Race to the Bottom of the Agenda

Paul Krugman follows up on today's column, "Black and Blue." Here's the last part of his response to reader's comments:

Like Oil and Vinegar, by Paul Krugman, Money Talks: ...I don't usually write about what motivates my columns, but I thought it might be worth saying a bit more in this case.

You see, my wife is African-American, which gives me at least a bit of a personal connection to race issues. (Wait until the right-winger who just sent me a fax that begins "Leftist Jew Slime Paul Krugman," then goes downhill from there, hears about that!) Last week we had my mother-in-law's pastor, a black South African woman who grew up under apartheid, over for dinner. And afterwards, I decided I really needed to say something about race and politics.

Let me mention in particular one thing that didn't make it into the column. In 1986 Dick Cheney, then a congressman, voted against a resolution calling on the apartheid regime to release Nelson Mandela from prison. At the time he had, alas, plenty of company - and the Reagan administration blocked all efforts to impose sanctions on the regime. But what's truly amazing is that in 2000 Cheney was still defending his vote, on the grounds that the African National Congress was "then viewed as a terrorist organization." The truth is that even in the mid-'80s most of the world viewed the A.N.C. as a group legitimately fighting for its people's freedom.

It's things like that which make me doubt the sincerity of the Bush-Cheney administration when they claim to be crusaders for democracy and human rights. In practice, they always end up defending privilege. And even before 9/11, they were both promiscuous and selective about whom to call terrorists: to Cheney, the A.N.C. - which did pursue violent resistance, in which some innocent people were killed, but was remarkably restrained considering the situation - was a terrorist organization, while the apartheid regime, which relied on brutal repression to stay in power, somehow escaped the label.

Comments

[save_the_rustbelt]

My memory may be fading, but when the Reagan administration suggested a policy of "constructive engagement" with the South African regime the liberals went nuts.

"Constructive engagement" with the totalitarian Chinese was ok though.

Neither political party has all that much to be proud of, except certain individuals (my hero was and is Hubert Humphrey, who stood up to the racists in his party very early on).

(If there is a God maybe people who send anti-semitic hate mail will be struck by lightning or something appropriate).

[Movie Guy]

Lightning would work just fine.

Who would they blame?

[Isabel]

"...the A.N.C. - which did pursue violent resistance, in which some innocent people were killed, but was remarkably restrained considering the situation - was a terrorist organization, while the apartheid regime, which relied on brutal repression to stay in power, somehow escaped the label."

A river that devastates the land is said to be violent, but no-one ever speaks of the violence of the banks that hold it in. - Bertold BRECHT

[hj]

"terrorism and terrorist" have lost any meaning. They have become words to characterize acts of violence one doesn't like. Nazi Germany was a terrorist nation, as was Communist Russia. The UK was a terrorist nation (Bomber Harris, Dresden, etc.). The US was and is a terrorist nation (Hiroshima)(Iraq). The word can be used on groups fighting, as best they can, for their freedom. It can be used on nations fighting to repress such people. In short it can be used on almost any acts of violence and as such has no particular meaning. And that may be why Bush&Co find it so useful: War against terrorism=war against violence=war against war waged by people we don't like.

[realpc]

Notice that Krugman completely fails to mention that we now have the first black female secretary of state. And this was not a result of condescending affirmative action, but of honest and genuine disregard for race.

Krugman, like all true believers, carefully selects facts that support his ideology.

[anne]

Notice that no matter the Secretary of State, African American voters overwhelmingly have supported and will support Democrats because they understand well where they are properly represented, and, yes, understanding what affirmative action has meant and that it has not been condescending but an affirmation of justice is a significant reason for African Americans to have turned away from Republicans.

[hj]

"...this was not a result of condescending affirmative action, but of honest and genuine disregard for race."

I have to laugh. Do you really believe this? You think she was the most qualified of all the people available? Shame on you if you do.

[realpc]

"Do you really believe this? You think she was the most qualified of all the people available?"

Ok, Pres. Bush does tend towards liberalism in some areas. It's obvious he genuinely likes and respects her, but he also likes to give oppressed groups a little advantage.

I am generally against affirmative action, but I am liberal and I like to see a black female in a high position.

The point is, Krugman doesn't even see any of this. He implies the Bush administration is racist, based on one (surely over-simplified) example.

I am not a Repulbican and I disapprove of many of their policies, but trying to accuse this administration of racisim, just because they are in some ways conservative, is ideological BS.

Krugman has stopped using his mind to advance truth and logic, and now uses it only to advance his preferred ideological perspective.

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/18/opinion/18herbert.html?ex=1279339200&en=22332b810284bb75&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

July 18, 2005

An Empty Apology
By BOB HERBERT

One of President Bush's surrogates went before the N.A.A.C.P. last week and apologized for the Republican Party's reprehensible, decades-long Southern strategy.

The surrogate, Ken Mehlman, is chairman of the Republican National Committee. Perhaps he meant well. But his words were worse than meaningless. They were insulting. The G.O.P.'s Southern strategy, racist at its core, still lives.

"Some Republicans gave up on winning the African-American vote, looking the other way or trying to benefit politically from racial polarization," said Mr. Mehlman. "I am here today as the Republican chairman to tell you we were wrong."

He made his remarks during an appearance in Milwaukee at the annual convention of the N.A.A.C.P., which has a relationship with President Bush reminiscent of the Hatfields' relationship with the McCoys. In a chilling act of political intimidation, the Internal Revenue Service responded to criticism of Mr. Bush by the N.A.A.C.P.'s chairman by launching an investigation of the group's tax-exempt status.

The Southern strategy meant much, much more than some members of the G.O.P. simply giving up on African-American votes. Put into play by Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon in the mid- to late 1960's, it fed like a starving beast on the resentment of whites who were scornful of blacks and furious about the demise of segregation and other civil rights advances. The idea was to snatch the white racist vote away from the Democratic Party, which had committed such unpardonable sins as enacting the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts and enforcing desegregation statutes.

The important thing to keep in mind was how deliberate and pernicious the strategy was. Last month a jury in Philadelphia, Miss., convicted an 80-year-old man, Edgar Ray Killen, of manslaughter in the slaying of three civil rights workers - Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner and James Chaney - in the summer of 1964. It was a crime that made much of the nation tremble, and revolted anyone with a true sense of justice.

So what did Ronald Reagan do in his first run for the presidency, 16 years after the murder, in the summer of 1980? He chose the site of the murders, Philadelphia, Miss., as the perfect place to send an important symbolic message. Mr. Reagan kicked off his general election campaign at the Neshoba County Fair in Philadelphia, an annual gathering that was famous for its diatribes by segregationist politicians. His message: "I believe in states' rights."

Mr. Reagan's running mate was George H. W. Bush, who, in his own run for president in 1988, thought it was a good idea to exploit racial fears with the notorious Willie Horton ads about a black prisoner who raped a white woman. Mr. Bush's campaign manager, Lee Atwater, said at the time that the Horton case was a "values issue, particularly in the South - and if we hammer at these over and over, we are going to win."

Mr. Bush's son, the current president, has been as devoted as an acolyte to the Southern strategy, despite anything Ken Mehlman might think. Like so many other Republican politicians and presidential wannabes, George W. Bush was happy to appear at Bob Jones University in Greenville, S.C., at a time when the school was blatantly racially discriminatory....

[nyuk]

I have been doing the same job for over 15 years, and it currently pays me about $46,000/year plus some rather nice benefits. In 15+ years of bi-monthly staff meetings, there have only been a handful where there was an African-American on staff. This is a lower middle class job. I don't know why this particular job is so infrequently staffed by African-Americans. I just know that it isn't. Occasionally, I will see African-Americans in some of the higher positions, but not often. And those that are in the higher positions cream-of-the-crop PhDs, with a whole lot of mind power. They are, in a word, elite.

The African-American middle class is as important as the white middle class. What a great place to start with economic policy, imo.

[realpc]

WHAT ABOUT THE DEMOCRATS" RECORD ON RACE?????!!!! THEY WERE THE PARTY OF SOUTHERN SEGREGATION.

You know, things continually change and no group is entirely without blame.

[bullbust]

"WHAT ABOUT THE DEMOCRATS" RECORD ON RACE?????!!!! THEY WERE THE PARTY OF SOUTHERN SEGREGATION."

Why, thank you for setting us right. For a moment we thought that racists dont change, that they switched sides from Democrat to Republican. And that this was done with the active involvement of both parties - the Democrats to abhor racism and the GOP to exploit it. You know, the acts of Humphrey, Kennedy, Nixon etc.

Phew! What a relief! We were wrong. People changed. Thank you.

[turquoise]

Republicans love rich people, even if they are not white.

[ob]

I don't understand why some people can't simply dispassionately accept that policies can negatively effect a class without strictly intending to.

Current neocon policy tends to support large asset holders (I believe as a policy goal). This is a small class, so it's fair to say that it is disadvantageous to the majority of all races. It is then trivially true that it is bad to the class of blacks. All this though it's probably not a racist policy goal.

Of course, policies like "The Southern Strategy" or looking at incarceration rates for drug arrests by race actually hint at racism, though I would suspect some of that is just crass politics at it's worst.

All this without my caps lock key- perhaps no one will think what I say is important?

[Bruce Webb]

Yes the Democrats were the Party of Southern Segregation and Republicans the Party of Lincoln. But the question is where did those politicians wash up. Yes Strom Thurmond was a Democrat, and so was Phil Gramm, (until he got kicked out of the Democratic Caucus for openly spying for the other side). But in the end they both had R after their names.

Look in the years between 1965 and say 1973 just about every virulently anti-civil rights voter in the country decided that on balance they would be happier in the Republican Party than an increasingly diversified and tolerant Democratic Party and deserted en masse. And as then current Democratic racist politicians started retiring they were replaced by Republicans and in the process the Democrats ended up losing the South. As Mehlman admits this was a deliberate strategy, the "Southern Strategy", Republicans saw that the Democratic Party had a solid voting block of white male racists and decided to target them using racially tinged tactics. Tactically it worked brilliantly, how it works out strategically in the middle term is an open question, maybe immigration will be a winner, I think the demographics work against it, but personally I say let the Republican Party keep the racist trash.

Yes Jefferson Davis was a Democrat. So what? His political descendents are now solidly Republican. I understand the importance of history, heck at one point I was a historian, but politics is played out in the now, not in the then.

[hj]

realpc:

Are you really that naive? Is it enough for you just "to see a Black in high position?" Does it not bother you as a liberal that the Black is an Uncle Tom? Or the female equivalent. Haven't you caught onto the reactionary ploy? When there was a "black" vacancy on the Supreme Court they rushed to find the most right wing black Uncle Tom they could and got (Uncle?)Thomas, a jurist of no distinction whatever, and put him there to block any chance of a Black like Marshall getting the seat in the future. And then when the racist GOP wanted more black fronts to deflect criticism of its racism it got two more Uncle Toms for Secretary of State....Powell and (female version) Rice. It is so screamingly obvious, and you don't see it?

[realpc]

"It is so screamingly obvious, and you don't see it?"

Everyone's "truth" is obvious to themselves. We all have different information and experience, so you should not expect your "truth" to be everyone's. That is the mistake of extreme ideologues -- they are too immersed in their own "truth" to see anyone else's.

[realpc]

"politics is played out in the now, not in the then"

That's a big mistake. You can't understand anything without knowing how it evolved.

[anne]

Notice that a mere mention of the ANC, African National Congress, the political coalition and party extending back generations and led for decades by Nelson Mandela and responsible for freeing 90% of the population of South Africa from Apartheid with the most remarkable restraint and probity and finally even sympathy and with truth reconciliation for those who were responsible for Apartheid, notice that a mention of the democracy bringing ANC leads to such an attack on Paul Krugman:

"Krugman approves the killing of innocent people from Leviathan Slayer

Here's Paul Krugman defending the African National Congress"

I have not bothered to click on and read whatever tripe this trackback site represents.

[anne]

Interestingly, the African National Congress included blacks and whites and those called "coloreds" who were Indian immigrants to South Africa such as the family of Gandhi. The ANC ranged from revolutionaries to pacificists to communists to capitalists to the secular and clerics, men and women.

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/10/books/gordimer-interview02.html

May 10, 2002

A Vibrant Battler of Apartheid Keeps Her Vibrancy
By RACHEL L. SWARNS

JOHANNESBURG

Behind the wooden gate, past the skittering dog, inside the rambling old house, plastered on the door of Nadine Gordimer's office is an African National Congress poster that proclaims, ''Freedom Now!''

The poster may raise an eyebrow. Just last year, it seemed that some black leaders of the governing African National Congress and Ms. Gordimer, the pre-eminent author and white anti-apartheid activist, had fallen out after local officials deemed one of her books racist and tried to ban it from high schools.

The officials backtracked after a furious outcry, but the poster still prompts the question: has Ms. Gordimer wavered in her longstanding support for the African National Congress?

To raise the question is to risk the wrath of Ms. Gordimer, a Nobel laureate who is slight but imposing with her silver hair and fierce eyes. ''This is so distressing and so annoying,'' she snapped. ''The A.N.C. did nothing to Nadine Gordimer.''

With that, she ticked off a few things she would like the world to know.

One: This was not some tragic tale of a white supporter of the struggle being betrayed by black allies. The members of the local panel that proposed banning her book were white, not black.

Two: The nation's minister of education called her immediately to say the idea of banning the book, ''July's People,'' was ludicrous and would never happen under an A.N.C. government.

Three: Nadine Gordimer is still a loyal member of the African National Congress, a supporter of President Thabo Mbeki and an optimist about South Africa and its future, eight years after the end of apartheid.

''People like myself, who identify with the freedom struggle, we see so many good changes that have occurred, so many true signs of freedom,'' Ms. Gordimer said in an interview this week. ''It's certainly not the majority of whites who feel pessimistic about the future here; there are many people who feel as I do.''

She continued: ''The laws have changed; this is a tremendous thing in itself. A large amount of people who never had running water now have it. The same thing applies to electrification. Many people take this for granted, but black South Africans never had these things available to them during the apartheid era.''

At a time when many whites grumble openly about their anxieties under black rule, Ms. Gordimer offers a striking counterpoint. In her sprawling house, with its crowded bookshelves, she is still celebrating South Africa's hard-fought freedom, even as she acknowledges the difficulties and challenges ahead.

Some whites roll their eyes at her talk. They dismiss her as a hopeless romantic, an idealist who has closed her ears to the everyday concerns of whites, who make up about 13 percent of the population.

Ms. Gordimer, who at 78 seems tough as nails, says she is no dreamer. She has watched the giddy euphoria fade in the years since Nelson Mandela was elected the first black president in 1994. She hears the complaints from prominent white politicians about crime and affirmative action. She has her own worries about unemployment, AIDS and corruption.

But it should not be forgotten, she emphasizes, that blacks and whites are now treated equally under the law, or that the A.N.C. government brought houses to more than a million poor blacks for the first time.

''I'm a realistic optimist,'' said Ms. Gordimer, who spoke to a reporter in a series of interviews, once at her home several months ago and then again this week. ''I know how huge the problems are. I know the big mistakes that have been made. But the problems are being tackled. They cannot be solved in seven or eight years. What is seven years?''

Ms. Gordiner is one of South Africa's literary giants....

[anne]

http://search.nytimes.com/books/98/02/01/home/gordimer-july.html

June 7, 1981

South Africa After Revolution
By ANNE TYLER

JULY'S PEOPLE
By Nadine Gordimer.

BAM and Maureen Smales, middle-class white liberals from Johannesburg, South Africa, begin their day with a tea tray carried in by their black manservant, July. However, there's something wrong here. The tea is served in two cheap glass cups, along with a jaggedly opened tin of milk. The door at which July knocks is only an aperture in the thick mud wall of an African hut.

The Smales are people who have overstayed. Extensions of Nadine Gordimer's earlier characters - those uneasy, conscience-stricken whites attempting to come to terms with the ambiguities of South African life - they find themselves face to face with the ultimate: total revolution. The time is the very near future, when rioting blacks have taken over the country. Airports are being bombed, and whites cannot leave. Bam and Maureen, with their three young children, have no choice but to flee to July's isolated village.

On a superficial level, this is a wonderful adventure story. It has the ingenuity and suspense of ''Robinson Crusoe,'' the wry twists of ''The Admirable Crichton.'' The Smales, whose hastily packed baggage includes a gadget for removing dry cleaners' tags without damaging the fingernails, are forced to adapt to a life of weed gathering and mealie cooking, of shivering in a rainstorm while the hut walls grow sodden and flying cockroaches zip through the dark. The clay vessels of the sort that Maureen used to collect as ornaments are now her kitchen utensils. In this village that they once imagined visiting on holiday - combining itwith a shooting trip and bringing along the portable fridge - Maureen scrubs her menstrual rags in the river, and the Smales children develop the hacking night cough that ''one always hears from black children'' and Bam goes on a bloody, gruesome hunt for warthogs to feed the family: ''All the old games, the titillation with killingand-not-killing, the honour of shooting only on the wing, the pretence of hide-and-seek invented to make killing a pleasure, were in another kind of childhood he had been living in to the age of forty, back there.''

Back there. The phrase comes to refer to more than a geographical area. It calls to mind an entire style of behavior that now seems, to us and to the Smaleses, ludicrous and pathetic. Back there, they used to speak of leaving the country and settling elsewhere, perhaps in Canada, but ''they had stayed; and told each other and everyone else that this and nowhere else was home, while knowing ... the reason had become they couldn't get their money out.'' Back there, they were kind to their servant July, supplying him with two uniforms and giving him Wednesdays and alternate Sundays off, but not offering him a sitting room: ''Since he would be the only servant in the suburb with such a privilege, there would be too many friends in and out the backyard, too much noise.''

On a deeper level, of course, ''July's People'' is much more than another survival story; and this level succeeds so extraordinarily because of the Smaleses' liberalism. It would have been too easy to make them racists, who finally see the light while roughing it with the natives. Instead, they are from the outset sensitive, politically aware, genuinely concerned with the welfare of black South Africans. How ironic, then, is their discovery that even in the underbrush, reactionaries exist! And how much subtler and more complicated is the hostility that develops between Maureen and July! ...

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/02/01/home/gordimer-daughter.html

August 19, 1979

Heroism in South Africa
By ANTHONY SAMPSON

BURGER'S DAUGHTER
By Nadine Gordimer.

"It's strange to live in a country where there are still heroes.'' The words seem to echo through this book, which is concerned above all with the nature of commitment and heroism in South Africa. But it is not about romantic hero-worship; it is about the problems, the humanity, the ruthlessness and the cost of political involvement, all against a background of love, squalor or boredom.

It is Miss Gordimer's most political and most moving novel, going to the heart of the racial conflict in South Africa. But it does not deal publicly with riots, tortures or crusades: Its politics come out of its characters, as part of the wholeness of lives that cannot evade them.

The hero of the book, whom we never meet, is Lionel Burger, a respected Afrikaner doctor who joined the Communist Party, worked for the revolution, was jailed and died in prison; and the story is that of his daughter Rosa, brought up under her father's spell, waiting outside prisons and living among dedicated Communists, yet trying to escape, alone, after her father's death, from a commitment that was all-enveloping.

For Burger was the kind of South African Communist who was drawn to the party by his humanity and determination to share the cause of the blacks; and in his house blacks and whites came together with a sense of common hope and faith in the future, defying the apartheid surrounding them. With his Afrikaner ancestry and his political understanding, Burger was a man who, as a compatriot describes him, ''could have been a prime minister if he hadn't been a traitor.'' (His story bears some resemblance to the actual story of Bram Fischer, the distinguished Afrikaner lawyer who likewise became a Communist revolutionary and died in jail.)

What is it like to grow up in the shadow of someone so dedicated and so charismatic and then to seek to become a separate, fulfilled individual? Rosa's answer, as it unfolds, tells us not only about South Africa but about the whole nature of commitment. It was Burger's gift to be able to break through ''the closed circuit of self,'' to give purpose to other people's lives; in his house the real definition of loneliness was to live without social responsibility.

The opening chapters describe vividly the splendors and miseries of that commitment; the passionate concern with the future, the moral certainties, the sense of identification with blackness as a way of perceiving sensual redemption, revealed in the magnetic attraction of the beautiful Marisa Kgosana. But on the other hand, there is the bossy narrowness of other white Communists, the jargon of dogma, the lack of escape and the sheer brutalizing effect of the race conflict. When Rosa sees an old black man senselessly flogging a donkey in Soweto, yet cannot intervene, she realizes suddenly ''I must know somewhere else.'' She makes her bid to escape....

[Bruce Webb]

"That's a big mistake. You can't understand anything without knowing how it evolved."

Um, my last three years of academic training was in the History PhD program at what was then the number 1 rated such program in the country. Just swiveled my head and saw a whole bookshelf stuffed with history books. I get the history part.

But that Lester Maddox or Bull Connor were Democrats is pretty much irrelevant today. Their modern day counterparts would be Republicans and taking their talking points from Rush and Grover.

"Did "you" know that Senator Edward Brooke was a Republican? The first black senator elected since Reconstruction? Huh, huh? Because that just goes to show something!" Yes it does, it goes a long way to explain why Nancy Johnson is in the fight of her political life, the Republican Party moved the line and an increasing number of Northeast Republicans are finding themselves on the other side.

But the fact that the Republicans got some things right fifty years ago at a time when the Democrats were getting a lot of things wrong has very little relevance to political choices today, the balance does just carry forward forever. (Its like Lieberman, he seems to think that being a Freedom Rider in 1964 entitles him to unlimited Joementum, and is hurt that anyone is asking what he has done for them lately.)

[anne]

Interestingly, Brad DeLong benignly mentioned the African National Congress only a day or so ago and immediately was gone after for the mention. I thought how odd, that the mention included a litany of ANC wrongs that would have taken me days to compile if they had any validity to begin with. How odd, but there was the case against the ANC in a moment. We are swept by our ideologies in remarkable ways.

[hj]

realpc:

Your "truth". I would say, is quite simply naivete. There is a difference between truth and naivete.

[nyuk]

Is the ANC still considered a "terrorist" organization?

[Esq.]

"Is the ANC still considered a "terrorist" organization?"

No. It won and gets to write the history books. [snark]

[nyuk]

Better them than Cheney.

If I had believed Cheney, by now I would be wondering just how long "last throes" can continue and still be considered "last throes". But I never believed the lying liar in the first place.

[Movie Guy]

Bruce Webb - "Look in the years between 1965 and say 1973 just about every virulently anti-civil rights voter in the country decided that on balance they would be happier in the Republican Party than an increasingly diversified and tolerant Democratic Party and deserted en masse."

Have you ever reviewed this map series?

Dave Leip's Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections (and Senate, Governor)

I don't necessarily agree with your assertion. It depended on the level of the elected office.

The big shift to the Republican Party didn't occur until much later in my opinion.

Have any data?

[Movie Guy]

Bruce Webb - "But that Lester Maddox or Bull Connor were Democrats is pretty much irrelevant today. Their modern day counterparts would be Republicans and taking their talking points from Rush and Grover."

You base this conclusion on what?

Frankly, that is not my observation in the 8 southern states where I know a number of elected officials. It's not my observation based on dinners and functions, either. At best, I would call it a draw.

There are plenty of conservatives and moderates still in the ranks of Democrats in the Southeast, including many of the leaders. Some conservative southern Democrats would die before ever voting Republican. And they will tell you that face-to-face. Many times in the course one evening.

[Movie Guy]

many times in the course of one evening.

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/04/06/reviews/970406.6wren.html

April 6, 1997

A Nation Saved
By CHRISTOPHER S. WREN

Anatomy of a Miracle
The End of Apartheid and the Birth of the New South Africa
By Patti Waldmeir

Somewhere between the newspaper headlines and the footnoted reflections of scholars lies a middle ground occupied by journalists who, having chased the breaking story on deadline, go back to explore the larger significance of what they had neither time nor space to ponder in writing history's first draft. A fine new example is ''Anatomy of a Miracle: The End of Apartheid and the Birth of the New South Africa, by Patti Waldmeir, a Detroit-born correspondent for the Financial Times of London who headed its Johannesburg bureau from 1989 to 1995.

Ms Waldmeir watched the unfolding of what she admits is ''an implausible tale of collective liberation'' of blacks and white alike, encompassing Nelson Mandela's release from prison on Feb. 11, 1990 and the roller-coaster negotiations that delivered the country intact to multi-racial democracy four years later. Virtually every page of her deft narrative sparkles with insights that ring true to this reviewer, whose own tour in South Africa overlapped with hers for three years.

Exploiting the luxury of hindsight, Ms. Waldmeir went back and interviewed just about everyone worth quoting, from the protagonists Nelson Mandela and F.W. de Klerk down to inmates and guards on Robben Island, the desolate prison colony where Mr. Mandel began his 27 and a half years of imprisonment by breaking rocks and fetching seaweed. She also made room for ordinary people like Sipho Maduna, a young rebel from Katlehong township who displayed no malice towards some white cops who had tied him up in a canvas sack and tossed him into a river. Mr. Maduna didn't need revenge, he explained, because the whites admitted that they were wrong by giving up power. ''We are all free,'' he tells the author.

What saved South Africa was good will on both sides of apartheid's divide, and a mutual desire to avoid the bloodbath that seemed the country's tragic destiny. ''Afrikaners might have fought to keep Africa at bay until well into the new milennium, and left the new black rulers to inherit a wasteland,'' Ms. Waldmeir writes. ''Africans might have merely changed the complexion of South African oppression, replacing white hegemony with black domination.'' That neither happened is due in large measure to Nelson Mandela and F.W. de Klerk, who didn't much like each other but subsumed their differences to cooperate, however warily, for the nation's survival.

Even in captivity, Mandela set the agenda, mastering Afrikaans and making his prison comrades learn the language of the oppressor too. To wage war, Mr. Mandela told his fellow inmate, Mac Maharaj, ''you must understand the mind of the opposing commander. You can never outmaneuver him unless you understand him, and you can't understand him unless you understand his literature and his language.'' He engaged his captors in unprecedented dialogue, comparing the liberation struggle of the African National Congress to the Boers' own resistance to colonial British rule, and almost convinced them.

But Mr. Mandela needed Mr. de Klerk to pull off the transformation. ''Though apartheid was in crisis when he became president, the state was not; the monolith was not about to crumble,'' Ms. Waldmeir says. ''And though the foreign loan embargo choked off economic growth, South Africa could have kept on getting slowly poorer for years to come.

Yet the Afrikaners came to understand that they could no longer afford apartheid. It took black labor to grow the economy, and as blacks filled jobs in mines and factories, they provided muscle for the trade unions that formed the core of active resistance to apartheid. Collective bargaining with white businesses provided the model for subsequent resolution of political antagonisms. Given the choice of living poor and racially pure or prosperous but racially mixed, Ms. Waldmeir says, ''Afrikaners decided they were simply not willing to pay the price of their prejudices.''

South Africa's last white President wanted to preserve power for the country's Afrikaner minority, not surrender it to the black majority. But in the end, Ms. Waldmeir writes, ''he traded power for influence, and gave his heart and soul to the democratic revolution which had so terrified his forebears. A man of less wit and boldness -- or more fanaticism -- could never have done the same.''

Seven months before Mr. Mandela's dramatic release, President P.W. Botha, ''the symbol of all that was brutal in Afrikanerdom,'' invited his prisoner to tea. They got along so well that Mr. Mandela told his astounded colleagues later,''I came out feeling that I had met a creative, warm head of state who treated me with all the respect and dignity I could expect.'' ...

[anne]

Political movements are complex and riven with cross-currents, but the African National Congress represented as inspiring a democratic movement as the last century experienced, and in Nelson Mandela a visionary leader on the level of a Gandhi or a Martin Luther King.

[Blissex]

«Are you really that naive? Is it enough for you just "to see a Black in high position?" Does it not bother you as a liberal that the Black is an Uncle Tom? Or the female equivalent.»

It seems to be very cruel and horrible and undeserved to paint Powell and Rice as ''Uncle Tom''s. Sure, they are tokens, but they are are figures of power in their own right, and Democratic presidents have engaged in tokenism too.

My impression is that the contemporary Republican party is not the party of racism like the southern Democrats were; but it is rather a party that does not support racism as such, but welcomes racist votes as they help staying in power to carry on with their agenda, which as someone said, is not racist, it is classist (pro-rich, not pro-white, as such).