"Nonetheless, American culture still exhibits a vigilante spirit and a tendency to impose local conformity, as when, for example, self-appointed guardians invoke extralegal tactics to harass Asian boat people, firebomb abortion clinics, promote gay bashing, prevent "outsiders" from joining the neighborhood, or mobilize Aryan skinheads against social pluralism"

Talk about seeing through PC glasses!

American culture has a vigilante spirit? Harassing illegal aliens? Preventing outsiders from joining the neighborhood? Excuse me...what? The average American family moves at least twice every ten years. That would be a lot of excluding. Suburbia is made up of a bunch of outsiders who don't know eachother. Who exactly mobilizes Aryan skinheads?

That thing is dangerous. It is so twisted up in PC think that it feeds persecution complexes and a wholesale distorted view of history and current events.

Sure lynching occurred. Sure there were folks of different races lynched but the mob has always been a mob and never spoke for mainstream America. For every family that brought their kids to a lynching - there were twenty who stayed home and closed the drapes. No one need excuse it but that little piece exudes PC revisionism and anti-American bile. I've seen pictures- far too many - and generally the lynchers exude the same charm as the folks who get ringside seats to boxing matches and hope some blood spray hits them. That's not mainstream America. No way.

As for the original point - comparing the ANC formed government to the American government - you make one crucial omission. You compare the beliefs and actions of 200 years ago to those of 40 years ago. How many folks were lynched in 1960? A handful? A dozen? Ever since Twain's The United States of Lyncherdom there has been a very self conscious effort to reduce the lynchings and lynchings slowed to a crawl at the beginning of the twentieth century. You don't want to say the folks at the ANC weren't as enlightened as the peaceful resistance fostered by Martin Luther King because that would put them in a bad light and might suggest they were still backwards savages in South Africa.

Davin believes it is justified armed revolution to overthrow an apartheid government - do you?

How bad does a government have to be to justify violence to overthrow it?.

If South Africa met the litmus test, why doesn't Iraq?

And if South Africa met the litmus test - what about the Black Panthers?
Was militancy correct? Should the Black Panthers have overthrown the US govt?
Shouldn't leftists then be celebrating Black Panther day instead of MLK day?

I hope you see the contradictions and schizoid pretzel twists one has to perform to believe Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King were both Saints.

Or is it all about race?
All anti-white uprisings are kosher?
All anti-Israel uprisings are noble?

That's just plain old reverse racism - an ANC specialty by the way.

You can't have it both ways...unless you're racist.

;-)

SDAI-Tech1