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Comment by deisteve | Hacker News Reader

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but you denounce apartheid, right? and you condemn the Bantustans? and the chemical and biological weapons being developed under Project Coast, including mass sterilization of the black population, as revealed by the TRC hearings?

Of course they don't. Apartheid nostalgia is easy enough to spot.

The Truth and Reconciliation thing was curiously one-sided. Why was Winnie Mandela allowed to be free until her death, for example? Why did we hear so little about the ANC's crimes?

If it was one-sided, it was in favour of the Apartheid regime. It was an inevitably imperfect system that went far too easy on the old Apartheid regime guard and let nearly all of them get away with what they had done.

Not a single senior Apartheid regime leader was prosecuted and jailed for their crimes, even though most refused to co-operate with the TRC. The ANC at the time decided to let things lie in the name of reconciliation, forward progress, and focusing on crime, but they would've been fully in their rights to have dedicated serious investigative and prosecution resources against the people who ran the Apartheid state.

> If it was one-sided, it was in favour of the Apartheid regime.

Who committed most of the crimes (and by far the worst crimes) back then? Definitely not the whites. And who were most of the victims? Also not the whites.

When talking about crimes committed by or on behalf of organisations the answer is by far the apartheid regime and its security forces. They brutalised & terrorised the majority of the population for decades in order to uphold a racist white minority regime, murdering many people in the process.

I’m astounded that you think this is even a debatable point.

Its not so clear cut and dry. Even Nazi Party had considerable support from Americans seeing many of its corporations took party in atrocities.

Simply writing off South Africa as racially politicized event is lazy.

It is exactly that cut and dried: We have primary source accounts from the architects and implementers of Apartheid where they outlined their rationale and their beliefs that black South Africans were inherently morally, intellectually, and culturally inferior in every way to white South Africans.

They banned racial iteractions to absurd degrees, forbidding interracial marriages, dancing, education, and a host of other things. They forced black South Africans into intentionally inferior education systems, the so-called 'Bantu Education', designed to keep them broadly uneducated and only able to carry out semi-skilled work at best. They implemented a brutal system of repression and pass laws. I could go on and on.

It was a system explicitly and unmistakably based on racism.

Continue, please.

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