There are times when I wonder if people read my blog. I mean, I don't exactly get a lot of replies (except when Ryan and Steven Craig Miller debate), and I'm definitely a small fish in a big pond. But then I discover that I'm read by more people than I think.
Read, and slightly misunderstood. Last night, I did a search on Yahoo to see if my blog has been referenced anywhere, and I found two very interesting posts. Or, actually, they're the same post located in two different places. They're found here and here.
Essentially, the post compares the Palestinians in the occupied territories with blacks under Apartheid South Africa. Here's where yours truly enters the picture:
"The often-repeated argument that Palestinians are better off in the Occupied Territories and Israel than in the neighboring Arab states. White South Africans made (and still make) exactly the same argument, but about Blacks being better off in apartheid South Africa than in Black-ruled African states. See, for example, this blog post by a white South African retrospectively defending apartheid, in which he repeats this and similar arguments echoing those used by Zionists: http://jamesbradfordpate.blogspot.com/2007/10/where-were-you-during-apartheid.html."
I'm not a South African, and I wasn't trying to justify Apartheid. I'm a conservative American who was defending the Reagan Administration's stance on South Africa during the 1980's. In my post, I praised the white South African government for its desegregation measures. I criticized sanctions and divestment campaigns because they hurt the very people they were supposed to help (black South Africans). And, in the end, I said that I admire Nelson Mandela for being a moral leader. These are not the words of a man who supports racist oppression.
Granted, some of my arguments were similar to those used by white South Africans to justify the Apartheid regime. I said that blacks were better off in South Africa than they were in other African countries, and I noted that the African National Congress had Communist support. My purpose in making these arguments was to criticize left-wing hypocrisy, not to defend Apartheid. Many liberals in the 1980's patted themselves on the back for opposing the South African government. They continue to do so today whenever they reminisce ("I was at an anti-Apartheid rally"). In doing so, they retrospectively accuse conservatives of racism because they disagreed with them on how best to approach the issue. I'm sure that the left genuinely cared about blacks in South Africa, but the question in the mind of most conservatives in the 1980's was this: How would it help South African blacks to replace the white government with a Communist dictatorship? Considering the Communist support for the ANC, that question was legitimate.
Other than the reference to me, there were two other things in the post that stood out in my mind. The author said that the argument about Israel and South Africa treating marginalized groups better than other countries ignores "the interventions of that same state in the neighboring ones harboring refugee populations, which affected how Palestinians and Blacks in Namibia, Angola and Mozambique were treated, respectively." The author elaborates:
"Like Israel in 1967, South Africa invaded and annexed what is now Namibia (as a sort of Occupied Territory re-named Southwest Africa) during WWI, supposedly as part of the Allies' war effort (it was a German colony). They stayed there until 1988. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the South African army made incursions into Southwest Africa to crush the independence group SWAPO, partly because it aided and harbored Black militants from South Africa. When the Portuguese withdrew from their African colonies in 1975, revolutionary Communist governments who supported South African Black militant groups came to power in Angola (the MPLA) and Mozambique (FRELIMO). Both groups harbored ANC members, and on these grounds South Africa invaded Angola and Mozambique repeatedly during the 1970s and 1980s. South African refugees in these countries were also terrorized by South African and U.S.-funded/armed proxy armies (UNITA and Angola and RENAMO in Mozambique) that attacked Black South African refugee camps and African National Congress militant strongholds. Cuba sent thousands of troops to Angola and Namibia to fight on the side of the MPLA and their South African allies, bolstering the apartheid government's claims that their brutal invasions and repression in the Bantustans were both part of the Cold War."
First of all, the author acknowledges that the African National Congress had Communist support, so I guess conservatives weren't off their rocker on that! But the second point that stands out to me is the most striking. This author bends over backwards to give Mozambique and Angola the benefit of a doubt. Sure, blacks were not doing too well in those countries, he argues, but that was because the South African government was always interfering. Well, maybe one reason that blacks were suffering in South Africa was that Communist governments were always interfering. Moreover, I don't think that we can blame the problems of Angola and Mozambique entirely on South Africa. Blacks in South Africa did better than blacks in Ethiopia, and South Africa wasn't interfering there, was it?
I have a problem with the left's historical stance on human rights. For them, we were supposed to treat South Africa as the worst nation on the face of the earth, while giving murderous Communist regimes the benefit of a doubt. That makes no sense.
But, overall, I liked the post. I appreciate the fact that he cited me, and he also gave me a new argument to use in the debate on Israel. After all, who are these hypocritical Arab countries to criticize Israel when Israel treats the Palestinians better than they do?