Reply #103: There's no gentle way to break this to you, but

[HamdenRice]

you basically don't seem to know what you are talking about, and seem woefully ignorant of modern South African history.

Where to start?

As I mentioned in the cross-cited post, I first went to SA on a human rights mission for a few weeks in 1986. I didn't live there until 1988. Btw, I was well aware of the arrest and detention of UDF leadership. For one thing, we were monitoring the crackdown from the US. I was also well aware on a personal level because I first met Patrick "Terror" Lekota at his treason trial at Delmas. As a consultant to an American organization involved in promoting human rights, I was an attendee at a meeting that was set up with the treason trial defendants through Bishop Desmond Tutu, and we drove out to Delmas to view trial procedures. Because it was a religious holiday, Bishop Tutu was able to go into their cells with us in tow and give an Anglican mass to the defendants. That was when I met "Terror." Incidentally, his nickname, "Terror," had nothing to do with "terrorism"; it was because as a young man, he was a "terror" on the soccer field. So of course I was well aware that UDF leadership was imprisoned and many were being killed.

But as your own cited information points out, there were hundreds of thousands -- more likely millions -- of people in UDF affiliated organizations. Perhaps you don't know what the UDF was. It was not a membership organization like the ANC. It was a coalition of civic, religious, educational and labor organizations. That's why I use the term, "UDF-affiliated." There were hundreds of Americans and Europeans in South Africa working for UDF-affiliated organizations, and it was not particularly dangerous because we weren't leadership or even particularly important to the government. If, for example, you joined the South African Council of Churches Justice and Reconciliation Network, you were in a UDF affiliated organization. If you worked for the Centre for Applied Legal Studies, you were in a UDF-affiliated organization. If you did volunteer work or research for the Congress of South African Trade Unions, you were in a UDF-affiliated organization. If you worked for the Transvaal Rural Action Committee, you were in a UDF-affiliated organization. There was no UDF as such, except for the leadership; there were UDF affiliated organizations. The vast majority of UDF leaders who were detained or abducted and killed worked either in the leadership of the organization itself or for particular kinds of UDF-affiliated organizations -- namely township civic associations.

Your insane strawman argument that I would not "notice" what was going on is a pretty pathetic rhetorical strategy. Those of us who were there knew the limited risks we were taking but were committed to human rights or whatever our particular specialties were. That's how activists were back then -- we didn't just diddle at keyboards and blogs and think we were being activists. My friends and classmates in the US who were similarly committed went to the Philippines during the anti-Marcos civil war, to Liberia, to El Salvador and Nicaragua. Maybe that's hard for you to believe, but that's the way it was.

Maybe you wouldn't have gone to South Africa in the 1980s. That's your prerogative. But surely you can't be saying you don't believe anyone else took those risks for their principles. It's one thing not to be brave enough to do such a thing; it's entirely another not to be able to imagine anyone who is.