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No, of course not. Nowhere did I say that apartheid was good. Nowhere did I say that blacks benefited from apartheid. What I said about apartheid was this:
Now, 30 years after the end of apartheid, South Africa is falling apart. There is extreme corruption, extreme discrimination against whites, and murder and torture whites without prosecution.
I don’t think “they had no choice” is a fair assessment of the situation. Even assuming you take ‘retreat to the Western Cape’ off the table, there were other options.
For example, in Namibia and Botswana, in Zambia too to an extent whites kept a lot of land and even political influence. Even today it’s likely most of the good arable farmland in all three of those countries is operated by white farmers. But the white populations were far smaller there.
The goal should have been something like modern-day Indonesia, China or the Philippines, where Chinese minorities control the vast majority of the economy and are very disproportionately wealthy and powerful, but in which native resentment is managed and they still have some ownership of the political system. 85% of the richest people in Thailand, 90% in the Philippines, somewhere in the region of 80-90% in Malaysia are Chinese. In Indonesia, the Chinese are 2-3% of the population but have more than 70% of private wealth in the country.
There are rare, every-few-decades incidents of sporadic violence against the Chinese minorities, but rarely anything like a medieval pogrom or even something on the level of the LA riots more than once or twice a century (excluding the highly volatile postwar period which saw the social order upended entirely, there was mainly 1969 in Malaysia and 1998 in Indonesia, which were both localized).
Only one African nation actually considered trying this plan in earnest - Rhodesia. But its proponents were overthrown in the democratic vote by fearful whites under Ian Smith who began the process that led to the civil war, and by the end of that enough resentment had built up that it was impossible.
GDP graphs of mentioned african countries. Botswana sure has a good thing going, not much else to see. If whites in Namibia or Zambia are noticable better off for their approach, this would have to come out of increased inequality rather than higher productivity.
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I think this is a good argument.
But, to state the obvious, the level of violence in South Africa society is on the order of 10-100x that of Thai, Filipino, or Malay society. The risk of pogroms and anarcho-tyranny is simply much higher in South Africa.
And market dominant minorities haven't worked as well in Africa. Consider, for example, the fate of the Indians in Uganda.
The Lebanese and Indians were disproportionately, visibly powerful in business as I was growing up in the 00s . The Lebanese had Islam and Arabophilia going for them I suppose. The Indians seemed fine without it.
I wonder how it's going with the Chinese now...
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Perhaps. There were also the Arabs of Zanzibar, as per Addio Africa. But consider also the Lebanese in Nigeria, who have been remarkably powerful for decades now and still haven’t been pogromed. Consider also that whites are still happily market dominant minorities in much of Southern Africa, including (to an extent that might - but shouldn’t - surprise you) in Zimbabwe, many of which have seen no substantial or organized anti-white violence in decades. A white man would have become democratically elected president of Zambia a few years ago were it not for the law on needing (as I recall) both parents born in the country to be eligible.
Like all peoples Africans can be whipped up into violent ethnic hostility, but I don’t think their ethnic resentment is particularly strong. I have always felt that both Indians and Chinese are educated into more soft-resentment for Europeans than Africans, who in my experience mostly don’t think about white people at all. Even in South Africa, there is more racial hostility between Zulu and Xhosa, between native Bantus and immigrants from Central Africa, and between black and Indian South Africans than there is between black and white South Africans.
A fact I find fascinating is that until (IIRC) 2021, every member of a Zimbabwean Olympic swim team was white.
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Better to rule in hell or serve in not hell.
Still think there was some better compromise between apartheid and current state.
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