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"