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Have we had a discussion on South Africa yet?
Recently, Andre de Ruyter, the now-ex CEO of the state owned power provider ESKOM, did an interview that basically said the corruption and everything was so bad that he and ESKOM cannot do their jobs properly. He himself was a target of assassination (cyanide pill in his coffee or something?), and after the interview has been removed from his post (he put in his resignation before the interview). He has since left the country.
There are many reports that the grid can totally collapse soon, despite the "load shedding" that they have been doing. Apparently this may lead to civil war?
Unemployment is apparently 35%, clean water access and supply is apparently unstable. Crime is apparently extremely high. If you go on /r/southAfrica, there are frequent discussions of home invasion and other crimes (70 carjackings a day, 2500 home invasions a day...). One post I saw last week was a question asking "Dogs been poisoned, both dead. Typically how many days before robbery hit?"
See this recent thread for more issues: https://twitter.com/k9_reaper/status/1630436052723720193
Some blame this all on the ruling ANC party, on their policies like BBBEE (from a few years ago: https://www.revolver.news/2021/07/south-africa-riots-looting-critical-race-theory/).
In general, SA's situation is not looking good...
From the news.com article. I'm astonished by this, if it's true. But it could be true.
Another article says "There were over 7,000 murders committed in South Africa from 1 July to September 2022."
Now I imagine the South African police aren't the most capable or reliable source of statistics, so maybe we pump that up to 10,000? Higher? Annualized that would be 40,000 deaths per year in a country of 60 million.
Nobody knows how many people have died in Ukraine. I highly doubt the estimates conveniently listed on wikipedia are accurate. Anyway, the UK says 40-60,000 Russians dead and presumably a similar number of Ukrainians plus 9,000 civilians. The number of dead Ukrainians is a guess even amongst this dodgy guesstimate arithmetic. So let's say 110,000+ have died in the war. But that's from a population of 185 million or so, the total of Russia and Ukraine.
So I conclude that, from a certain point of view, South Africa in peacetime really could be more violent than a full-scale war in Europe. This is an intimidating level of dysfunction.
I always get ratio'd when I say this, but, well, that's what autism is for, to make me impervious to pro-Ukrainian social pressure.
To wit: have you considered perhaps that Ukraine is not embroiled in "full scale" war in Europe and is instead being subject to a limited and comparatively humane Special Military Operation? Y'know, like that one side keeps saying it is, but everyone just keeps disregarding in spite of mountains of circumstantial evidence (like this)?
Well I don't buy the whole 'Russia inflicting genocide' line and I suppose the war isn't being waged along the whole front-line, mostly in the Donbass. But there have been mobilizations on both sides!
What would a post-45 full-scale war look like if not this? Korea had short, manageable frontlines and intense strategic bombing involving the flattenning of all the North's urban centres. Russia made an attempt at destroying Ukrainian power infrastructure but there's a lot of it to destroy plus missile defence and SAMs preventing unlimited bombing. Is it practical to flatten areas they want to conquer anyway? No.
In my book, if both sides are conscripting then it's a full-scale war. It isn't a total war, that would be finished in a week. I suppose you can ask 'why aren't you considering a full-scale war and total war to be the same' and my answer is that it's a matter of nuclear weapons. If it was a total war, Russia would demand unconditional surrender and start glassing Ukrainian cities if their demands weren't met.
Russia's stated goal is to reunify the Ukrainian people with the Russian people, destroying an independent Ukrainian identity. That matches the definition of genocide.
Forced assimilation qua taking Ukrainian children is one of the 5 prohibited acts, amounting to genocide in context.
Well they can define genocide that way but unless Russia is actually killing huge numbers of Ukrainian civilians, it's not meaningfully genocidal. When France enforced its own state language and culture on the various regions in the 19th century, that wasn't genocide. Political and social institutions come and go. The Soviet Union messed with a lot of things in terms of political and social institutions, culture, religion and economic existence. Yet we only talk about its genocide or classicide in the context of mass deaths in Ukraine, kulaks and so on.
Forced assimilation conducted in various ways might be bad but it does not fit the core meaning of genocide, which relies upon massed deaths. Why is genocide bad? Because of the massive numbers of civilian deaths! When Theodore Roosevelt raged against hyphenated Americans, he was not calling for genocide in any meaningful way. Wales was not genocided when its identity became part of Britain via military force. Alsace-Lorraine was not genocided by either France or Germany during its long history of conflict.
Imo a lot of what France did to the south would definitely count as genocide today. Not to mention their religious wars.
Yeah, the religious wars would count. Suppression of the Vendee in the revolutionary war too. But what were they doing that was so bad in the 19th century?
In the late 19th century and early 20th century, France (really shouldn't single out France, a lot of placed did this) banned the teaching of local languages/official use and engaged in a campaign of forced assimilation (basically, to make France "french").
Before modernization, basically every region of France (and pretty much everywhere in the old world) had a regional language and culture. I think under modern criteria the wiping out of these languages and cultures would be considered ~10-15 genocides (although you could make a convincing argument from anywhere between 4 and about 50).
That's the story of pretty much everywhere in the old world during that period (the period does vary a bit, for example, England managed to wipe out a lot of regional languages much earlier).
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