Jacob Helbrunn of The American Prospect: 2001 Article Chronicling the Role of U.S. Conservatives as Apologists for South Africa's Apartheid Regime

South Africa

Jacob Heilbrunn's 2001 article at The American Prospect is linked below.

Jacob Heilbrunn: American Conservative Apologists for White-Rule in South Africa

"Exposing the conservative crusade for South Africa is not a matter of engaging in retrospective moral condemnation. Conservatives were arguing against liberals who stated that it was imperative to isolate and condemn South Africa. Liberals correctly understood that ostracizing a white ruling class that posed as an avatar of Western civilization might sap its confidence and cause it to lose its putative moral edge. Perhaps most important, liberals grasped a fundamental moral truth: The struggle for liberty and justice in South Africa, as Robert Kinloch Massie shows in his magisterial new Loosing the Bonds: The United States and South Africa in the Apartheid Years, was a direct continuation of the American struggle for civil rights. Just as conservatives were on the side of repression in the American civil rights battle, so they joined ranks with the tyrants in South Africa."

---Jacob Heilbrunn, The American Prospect