Why I Am Sorry About Apartheid

[Horagalles]

Why I am sorry about Apartheid

Moneyweb community member tells us how For Whites Only inspired him to write an apology.
Marius Strydom*
21 April 2009 15:41

I recently read Charles Cilliers' book For Whites Only**. It was insightful, sometimes made me very sad, but also gave me hope for the future. It is due to this book that I would like to address the following apology to everyone who suffered under Apartheid.
I am sorry for my direct contribution, the contribution of my family and the contribution of my people to Apartheid. I am deeply ashamed to be one of the "children" in whose name so many atrocities were perpetrated.
I am sorry for the deeds that were committed for decades to ensure cheap labour on our mines, farms and in our factories. I am sorry for the land appropriation, the pass laws, the laws that denied property and business ownership and I am sorry about bantu education.
I am sorry that for generations, so many parents could not say to their children, "My child, if you work hard enough and you have enough perseverance, you can achieve anything", and instead had to say "My child, stop dreaming and be realistic".
I am sorry about the Group Areas Act, the anti-miscegenation laws and racial classification that tore apart so many families.
I am sorry that for so long, so many people in our country could not sleep soundly, fearing that knock on the door late at night.
I am sorry about Sharpeville, Soweto and the state of emergency in the eighties. I am sorry about Steven Biko, Nelson Mandela and so many others.
I am sorry that despite the fact that I never had the option of voting for the old NP, I still gained so much advantage from Apartheid. I am sorry that my mother had access to the best medical care before and during my birth while your mother did not. I am sorry that my mother and father were there all through my childhood years to love me, take care of me and lead me, while yours were so often absent. I am sorry that I had electricity and running water while you had to walk for kilometres to gain access to fresh water. I am sorry that I went to school every day on a full stomach while you were hungry. I am sorry that I could be educated in small classrooms by good teachers and you could not. I am sorry that the bank was willing to lend me money for university while they showed you the door. I am sorry that I was able to get my first job through contacts, while you did not have the same opportunity.
I am sorry that I am sometimes negative about our country, not having the perspective to realise that we are not unique in our failings. I am sorry that I do not do more to counter and reject the racist comments of others. I am sorry that I also sometimes harbour racist thoughts.
I am sorry that I do not speak IsiXhosa or IsiZulu, while you speak three or more languages. I am sorry that I sometimes look down at you for pronouncing a word funnily in your fourth language.
I am sorry that I am not friendlier to the woman at the traffic light and the man in the parking area. I am sorry that I am too scared to go to Khayelitsha. I am sorry that I do not go to more trouble to make you my friend.
But I am also grateful. I am grateful that you do not hate me, despite what I and my ancestors did to you. I am grateful that you are so willing to reach out a hand of friendship to me. I am grateful that you do not question my right to exist in this wonderful country. I am grateful to be a proud South African.

Source: http://www.moneyweb.co.za/mw/view/mw...6834&sn=Detail

Marius Strydom is an example of a kind of brainwashed Afrikaner.

[Teuton]

That level of brainwashing goes beyond me.

I'd swear it was an extract from Animal Farm or a documentary clip from Communist Russia if I didn't know better.

[Horagalles]

The difference is that the ilk of Marius Strydom is making confessions on behalf of the group, which is even more crazy.

The Cult of Confession
Closely related to the demand for absolute purity is an obsession with personal confession. Confession is carried beyond its ordinary religious, legal, and therapeutic expressions to the point of becoming a cult in itself. There is the demand that one confess to crimes one has not committed, to sinfulness that is artificially induced, in the name of a cure that is arbitrarily imposed. Such demands are made possible not only by the ubiquitous human tendencies toward guilt and shame but also by the need to give expression to these tendencies. In totalist hands, confession becomes a means of exploiting, rather than offering solace for, these vulnerabilities.

The totalist confession takes on a number of special meanings. It is first a vehicle for the kind of personal purification which we have just discussed, a means of maintaining a perpetual inner emptying or psychological purge of impurity; this purging milieu enhances the totalists' hold upon existential guilt. Second, it is an act of symbolic self-surrender, the expression of the merging of individual and environment. Third, it is a means of maintaining an ethos of total exposure - a policy of making public (or at least known to the Organization) everything possible about the life experiences, thoughts, and passions of each individual, and especially those elements which might be regarded as derogatory.


The assumption underlying total exposure (besides those which relate to the demand for purity) is the environment's claim to total ownership of each individual self within it. Private ownership of the mind and its products - of imagination or of memory - becomes highly immoral. The accompanying rationale (or rationalization) is familiar, the milieu has attained such a perfect state of enlightenment that any individual retention of ideas or emotions has become anachronistic.

The cult of confession can offer the individual person meaningful psychological satisfactions in the continuing opportunity for emotional catharsis and for relief of suppressed guilt feelings, especially insofar as these are associated with self-punitive tendencies to get pleasure from personal degradation. More than this, the sharing of confession enthusiasms can create an orgiastic sense of "oneness," of the most intense intimacy with fellow confessors and of the dissolution of self into the great flow of the Movement. And there is also, at least initially, the possibility of genuine self-revelation and of self-betterment through the recognition that "the thing that has been exposed is what I am."


But as totalist pressures turn confession into recurrent command performances, the element of histrionic public display takes precedence over genuine inner experience. Each man becomes concerned with the effectiveness of his personal performance, and this performance sometimes comes to serve the function of evading the very emotions and ideas about which one feels most guilty - confirming the statement by one of Camus' characters that "authors of confessions write especially to avoid confessing, to tell nothing of what they know." The difficulty, of course, lies in the inevitable confusion which takes place between the actor's method and his separate personal reality, between the performer and the "real me."


In this sense, the cult of confession has effects quite the reverse of its ideal of total exposure: rather than eliminating personal secrets, it increases and intensifies them. In any situation the personal secret has two important elements: first, guilty and shameful ideas which one wishes to suppress in order to prevent their becoming known by others or their becoming too prominent in one's own awareness; and second, representations of parts of oneself too precious to be expressed except when alone or when involved in special loving relationships formed around this shared secret world. Personal secrets are always maintained in opposition to inner pressures toward self-exposure. The totalist milieu makes contact with these inner pressures through its own obsession with the expose and the unmasking process. As a result old secrets are revived and new ones proliferate; the latter frequently consist of resentments toward or doubts about the Movement, or else are related to aspects of identity still existing outside of the prescribed ideological sphere. Each person becomes caught up in a continuous conflict over which secrets to preserve and which to surrender, over ways to reveal lesser secrets in order to protect more important ones; his own boundaries between the secret and the known, between the public and the private, become blurred. And around one secret, or a complex of secrets, there may revolve an ultimate inner struggle between resistance and self-surrender.


Finally, the cult of confession makes it virtually impossible to attain a reasonable balance between worth and humility. The enthusiastic and aggressive confessor becomes like Camus' character whose perpetual confession is his means of judging others: "[i]…practice the profession of penitent to be able to end up as a judge…the more I accuse myself, the more I have a right to judge you." The identity of the "judge-penitent" thus becomes a vehicle for taking on some of the environment's arrogance and sense of omnipotence. Yet even this shared omnipotence cannot protect him from the opposite (but not unrelated) feelings of humiliation and weakness, feelings especially prevalent among those who remain more the enforced penitent than the all-powerful judge.
http://www.newciv.org/nl/newslog.php/_v308/__show_article/_a000308-000156.htm

[lioness]

Shame, obviously you have not woken up yet. Have your best friend's son been killed for a cellphone yet? Have your parents been brutally, savagely burnt and tortured? And you say you are thankful that they do not hate you? Do you know that this happened before separate development? "Apartheid" as some people would like to name it. Do you know that the ENGLISH started separate development? Please do me a favour and study your history. Then you will not say sorry for separate development, but sorry that it ended!

[Horagalles]

Shame, obviously you have not woken up yet. Have your best friend's son been killed for a cellphone yet? Have your parents been brutally, savagely burnt and tortured? And you say you are thankful that they do not hate you? Do you know that this happened before separate development? "Apartheid" as some people would like to name it. Do you know that the ENGLISH started separate development? Please do me a favour and study your history. Then you will not say sorry for separate development, but sorry that it ended!!!!!!!

You should put down some links on that here. I still remember Anton Goosen was robbed and knocked down and we speculated that this might lead him to better insights.
http://www.news24.com/News24/Entertainment/Local/0,,2-1225-1242_2059979,00.html

Wel it unfortunately didn't help. He denied any speculations on him changing his attituded:

Anton voel ook baie sterk daaroor dat hierdie insident nie op enige manier deur iemand gebruik moet word om te insinueer dat hy nou spyt sou hê oor die rol, maak nie saak hoe klein dit was, wat hy gespeel het om die land te bring van 'n onregverdige bestel na een wat vir al sy burgers voorsiening maak nie.

Anton verwerp ook enige gedagtes dat daar 'n komplot van regeringskant is om wit mense te laat uitvermoor of dat die huidige misdaadgolf tekenend is van 'n swart op wit geweld nie.
http://www.litnet.co.za/cgi-bin/giga.cgi?cmd=cause_dir_news_item&news_id =9074&cause_id=1270

Of course we also had fun with these idiots:

Maar, ai tog, wat ís dit met die kunstenaars en hulle skuldgevoelens? Júlle is die slagoffers, Anton Goosen en Lochner de Kock. Ly julle aan Stockholm-sindroom, dat julle een of ander misplaaste skuldgevoelens van julle eie op die misdadigers projekteer en aan hulle kant is, al het hulle julle wreedaardig aangeval?

Indien nie, hoekom dan verregaande en belaglike snert soos die volgende kwytraak soos wat Lochner de Kock gemaak het? "Ek weier dat die voorval my in 'n rassis verander."

Anton Goosen se héél eerste reaksie was insgelyks om ons almal "gerus te stel" dat hy nog steeds 'n aanhanger van die breinspoeling van ʼn nie-rassige samelewing is. Vreemd en bisar is twee terme wat by mens opkom.
http://www.litnet.co.za/cgi-bin/giga.cgi?cmd=cause_dir_news_item&news_id =34412&cause_id=1270

This just shows you now after the things the "racists" predicted are happening, the lefties are loosing ground and the initiative in public debate. We should load the arguments here to make sure readers got some ammunition, when they are debating issues in their private circles.