Cold Eyeball to Cold Eyeball on Southern Africa

For a certain type of personality, realism can be as heady a drug as that more familiar stimulant, idealism. To pursue the metaphor cautiously, both potions can be beneficial when taken in moderation. But I am afraid that my valued friend and colleague Jim Burnham, whose cold-eyed realism about world affairs is surely one of the major assets of the American Right, overindulged in his column in the July 23 issue of NR.

Splicing the recent riots in Soweto and other black townships of South Africa to Secretary Kissinger’s Lusaka policy statement (which preceded them by nearly two months), Burnham concludes that “The West is ready, to abandon” Rhodesia and South Africa, and thereby permit “the decolonizing wave to complete its surge through to the Cape.” The whites of southern Africa may resist a while longer, but basically they are through.

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William A. Rusher

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For a certain type of personality, realism can be as heady a drug as that more familiar stimulant, idealism. To pursue the metaphor cautiously, both potions can be beneficial when taken in moderation. But I am afraid that my valued friend and colleague Jim Burnham, whose cold-eyed realism about world affairs is surely one of the major assets of the American Right, overindulged in his column in the July 23 issue of NR.

Splicing the recent riots in Soweto and other black townships of South Africa to Secretary Kissinger’s Lusaka policy statement (which preceded them by nearly two months), Burnham concludes that “The West is ready, to abandon” Rhodesia and South Africa, and thereby permit “the decolonizing wave to complete its surge through to the Cape.” The whites of southern Africa may resist a while longer, but basically they are through.