Apologists Without Remorse

Apologists Without Remorse: Indeed, like the leftists who praised the Soviet Union, conservatives did not just defend South Africa, they often sympathized with it. In their admiration of the Soviet Union, leftists who were entranced by notions of equality refused to recognize the horrors of the Gulag. That was bad enough. And yet, the South African regime was even more morally odious, more akin in spirit to the Nazi dictatorship than the Bolshevik one. Apartheid was the first cousin of Nazism. In both the South African and Nazi regimes, an entire class of people was singled out for persecution and degradation solely on the basis of arbitrary racial categories. Remarkably, almost no attention has been devoted to the history of the conservative defense of South Africa. The silence must end. Now that apartheid has crumbled, American conservatives have an obligation to confront their shameful complicity with white-ruled South Africa.