THE WHITES IN SOUTH AFRICA
613
was · certainly a · relief after .the weeks spent
In
thesuburbari
gentility of White South Africa.
Nevertheless I am quite unr.epentant about the purpose of
my visit. There were practical reasons that dictated my narrow
subject; time available, possibility of quick contact with the
white community through my numerous family there, a personal
pilgrimage to a world I had known in childhood-my mother's
background. Yet my principal motives were broad and social.
I wanted to present to the public of the new English weekly,
The Sunday Telegraph
for which I was writing-a public large–
ly conservative and suburban-an image of themselves as they
might behave under stress of racial fear. I hoped that they
would be disgusted and, more important, not disgusted at the
easy distance of outside judges, but uncomfortably disgusted as
at something very close to themselves. I have always thought
that Nazi Germany should have been presented to us
in
this way
in
the 'thirties as ourselves gone awry. I am fully aware of the
danger of this, that by such identification we fail in justice to
ourselves and do more than justice to the criminal, that false
sympathy may consequently blur our disgust. When, on my first
visit to the United States last autumn, I went from New York
to the South, some of my New York friends underlined
this
danger. "We just don't go to the South," they said. I knew what
they meant. I met, of course, many attractive, otherwise mean–
ingful, even "good" segregationists in the Southern states as I
did Apartheid supporters
in
the Union. It is these contacts, I
believe, that my left friends dreaded. Either you may label the
enemy at a distance and then you need have no regard for
individuals, or you may live with him daily so that you can
forget him in familiarity, as one does a chair or a table. These
are the two ways, I think, in which people prefer to treat political
opponents; and if ultimate extermination is their
aim
then they
do well. But surely a liberal or humane mali must face that
sudden confrontation of "niceness," even of "goodness" in our
opponents that comes with the first intimacy, when the label
