Would South Africa be a better place if it had become a Russian-influenced Communist country?
If Mandela was a secret operative for the communists in South Africa, as the local communist party claimed when he died, and as this former CIA operative has claimed, then he had to have known he was playing a tricky game. Ending apartheid, creating a communist paradise, pick one.
[Edit] I know I'm being downvoted, but I also doubt anyone commenting here lives in a communist country, or has ever spent much time in one.
> [Edit] I know I'm being downvoted, but I also doubt anyone commenting here lives in a communist country, or has ever spent much time in one.
I didn't downvote you, but this edit seriously tempted me. Your background is irrelevant. It is your arguments we have taken issue with.
The replies you have gotten point out how flawed this idea is/was. We know what politics Mandela would come to push, because he eventually got to run the South African government, and despite having prominent SACP members in it, it was a fairly moderate government which opposed a lot of SACP policies. This despite decades of Soviet influence on the ANC after Mandelas arrest.
Even if the CIA could not have known that at the time, what they would have known if they did their job properly was that the ANC at the time was quite moderate, and that they had an opportunity to stem SACP influence in the ANC if they'd engaged constructively with them.
Instead they treated them as a terrorist organization and chose to act to help their racist authoritarian enemy, and as a result they were part responsible for forcing the ANC to turn to the Soviets for weapons, training and exile for prominent members.
If South Africa had become a Soviet satellite, it would have been in parts thanks to yet another case of CIA blowback, not because of Mandela.
Why are you talking in hypotheticals when Mandela became president of South Africa in 1994?
Your false dichotomy is empirically false because apartheid was ended without creating a 'communist paradise'.
Even if we were to accept your limited worldview/binary choices; it is not clear how a state with codified racism (apartheid) is superior to an egalitarian communist one.
An egalitarian communist state has never existed, it's always a state where the ruling party does as it pleases while the majority has no rights whatsoever. (Whether this is superior or inferior to an apartheid state is a tough question.)
That's not true, Cuba is egalitarian, to a far greater degree than the Soviet Union was. Revolutionary Spain was very egalitarian. The Soviet Union can't really be called socialist, it was more of a totalitarian dictatorship.
Grandparent said "communist", not socialist, so while many people argue about the difference it doesn't seem relevant here.
Revolutionary Spain did not survive long enough to discuss IMO.
Cuba... egalitarian in what way? Is there anything the government does that the citizens can legally undo without overthrowing it? (Note that a benevolent dictatorship can exist, in theory, and among other things it can be a communist - or a racist - dictatorship; nothing prevents from the dictator to grant freedoms to the subjects, the point is that nothing prevents him from taking them away, either. If you don't refer to rights in the sense of things the government cannot prevent you from doing but instead refer to "egalitarian" in some sense of Cuban citizens living substantially different lives than Soviet citizens, I'd be curious to hear what exactly you mean.)
>If Mandela was a secret operative for the communists in South Africa
Pretty much all of the ANC has/had strong communist links since thats who sheltered those that went into exile. So I wouldn't say "secret operative"...
If you were an ANC strategist at the time (cold war), who would you have aligned yourself with for financial & military support?
Remember, you are a "3rd world" movement, European colonialism is still in full swing (though wavering), you are probably the wrong color and civil rights aren't a thing yet -Jim Crow laws are still being enforced in the US, and the apartheid government you are fighting have been aligned with the Allied powers (the west) since WW II.
Edit: corrected 'Allied' powers: had named them Axis by mistake
Same thing all over the place. Castro went on a PR tour of the US trying to gather support and was snubbed long before he went to talk to the Soviets. Few years later his party finally called itself Socialist. Another few years and they finally called themselves Communist.
Ho Chi Mihn was a Comintern member, but the Viet Minh was a broader alliance that included nationalists and others as well alongside the communist party until it was clear that they would not be able to rely on the west for support. Ho even bean the Vietnamese Declaration of Independence with an explicit reference to the US Declaration of Independence [1], which he admired greatly.
And so on...
US governments kept throwing pro-democracy movements under the bus one after the other for large parts of the cold war in ways that made it trivially easy for the Soviet Union to buy themselves friends.
It's only the appearance of social-democracy that matters in Europe. It doesn't matter which party is in power, as long as policy is broadly neo-liberal and not too aggressively anti-corporate.
When someone like Jeremy Corbyn appears and challenges or threatens that consensus, you immediately get a determined media campaign to smear and undermine him - while barking mad racist demagogues are treated as serious political representatives without being questioned or challenged in the same ways.
United Fruit Company being a particularly nasty one to get on the wrong side of.
Its successor Chiquita as recently as 2007 pleaded guilty in US courts to aiding and abetting a Columbian terrorist organization, and got away with just paying $25m restitution, and the US government refused to allow extradition of any of the involved parties to stand trial in Columbia.
>who would you have aligned yourself with for financial & military support?
There wasn't really much of a choice. The west was sorta unofficially aligned with the Apartheid gov, so by default that puts revolutionaries on the soviet side. Idealogical the soviets were also a better fit.
Mandela would've turned South Africa into a Russian-influenced Communist country in much the same way that Walter Ulbricht turned East Germany into a West Germany-influenced market economy.
Ulbricht borrowed money on easy terms in return for West German political influence. Lots of money, not so much influence.
I lived in a country run by communist party for 14 years, but I do not see any link with ending South African apartheid at all. The apartheid ended and no communist paradise/hell/regime instead.
> Would South Africa be a better place if it had become a Russian-influenced Communist country?
If it had been, it would have been thanks to idiotic operations like this.
There was no secret that there were tons of SACP members working within the ANC - they were in an explicit alliance with the ANC and COSATU (trade union alliance), and when the SACP forerunner - the CPSA - was outlawed with the introduction of apartheid, because they'd consistently opposed it, many CPSA members joined the ANC with full knowledge of the ANC. Some continued working within the ANC after the party was re-formed as SACP.
To the extent the SACP had "secret" operatives in the ANC, they were secret from the public, not from the ANC. There'd be no point - SACP members were actively encouraged by both the SACP and ANC to be active in the ANC leadership.
And the official statement on Mandela's death from the ANC [1] is what stated he was a member of the SACP Central Committee - it was not a statement from the SACP.
However, given the policies he's actually fought for, which included openly opposing a lot of the SACP's programme, this likely says more about the close mutual relationship of the SACP and the ANC than about Mandela's political views.
More importantly, prior to Mandela's arrest, the ANC was largely a social democratic leaning organization. If the CIA was concerned about Soviet influence on the ANC, getting Mandela arrested was entirely counter-productive.
Because after Mandela and other leaders was arrested, the weakened ANC radicalised massively while it rebuilt as its leadership was forced into exile where the SACP used Soviet contacts to ensure training and supplies of weapons, and many ANC leaders ended up spending a lot of time working closely with Soviet-supported governments.
The CIA basically handed the ANC to the Soviets.
> Ending apartheid, creating a communist paradise, pick one.
That's a pretty idiotic statement. The CPSA/SACP made ending racial segregation a cornerstone of their programme to lead South Africa towards socialism from the 20's, about 30 years before apartheid was even introduced, and their membership continued to risk imprisonment for about 70 years to fight apartheid.
They did so because the Soviet dominated Comintern explicitly told them to.
There were plenty of Stalinists amongst them who nobody in their right mind would want to lead a country, but there were also a great of them that gave their lives to end apartheid because they believed it was the only way forward for South Africa, and members of the SACP were also central to the creation of the Freedom Charter
Best i can tell, the thinking in Langley was/is that any social democratic movement will soon after coming to power be hijacked by hardliners and turned "soviet".
Sadly their actions seems to more often than not hasten the takeover rather than counteract it.
Then again there is also the whole "banana republic" issue, that had been going on since at least WWI.
Agreed - the pre-1994 ANC was clearly more complex than just being a puppet of the Soviet Union.
However, despite the CIA's (perhaps counter-productive) interference, it is a common misconception that the ANC's violent struggle forced the capitulation of the Apartheid government. I believe Mandela's arrest had little to nothing to do with how things played out. MK was outmatched by the government's security forces, and as long as the world wanted our gold, this could have continued indefinitely. It is tragic, but, those who gave their lives in the struggle did so only to maintain the threat of all-out civil war. Instead, what determined South Africa's future was the west's reluctant imposition of sanctions (not co-incidentally, just as the Soviet Union was falling apart).
I'm convinced that the end of Apartheid was negotiated between the nats and the West. The government knew that they were going to run out of money, in which case the ANC would become a real threat. The US first forced them to destroy their nuclear arsenal, and then the CODESAs followed as the public face of negotiation, but I suspect the actual terms of the transition was decided largely by world powers and the ANC was given instructions.
I sense a lot of outrage from Americans on this CIA/Mandela thing, but look at it this way: the US did eventually end Apartheid in a way that didn't create another Cuba, while simultaneously disarming bunch of white guys with nukes who were convinced that it was their God-given right to wield them.
Marco seems upset because Apple, to whom he owes his livelihood, is about to ruin his business. I think he has a much bigger problem than the podcast producers, who might finally get a larger platform and more attention, especially if Apple thinks they can turn podcasts into a competitive weapon in the streaming wars.
Sorry Marco, you chose the wrong centralized OS platform for your vision of a decentralized podcast future.
AFAIK he does not owe his livelihood to anyone. He made his FU money from Tumblr, and a bit more from selling Instapaper, but since then his output (which, yes, has been iOS-focused) has been more like hobby projects that at worst keep him busy but at best may have made him a little extra on the side. The stuff he does now looks to me like someone following their bliss, not someone trying to make a living.
The way he talks on ATP, Overcast really is his primary source of income, and the Tumblr money is probably stashed away. If Overcast stopped making money, that would be a big deal for him.
It's not about Marco's business. He doesn't need whatever little money Overcast may make. His point is that podcasts as a medium are threatened _for everyone_ if Apple asserts more control over distribution and/or what shows up in the iTunes Store podcast directory.
It doesn't matter what OS your phone runs, the proposed changes are huge threats to today's podcast ecosystem and the opportunities it presents for small podcasts to get a foothold.
I think the bigger point here is that Apple's benign neglect has resulted in a vibrant, growing market for high quality podcasts.
Contrast that to the AppStore, which for the most part is a race to the bottom. The only people directly making money are the skinner-box game developers and Apple.
Podcasts are a great anti-Amazon weapon -- they displace Audible and radio. So it won't be ignored for long. I sincerely hope that Apple uses Podcasts as a model for a better AppStore, not another place to setup a toll booth for their 30% vig.
What is Apple about to do? If I understand you correctly it's something that will ruin Marcos's business and benefit some other people, but what is it?
His argument is perfectly sound economically. Right now there is a ton of competition. Apple is perfectly positioned to capture the majority of the market share and severely limit competition among platforms and clients. This would hurt the market long term.
As anti-trust in the EU is also focused on competition, I could imagine that the EU comission might also take an interest in Apple in such a scenario.
I also doubt that Apple actually is going to do anything. Whatever profit they might be able to gain is probably not worth the risk.
Hear hear. Marco is one of the more outspoken developers, at least when it comes to Apple's broken developer relations, but for all his well-founded critique he still remains an iOS-exclusive one-man shop.
Is this a choice based on the quality of the Android developer platform, the Android market realities, or simply a religious devotion to the Apple ecosystem?
I think you're perhaps overthinking it. Is it so hard to imagine that maybe a) developing his app for multiple platforms requires more development effort than he alone is capable of and b) he chooses to allocate the effort he can produce towards the platform that he himself uses and has a preference for?
Well considering that one of his major competitors has claimed 5x higher unit sales on Android vs iOS (and the Andriod price was $1 more at the time) [1], I think you can draw your own conclusions.
I originally thought this is how Dropbox functioned years ago. Learning that you had to actually have every file on your hard disk if you wanted it in the cloud really put me off from using Dropbox for any significant amount of data.
As so many have stated before me, they better release this for everyone. It isn't a revolutionary feature, it's pretty basic, even if the behind the scenes technicals are complicated.
That's the theory, in reality it goes to both. One part ges to roads/schools/etc and another part goes to a pile of corrupted politicians or unnecessary middlemen or completely useless endeavors.
The black hole in America is a pretty big one, is just that the taxes pie is big enough and there is enough for both the black hole and the good projects, but the pie is shrinking and people is starting to get angry and to make stupid decisions...
AFAICT this is exactly it, they were very very cheap. And so they captured a lot of domains, and if you asked someone about getting a domain it was "oh I got one from GoDaddy it was cheap, the service was bad but what do you expect?" and lots of people had domains from them. Then they started raising their prices until they had a nicely profitable business. They had become "established" and they continue to use name recognition to this day to attract business from people who either don't want to, or can't, shop around.
Honestly, because I needed karma so I could confirm this account on keybase. So I jumped on the homepage and commented on something I thought relevant to me.
If Mandela was a secret operative for the communists in South Africa, as the local communist party claimed when he died, and as this former CIA operative has claimed, then he had to have known he was playing a tricky game. Ending apartheid, creating a communist paradise, pick one.
[Edit] I know I'm being downvoted, but I also doubt anyone commenting here lives in a communist country, or has ever spent much time in one.