U.S. Role in South Africa?

As a people and as a government we seem to grow less able to resist the temptation to interfere to various degrees in the internal politics and government of any and every nation in the world.

Where once the sun never set on the British Empire, it now shines every hour of the day on some country where Uncle Busybody or his citizens are trying to get the people there to run things to our satisfaction. Currently, still affected by our guilt over slavery and Jim Crowism, we find it fashionable to persecute the Union of South Africa.

While the Calvinist Boers just may not be the sweetest and most likable of all peoples, they have for a longer period than the life of the U.S. government done a fantastic job of making the deserts bloom and the earth yield its riches. They have built the one nation south of the Sahara on a level with the civilized countries of Europe, Asia and the Americas.

Over three centuries they made the single mistake of not eliminating or exiling from the land (as we did here) the aboriginal Pygmies and Zulus whom they first conquered.

Their enslavement, first real and later economic, of the vanquished comes back to haunt them as in the latter half of the 20th Century their boundless prosperity has attracted hordes of workers from every disadvantaged nation within 3,000 miles.

Had the pioneers of the Transvaal limited immigrants to those whom they were willing to admit to their schools, churches and families, they would have no problem today.

Now we watch, applauding or mourning, the transition of power from white to black where Bishop Desmond Tutu, his sympathizers and the African National Congress will give us a people’s democracy ruled by the substantial black majority until will arise the first of a long series of black dictators.

Within a very few years will come the end of South Africa’s exports of diamonds, gold, rare metals and goods, which provide today’s foreign exchange. That country can then join its continental neighbors in living on welfare from either the U.S.A. or the U.S.S.R. It is both regrettable and puzzling why the American public clamors and beats its drum for the development of another foreign welfare client.

JOHN D. ANDREWS

Palos Verdes Peninsula