And Brian Beutler and his ilk are de facto rabble rousers
Take a look at this excerpt from a piece by Beutler in TNR about the racial situation in Ferguson, Missouri [emphasis mine]:
You’ve probably seen the statistics by now. Ferguson is about two-thirds black. It’s police force is nearly 100 percent white. Less than a third of its residents are white, but whites hold five of Ferguson’s six city council seats.
When the black community in a city like Ferguson loses faith in its police force, and the police respond by crushing the community’s civil and constitutional rights, it isn’t a stretch to say that the white ruling class has created de facto apartheid. Probably temporarily, perhaps without segregationist intent. But functionally, that’s what it is. They’ve also denied the people they serve the services to which they’re entitled. Ferguson’s police department commands a third of the city’s budget and they are using those resources to provide aggressive disservice to the people who finance that budget.
I almost wrote in the title that Beutler is a de facto dunce. But that would be wrong, because I don’t think words like his are chosen from stupidity, they come from cleverness and a reliance on the readers’ stupidity and/or ignorance. The emotionally-loaded word “apartheid” gets thrown around for a reason, and that reason is to tie a group to the very racist government of South Africa during the latter part of the 20th century.
“Apartheid” has a very specific meaning. It was not just a loose separation or imbalance that came about through custom or choice, it was a legal system that was established by legislation. That was its hallmark, what distinguished it from the de facto racial separations that exist in most countries of the world.
And that legal enshrinement, and the degree to which it was taken, was what inflamed the world against it. The system featured [emphasis mine]:
…racial segregation in South Africa enforced through legislation by the National Party (NP) governments, the ruling party from 1948 to 1994, under which the rights, associations, and movements of the majority black inhabitants were curtailed and Afrikaner minority rule was maintained…
Apartheid as an officially structured policy was introduced following the general election of 1948. Legislation classified inhabitants into four racial groups, “black”, “white”, “coloured”, and “Indian”, with Indian and coloured divided into several sub-classifications, and residential areas were segregated. From 1960 to 1983, 3.5 million non-white South Africans were removed from their homes, and forced into segregated neighbourhoods, in one of the largest mass removals in modern history. Non-white political representation was abolished in 1970, and starting in that year black people were deprived of their citizenship, legally becoming citizens of one of ten tribally based self-governing homelands called bantustans, four of which became nominally independent states.
To throw that word around lightly is an abomination. To use it to refer to the town of Ferguson, where its black citizens can and do vote, and are members of both the city council and the police force (albeit not in numbers nearly commensurate with their percentage of the Ferguson population) is misleading propaganda.
But none other than Jimmy Carter is guilty of the same thing, in Carter’s case regarding Israel. His use of the word “apartheid” has been rationalized thusly by Carter’s defenders:
And [Carter’s] use of the word apartheid is not only morally valid; it is essential, because it shakes the moral stupor that allows many liberals to rationalize away the daily, grinding horror being inflicted on Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza”.
In other words: we liberals hold the moral high ground, and so we are morally justified in using words incorrectly for the purpose of creating propaganda that inflames passions in the desired direction. Our ends justify the means.
One good look at South Africa now will show you that they were correct in doing what they did.
rechill:
That South Africa had problems then, and continues to have them now, is no justification for apartheid.
Hey, according to your “reasoning,” why not just have killed all the black people in South Africa? It probably would have solved a lot of the problems, too.
Ever hear of the old saying, two wrongs don’t make a right?
Liberals lie and mislead and misdirect deliberately.
Five literal clubs with which to beat figurative baby seals into submission:
Apartheid
Genocide
Racist
Sexist
?(insert perfectly conventional deviant)-phobe
Lying for a good cause is ok and since all liberal causes are good they lie all the time.
I used to think that Carter was just feckless but now I believe the man is evil.
This isn’t apartheid or some other intentional system of racial control, it’s just a case of a rapid change in the racial demographics of the town. Per Megan McArdle via Bookworm:
“Twenty-four years ago, it was a majority white town. Fourteen years ago, it had the slimmest of black majorities. And four years ago, it was almost 70% black. Although the town demographics changed rapidly, the police demographics did not.”
So would these race hustlers and media folks expect towns and cities to review census bureau information on their racial demographics and staff accordingly – is that what we’ve come to in Obama’s America? That’s what Beutler is implying – that the police force should have laid off its white officers and hired blacks based on the shifting population of the town (violating the law and likely union rules, too). Should they have kicked out the white City Council members, too? Maybe included race as a candidate qualification (say X number of white seats and Y number of black seats on the City Council).
It’s an ugly assumption on Beutler’s part that people can only trust and relate those of their own race.
Using the word “apartheid” is sort of like calling your enemy “Hitler.”
We need a “Godwin’s Law” for when folks do use the word apartheid.
Who can miss the bizarre usage of “apartheid” as a smear against Israel?
&&&
Africa was self-segregating long before the Dutch ever reached the Veld.
Because of American Jim Crow laws — and slavery — Americans conflate essentially EVERYTHING that ever happened in southern Africa with what happened in Antebellum southern America.
But the Dutch / Africaans never, ever enacted slavery. They didn’t even have indentured Irish.
Hard as it is to believe, most of the Blacks in South Africa migrated hundreds of miles — on their own volition — to hook up with the Dutch/ Africaans economic engine.
The original (European) settlers entered a land that was literally no-mans-land. Lacking modern firearms, no African tribe was ever able to make a go of it down on the ‘flats.’ (Veld/ Veldt)
So from the very outset, the Dutch wanted to self-segregate — generations before apartheid.
Likewise the Africans and the South Asian Indians also self-segregated.
This practice was never codified into any statute, it just happened. This was a natural evolution of a multi-tribal economy. Neither African, Indian nor Dutch trusted their young women in the hands of the others.
And they still don’t. The White, Brown and Black tribes of South Africa are STILL largely self-segregating… even after statutorial apartheid has been swept away.
Americans have this cockeyed attitude that the rest of the planet is socially able to blend into a harmonious polity. The exact opposite is normally the case. Africa is so fractious that most everything breaks upon tribal lines.
Who could forget the Ibo? (Nigerian civil war) The Hutsi-Tutsi genocide?
As for apartheid — as enacted by the Africaaners (circa 1948) — it smacks of totalitarianism. It’s just too much government meddling in economic and social arrangements.
It prohibited any opportunity for lawful, hard-working, native Africans to break out of their lower economic caste. While the Zulus were obviously in the stone age less than two-centuries ago, it is a manifest evil to keep them so backward.
(This reality must really be conflicting for anthropologists — and Stanley Ann Dunham.)
Nothing like that is true for modern Israel. Yet the slur is cast around, far and wide. I do believe the younger generation does not comprehend how unjust and bizarre that insult is.
Agitprop is debasing political argument at every turn.
When the “measured opinions” being sanctimoniously discussed by Lefty pundits are full of such racially divisive garbage, I start to believe the claim that The Obominable Administration *wants* civil unrest.
From “the police acted stupidly” to the notion that Trayvon Martin looked “like my son, if I had one”, the highest office of our land has pushed racial dissension at every possible turn.
Do the nation’s top Alinskyites believe they can stir up enough urban hot-spots to make martial law palatable to the masses? I can see that their tactic is “sow chaos” (financial, social, racial, etc) . . . but I don’t know what the Progressives think they will reap at the end.
I assume they’re not simply nihilists – but do they think this nation is ANYWHERE near ready for the famous “Strong Leader” who can “weed out corruption” and “fix what’s wrong” if we just allow him to bypass the protections of our Constitution/ Bill of Rights (but ONLY temporarily, of course!)??
Most of the people who routinely vote for the (D) candidates have not the slightest clue about the nefarious intentions of the likes of an Ayers or an Alinisky. Their votes are based upon emotions and a lack of appreciation for the unintended consequences of their mushy ideas. The failure of 50 years of the so called war on poverty isn’t on their radar screen. Instead of asking why this has not decreased poverty, they fall back on the tripe propaganda that it is merely a matter of coming up with more money to be spent on new and improved programs to combat poverty.
The apartheid in South Africa was a matter of practical necessity. It was a coping mechanism to address the conflict between warring factions in the African plains. The end of apartheid was stoked by Mandela’s faction conspiring with international forces to brutally murder millions of black and white Africans in order to gain control of the developed resources in South Africa. It’s not a coincidence that the Left uses the same language and emotional appeals in order to marginalize Israelis and Americans. The resolution of apartheid, implicit or explicit, in South Africa, Israel, and elsewhere does not justify the murder of millions of people, and it does demand the transparent revelation of the related special interests.
blert and n.n. get it.
Rodney King Riots 1992
James Byrd
Sorry… it’s late
Rodney King Riots 1992
James Byrd 1998
Travon Martin 2012
Ferguson MO 2014
See a pattern? Feel free to add others.