-:Undertaker:-
25-02-2013, 02:58 PM
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/brendanoneill2/100204085/why-did-it-take-the-killing-of-a-pretty-white-woman-for-western-liberals-to-realise-the-new-south-africa-isnt-a-bed-of-roses/
Why did it take the killing of a pretty white woman for Western liberals to realise the New South Africa isn't a bed of roses?
http://www.iaza.com/work/130226C/iaza15616533965000.jpg
Last year, 34 black striking miners were gunned down by South African police at the Lonmin mine in Marikana. Some were shot in the back as they attempted to flee. Some were killed as they surrendered. Others were killed 300 metres from where the main massacre took place, suggesting they had been chased – that is, hunted down – by the armed servants of the ANC. Yet there was no outrage in the Western liberal press. There were no fuming leaders; very few angry columns. Amnesty International, guardian of the modern liberal conscience, issued a weak, almost uninterested statement about this act of mass murder, and then went back to throwing money and staff at the campaign to have ***** Riot – prettier and way more fashionable than those dead miners – freed from jail in Russia.
This month, a pretty white woman, Reeva Steenkamp, was killed by her boyfriend, Oscar Pistorius, in a gated community in South Africa. And this time, right-thinking observers went crazy. The shock and outrage have been palpable. Feminists have popularised the Twitter hashtag #hernamewasReevaSteenkamp, to draw attention to the scourge of domestic violence in South Africa. Column after column tells us that the Steenkamp killing shows that the New South Africa is sick, that it's a fear-ruled, crime-ridden, corrupt nation. This tragic shooting and the fractured court case and debate it has given rise to have cast a "lurid light" on South Africa, commentators tell us, calling into question its image as a "Rainbow Nation". Where the massacre of 34 black workers elicited a collective shrug of the shoulder among observers over here, the killing of Steenkamp has got them tearing their hair out, demanding answers, wondering what the hell went wrong with the country they once admired (the New South Africa) and its ruling party that they once cheered (the ANC).
All of which raises a very awkward question: why is the shooting of a white woman in a domestic setting more shocking to liberal commentators than the massacre of 34 black miners at a public strike and demonstration? This isn't a complaint about how the media elevates celebrity news over all other forms of news. I can understand why there is so much media and public interest in the Pistorius/Steenkamp case: it isn't every day a global sports star shoots his famous, beautiful girlfriend in questionable circumstances. But what is striking is the fact that it took this incident – and not, say, the ANC's massacre of 34 miners – to open Western liberals' eyes to the profound problems, the moral and political decay, in modern-day South Africa.
To the critical observer, it should have been clear for years that this so-called Rainbow Nation, born of the end of Apartheid and the election of the ANC in 1994, is a dark, unpleasant place. The unhinged police assault on those striking miners last year was only the most graphic manifestation of the ANC's creation of an even more unequal, unpredictable society than that which existed under the racist rulers of the Apartheid era. As a Yale University study found recently, in the New South Africa "income inequality has probably grown". Certainly life expectancy – that basic measure of a nation's fortunes – has declined in the New South Africa, falling from 62 years in 1990 to a truly depressing 49 years in 2012. Life for most blacks in ANC-ruled South Africa (not those blacks who were on the ANC's gravy train to power, of course) is harsh, unequal, brutish and short; and as those miners learned last year, anyone who fights back against the new system risks being mown down by the cops. It is not surprising that such living conditions, that the glaringly unrealised hopes of the post-Apartheid era, have nurtured much fear and violence in the New South Africa.
..article continues via the link.
I feel this comment is pretty good, so i'll post as well;
I don't think this murder has made more of an impact because the victim was blonde Mr O'Neill.
There have been plenty of blondes murdered in South Africa since the end of Apartheid - with barely a word mentioned lest it upset the notion of some leftist world view of a multicultural nirvana.
Nearly 4,000 white farmers have been murdered since Mandela came to power. This is out of a population of some 40,000 farmers which equates to a higher mortality rate than that of a soldier in WWII.
This should be huge news, and would be huge news if majority whites were committing genocide against minority blacks, but the other way around brings with it only silence.
How, Mr O'Neill, can you write the above article without mentioning this ongoing genocide? Do you not know about it or are you merely uninterested in it?
Shameful Mr O'Neill, positively shameful.
I always find this an interesting topic to debate because the majority of people who you talk to about this subject have only ever heard the one side of the argument that apartheid was terrible as it denied the vote to black citizens (true, of course) and that when Mandela and the ANC took over it was all amazing. The other side of the argument is never given;- that Mandela himself was head of the armed ANC terrorist wing that targeted innocent people, that his wife Winnie Mandela was a fan of necklacing (look up on Google for what that is) and that since the ANC took charge back in the early 1990s society in South Africa has broken down (both white and black areas) and it's to-the-left economic policies have left blacks worse off than they were in the apartheid days. None of this is popular or politically correct to say, but the truth is there if you look for it.
A lot in South Africa feel (amongst the British and Dutch South Africans) that has conditions decay, somebody like Mugabe will be voted in as an act of desperation by the majority-poor black population... and we know how that turned out. What's always interesting though, is that those in the west who couldn't shut up about South Africa back in the 1970s and 1980s ... now have nothing to say on the matter, all is well to them. The truth is that both black and white South Africans are worse off.
What do you think of the situation in South Africa? if taught at school, were you taught the 'other side' of the debate or not?
Thoughts?
Why did it take the killing of a pretty white woman for Western liberals to realise the New South Africa isn't a bed of roses?
http://www.iaza.com/work/130226C/iaza15616533965000.jpg
Last year, 34 black striking miners were gunned down by South African police at the Lonmin mine in Marikana. Some were shot in the back as they attempted to flee. Some were killed as they surrendered. Others were killed 300 metres from where the main massacre took place, suggesting they had been chased – that is, hunted down – by the armed servants of the ANC. Yet there was no outrage in the Western liberal press. There were no fuming leaders; very few angry columns. Amnesty International, guardian of the modern liberal conscience, issued a weak, almost uninterested statement about this act of mass murder, and then went back to throwing money and staff at the campaign to have ***** Riot – prettier and way more fashionable than those dead miners – freed from jail in Russia.
This month, a pretty white woman, Reeva Steenkamp, was killed by her boyfriend, Oscar Pistorius, in a gated community in South Africa. And this time, right-thinking observers went crazy. The shock and outrage have been palpable. Feminists have popularised the Twitter hashtag #hernamewasReevaSteenkamp, to draw attention to the scourge of domestic violence in South Africa. Column after column tells us that the Steenkamp killing shows that the New South Africa is sick, that it's a fear-ruled, crime-ridden, corrupt nation. This tragic shooting and the fractured court case and debate it has given rise to have cast a "lurid light" on South Africa, commentators tell us, calling into question its image as a "Rainbow Nation". Where the massacre of 34 black workers elicited a collective shrug of the shoulder among observers over here, the killing of Steenkamp has got them tearing their hair out, demanding answers, wondering what the hell went wrong with the country they once admired (the New South Africa) and its ruling party that they once cheered (the ANC).
All of which raises a very awkward question: why is the shooting of a white woman in a domestic setting more shocking to liberal commentators than the massacre of 34 black miners at a public strike and demonstration? This isn't a complaint about how the media elevates celebrity news over all other forms of news. I can understand why there is so much media and public interest in the Pistorius/Steenkamp case: it isn't every day a global sports star shoots his famous, beautiful girlfriend in questionable circumstances. But what is striking is the fact that it took this incident – and not, say, the ANC's massacre of 34 miners – to open Western liberals' eyes to the profound problems, the moral and political decay, in modern-day South Africa.
To the critical observer, it should have been clear for years that this so-called Rainbow Nation, born of the end of Apartheid and the election of the ANC in 1994, is a dark, unpleasant place. The unhinged police assault on those striking miners last year was only the most graphic manifestation of the ANC's creation of an even more unequal, unpredictable society than that which existed under the racist rulers of the Apartheid era. As a Yale University study found recently, in the New South Africa "income inequality has probably grown". Certainly life expectancy – that basic measure of a nation's fortunes – has declined in the New South Africa, falling from 62 years in 1990 to a truly depressing 49 years in 2012. Life for most blacks in ANC-ruled South Africa (not those blacks who were on the ANC's gravy train to power, of course) is harsh, unequal, brutish and short; and as those miners learned last year, anyone who fights back against the new system risks being mown down by the cops. It is not surprising that such living conditions, that the glaringly unrealised hopes of the post-Apartheid era, have nurtured much fear and violence in the New South Africa.
..article continues via the link.
I feel this comment is pretty good, so i'll post as well;
I don't think this murder has made more of an impact because the victim was blonde Mr O'Neill.
There have been plenty of blondes murdered in South Africa since the end of Apartheid - with barely a word mentioned lest it upset the notion of some leftist world view of a multicultural nirvana.
Nearly 4,000 white farmers have been murdered since Mandela came to power. This is out of a population of some 40,000 farmers which equates to a higher mortality rate than that of a soldier in WWII.
This should be huge news, and would be huge news if majority whites were committing genocide against minority blacks, but the other way around brings with it only silence.
How, Mr O'Neill, can you write the above article without mentioning this ongoing genocide? Do you not know about it or are you merely uninterested in it?
Shameful Mr O'Neill, positively shameful.
I always find this an interesting topic to debate because the majority of people who you talk to about this subject have only ever heard the one side of the argument that apartheid was terrible as it denied the vote to black citizens (true, of course) and that when Mandela and the ANC took over it was all amazing. The other side of the argument is never given;- that Mandela himself was head of the armed ANC terrorist wing that targeted innocent people, that his wife Winnie Mandela was a fan of necklacing (look up on Google for what that is) and that since the ANC took charge back in the early 1990s society in South Africa has broken down (both white and black areas) and it's to-the-left economic policies have left blacks worse off than they were in the apartheid days. None of this is popular or politically correct to say, but the truth is there if you look for it.
A lot in South Africa feel (amongst the British and Dutch South Africans) that has conditions decay, somebody like Mugabe will be voted in as an act of desperation by the majority-poor black population... and we know how that turned out. What's always interesting though, is that those in the west who couldn't shut up about South Africa back in the 1970s and 1980s ... now have nothing to say on the matter, all is well to them. The truth is that both black and white South Africans are worse off.
What do you think of the situation in South Africa? if taught at school, were you taught the 'other side' of the debate or not?
Thoughts?