Tebbit just been on the news trying to pretend that Thatcher embraced the old Apartheid regime for the good of the country! Yeah, course you did Norman - it had nothing to do with the business interests of Denis and Mark Thatcher, and half the cabinet too, for that matter.
Amazing that even though there's a mountain of evidence available those ****s aren't outed for the swindling bastards they are or were depending on their heartbeat existing or not.
We all know it's Realpolitik and morality and ethics don't come into it. Those involved would be better off keeping their heads down and their gobs shut rather than trying to rationalise it.
Just one word about him being a 'terrorist': my dad (and my uncle) were in Bomber Command in WWII. They dropped bombs on German women and children, no getting round it. Still my heroes, I'm still proud of them, and if they - and the rest of their generation - hadn't done everything they could we'd not be free now. And just now, at least Howe, and to some extent Charles Powell, have just admitted that Thatcher was pro-Apartheid and, in the words of Powell "Instinctively took the side of her fellow white people".
i have to say... what is a terrorist... someone who crosses a line, or someone who even does anything. eg. put a bomb in a civilian area... thats terrorism.
but.. you know. guys in planes doing their job... not terrorism. guy shooting people on parachutes or guys shooting up civilians from the air... terrorism. you get told to fly to dresden and drop bombs you do it. mandela was involved in bombings. if you cannot resist or change something by anythign else? you should be goign to politics route.... is there terrorists in syria... yes, are they all no.... some are doing heinous things i have no doubt but those fighting thier government have a right to do it.
Think your simplifying things mito, the British like the Afrikaans have committed their fair share of "heinous things" down the years which is precisely why people like Mandela do what they do/did, can't be arsed going in to the rights and wrongs of it but I'll just say that some of the ammunition that killed British service men and women in the first Gulf War was supplied by the British government to Saddam.
yeah i probably am. i think its convenient for western countries and arab dictators to throw the word terrorist and enemy combatant around to avoid following the proper rules of war themselves. I totally agree we've done many many heinous unlawful acts and so the ruling calls in SA. Mandela proves on thing. Change is always possible. this should be the lesson i guess. i also agree on the saddam thing. these guys love him when it suited them. he went a bit off... i bet we loved mugabe for a while... its convenient as a democracy to not mind one bit that another country is a dictatorship thats a problem. In the end if a guy fires an RPG at a armoured car thats war.. if they drive a car into a market place or some such IMO thats terrorism.... its a fine line. look at NI, they started attacking the army but quickly switched to easier targets and such were terrorists. the problem is the army then started doing the same with kill squads shooting anyone and it all goes to ****. in short it'd always be better to talk and have a true democracy here you can change things with a vote. if the 70% of the world F'd up by colonisation and such were democracies would the world not kill each other as much... hmmm perhaps perhaps not.
Btw, just done some research (and seen a documentary with David Dimbleby), and mandela was NEVER a terrorist, per se (not in the sense of the IRA, Al Qaida, the Luftwaffe, Bomber Command or the US 8th Air Force, anyway) but insisted he was a saboteur. Indeed, they targeted electricity pylons, government buildings and SA infrastructure. They never killed ONE civilian - NOT ONE. Far, far ****ing less than the drones we and the Yanks send over Afghanistan and Pakistan every day anyway.
Now DD don't let your prejudice run away with you when you select targets to be labelled as terrorists will you! I'm sure that the less than 50% of flying crew who survived WW2 will totally agree with you declaring them to be terrorists from this safe distance! But then why not bend history when it suits hey?
Listen Dave, as said, my dad was in Bomber Command. My uncle died over Essen in February 1945. My dad had been a volunteer fire warden before he joined the RAF. He was at the scene when a mine landed on a school in Lister Drive, when afterwards they just bulldozed over the ground and didn't waste time searching for miniscule remains. My mother used to work in the Auto (later Plessey's) on Edge Lane and, as a fourteen-year-old, had to get home in the blackout all the way to Dovecot with no trams or buses and bombs falling all around. She was forced to beg one family in Broad Green if she could get in their Anderson shelter during one ferocious raid in January '41. All of them wanted to give it back to the Germans in spades AND I DON'T ****ING BLAME THEM! But as a strategic force that is what Bomber Command became - an instrument of terror against the German population. Don't be so ****ing naïve as to deny it. My dad never, and nor did he apologise for it. Mandela blowing up electricity pylons is nothing in comparison. And terror against civilians is nothing new - sieges against towns and cities from biblical times onwards have carried the threat of massacre for those that wouldn't surrender. Even Cromwell in Ireland didn't start that one. But my admiration for Bomber Command, and the young men that suffered the highest attrition rate of any branch of our forces in that war (if you don't count the Merchant Marine that another of my uncles was in) remains unparalleled. I wouldn't have gone up in one of those flying coffins (my dad was in Stirlings) and fly 15,000 ft above the Third Reich with them using everything at their disposal to shoot you down, and the chances are that you'd be murdered on the ground if you successfully baled out. BUT, the area bombings of '43 onwards were strategically designed to de-house and demoralise the urban population of Germany - its civilians. That's not my definition, but that of Arthur Harris and Charles Portal. I don't blame any of them for that, least of all the young men doing their duty, but the terrorising of civilians was its prime purpose.
That's not entirely true. Mandela admitted that if his initial sabotage campaign proved unsuccessful (as it did), then MK would resort to "guerilla warfare and terrorism" to achieve their aims. Which MK did in later years as part of the ANC, which Mandela still influenced strongly from prison, thus placing some blood on Mandela's hands. Tho' as Page points out, it does all come down to perspective. There's no accepted international definition for terrorism as a crime, but the general definition is the systematic use of violence and fear as a means of coercion to achieve political purposes. Which is so broad as to be selectively applicable to pretty much any armed conflict in the last century or so. Very true, but then if one side holds the power and won't allow you to talk, how do you achieve a true democracy? If we accept that the right to vote is a fundamental human right regardless of race, gender or other factors, did Mandela and others not have a duty to fight for those rights on behalf of the race who was denied them? Not sure colonisation is entirely to blame there tbh. I doubt Africa under Shaka and the other warlords of the pre colonial times would have been much better for freedom and equality than apartheid South Africa, albeit the repression would be tribal rather than racial in nature. It's human nature to try to fear and control other people, particularly those who are different, and even the modern democracies like the US and UK still try this in Iraq, Afghanistan and other places. Like Churchill said, democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the rest, and the current fervour for spreading democracy all over the world by force is materially not much different than Marx and Engels' arguments for spreading communism.
That's a bit of an oversimplification too tbh. Bomber Command would have much preferred it if they'd been able to selectively bomb just the factories and infrastructure (the attrition rate would certainly have been much lower), but the bombs simply weren't accurate or destructive enough to do so. So they crippled production by targeting the civilian population in order to hinder productivity and demoralise the workforce. The prime purpose was still to cripple the German war machine, but the technological limitations made attacks on civilians the most effective way to do it.
What blood? I stand corrected if you can find it, but I can't see one civilian death in their acts of sabotage. Not even an accidental one. Don't deny it could have happened, but I can't find it. Please do correct me. Be aware though, in an interview with Dimbleby just shown he stated he NEVER supported or endorsed the killings of any civilians. Now his then wife...
Every member of the Luffwaffe, Bomber Command and the US 8th Air Force was enroled in the military service. The vast majority of them had no say whatsoever as to what their targets might be. But if you want to consider all armed activists as terorists then you should also include every soldier that has ever served in our army or navy. As for the strategy employed then I am certain that there was general support for our bombing efforts throughout the war if for no other reason than it was considered as one of the few ways of 'hitting back' - after all "they started it" . But why pick up on ariel slaughter of civilian populations. Armies of all nations regularly raped, pillaged and slaughtered even when they had no need to. At least the bomber crews could point to the technical limitations of the equipment that they were supplied with. So don't be so bloody revisionist. None of those guys were terrorists in any way shape of form and it's pathetic to even attempt to portray them as such.
By the use of de-housing and demoralising the civilian population. As said, not my words but Portal's and Harris's. The semantics aside, that's terror, and Harris never denied it. As for the arguments about technical limitations - that was the same argument for using mustard gas in the trenches of WWI. For all their talk of accuracy the Yanks bombed from @ 25k ft, and thus their bombsights were no more accurate than us bombing at 10k ft at night. And Dresden was in Feb/march of '45 when Oboe and Gee made even night bombing greatly more accurate, but they (and the US) still splattered the city for purely strategic a demoralising purposes.
The Church Street bombing amongst others: http://www.southafricaproject.info/remembering_the_church_street_bombing.html He discusses it in Chapter 88 of Long Walk to Freedom where he says all of the ANC knew the deaths of civilians would be a likely consequence of their decision to engage in more violent acts: https://archive.org/details/LongWalkToFreedom
