Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.1 6/24/83; site ubc-cs.UUCP Path: utzoo!utcsri!ubc-vision!ubc-cs!andrews From: andrews@ubc-cs.UUCP (Jamie Andrews) Newsgroups: can.politics Subject: South Africa bogosity Message-ID: <80@ubc-cs.UUCP> Date: Thu, 31-Oct-85 14:03:19 EST Article-I.D.: ubc-cs.80 Posted: Thu Oct 31 14:03:19 1985 Date-Received: Thu, 31-Oct-85 16:43:38 EST Reply-To: andrews@ubc-cs.UUCP (Jamie Andrews) Distribution: can Organization: UBC Department of Computer Science, Vancouver, B.C., Canada Lines: 28 Whenever I see certain names in the author line, I get ready for high bogon flux. I suspect that all these picky little semantic points are being argued because either (a) some people are just feeling pedantic or (b) some people don't believe that the political situation in S.A. has to change. The real issue is not how arable the homelands are or what label one puts on the S.A. troops in Namibia. The issue is why the Blacks living within S.A. proper have no political control over their own lives. As long as there are areas where apartheid is the rule, there will be institutionalised racism in southern Africa. I can appreciate (just barely) the argument that the S.A. Blacks do not have enough political sophistication at this time to elect a government, though that is of course due to their recent history, not any innate factors. And I would support the course Botha is taking if he were making any more than the feeblest attempt to improve the lot of Black S.Africans. But Blacks are still undereducated, underpaid, and underprivileged there, and it seems Botha -- and by the looks of the recent byelections, the majority of White S.Africans -- are uninterested in changing that. The issue is institutionalised racism, and any government or people that perpetrates that deserves to be punished. If the punishers are not those more enlightened peoples of similar ethnic, cultural, and linguistic background, who will they be? I'm not suggesting that S.A. is the only place where this goes on; but there are some who seem to be suggesting, through tangential arguments, that S.A. shouldn't be punished at all. This is completely bogus. --Jamie. ...!ihnp4!alberta!ubc-vision!ubc-cs!andrews "I am thinking of aurochs and angels, of the secrets of durable pigments"