this post was submitted on 28 Nov 2023
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A Boring Dystopia
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Calling Israel's apartheid "modern" to me kind of implies that South Africa's apartheid, whose transitional period ended in 1994, was somehow "ancient" or "old-fashioned"... Yeah, you can rest assured that apartheid/segregation always has been far too modern.
I mean... It ended. Almost 30 years ago. So it's not happening in the modern day.
"ended"
30 years was so long ago.
Flip phones, PAY PHONES and pagers!
That's how long ago it was.
I agree as I do not consider my IBM PS/1 25mhz system to be a modern computer.
I own a flip phone now, I pay with my phone and pagers are alive and well at the hospital I work at. Just saying...
Also South Africa still has massive problems between white and black people. I watched a documentary a few years ago where I black paralympian travelled round South Africa to see how things had changed and he was stunned that black people live in shanty towns outside major cities still, also the guy was shown a rich area with private security patrols and high walled residences and the security kept coming back to look at him, basically not trusting him there.
Intergenerational poverty can be extremely hard to break out from. It isn't helped by the fact that wealth in this planet is finite with most of it trickling upwards.
That's because you can't fix the mess caused by capitalism, colonialism, fascism and white supremacism with feel-good liberal fairy tales.
I was thinking about this recently and it won't happen given the current climate but what Palestinians need is their own Truth and Reconciliation just like South Africans did. Codify that shit.
As a South African I wouldn't recommend it. We essentially allowed all the murderers, torturers and rapists to get off scott free so that "business as usual" - ie, the looting and pillaging of South Africa's mineral resources - wouldn't be disrupted too much.
We literally have gigantic gaps in our history because the Nat regime was allowed to perpetrate one of the largest orgies of evidence destruction in known history while the TRC wasn't even allowed to subpoena people to testify about anything - and now we still sit with a white population that sees no reason to confront what was done in their name and are pretty much still just as white supremacist as their grandparents were.
It's only a solution to the liberal types that want to sell feel-good propaganda and little else.
My GF is Zulu and she's pro T&R so I imagine YMMV.
I can definitely understand your position.
From a layman Canadian where our indigenous people did the same thing it's only as powerful as the weight and teeth it's given.
I have a 2200 AMD Sempron running windows XP for nostalgia. This computer is by no means a modern PC. No one in their right mind would consider it modern. Yet it was originally manufactured after 1994. By your logic, it is a modern PC.
Something can be "not-modern" without being ancient.
I mean, if your measure of modernity is just how good home computers were back then, rather than that any substantial number of people had home computers at all, then of course 1994 is going to seem non-modern.
I guess I have a skewed perception of how long ago 1994 was, though, because 1995 was when my parents first came into contact with each other from opposite sides of the globe, through the ol' information superhighway. For me that makes 1994 seem incredibly recent, even if it was nearly 30 years ago and a lot has changed since then. The '90s were this whole decade of pop culture, technology, and political and social change whose shadow I grew up in, basically the beginning of what I would consider in most contexts to be the "modern day". But if I had actually been alive and conscious at the time, then maybe I would be more practically aware of the differences between then and now, and hesitate to call it "modern".
But modernity always is relative. If I were talking specifically about computers, then obviously even a computer from as recently as 2008 would really be stretching the definition of "modern". But then in another context I might even say that something that happened in 1898 would've been "recent", though I wouldn't necessarily refer to that as "modern" per se.
Put another way, an apparent slim majority of the world's population (but not of South Africa's population) was alive when Nelson Mandela took office. Probably a lot of them were infants or small children at the time, but still: even for the people who weren't alive at that time, or who were too young to really remember it personally, there are so many people who were very alive and very conscious at the time, that everyone's bound to know a good few. My mom attended anti-apartheid protests when she was in college, for instance. Mandela himself was president until 1999, and only died in 2013, which it's hard to believe was already ten years ago.