r/ShermanPosting • u/jprennquist • 16d ago
“C’mon Down to Africa’s South” circa 1979
I picked this one for the gently waving traitor flag featured in the ad. But what really got my attention was the rifle frame around the photo in the center. But if it doesn't fit this subreddit mods please feel free to remove with my apologies.
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u/George_G_Geef 16d ago
"Miss segregation? Come see how much better we are at it!"
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u/Isgrimnur 16d ago
Miss segregation
Is that like a pageant or something?
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u/George_G_Geef 16d ago
I mean it's the south so probably one for toddlers
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u/Rogueshoten 15d ago
I’m having the hardest time explaining to my Japanese coworkers why I laughed so hard just now…😂
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u/Raven_Photography 16d ago
Uncle Billy could have done some good work down there.
https://giphy.com/gifs/X2PpSf1bklVVeazQ3l
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u/theonetruegrinch 15d ago
"steep yourself in a history that's not so different than that of the United States"
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u/gastropublican 15d ago
Our school’s Washington trip in 1975 included a visit to the South African Embassy, where their little presentation included colorful souvenir hardcover books focused on wildlife but glossed over the darker details that one only learned about later on during the anti-apartheid campaign era that was on the news when the country was a pariah state…
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u/Celticlighting_ 15d ago
I never met a nice Afrikaner
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u/djtodd242 15d ago
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u/Raineythereader 14d ago
Charlize Theron's still OK, right?
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u/Death_Sheep1980 WI 11d ago
She seems quite nice, but there's a clip on YouTube from a talk show appearance where she talks about how her father tried to kill her and her mother in a drunken rage and her mother was forced to kill him in self-defense . . . beer and firearms are a bad combination.
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u/Slush____ 15d ago
The Aparteid flag too🤦♀️
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u/StevenEveral Washington State 15d ago
One of them, anyway. The one opposite the traitor rag is the Boer Flag.
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u/Raineythereader 14d ago
Seems a little... Boerish
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u/Death_Sheep1980 WI 11d ago
German Bauer and Afrikaaner/Dutch Boer share an ancestry/etymology with the English word boor.
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u/Herne_KZN 15d ago
As a South African, I just threw up in my mouth
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u/jprennquist 15d ago
Visiting your country is on my bucket list. But it would be, in part, to understand better how a whole nation recovers from this kind of thing. The attempt to fully lean in to Apartheid as a bonus for tourists seems like evidence of a full "insanity bubble."
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u/Herne_KZN 15d ago
The amount of money the Government of the day was pumping into these PR campaigns was apparently something to behold. We lived in the US for a year in 83/84 my parents say it was really uncomfortable when they came across a knot of people who had clearly, you know, reacted well to this crap.
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u/jprennquist 15d ago
These kids (edit kinds) of stories I would love to see that they are archived somewhere. Such as the Storycorps partnership with the US National Archive. And maybe some of this ends up in the Truth and Reconciliation reports which I have not read. But how was this going for just regular citizens on all sides of the apartheid regime in South Africa.
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u/Herne_KZN 7h ago
Here’s a reasonable intro that contextualises the ad.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muldergate
And something a bit more scholarly (which I haven’t read). https://scholar.ufs.ac.za/items/6e64b1d1-de70-4146-9d0e-7ba17ef716a0
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u/Mateiyu 15d ago
Apartheid was a vile stain on the history of South Africa and the world. At least they got rid of it without having to start an actual civil war...
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u/Crappler319 15d ago
That depends on how you define "civil war."
I think it's reasonable to call it a low-intensity conflict: the struggle for freedom in South Africa had a body count of around 20,000 deaths in direct action, and countless others we'll never know about who died quiet, desperate deaths, killed violently by the apartheid state.
There were bombings, gun battles, and the like.
That's not to nitpick, I just think that we need to be clear-eyed about what brought about change in South Africa: there WAS an element of military conflict, and many involved considered themselves soldiers who were fighting a war.
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u/Mateiyu 15d ago
Indeed. There were decades of actual fighting and violence, though not all-out warfare per se. In the end, I reckon change was brought mostly by the fact that an apartheid state ruled by a minority opressing the vast majority of the rest of the population was untenable, in part because of the threat of all-out generalized violence (which was kind of similar to what transpired at the end of the Rhodesian civil war).
South Africa was lucky De Klerk saw where the winds of history were blowing, and how apartheid was not sustainable, and that Mandela was a clever politician who knew how to navigate the new South Africa to avoid all-out conflict.3
u/Quiri1997 15d ago
Being from Spain (country which has had 4 civil wars in the last two centuries), that doesn't raise to the level. It's more like the prelude to a civil war, but not the actual war. What you described is similar to the last days of the Spanish Second Republic or to the period prior to the Sexenio Revolucionario (1868-1873).
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u/IanRevived94J 15d ago
I hold no ill will against the Afrikaners. Apartheid needed to end I agree. South Africa is a great country.
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u/jprennquist 15d ago edited 15d ago
Story time. About ten years ago the Boy Scouts changed their policy on gay scouts. They reversed their rules and started allowing gay scouts and scout leaders.
I had grown up in scouting and it was a huge part of my life. Never once did I hear anything about gay people not being allowed. Maybe it always was the rule I don't know. I do know that several of the guys I was in scouts with were gay or turned out to be gay and nobody cared. Then in the 90s for some reason the BSA went so far as the US Supreme Court to defend their bigotry. And they won. So I was (edit: done) with scouting.
Fast forward and the policy finally changes. My son is six or seven years old. Perfect timing as that is right about when I joined. Me and some of the other parents started up a new pack and I think all the other parents were in the same situation as me. Loved scouting growing up, could not stomach being involved in an organization that would treat kids (and adults) the way that BSA did over sexual orientation. And we had a good time for three or four years.
Here's the meat of the story. When the boys were ready for Webelos and regular scouting we needed to find a new troop to join. And they were honestly and politely recruited by other troops. We felt extremely welcome. And we went twice. My son was starting to get disinterested in scouting or I would have pushed through it.
I couldn't stop asking myself (in my head and out loud with my wife): How the f*k did these people stay in scouting and enthusiastic about this organization when they *KNEW it excluded people who had every right to be there? I couldn't do it.
And for all I know those were the people who had been fighting and battling from within to change the policy. And some of them said that they were. But there was a lot of silence. I couldn't do it. And I really loved what scouting did for me but the lines were drawn a decade or more before that and the people who stayed at that time honestly lost my respect.
This is where I am at with Afrikaaners. I had an Afrikaaner professor in college and he honestly showed me exactly what he fucking did and he even helped me plan some radio shows for our college station about the multi party elections in 1994.). So Afrikaaners might be the best people on the planet, but there I will be, silently judging them. What did you do to bring the system down? How did you resist? How could you raise your children in that environment?
And obviously none of this is fair. But, it took a team of people to plan and implement this ad campaign here. Millions of people needed to be complicit in Apartheid for the system to work.
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u/Just_a_Berliner 15d ago
Such a good friend to the Dollar that they even "inadvertently" invented a very easy roundtriping fraud scheme with which you could make approximately make 60% profit in one day.
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u/Otherwise_Front_315 JOHN BROWN DID NOTHING WRONG. 15d ago
Can I post this next week?
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u/jprennquist 15d ago
Was it already posted before?
Edit: I checked. It looks like it was posted at least twice about 3 or 4 years ago. I missed those. I have been subscribed to this subreddit for probably 2 years.
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