Ronald Reagan, the Great Liberator

Then there's the matter of the Reagan Administration's policy toward South Africa. Throughout the 1980s the Reagan Administration remained a stalwart supporter of the apartheid regime. Let's listen to Father Michael Lapsley, a South African activist who lost an eye and his hands and was burned severely by a letter bomb planted by the white South African government in 1990:

I think it’s good to think about what South Africa was like inside the country as well as what was happening in the front line states at that time. During those years, there were two states of emergency. Vast numbers of people were imprisoned. It was during those years, and this is a salient point for people this country this time that torture became normative. It became a principle weapon used by the Apartheid regime against people, particularly against black children during that period. It was also a period where there were a vast number of people on death row in South Africa. Every Thursday, up to seven people at a time were executed, but it was also a time when the Apartheid regime was in the rampage in the Front Line States attacking Botswana, Lesotho, Mozambique and Zimbabwe. There were a number of massacres of refugees that took place. It was also a time of civil war in Angola. And it was the Reagan administration that was supporting the Unita bandits in Angola and fomenting war. And it was clear to the people of South Africa during those years, that whilst there were a vast number of ordinary people in the United States, particularly African-Americans who stood with us, the Reagan administration was on the side of Apartheid. It was both Reagan and Thatcher who were giving succor to the Apartheid regime and in a sense prolonging our struggle. More people had to die in South Africa because of the support that came from western governments, particularly from Washington and London at that period.

Why the support for South Africa? Because Reagan and those in his administration thought that Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress were communists. And loyalty to governments that allied with us against the communist threat, even if they were dictatorships guilty of grotesque human rights violations, was the cornerstone of Reagan's foreign policy. As Reagan told Dan Rather in an interview: "Can we abandon a country that has stood by us in every war we’ve fought, a country that’s strategically essential to the free world?" [This statement is true - over 300,000 South Africans fought with the Allies in World War II, for example. But South Africa's participation in WWII occurred over the strident objections of the Afrikaner-based National Party, which advocated neutrality. It was the National Party that dominated South African politics from the 1950s on, formalizing the system of Apartheid and withdrawing from the British Commonwealth in 1961 over the race issue.]

Opposition to the Apartheid regime grew in the United States during Reagan's time as president. When Desmond Bishop, fresh from winning the Nobel Peace Prize, visited the United States in 1984, he blasted the Reagan Administration's policies as "immoral, evil, and totally un-Christian." Black activists and white liberal allies began pushing for the United States to join an international embargo against South Africa. In 1986, after South Africa declared martial law in order to suppress anti-apartheid protests, the U.S. Congress voted overwhelmingly to impose sanctions. And Ronald Reagan? He vetoed the bill. Congress overwhelmingly overrode the veto. The sanctions put enormous economic pressure on the government of South Africa. Four years later Nelson Mandela was released from prison, and in 1994 the Apartheid government was removed in peaceful, democratic elections - elections that occurred perhaps a few years and many thousands of deaths and injuries later than they would have without the efforts of Ronald Reagan.