Whilst Mammon remains the god of the West these nations who like to think they are a cut above the rest remain just cheap and nasty hypocrites.

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Regimes like the one we were under would not have tolerated it and it would have meant a white-on-white civil war here. We could be having the same discussion years from now about Zimbabwe. Why don’t you leave your job, find arms dealers, raise a group of moral objectors and declare war on Mugabe’s regime today? Fight for those poor souls there, starving and being beaten, removed and killed. You won’t, because although it is morally right to do so, it is practically and logistically not feasible.

You and your children need to survive, to eat, to work and to be happy. If you are a normal human being, you do not go out of your way to put all of that in jeopardy. That makes us moral hypocrites, perhaps, but normal human beings. And if you think this is a ‘white’ issue then why have black South Africans, those who have fought for their rights before, not jumped at the chances to right the wrongs going on under our noses? Show us how its done, lead the way? Because there is no practical and feasible way to do this without risking life and limb and losing your job and possibly getting killed. Maslow is a reality. That is why white South Africa did nothing and we are not evil as a result, no matter how convenient that would be to a simple equation of guilt and the guilty.

MidaFo, you sound angry and once again are arguing emotionally. My point is that industry in South Africa is dominated by white people for 2 main reasons not 1. They are: skills obtained and imported from European links as well as exploitation of the black labour force in South Africa and NOT just from the latter. Our ‘crime’ was not to share our knowledge and uplift those around us, not that this is common practise anywhere in the world. Now if you have a valid counter-argument, please lets hear it. All I am trying to do here is to illustrate that the complexity of the truth is being hidden by emotion and politically correct repetition.

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Thanks for the smiley but this quote is the point that gives my original response an edge. It is extraordinarily insensitive to the details of the destructive process by which the whites got the money and land and maintain the nefarious economic balance.

I have run three concurrent businesses in SA, lived a modestly comfortable life and educated my children, not because I am clever but because of the wonderful labour supplied mostly by black men. They produced products of a higher standard than the British workers making the same products (according to the Chairman and MD of the licence holding Co.in the UK and my own observations)

They received more than anyone in our area paid labourers. The circumstances of going prices, their lack of education, costs associated with capital expenditure, in other words the state of the economy in SA precluded them being paid enough to properly reward them in accordance with the relevant rates of pay in England and their standard of living was accordingly very much lower than that of the worker in the UK who did not live in squatter camps and shit in the bush, who had motor cars and good beds, good health care and whose children went to schools with educated teachers. My father had the same experience and I was well educated on the basis of that.

This awareness is absent from your writing, which is severely compromised as a result. You are not alone, which is why I choose the words I do.

Idiot by the way means common man who thinks predominantly of nothing but self and today.

Common means ‘in common’, meaning we are all idiots, you, me and the rest, now and forever. The aim on this idiotic earth is to supersede the idiot within and seek the higher planes of honour, generosity, integrity and we all know the rest of the pertinent words here.

We are educated after all. And no! I am not living it up now but working till I die, but with children who are wealthier than I have ever been, which is a hell of a lot more secure than any of my previous employees.

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I just get a little tired of hearing older white people tell me that there was nothing, nothing AT ALL, that they could do to ATTEMPT to change things during apartheid.

You are right: the reality is that no vote for the opposition could really have made a difference, and that for the majority of the apartheid era, negotiation/discussion/election wouldn’t have made a damn difference.

BUT I get angry when I see how many older white SAfricans throw their hands up and say there was NOTHING to be done - why, then, were there white people involved in the resistance movement at all? Why did SOME white people get involved, throw their ideological weight behind scrapping apartheid, lose their lives (in some cases) because of it?

I think the reality is that apartheid was EASY for white people, just as the Holocaust was EASY for ordinary citizens who knew damn well what the smoke rising from Dachau’s chimneys meant. It was EASY to let it all happen, not to raise your voice, because the apartheid government created a false Utopia in which the streets were safe, the unruly swart gevaar was subdued, and your children could sleep soundly at night.

So my point - made in a rambling and disjointed fashion! - is that while white people may not have been able to STOP apartheid, they could bloody well have tried, rather than sitting back and getting fat, happy and rich. And then, for shame, spending the post-’94 years smugly proclaiming that of course they’re liberals…

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As for the ‘work’ you talk of, please explain in practical terms what you mean. It sounds a lot like the rallying call, ‘lets all fight crime together’ which is simply government spin as explained so beautifully by Mr Lancaster. Lets stop repeating party lines, analyse what is being said and think for ourselves here.

And I resent the lazy, easy comment…takes a lot of work to type all this stuff out

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The NATS arranged the vote so that even a concerted effort by progressive liberal people, lets steer away from English and Afrikaans here, would not be able to oust them from power. Many hundreds of thousands of people did vote against them in every election but it was not enough. We perhaps forget how oppressive the state was towards white people who did not tow the line, as well as towards black people. To rise up against this state that controlled one of the world’s most powerful armies would have been suicide and you would have needed great motivation and huge support to do so.

It also seems silly now but the ANC and their allies were funded, trained and supported by the Soviet Union and the fear of what might happen if communism was instituted here was a very real one in the 70’s and 80’s and the NATS took full advantage. The fall of the Berlin wall is actually what broke the deadlock here and removed the greater fear and allowed us to focus on our internal politics.

Now we can sit here and look back and say this and that should have happened based on our current historical perspective and our moral guilt but if the Russians had marched into Pretoria we would now be having very different problems, comrade, and the world would be a very different place. They did not and we now have the luxury, for that is what it truly is, to try and all live together harmoniously.

Within that framework we need to find a solution that allows ALL of us the freedom we need to prosper. Yes, white males probably benefited hugely under apartheid BUT I would also like to point out that virtually all the skills needed to grow a modern industrial economy were imported by the self same group of Europeans into South Africa in the first place. You would therefore expect them to be the most wealthy group, apartheid or not…not so? Every single country has a wealthy elite. Taking an axe to the prosperity of that group of people is not going to level the playing field, it’s going to damage the playing field.

The fact remains…when the question was asked, the conditions were right and the people voted for change. Does that make us good or bad? Well if we were all such terrible racists why did more than half of us say ‘yes’ we want change? It could have been 15% and the war would have continued and who knows what could have happened. Plenty of people would have been happy with that result. What a different place we could be living in now. Discredit it if you like but that referendum was pivotal and the timing was no chance happening and here we all are.

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If it makes us think then the article has achieved it’s purpose.

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I think the original article raised some fascinating and very, very valid points and it makes me smile rather wryly to see that we’ve steered the discussion rather rapidly in the opposite direction.

Grant W points out that the majority of whites voted for change “not because they had to, but because they were finally asked the question”.

That question - should apartheid be scrapped; should we move towards democracy and relenquish minority control - had been asked a number of times, in a number of ways.

The reality is that MOST white South Africans, English and Afrikaans, sat back and let the regime strangle the majority of South African citizens; sat back at let apartheid happen. If all of those people had risen up and attempted to make a real difference, things would have come to a head much sooner.

Instead, white South Africans (again, MOST), let apartheid happen because it was easy, and because those were the days of braaivleis, sunny skies and Chevrolets, and it was glorious to be a (white) South African, cocooned in a fantasy world where the black masses shut up, put up and went home promptly at 6pm every evening, leaving the streets clean and peaceful.

Great article, Traps. Made me think.

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