He really is a bit of a plank isn't he ? He's called Nelson Mandela a terrorist and said that South Africa is now a hellhole after being an economic powerhouse. Is he really that thick ?

No, but he believes that we are thick enough to believe it.
Not a plank but a very nasty individual who surrounds himself with scary-looking knuckleheads.

He's not wrong on Mandela though, is he?

Statesman in his later years, but admits to giving the order to plant a bomb that resulted in the deaths of 11 people. I'd say that makes him a terrorist.

Or are "terrorists" only ever the bad guys we disagree with?

He's an ignorant knuckle dragging scrotum faced buffoon, his party is flailing to the point where most of his support comes from the even further right factions of EDL thugs, and people who think Nigel Farage is too posh to protect the working classes of Britain.

People constantly call for him to be banned from every social network, his party struck off the electoral commission, and booted thoroughly up the by Danny Tickle. But I think letting him have his say can only make him even less popular, same goes for the likes of the EDL. We don't even have to give them much rope for them to (figuratively) hang themselves with their constant hatred fuelled drivel.

'One man's terrorist' ... etc.

If Mandela was a terrorist, what about the apartheid regime that was entirely happy to shoot unarmed children?

Would resistance fighters in WWII have been terrorists too?

Absolutely agree. And the other aspect of that is that censoring them merely makes them martyrs.

A terrorist is a terrorist. Whether their cause is righteous, or justified, or not.

If you need to censor any "politician" in our first past the post electoral system then you are being undemocratic. No need to censor people unless you have PR.

Tricky question to answer, as the term is only used as a pejorative but the meaning of it is as you describe.

Unfortunately, the word is used as emotionally/politically as 'freedom fighter'.

Whether the cause is righteous, or justified, or not.

By which I think you mean that the BNP will get nowhere under FPTP but might get a seat or two under PR, therefore we'd need to silence his group to avoid a democratic result.

I don't think you've quite got the hang of this democracy lark.

Extremist parties can much more easily build support under PR. No "wasted" votes.

If you read my previous post, you'd see that I was aware of that.
Your suggestion is to curb democracy because the wrong people might get votes.

I repeat, you haven't quite got the hang of democracy.

Well NM wsas classed as a terrorist in the olden days. So, that's just attention seeking.

SA was previously the economic powerhouse of Africa and other Africans used to aspire to live there. Not sure whether or not it is a hellhole at present but I guess it's not so great for many people. I certainly know while-folk who packed up over here to go back home to SA but then came straight back. Not sure the lot of the poorer black folk is any better than it ever was.

As to the future, with NM seemingly about to die, I would have to be very concerned.

I suppose if it was one of my loved ones who had died, he would be a murdering b'std, but the world has rubber stamped these deaths as OK, because of the evils of apartheid he fought.

I don't know that anyone has said that the deaths were "OK", but I think that there is an understanding that, in certain situations, there is little choice but for resistance to be violent in nature.

There's a reason that I mentioned WWII resistance fighters.

As in South Africa under apartheid, there was hardly a peaceful option available to those who were opposed to the state: those had been tried and put down with violence in SA; in WWII Europe, the Nazis acted quickly to get rid of any political opponents. So were resistance fighters then terrorists?

There probably is a difference. In WW2 Germans had invaded other countries. It is only right that people should attack the aggressor. In South Africa some would argue that the whites were invaders and so the situation is the same. However, the whites (more than arguably) had a legitimate right to be there by NMs time and they had "developed" the country.

1) Before Nazi Germany invaded any other country, the regime very deliberately and carefully removed political opponents and many of the cultural and intellectual elite that were opposed to it.

2) The ANC campaign did not start from a viewpoint that white South African had no right to be in the country.

As for the 'development', that's a different issue, although there are serious theses out there that Africa as a continent was 'underdeveloped' by the assorted colonialist powers. You'd have to ask tb about that: he knows a very great deal more than me about the subject, having both lived in SA for a decade and studied the history and politics not just of SA but the continent.

Whether they had a right to 'be there' or not, they had no right to treat black people like animals.

When we docked in Simonstown in 1973 it was designated a 'uniform visit' the local authorities said that our black sailors should not wear uniform ashore, the skipper politely told them that we either ALL wore it or no-one did. The racism extended other nationalities as well.

That's the Dutch for you!

But it is easy to look at these things in a moralistic way with the benefit of hindsight. But when the white settlers arrived the black tribal populations were in various phases of development that Europeans had been through, in some cases, thousands of years beforehand - stoneage upwards. The minority white settlers built properity from scratch and could not safely have offered democracy to the indigenous population until their level of cultaural development (for want of a better term) was suffcient. At what point in SA's history that was, I do not know. But given, the "land of the free" (USA) treated its black population represensibly until just a few years before apartheid collapsed with far less "reason" maybe the timing was not too far wrong?

If you want an example of what can go wrong by giving majority rule too early, look at Zimbabwe. A once prosperous country brought to its knees.

PS [uEVERY[/u single black African I spoke to in Zimbabwe and Zambia in the last years of apartheid said they wanted to go to live in SA because their lives would be much better there.

Sometimes I think you've reached the depths of your unpleasantness, and then you go and surprise me all over again.

congratulations on you 10000th post rock god, and how suitable it is!

If you add in the ones from the banned usernames, the actual figure is much higher. Misspent youth, innit.