Sin
As I said. You only seem to care about one group and the group is, apparently, not Americans. I don't bluster. Nothing I said was remotely blustery. I was cold, if anything. I asked you to bow out with grace instead you shoved a mountain of irrelevant facts down our throats. Nothing, not one thing you wrote refutes my analyses and, once again, your conclusions and assertions are just your own.
Even if all of Europe had agreed with Hitler, the US would not have been under any obligation to accept more refugees than it wished to and would not have been responsible for any negative treatment visited on foreign nationals by other foreign nationals within the borders of those other countries. That is the end of the story. What you have written is bluster. It's chaff.
Please stop with the Frederick Douglas crap; it's not relevant. It doesn't even count as a response to the sentence I wrote that it means to attack. If you READ what I wrote you'll see why. It is, however, an example of you jumping around in time to find random beads to add to your string off erroneous assertions.
You have an opinion. You have emotion. You have a few, mostly unrelated, facts. You do not have a point. You lost this argument pages ago and still can't see it. And you don't even have the balls to own the fact that this was a debate. Sad.
I didn't obviate the effect of the sanctions. I minimized them. As I said, I was present, you were not. If the sanctions had any effect on the day-to-day lives of South Africans, even a slight one, there was literally no evidence. They did everything just as they always had done. What changed was internal politics and that has to do with a shift in generations.
Just as Israel will never beat the Palestinians and the US would NEVER have beaten the Vietnmese and the Chinese will never beat the Tibetans, White South Africa would never have beaten the various black nations (the Xhosa are a nation, just like the Sioux) that had been there forever. The blacks had nowhere to go. They were already home. And they outnumbered their oppressors 20 to one. Each successive generation became more militant and more violent in their struggle to regain their country and ALL PROJECTIONS AT THE TIME had the place descending into an orgy of blood. There was no foreign nation for the South African war machine to move against. They would have been destroying their own infrastruture. There was no way to partition the country because blacks were all over it and too much of the economy depended on their nearly free labor. They tried to partition it wth townships but couldn't take it farther than that. You think the Israelis have a rough time with the PLO and HAMAS? I think, in Rwanda, you've seen what a committed population armed only with knives, can do. As I said, the world was SURPRISED when South Africa didn't explode. Literally. There was real concern that the apartheid government would nuke the place rather than hand it back to its owners.
But, in treating the past as if it's all one era, the same era, as you seem to want to do, you have conveniently missed this and other facts that undercut all of your assertions and conclusions.
It was math that killed Apartheid. If you were capable of making a clean analysis, one without the filter of your prism, you would see this. But, sadly, I'm guessing that's not possible.
As for your increasingly shrill pronouncements about what the US owed those refugees, this despite the obvious and well documented pattern of equivalent treatment for all refugees inside the framework of our politics here, I just shake my head. Horse, there's the water. Figure it out.
You did come up with facts, yes. Lots of them. Thanks. But those facts do not support your conclusion which was already handily refuted by me. The US is, in NO WAY, responsible for any part of the WW2 Holocaust. Zero percent. We stopped it and killed or imprisoned the people who actually were responsible. That's the US participation.
You feeling otherwise is your right but it is a delusion. It's certainly not proof.
This isn't a hot button issue for me. It's just the theme of the thread.
"We" blacks do not have unresolved issues from slavery. WHITE people say that. "We" blacks have REAL, CURRENT, life altering issues that stem from a constant racist attack from our own country. That attack began with slavery but slavery is not something that influences the current discussion. Again, that is something WHITE PEOPLE float to infantilize the complaints.
Michael.
As much as I enjoy our fencing matches and think you're a basically good guy, you also have one test by which you determine the worth of a candidate or other public figure.
All this hand wringing about Wright being done by right wing whites is bullsh*t. One, if you're surprised that blacks in this country have ambivalence or even anger about how this place has treated and continues to treat us, you've been living in a box. Or you think we have. For hundreds of years before this country was founded and for hundreds after this nation has given us the second worst deal it has had to offer and, SURPRISE, we noticed. Now some whites have the audacity to pretned there's something out of school being said by the Reverend? Bullsh*t.
Two, Wright has been a pillar of his community for decades, doing good works, being a solid example of Christin fellowship, uplift and bridge building. The church he built is filled and it's not becuase he preaches hate rhetoric. Those whites who are claiming shock and "disgust" at his words are completely full of sh*t. They are behaving as if there is som parity of experience between the two groups and that, by speaking the way he does on occassion, the Reverend is somehow being unfair. Again, bullsh*t.
Three, this other guy that has been recently YOUTUBED is a joke. A meaningless aberration that makes racists feel good and secure in their feeling about us. Not even worth the time it took to type these last three sentences. More, bullsh*t.
Rev. Wright has done more, considerably more, than give these few isolated speeches and the text of the speech that started this ball rolling DOES NOT in fact, say what so many in the media have claimed. I've really had it with this crap.
Let me be very clear on this.
Nothing he has said that I have read, including the big "Damn America" speech is in any way hateful or even bothersome. And you'll find that most black Americans feel the same. And you'll find that most honest white Americans do too if they bother to actually read it instead of listening to pundits. If they let their minds be guided by the likes of Hannity and Limbaugh then, frankly, I can't describe them as having minds at all. They're just skin bags taking up space. Useless.
How a candidate feels about Israel or Hamas or the PLO is meaningless because that region is meaningless to the future existence of this nation. They don't produce goods we can't get elsewhere. They don't have any oil. They draw billions of dollars out of our economy annually with absolutely no return. They are a tick on the American economy. A candidate's opinion on CHINA or INDIA dies have deep and last impact on how things work here does matter because it is our companies giving our jobs to those countries and selling our economy to them that is having impact on all our lives.
Israel means a lot to you. Hamas is high on your radar. You have a reason for that that I understand. But those entities are meaningless to the mass of us here because they are meaningless to life in this country. Literally. If the whole region went away tomorrow, no one here (in the US) would notice. If China vanished, we'd feel it.
Bottom line: Don't talk all this peace and love stuff just so you can feed me your personal party line. I'm not buying it and I don't think the mass of black Americans are either. We live here, remember? We know exactly where we are and always have.
Barack Obama is smart. Articulate. Sober. Passionate. He apparently seeks the high ground whenever possible and has, at least he's campaigning on, a deep desire to fix a good many of the things that are troubling Americans in their millions. If he can make his case for that, he gets the job. End of story. And that, my friends, is a VERY good thing. If you really think his opinion, good or bad, about Hamas, or rather the opinion of his former pastor about Hamas, is even a tiny bit relevant to whether or not he deserves to be president, I submit that you think of yourself not as an American first but as something else. If you don't think of yourself as an American first, you have no place in a discussion about America's future because, ultimately, you don't really give a damn about it. I further submit, if Wright's opinion, good or bad, on Hamas sways your vote, that you weren't voting for Obama in the first place, despite any protestations to contrary. You can't vote for a black candidate in the US and not appreciate a little of the life experience that is a consequence of being black here.
Black America has earned the right, in perpetuity, to be as critical as we like about this nation and any policy this nation takes. It's been kicking our assess since it dragged us here in spite our service and affection. When the kicking stops, after a short rest and maybe a party, we'll scale back the crits.
Until then, expect more of the same.
