successor government mostly serves as a distraction from the very real, very recent despotism and absolutism of semi-medieval tsardom.
> Note that this isn't the same as saying "meh, we found it like this, let's not do anything".
But isn't that how it's often deployed? "Don't look at me, blame the previous boss!" is an age old diversion strategy.
>But isn't that how it's often deployed? "Don't look at me, blame the previous boss!" is an age old diversion strategy.
It sure is, which is why I made that remark. My point is this kind of misuse doesn't automatically make the original claim false.
Also, the mirror-image claim is just as frequently deployed: don't look too closely at the skeletons in the closet; we now have a magical clean slate.
You can't.
>but most of the important, nation-wide decisions were obviously affected by how (dismally) Nicky ran things.
Observe the word most. Just as I was saying the tsars definitively were responsible for most (note the word carefully again) of the momentous decisions later, it should be painfully obvious that they weren't responsible for 100% of all actions forever after. This is ridiculously obvious in any non-insanely polarized debate, which unfortunately isn't always the case of HN.