riddle@im4u.UUCP (08/14/85)
>> I see the Communists had a big parade in Washington yesterday (Monday, 12 >> August). Mayor Koch was there, Jesse Jackson was there, Coretta Scott >> King was there---what a crowd! Don, you're just being silly and you know it. "Communists" indeed! >> What we're watching is the beginning of the end of freedom in South Africa. Freedom for whom? Certainly not for the black majority; surprisingly enough, not even for the white minority. For all of the Western democratic/capitalist trappings that white South Africa maintains for itself, the fact is that even *white* South Africa is oppressed by white minority rule. I have met a number of white South Africans who have been in effect exiled from their country by this oppression. In some cases it was overtly political -- the current emergency is not the first time that opponents of apartheid of all races have been attacked by the government -- and in other cases it was psychological oppression: apartheid is a deeply *sick* social system, and some people, even its supposed beneficiaries, can't stare its sickness in the face day after day in silence and survive. Things won't be easy for whites in South Africa when majority rule comes. (Nor, as we are sadly learning, for the Asian minority, which seems to be caught in the middle of the conflict.) But they aren't, in fact, easy now for whites of any conscience. The main thing is to hope that the inevitable changes come *soon*; the longer they are bottled up, the more explosive they are going to be. People (like Don Black) who seem to equate freedom with alignment with a particular political block have an awfully meager notion of what freedom is all about.