To return to my original point, I grew up in SA during Apartheid. I lived through the last years of that terrible time, as the cracks formed and then everything disintegrated. It was a nightmare. I will not detail what happened in Apartheid, please research it for yourself. - ThreadSky

omicronlyrae.bsky.social • 26 days ago

To return to my original point, I grew up in SA during Apartheid. I lived through the last years of that terrible time, as the cracks formed and then everything disintegrated. It was a nightmare. I will not detail what happened in Apartheid, please research it for yourself.

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omicronlyrae.bsky.social•26 days ago

But I was instilled from birth with a fierce sense of Wrongness about Apartheid. The word literally means ‘Apartness’ and was a government-level separation of ‘us’ and ‘them’ built on colour of skin. As the world slides toward fascism, and ‘otherness’ again becomes a buzzword for everything bad...

omicronlyrae.bsky.social•26 days ago

...because it’s easy to blame others for your own failings, I am reminded of this time when growing up. We have been here before, and while we are evidently doomed to repeat the Bad Cycle again and again, there is always hope.

omicronlyrae.bsky.social•26 days ago

When looking back at that time, it is easy to think – certainly in the 1980s – that South Africa was doomed. Boycotted by almost every country on the planet, isolated, and pressured to change, the country embraced the outsider status and tried to keep going. But it didn’t work.

omicronlyrae.bsky.social•26 days ago

I think, therefore, one can draw a lot of parallels to the current climate in the UK – this fear of immigrants (specifically with different skin colours, we’ve not advanced that much) and return to fascist separation that we’re also seeing in the USA.

omicronlyrae.bsky.social•26 days ago

Many people have drawn parallels to Germany in the 1920s and 30s but I would also consider South Africa in the late 1940s. By that point, a number of laws were in place to restrict Black people from ownership and equal rights, but under the British this had gone to a certain point and no further.

omicronlyrae.bsky.social•26 days ago

After independence, when the NP were able to gain power in the election, and then change a tonne of things very quickly to solidify their power and prevent ever losing it again. Even then, there was hope.

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