Sal Paradise wrote:I am quite capable of exercising my brain - thankfully it doesn't need to be fully extended to debate with you...
If you had, you'd realise that since you and I rarely agree on much, you would – by your own 'definition' – be banned.
You haven't been. So I suggest that your paranoid comment was simply that and didn't involve you thinking and using facts.
Sal Paradise wrote:You were the one who suggested that Mandela's actions were justified considering the conditions the blacks in South Africa were subjected too...
Actually, what I did was to ask what should have been done to deal with a regime that behaved in such a manner – that was not an isolated incident.
Nobody has yet made any suggestion based on the situation in South Africa at the time, although some have made efforts to obscure these issues by raising others, elsewhere.
Of course, to attempt to make any suggestion might require some thought.
Sal Paradise wrote:Reaction to isolated incidents can be dealt with in a number of ways. Can shooting innocent children be justified - never - it is how you react that confers status. Luther King's methods were less violent and far more effective than anything Mandela and the ANC extracted for random murder. Conditions/provocation in the deep southern states such as Alabama were equally as bad as in SA. People like Gov. Wallace were every bit as evil Vorster et al...
Apartheid didn't produce just one 'isolated incident' of murderous behaviour by the regime. Brutality, police murder and so forth were rather more regular than that.
If Mandela was a terrorist, what was the regime? It certainly wasn't a legitimate, democratic one – unless you believe that legitimacy does not require democracy, and democracy doesn't require the involvement of all the people, but the exclusion of the majority from politics and from vast swathes of life, simply on the basis of race.
This was a regime that had came up with something as obscene as the 'pencil test' to judge your race if it was not immediately obvious. If a pencil could be held in your hair, you were black; if not, you weren't.
You've made a vague attempt to approach the question (which itself is considerably better than anyone else has made) but it doesn't answer it except to say, in effect: 'well, there must have been another way because there was another way that worked somewhere else'.
Sal Paradise wrote:Mandela was a terrorist and that should not be ignored in all the hero worship. He eventually effected great change - the question remains is the country a better place for the struggle?
Yes: he and others brought about great change. And the armed struggle and the boycott were both important elements in achieving that.
If you have to ask that question of apartheid, then quite apart from anything else, it would suggest that you think that apartheid wasn't really
that bad, which itself excuses oppression and much, much more, and suggests that you don't actually know what you're talking about.