I dont know how many of you have heard of this short film, but its mostly in Afrikaans and is based on interviews of South African military personnel back in the Angolan Border War. Personally, I found the movie a little bit stilted and overdramatic, but what really stayed with me were the comments. Every historical video Ive seen regarding the old South African army or the Angolan Border War seems to draw many Afrikaners. And many of them seem to look nostalgically back on aparteid, seeing it as the good old days, and lamenting the fall of South Africa to black communism. There appears to be a wide consensus, and a conviction among many Afrikaners that the county was better off under aparteid. To me, it seems rather axiomatically self-defeating. Even if one were concerned by the growth of communist influence in Africa, SWAPO, MPLA, the USSR, Cuba, et cetera, how would that justify establishing and ruthlessly defending a political system in which most of the country has no autonomy or rights whatsoever? Moreover, even if one were to make the perfectly reasonable argument that South Africa has gone downhill since the end of aparteid and that the country is plagued by obscene levels of crime and corruption, how does this justify aparteid in retrospect? One evil does not excuse another. Perhaps some of you can explain this cultural mindset to me, because unless its just a zero-sum game of socio-political dominance...I cant begin to understand it.
Posted on: Sat, 15 Nov 2014 05:14:07 +0000
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