Countries should simply surrender territory to whomever wants to take it by force. I'll have to remember that. Thanks.

- RealName

No, South Africa's racist and totalitarian white regime should have given the country to its own citizens. It was their country; the country was that of the African, Coloured, and Indian majority just as much as it was of the whites who controlled the army and police. It was, after all the colonialist-minded whites who had "take[n] it by force."

Of course Mugabe was the result of the Rhodesian colonialists. Had it become decades earlier a multi-racial democracy with a decent program of land reform, a guerrilla movement wouldn't have arisen, and the situation would be better for everyone concerned. Everyone. Just like all of South Africa would have been better off with a democratic, de-colonized state from the 1950's on. In fact, all of Southern Africa would have been better off.

I know you wish that somehow, someday, more people than the stinking little basement meetings of ultra-right wing and merc nerd cranks will look back at the fascist Southern African regimes of the 1950s or 1960s as heroic crusaders for democracy, as devoted protectors against Stalinism, but they won't.

And everyone now understands that every person, group, or idea that somehow seemed different from what US foreign policy leaders, or South African racist regime leaders, wanted, was "Communist." Communist this, Communist that. If they wanted independence, they were Communist. If they wanted to do something with national resources that US or South African leaders didn't, it was Communist. Communists under the bed, Communists in the attic, everywhere a Communist.

Just like every skirmish in Iraq might now be called "Al Qaida."

But, of course, in the end, I'm just throwing your own game back at you. You have noticed, right?

Tragic tragic little college freshman Cid

There were lots of whites opposed to apartheid who defended their homes farms and ranches from attack. I guess if someone bursts into your house, with a machine gun you can read international law to them. And blog about it. But on the frontier you're kind of left to your own devices.

-- RealName

So, now it's not the white racist nationalist regime of South Africa making policy which destroyed the chance for a peaceful transition to democracy for decades, it was Little House on the Prairie vs the Giant from Jack and the Beanstalk.

Yup, that was it, there was no racist Nationalist Party which made South Africa remain as a racist, colonial state instead of a multi-ethnic democracy, it was just poor little Poppa Jake de Verwoerd in the veldt facing Mr. Mean Armed African.

And who's tragic here? I mean, literally, in the overspun Greek tragedy sense of melodrama?

I don't know why you think I'm a college freshman. Probably for the same reason I think you're a merc / shooter magazine nerd. That's okay, though, because I'd rather be seen as a college freshman than a pathetic dweeb trapped in merc nostalgia for South African colonial wars any day.

And all reporters for McClatchy will have to leave the USA and go back to their presumed Al Qaida camp of origin and fill in re-immigration papers with their Al Qaida embassy in order to return or be printed in the USA.

Although I don't want to get in the middle of the intense debate going on about various topics around the core makeup of US and philosophically liberal societies, such as the role of violence in government, or the ability of Constitutional democracies to surpass prior wrongs, there is one thing that occasionally gets forgotten.

There is no evidence whatsoever that the society created in the USA and surviving for over two centuries is the basic model for all future societies and the endpoint of humankind and its societal evolution.

Most of us can tell the difference. There's a big difference in between making an argument about the best possible course our society may head towards in some conceivable short or medium term future -- i.e., perhaps by adopting single-payer health care, which arguably could (though as easily may not) happen -- and saying, that's it, this is pretty much the best that humanity can achieve, ever.

If someone argues that, say, it should be possible to move toward a society in which power is distributed in such a way and so democratically that the traditional notion of "state" as the arbiter of the use of force is drastically redrawn, it's not an argument against that idea to posit that it has never happened and is not likely to happen in the foreseeable future.

The same goes for arguments regarding the role of private capital in an economic system. If someone believes we should not only embrace a society based on a participatory democratic structure but expand that sense of democracy into the economy and control of material resources, there's nothing illegitimate or silly about that goal or set of ideas, unless someone foresees that happening shortly or without tumultuous change.

In defending against the right's ever-present reactionary attack on achievements gained so far, it's not fair to also ask anyone else to give up their sensible conclusions about what could someday exist as a vast improvement over what exists now. Just because something may not happen soon, and may in fact never happen, doesn't mean human society is incapable of a quantitative improvement over currently existing levels and richness of democracy.

If we survive another 500 years, and still resemble humans, I certainly hope that we have vastly improved over our best current forms of democracy and economic participation.

And if one views this system with a few tweaks and improvements here and there as the best, the highest, the ultimate that humans can achieve, well, maybe we've undersold ourselves.