Presswatch/A Safe Crusade
D'Souza, Dinesh
A SAFE CRUSADE -/According to what criteria do progressive passions surge? Today South Africa is the cause ce&bre with the national media, just as yesterday it was nuclear power, the imperiled...
...The foreign policy of the elites in our media, academy, and government permits the Soviet Union to treat its citizens any way it pleases and to make alliances based on strategic necessity alone...
...And as for the South African leadership, let's not be simplistic∔they can't all believe that talk about racial superiority...
...Abortion, reverse discrimination, busing, welfare programs∔the correct approach to these is ambiguous, at best, and in many cases the moral momentum has shifted to the right...
...I wonder how anyone can say that, as there are so many different variations of racial segregation...
...the Soviets would have killed him, so he would only be a wistful memory∔and a reminder of the price of dissent...
...In the 1960s and 1970s you also had to hitch up to the Soviet Union, promise to establish Soviet bases, and so on...
...Yet, the media assumes that the best way for the U.S...
...Oh, it isn't...
...Neal Ascherson, in a recent cover article in the New York Review of Books, denies that there is either a logical or a direct connection between Pretoria and Moscow...
...Recently the press has uncritically amplified statements by Randall Robinson, Jesse Jackson, and others that South Africa is the most immoral regime known to man...
...Now anyone with an ear for music will realize the perfect justice of this reaction by the authorities...
...The result has been a vacuum which the media has exploited by creating its own issue...
...Uganda has since 1971 killed more than half a million of its political prisoners...
...If you're going to stay in power, you've got to go the whole hog...
...Even in Greenwich Village, this sort of activity is no longer regarded as pleasurable...
...My September 16 issue of Newsweek, for instance, quotes "one senior U.S...
...That continent is really a hellhole, it turns out...
...Come on, this is 1985...
...in a letter to the September 20 National Review...
...Of course what Ascherson means by his tiresome use of quotation marks is that there are no real Communist guerrillas∔only "communists" in the fertile fancy of the Afrikaners...
...while it simultaneously insists that the best way to fight Communism is to increase cultural exchanges and leverage, expand trade and tourism, employ cautious rhetoric to encourage moderate elements in the regime, and continually search for common areas of agreement and concern...
...Amnesty International reports that torture tactics in Ethiopia include "dipping the body in hot oil," "inserting a bottle or heated iron bar into the vagina or anus," and "tying a bottle of water to the testicles...
...Disinvestment will only play into the hands of hardliners...
...A hint of this came in the lead story of the September 5 Washington Post where it was revealed that "dozens of mixed-race students were set upon by police after they started singing 'We Are the World' outside an entrance to Cape Town's newest shopping mall...
...It can be done...
...But don't expect most journalists, products of the public school system, to understand the complexity so elaborately outlined by Johnson...
...to oppose the evil of apartheid is to launch boycotts and sanctions, ostracize athletes and artists, eliminate cultural ties, support the militant opposition, and do everything to distance ourselves from South Africa...
...But even talk about the dearth of Yuppie altruism was not indignant, only sneering...
...Yet the U.S...
...the U.S., by contrast, is only permitted to ally with countries that a) are democratic, b) have outstanding human rights records, c) expropriate land for redistribution, d) are racially integrated, and so on...
...Threatened to blow up New York if the U.S...
...Indeed, the New Republic, continuing to rely heavily on its interns, editorialized about South Africa that "there has not been an evil so simple since the fall of Berlin...
...The first reason is that, unlike the Soviet Union and even some African states, South Africa is only moderately totalitarian...
...What is it, then, his recurrent backache...
...They have a country to run...
...The Soviets already have this on the Scoreboard: 30 million of their citizens killed, several countries invaded, poison gas sprayed on Afghans and Cambodians, villages leveled, all basic freedoms (political, religious, press) controlled both at home and abroad, dissidents placed in psychiatric wards∔the most brutish Afrikaner must eye this partial listing with envy...
...The best it could come up with was that we live in an age of solipsism and self-aggrandizement, an accusation whose credibility is a bit singed when it is leveled by Talking Hairdos on the TV networks who, everyone knows, would massacre their families for a point in the Nielsen ratings...
...They live in the real world...
...In the 1950s you merely had to say you were a Communist to merit the label...
...have only given snippets, but the evidence is indisputable: Blacks in South Africa are better off...
...The 25 Afrikaners permit freedom of the press, so the world can witness sobbing blacks at cemeteries...
...the Soviets would have expelled the international media and placed the sobbers in lunatic asylums, and the only photographs we'd see would be of cheery, well-dressed government officials arriving in Washington for summit talks...
...I suspect that much of the huffery would be muted overnight...
...But I still don't see why we respond differently to South African totalitarianism than to Soviet totalitarianism...
...Better: Imagine what would happen if the South African government suddenly allied itself with the Soviet Union...
...The journalistic consensus was refuted recently by Paul Johnson's Commentary article, "The Race for South Africa...
...All the other bleeding heart causes, taken up by the cheerleading press in the 1960s and 1970s, have lost their moral steam...
...is prevented from recruiting their support in the anti-Communist struggle, and is urged instead to overthrow their governments...
...Congress tried any stunts, say...
...Also compare the plight of South Africa and the Soviet Union...
...The press is doing a collective rain dance, utterly uninhibited by the perplexed expression on the faces of most Americans...
...What if South Africa aimed its nuclear weapons at American cities...
...As in South Africa, blacks are denied the vote in Angola, Benin, Burundi, Cameroon, Cape Verde, Central African Republic, Chad, Congo, Ethiopia, Gabon, Ghana, Kenya, Liberia, Malawi, Mauritania, Mozambique, Nigeria, Seychelles, Somalia, Namibia∔the list goes on...
...John O'Sullivan is on vacation and will return to this column next month...
...This reminds me of the way that Time and Newsweek, in almost every foreign policy article, print fluid, lengthy quotations, summarizing the thesis of the story, attributed to anonymous high-ranking officials...
...These media flare-ups are demonstrably unrelated to events∔indeed the evidence in the Third World is that Western press coverage shapes'what goes on more than the other way round...
...asking myself as I witness the frenzy is: Why South Africa...
...We should respond positively, not atavistically...
...media was cowed and sullen...
...But the comic irony of African discontented adopting the jingle of a Philadelphia rock concert should not be missed...
...official" saying that "South Africa is on the slippery slope" to revolution...
...Now indignation and self-righteousness are back in full opulence...
...Today South Africa is the cause ce&bre with the national media, just as yesterday it was nuclear power, the imperiled ozone layer, and those damn snail darters...
...The sneakiest tactic being used by journalists who want to seem objective is the ventriloquist self-fulfilling prophecy...
...Until South Africa came along, the U.S...
...A he answer is hardly obvious...
...Our suave President must also take some of the blame for the media epilepsy over South Africa, not only because of his man Chester Crocker's complete inability to articulate the case for the Administration's policy, but also because Reagan has, in his second term, failed to set the foreign policy agenda...
...Is there such a thing, really...
...We make the damn things up," I was told by top editors at Time and Newsweek, who asked not to be identified...
...From the media's point of view, South Africa offers the advantage of being a "safe issue...
...No matter what you say or do, the networks and newspapers are convinced that you aren't really a Communist...
...They ask not to be pigeonholed, but to be treated on a human level...
...The South Africa issue, on the other hand, is crystal clear, a safe crusade...
...I must say, I was deeply alarmed to hear this, because it reminded me of the "evil empire" rhetoric of that irresponsible fellow Reagan...
...In the past 18 months South Africa has detained 2,000-3,000 blacks without trial, but a hundred times as many people face not only incarceration but torture and "re-education" in Ethiopia, Mozambique, Angola, Zaire, Tanzania, and elsewhere...
...this has got me thinking about "apartheid...
...In particular, I worry about such provocative and inflammatory talk coming at a time of heightened tensions between the two countries...
...Instead we should think about how to use our economic might to help the South African government solve its problems...
...Which inspired a rumination from Joseph Eule of Washington, D.C...
...I admit it: I know what makes South Africa different from the Soviet Union or other countries, what makes it eligible for special indignation...
...They reject labels...
...Today∔well, it's impossible to do it...
...They're not ideologues, following some macabre doctrine of "apartheid," they're pragmatists...
...Perhaps something along the lines of a new Marshall Plan is in order...
...Tomorrow it will probably be homophobia in Brazil, or alcoholism among American Indians...
...Wouldn't that pose a real dilemma for the Gorbachev lobby at the networks and the Washington Post...
...Would the Western media hang tough, or would it quickly begin to rationalize the most repugnant aspects of apartheid, its arms control appetite suddenly kindled...
...In the fall issue of Policy Review my colleague Adam Wolfson documents "what governments do to blacks in the rest of Africa...
...Notice, these days it is becoming increasingly difficult to be treated as a Communist by the U.S...
...after all, if we can put a man on the moon . . . Can't resist lapsing into media-talk...
...For example, the South Africans imprison Nelson Mandela for life, so he can become the focus of world attention and a living legend...
...Thus America is reduced to a policy of pulverizing her friends as she appeases her mortal enemies...
...They have to adapt their ideology to reality...
...And poor Carl Rowan would have to return to his fall-back subject, Reagan's insensitivi-ty to the plight of minorities in this country...
...Ever wonder how such articulate and appropriate quotations are come by, especially under deadline pressure...
...Reportedly Pinochet's opponents have taken up Bob Dylan, and the guerrillas in the Philippines are rehearsing some of Prince's latest stuff...
...As we've discovered with our experience with Bob Dole, being wishy-washy about anything is always a strategic mistake, and this applies also to totalitarianism...
...Migration patterns attest to this too: Blacks seem to find the quality of life∔that by Dinesh D'Souza weighted average of economic and human freedoms∔higher in South Africa than in the rest of that wretched continent...
...I do not expect the frenetic press effort to destabilize the South African government to subside soon...
...Since most countries in the world do not satisfy the escalating list of liberal moral demands, the U.S...
...ally...
...He informs us that "Botha's problem is not the external threat of 'communist* guerrillas...
...Remember that the main argument for 24 dealing cordially with the Russians∔ "They have nuclear weapons"∔applies in all probability to South Africa...
...South Africa practices forced expulsion or relocation of blacks, but the Ivory Coast expelled 16,000 Beninese in the 1960s, Ghana kicked out half a million "aliens" in 1969, during the 1970s Zambia relocated 150,000 undesirables and Uganda expelled 50,000 Asians, in the last two years Ethiopia relocated 1.5 million people and Nigeria expelled 700,000, often using tear gas to break up refugee camps...
...Okay, I'm mimicking Tom Brokaw...
...press' consistently treats South Africa differently, and surely it couldn't be because it expects greater virtue of white people than black people...
...The second, more important, reason that South Africa is different is that it is a U.S...
...The question I am Dinesh D'Souza is managing editor of policy Review...
Vol. 18 • November 1985 • No. 11
