From bully boys to wimps: the decline of SA's military (South Africa)

Mail & Guardian Online, South Africa ^ | May 04 2012 | PHILLIP DE WET

[elcid1970]

Willkommen in Amerika! (I know, that’s German, not Afrikaans)

I learned in grade school that the Boers had been in south Africa for centuries. Our fourth grade geography textbook showed an Afrikaner farm with the year 1756 on the gate; the owner said his family were relative newcomers!

Later we studied Jan Christiaan Smuts as one of the world’s great independence fighters.

Have you found out that during the Boer War the American people were absolutely in the Afrikaners’ corner? Anti-British sentiment re colonialism was still quite strong.

The best people I have ever known in the military are those who are pro-Afrikaner, pro-Rhodesian, or pro-Israeli. They all stand for Western Civilization.

[Ironfocus]

Thank you very much.

My forefathers from my fathers side came to South Africa in the late 1600’s and were also some of the first farmers to venture north. Most Afrikaners from my generation and earlier still hold to some dislike for the British due to what they did in the Boer War, among which the invention of concentration camps. I also still have a letter one of my great-grandfathers wrote from a POW camp at the time.

There is nothing like seeing the effects of political and economical socialism up close to make one appreciate the values and freedom that we enjoy in the USA. I am astounded that some here would choose to willingly give that away. This is the last great free country in the world, and worth fighting for.

[Ax]

Better the British than the thick-necked Boers. I’d had a few run-ins with them.

[Yardstick]

...there was a secondary nod to showing the rest of Southern Africa that South Africa would never again be a threat. That meant disempowering the military rather than supporting it and subsequent swift policy changes did not help.

Naturally.

[MinorityRepublican]

Apartheid had to go, but the total betrayal, broken promises and surrender of De Klerk, and his little lapdog Meyer (the same guy in the report above) meant that the transition did not happen in a way that protected minority rights in any meaningful way

If you were in charge of South Africa, how would you have dismantled Apartheid while ensuring the minority rights in the nation while giving the vote to uneduucated and impoverished Africans?

[Ironfocus]

Thanks for asking. My answer is probably too long to list here in detail, but you seem to think that whites are the only minority in South Africa by contrasting Africans with minorities. That is simply not the case, because of the diversity among the Africans in South Africa, as well as some other minorities like the Khoi, the Cape Colored and the large Asian community.

I would have entrenched some form of self-government, probably guaranteed proportional representation and some land for every tribe and group in the constitution to weaken the national government’s ability to do what they want. The Zulus, for example, were supporting such an arrangement at the negotiation table but got railroaded.

You mention another important point, which is how a country so utterly rich in natural resources, with gold more valuable than ever, still has so many people who are impoverished? No political solution can ever work if the economic system doesn’t also support it.