By Paul Gottfried, Editor in chief, Chronicles, October 2025
Paul Gottfried is editor in chief of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture. He is also the Raffensperger Professor of Humanities Emeritus at Elizabethtown College, where he taught for 25 years, a Guggenheim recipient, and a Yale Ph.D. He is the author of 14 books, most recently Antifascism: The Course of a Crusade and Revisions and Dissents.
A commentary by Will Tanner in Tablet published last year (“Back in the USSA”) deals exhaustively with the multiple iniquities of the postapartheid South African government. Tanner’s remarks leave no doubt that this black majority regime has unleashed considerable mischief, seen particularly in a spoils system run by the ruling class that preys on the population, seizes the farmland and homes of the Afrikaners, and tolerates random acts of murder and mayhem. Tanner’s examination of this abhorrent regime, whose outrages the Western media have predictably ignored while celebrating South Africa’s victory over white racism, deserves our praise. And I am giving Tanner’s timely revelations due praise, except for this passage:
The economic aspect of South Africa’s decline is primarily a result of its postapartheid obsession with extending the country’s cursed racial logic, this time in the name of justice and equity.
This identification of black South African tyranny with “the country’s cursed racial logic” rests on a fallacy. It is one driven by political correctness among journalists and historians on both the establishment right and left. The disorder and violence that has come from black majority rule in South Africa are entirely consistent with black rule elsewhere, including in American cities, where black majority governments have done pitifully little to control crime and graft and have routinely engaged in antiwhite rhetoric. ….
