Posted on 04/13/2013 12:29:08 PM PDT by MinorityRepublican
I'm generally sympathetic to non-interventionist foreign policy, but White Afrikaaners did not "steal" anything from the Xhosa or Zulu peoples. The white settlers had farms and property in many parts of South Africa long before there were Xhosa or Zulus squatting there to dispute it.
Following your logic, we should all pack up our bags, move to Europe, and return all of the US lands to Indian tribes. Come to think of it, just about everyone lives on land that's disputed by some other nationality or tribe, what are they to do? Possession is 9/10ths of the law, especially when the possession has been going on for generations, and when the nation in question (along with its institutions and infrastructure) wouldn't even exist without the "colonizers."
“we should all pack up our bags, move to Europe, and return all of the US lands to Indian tribes.”
No living American was pushed off his land and onto a reservation. No living American did the pushing. No living American is or was a slave. No living American is or was a slaveowner.
But Africa is chockablock with people who, twenty-five short years ago, couldn’t vote, own land, go to school (unless it was a school for “laborers of color”), live where they want, start a business or work in a profession, and who were “encouraged” — at gunpoint — to stay at their jobs changing Master’s sheets and picking Master’s crops. In short, they were slaves in their own home. While foreigner occupiers denuded their countries of gold, diamonds, and arable farmland.
Do you really not see the difference?
So this justifies having whites, whose ancestors have often been landowners and farmers for generations in South Africa and what used to be Rhodesia, being robbed of their property by thuggish black communists like Robert Mugabe or Jakob Zuma?
Moreover, Zulus and Xhosas were barely even aware of the agricultural and mineral wealth they were squatting on, so in what sense could you say that it was unfairly taken from them?
White settlers built the farms, roads, cities, and mines in Africa just as they did in North America. Some indigenous people were marginalized and displaced in the process. The situations are completely analogous. We don't owe anything to American Indians, nor do Afrikaaner whites owe anything to the blacks.
“Moreover, Zulus and Xhosas were barely even aware of the agricultural and mineral wealth they were squatting on, so in what sense could you say that it was unfairly taken from them?”
Say your elderly aunt has a Monet hanging in her bathroom. She has no idea what it’s worth. But you do and you grab it. And if she objects — she likes it hanging there, not interested in selling — you take it at gunpoint.
Then you push her out of her house, because she needs to go live in the elderly zone with the rest of her kind. And you move in. But you allow her to make a living scrubbing your toilets, paying her five bucks a month from the proceeds of the sale of her painting. But she has to be out of her former home and back in her “zone” by sundown.
That is the recent history of Africa. The history of the CURRENT generation now in their thirties and older.
Why shouldn’t modern-day enslaved Africans have rolled the dice on civil war? Any sensible person, once they gathered sufficient strength and numbers, would have. Sure, it’s ended badly, with Mugabe et al in charge. But that’s not our business. And the losers in civil rebellions don’t get to dictate the terms of their defeat.
Like I said in an earlier post, if someone hotwires the car you stole... I don’t care.
Great post. I agree with your points.
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