re: #158 Dark_Falcon

My claim was of necessity, not justification. No one in the US government truly supported South Africa’s apartheid system, but until the end of the Cold War the problem was the danger that a ANC-led government would have aligned with the Soviet Union. And given the strategic position South Africa occupies and its natural resources, a Soviet-aligned South Africa would have been unacceptable for the national security of the United States. So we continued to trade with South Africa, though not in arms or military aid (the tech transfer for the G5 howitzer being the sole exception).

I can’t claim that was morally justified, but it was what we had to do at the time. The goal was to maintain the USA’s strength as a nation, and it did not have a moral purpose. And we helped push out the National Party soon after the Berlin Wall came down. So it was an ugly, immoral, but needed thing to continue trading with South Africa during the 1970’s-1980’s. it was about power, not who was right, as was much of the Cold War. As a nation, we did evil to keep our power, power we needed to survive.

If anyone knows what a better policy would have been, given what we knew at the time and what our track record of managing revolution is, please tell me.

The Cold War prism you’re looking through doesn’t really give a full picture of all the factors involved. We used the same paranoid rationale (“OMG, if the Soviets get influence in this country—Chile, Vietnam, Nicaragua, S. Africa, etc.—then we’re all doomed”) to justify a whole array of illegal, immoral, counterproductive, excessive acts around the globe. Fact is, not only were there many patriotic anti-communist American political leaders who opposed the Reagan/Thatcher policy, but so did the leaders of many western democracies who realized that South Africa, even with the ANC in power, was not the giant bogeyman portrayed by the right.