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Comment by lelanthran | Hacker News Reader

> Can one blame apartheid governments for today's problems?

No. Too many other countries suffered worse and bounced back faster.

> When can one stop blaming the apartheid?

It will never happen. While the voters are all tribal in their support, the one thing they mostly agree on is racially-based legislation. In such an environment you do not expect the voters to ever dig themselves out of this.

> Instead of blaming, what mistakes that the post-apartheid governments have committed? Sure, corruption is one. How about competence? Competence and corruption can co-exist, though.

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> No. Too many other countries suffered worse and bounced back faster.

For example?

One issue with apartheid is that it essentially withheld education from the black population. Sure, it had schools for them, but they were nothing like the standard of the schools for white children.

So what's an example of a country with an essentially uneducated population of tens of millions who "bounced back(?) faster"?

Germany leveled to the ground in 1945, occupied up to 1955

Germany made the allies to believe much more factories and infrastructure were destroyed than actually were. Additionally Germany has been shortly before that the scientific center of the world regarding Physics, Chemestry, Engineering… So the land of the thinkers and poets ("Dichter und Denker") obviously had a different starting point, no?

(I'm German, in case that matters).

In that case, try Poland. It was destroyed very thoroughly and methodically, with all the famous German attention to detail, so to say. And the subsequent occupation by the Soviets didn't help either.

Looking at contemporary Poland, one would hardly believe that the country was a heap of ruins and dead bodies mere three generations ago.

> Soviets didn't help either

They literally built everything after the war and transformed Poland in a country where no one was jobless or homeless a decade after ww2.

Socialism was a godsend (socially and economically) in after-war Poland and so was getting rid of it 4 decades later and later joining the EU.

maybe godsend is too strong a term for a repressive, corrupt military occupation that only ended in 1992.

We have never had a soviet military occupation. You're thinking about Hungary and Czech Republic.

I grew up next to the Polish border. In the 80s, the grocery stores were literally empty and everything had to be bought on the black market. In a country that is fairly agriculturally productive no less.

Don't lecture me on "socialism being a godsend". I saw it with my own eyes. It was a dirty, suffocating, ossified structure where prosperity was a crime, and so was any freedom.

Man I'm Polish, grocery stores have never been empty.

We had martial law between 81 and 83 which made life difficult, as you can imagine a martial law can do, but no one was starving.

I visited places like Cieszyn, Katowice and Sosnowiec when I was a kid, and anything beyond the most basic things had to be bought on the black market.

You could have bread and milk in the official grocery stores, as long as you were willing to rise early and stand in queue. By 10 am, already sold out.

Buying meat, IIRC, was already somewhat of a challenge. The authorities tried to "re-educate" people towards canned fish.

But the black markets were huge. Impressively huge. You could buy a lot of stuff there, plus sometimes peddlers went door-to-door selling stuff from their backpacks.

Yes, it's true. Meat has always been highly trafficked on the black market.

Queues existed, this is also true, but again, those were limited to certain rare periods.

What was not bombed down, was looted by invading armies, especially in eastern front.

With the help of huge amounts of cash and other support from the United States. This is also why Japan and South Korea recovered so quickly. South Africa did not get a Marshall Plan.

That has something to do with fact that South Africa was not bombed into oblivion, but had actually working economy on the end of the apartheid. Additionally there might be no Marshall Plan for African countries, but there is constant financial aid to African countries since end of WW2.

Edit: I have completely forget that whole Eastern Block was not allowed to accept Marshall Plan from political reasons and help from Soviets was not really there.

The Eastern Bloc had https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comecon.

That's more-less like current EU but completely worthless

Economic aid to Africa since 1960 exceeds the Marshall Plan by an order of magnitude.

100% sure Germany would have recovered without any aid, maybe it would take 10 years longer.

German democracy began almost as soon as the war ended … in some cases a bit earlier.

German socialists were rejecting cooperation with Soviet Communists as early as May 1945.

New authentic German parties were organized in June 1945. The CDU was organized (in the Soviet zone) by merging Catholic and Protestant parties that existed in Weimar Germany.

One of the earliest political controversies was whether the surviving July plotters (“Operation Valkyrie”) or Weimar politicians should lead the German people.

The Allied government preferred the Valkyrie plotters. They were sidelined by the politically experienced Weimar politicians.

The Soviets were holding semi-rigged German elections in September 1945. Austria had fair elections by November 1945.

The current German state (“West Germany”) came into existence in 1949. The occupational and autonomous German government existed hand in hand for six years.

It really is amazing how fast “normal politics” resumed in Germany.

Germany was not uneducated.

28 years is a generation ago. What's been happening with the education since then?

>So what's an example of a country with an essentially uneducated population of tens of millions who "bounced back(?) faster"?

South Korea. Took them a couple decades to get moving but once they did they took off like a rocket.

What was the school quality in other African countries, without apartheid?

Have any of them ‘bounced back’?

"Back" to what? Their level of development before the age of colonization?

You’d have to ask the poster I was replying to. It’s a good question though!

I feel really conflicted about this. If enfranchising a large group of people destroys the quality of government … is it a good idea?

To rephrase the question: “is democracy an end itself, and not just a means to better government?”

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