8.
suasion and friendship and the sort of Midas touch of Reaganto persuade Afrikaners to turn over the reins of government to these people they've been heaping abuse upon for hundreds of years? If I were an Afrikaner I wouldn't do that, because that's just simple. People don't give away power like that. It's going to take two elements. Just as it did in Zimbabwe, it's going to take some amount of fighting, and it's going to take some severe pressure from the Western powers to let South Africa know that they have no base of support in the West, so that they would serve themselves best to go to the table and negotiate in good faith, and for the best deal that can be gotten. I think in that way you limit the bloodshed in the final analysis.
If the sanctions had been lifted in Zimbabwe and the war had gone on, the whole infrastructure of that society might have been destroyed, and there would have been infinitely more bloodshed than there was. But to say that the situation in South Africa can be peacefully resolved is to not look at the facts of history. It's just ludicrous to me, which leads me to believe that the people in the administration are not acting in good faith, that they're not telling us the truth. I don't, in my own heart, believe that they really want change in South Africa. Obviously they think more about mineral rights than they think about human rights. I think they feel more comfortable with a government in white hands. It is a culture and a value system that they know. They are concerned about the Cape route, that tip of land that sits astride important sea lanes to the United States. There's talk about South Africa as part of some kind of South Atlantic treaty organization with direct ties to the Argentinas and the Brazils of the world as well as to the NATO powers. And I believe that the thinking here is to ram that down the throats of the gullible and go with it as far as you can. I don't know what more to say about that, except that it's very much related to our policy in Pakistan and our policy in other parts of the world where we still find ourselves supporting tyrannical and oppressive regimes with our dollars and our reputation.
I guess in ending, the real upshot here is that Americans generally know less about what America is about in the world than do other people in the world who are touched by American foreign policy. The sad thing about traveling in the world is to find out how woefully ignorant we are. And the saddest thing about it is that Americans are so arrogant in their superiority. Hell, this is the United States, the greatest country in the world! And the problem with being the greatest is that those less great always know more about you than you know about them, because you never deign to look down with real examination. So Americans don't speak anything but English. The U.S. is the most language-ignorant country in the world. We don't know much about anything west of Los Angeles or east of Washington. We're closed in by these oceans. Mexico is a place where you can't drink the water, and Africa's a place where Tarzan still reigns. The sad thing about it is that out of t is sort of socialization process, our foreign policy is produced, because wevre all captives of that. You can't read anything about anyplace else in the world in the paper. Thirty million children under the age of five starved to death last year, but nobody knows that. But we all know that Prince Charles fell off the horse twice. Nowthe question is, what is the foreign policy consequence of that further down the road? The consequence is that we produce people who take the reigns of government with blinders on, cultural blinders,