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ANGUS WILSON
ness community-are perhaps the most attracted by its "give up
nothing" extremism, as they are often the most annoyed by the
dangers this intransigence entails. Are there no motives for
Apartheid other than racial lunacy, racial fear and economic
greed? Many supporters of the policy do in fact announce a
positive white way of life that they are 'resolved to defend.
To the visitor from abroad this way of life is usually
presented as a rather vague anti-communism. The average white
South African's knowledge of the outside world is rudimentary,
and this ignorance is fostered by a censored and, in any case,
poor quality press and by the self-protective desire not to know.
Of what communism, then, consists, these partisans of anti-com–
munism are largely unaware. More than once South African
whites of my acquaintance took comfort to themselves that if
their lives were threatened by a black uprising, they were at
least free of the nuclear threat under which the rest of the
world trembles. That this belief is absurd does not prevent them
from holding it. Their anti-communism springs from no sense
of a Russian or even Chinese threat; it is largely used to give
their cause respectability in the eyes of industrialists and business–
men abroad; and no doubt it has some success. This is not to
say that the infiltration of communism among African National–
ists or indeed among Liberal whites is not a reality; one has
only to talk with some of them for a while to be treated to
those stock Marxist analyses and terminologies that so often
betray the fellow traveler. But I do not for a moment
think
that the White South African who boasts of his country as
the
last stand against communism really distinguishes between Mri–
can Nationalists who are communists and those who are not.
There is none of the reality communism has for the Fascist sup–
porters of Franco or Salazar. Anti-communism is merely a phrase.
Is there nothing that Apartheid policies are really defend–
ing? I think for a vast mass of whites, and particularly the more
stupid, the less educated and the comparatively poor, the motive
is purely economic. There was serious ' unemployment among
