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Comment by scarmig | Hacker News Reader

Weren't those laws only really enforced when non-white people broke them, though?

After all, the apartheid state was more than happy to bulldoze thousands of people's homes and not pay restitution; it was more than happy to shoot hundreds or thousands of peaceful protestors and not prosecute anyone for it; it was more than happy to take political prisoners, break their limbs, and throw them out of airplanes a hundred miles from the coast; it was more than happy to plant biological bombs of yellow fever and cholera in refugee camps to lower the number of undesirables.

If a law is observed more in the breach than in the general, is it really a law?

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"Weren't those laws only really enforced when coloured people broke them, though?"

What? 'Coloured' people also refers to a very specific subset of South Africans It doesn't mean what you think it does here.

You're right--I've revised to convey my meaning correctly. Thanks for the correction!

Can you elaborate? When I visited South Africa, a few white people used it to refer to the non-whites. I do not know if they were just trying to be descriptive or discriminatory. Perhaps it didn't mean what I thought it meant.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coloured is fairly accurate.

"Coloured" refers to (and is used self-descriptively by) a subset of people of mixed race of generally one or more of usually British and Dutch ancestry on the "White" side, and generally one or more of various Bantu groups (mostly Xhosa, Zulu, some Ndebele, &c.) or Khoisan ancestry, and sometimes also of Malaysian or other South-East Asian ancestry (from ex-Dutch colonies).

A more descriptive, if not less offensive, term would be half-caste. Half-caste means the same thing everywhere in the world.

I am one.

I would get scowled at using that term when I first moved out of SA. It is referring to a specific group of people: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cape_Coloureds

I don't know anything about the laws being enforced. My point was, it's hard to argue that "the moral thing to do" is to harm others or destroy property.

I actually think apartheid is a good example of why the moral thing to do sometimes is to harm others and/or destroy property. It's not hard to argue at all. Preventing the suffering of the many by harming a relatively small number of people (or destroying practically any amount of property, really) is a clear win from a utilitarian perspective.

I understand your perspective and realize it's an easy argument to make. I see the same arguments about America's use of the atomic bomb in WW2.

There is not much more to say on this topic with two opposing viewpoints :)

>I see the same arguments about America's use of the atomic bomb in WW2.

Only that use was totally unjustified, as Japan was surrendering anyway, a military defeat was already 100% feasible, and the bomb was used needlessy to send a message to the USSR.

Read your history. Japan wasn't "surrendering anyway" at the time - not even after the destruction of Tokyo (which btw resulted in more casualties than the nuclear attack). In fact, six Japan's largest cities were destroyed and they weren't "surrendering anyway". They rejected the Potsdam declaration as late as end of July. Even after Hiroshima they were only ready to surrender if the whole power structure and the government were preserved and granted the authority to deal with the aftermath of the war (that's like Hitler demanding Nazi party would stay in power and be responsible for investigating Nazi war crimes). In fact, the Japanese military was completely convinced they can and should go on with the war even after Hiroshima.

Except that the overwhelming majority of the violence of apartheid was against Black people. You have to completely ignore context to think that there's a reasonable comparison between an oppressed people - a people that suffered both imprisonment and slaughter - attacking their oppressor and the US dropping an atomic bomb on a city.

All of the posts here decrying the violence of the ANC are ignorant at best. The violence of the ANC was nothing next to the violence of apartheid. The violence of the ANC was far more selective than the violence of apartheid, which was indiscriminate.

I see the same arguments about America's use of the atomic bomb in WW2.

A false analogy, since the US was in a position of overwhelming strategic superiority when it dropped A=bombs on Japan. It could easily have set up a naval blockade and waited the Japanese out, or continued it's highly effective conventional bombing campaign, or demonstrated the devastating power of the A-bomb in a thinly populated area - by dropping it on Mt. Fuji, for example, which would certainly have garnered a similar level of attention within Japan.

Harming others may be morally ambiguous (or clearly just wrong) for some people, but I don't think anybody honestly believes that destruction of property should always be off the table. Industrial sabotage targeting the infrastructure of the tyrannical is a time honored tradition.

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