Discussion: Kobach Letter Against US Divesting From South Africa Amid Apartheid Resurfaces

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Hasnā€™t a clue on how protests work in 1986, 1990 and 2017

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Kansas
Kris
Kobach

Say no moreā€¦

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Have fun in the barrel, dickhead.

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ā€œHe said having American companies pull out of South Africa would hurt its black citizens mostā€¦ā€

Ford sold military vehicles, and ratted out anti-apartheid union members, to South African security forces.

IBM and Burroughs sold PCs, software, and training to segregate and ā€œdenationalizeā€ people of color.

They allowed the secret police to build a database of fingerprints and photos for every person in the country.

And enabled the midnight arrests, disappearances, torture, and wholesale murder of political opponents.

All of which was stoneage, given the Net, supercomputers, drones, CCTV, and geolocation tech nowadays.

In other words, what Trump and Kobach have at their disposalā€¦

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Strikes a nerve. I was fairly deep into this issue in college, as I suspect many here were. And this was the standard line of tripe spewed by every apologist who was neck deep in Apartheid; and, of course, a Reagan Administration that somehow saw the minority rule that was radicalizing a majority as a bulwark against communism.

Itā€™s basically an argument that Free Market Fairies would make it go away if we just gave them more time. A Kansas fave, as best I can tell.

Call my crazy, but Iā€™m willing to the words of Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutuā€™s on whether it helped or hurt over the likes of Kobach and the Reagan Administration.

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This asshole is running for governor of Kansas? Glad I donā€™t live there.

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A decades-old letter Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach wrote denouncing apartheid in South Africa but arguing against U.S. companies pulling out has resurfaced ā€¦

shocked? nope

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Well it will be a smooth transition from one asshole to another asshole.

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Kobach will carve out a Bantustan in downtown Wichita called ā€˜Nuevo Leonā€™, and heā€™ll make Mexico pay for it.

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I can never quite decide who Kobach reminds me of the most: Eichmann or Heydrich.

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Proving yourself to be the newest poster boy for GOP hypocrisy in the name of the wild goose chase ā€œVoter Fraud Commissionā€ or commonly known as another Trump Circus Act can only come from the politically weird state of Kansas and a corrupt GOP administration. Theyā€™ll probably promote you.

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I hear Brown(Ko)bachā€™s free market has really been working out great for Kansas. So much so, in fact, that theyā€™re taking it national!

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There were Republicans who stood up to Reagan on South African sanctions.

"Eventually, in 1986, the Senate passed the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act with enough votes to override Reaganā€™s veto. ā€œI think he is wrong,ā€ said Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY), explaining his break with the administration. ā€œWe have waited long enough for him to come on board.ā€

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Not unlike the ā€˜but they need jobs so low wages are better then nothingā€™ argument justifying slave wages in Bangladesh etcā€¦

P.s. yes research has shown standard of living goes down when these companies move in

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The liberation and election of Nelson Mandela really hurt all those black South Africans that Kris Kobach we can be absolutely certain was really concerned about. Just like he is extremely concerned about black folks voting in his own country.

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Why is it that these uber ambitious president wannabes from the midwest like Kobach and Sasse go to Ivy League schools but dont have the balls to be anything but stereotyped Reagan Era Cookie Cutter Conservatives. So fucking trite.

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I remember this well. Opposition to apartheid was taking hold in the US because the minority government in South Africa was so frigginā€™ awful and brutal that even Americans were having a hard time defending it, particularly with our own version of apartheid still fresh in our memories (and still, then as now, extant in parts of the South and in our countryā€™s dying inner cities).

This happened at a moment, during the awful, pivotal Reagan years, just before the Republican agitprop machine had re-energized and weaponized racial malice to the staggering degree that exists today: when the Southern strategy still operated in the shadows, delicately, packed with dog-whistles and genteel code.

The right didnā€™t want divestiture, because their corporate buddies were profiting hugely from South Africa, and also because as reactionaries they believed profoundly in two thingsā€”the entitlement of the rich to do whatever they wanted to do in pursuit of profit, and the White Manā€™s Burden: but they couldnā€™t come right out and say any of this, because apartheid was so bloody awful, and because their friends the Afrikaners were giving the Master Race a bad name, as powerful white people so often do.

So they hit on this line: We donā€™t like apartheid, but if we do anything to defund the profiteers, itā€™s the workers whoā€™ll be hurt. Sure, apartheid is terrible, the Republican Party is the Party of Lincoln, but if we pull our money out of South Africa, workers will go hungry, and as Republicans we just canā€™t bear the thought of hungry workers.

To give you some context for what utter, malignant, Republican BS this was: Pat Buchanan was spouting this same line at this same moment. This was Party Line on the fringe right that was beginning to consume the entire Republican Party.

Although the timeline is a little before the invention of the Frank Luntz mantra mills, Koch money was already flowing into the whole agitprop grift machine at this point, so there were plenty of reactionary pundits who came up with the same talking points at the same moment. Buchanan and Kobachā€”racist reactionaries then as they are today---- were just two loyal laborers in the dark money army.

In fact this attack on divestiture was one of the earliest examples of the Orwellian, inside-out blather, the malicious inversion of reality, that has by now become the Republican facon dā€™etre, the contemptible and easy lies that allow them to make pious utterances seemingly out of the highest and noblest of motives, meanwhile doing everything they can to subvert ethics, basic humanity and common decency in pursuit of power and profit. Kind of like what Mad Donald is doing to affordable care right now. Kind of like what the Republicans in Congress are doing to literally everything right now.

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Even more disgusting, when you realize it was IBM that helped the Nazis with their segregation and documenting of Jews and other who were sent to the camps. :angry: Obviously they learning nothing other than that they can make money off of the mistreatment of other humans.

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Connor

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