Listening to the silent majority

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‘The Soviets want Southern Africa,’ warned Richard Nixon in his amazing book, The Real War. He further warned that the ussr continued to succeed in its penetration of Africa since its strategic policy to encircle the West and cut off its industrialized centres from resources

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without which it cannot survive. One single jet aircraft requires more than 3 600 pounds of chrome. Perhaps, us long-term vulnerability in chrome is greater than in petroleum. The us imports 92 percent of its chrome. Two principal us sources for chrome are South Africa (33 percent) and the ussr (25 percent). Of the world's known reserves of chromium, 96 percent are in South Africa and Zimbabwe. Nixon stated, ‘The Soviet Union seldom acts without purpose, and its purposes are always strategic, never moral.’ With Mikhail Gorbachev at the helm in the Kremlin, the communist script for influence and power around the globe might have undergone a shift in tone and setting, but the basic goal of helping to establish further one-party Marxist states has not changed. Soviet diplomacy and public relations exercises are always geared towards discovering new dupes, who will fall into their traps and naïvely assume that communist purposes are perfectly honourable and acceptable. Hordes of Africans, and some white Africans as well, continue to fall into this trap.

Richard Nixon underlined that South Africa is Africa's leading economic power. ‘The Republic possesses a tenth of the world's asbestos, three fourths of the world's chromic ore, more than half of its platinum-group metals, half of its gold, a third of its manganese ore, a fifth of its uranium, and a third of its diamonds: a mineral treasure of almost incalculable strategic and economic importance,’ the former President wrote. ‘South Africa alone produces 40 percent of Africa's industrial production and 25 percent of all of Africa's agricultural production.’ Nixon further warned that the Soviets already controlled the ports of Mozambique and Angola flanking the Cape of Good Hope. After all, 70 percent of the strategic materials and 80 percent of the oil needed by Western Europe and the nato powers pass the sea lanes around South Africa.

Richard Nixon underlined that the ussr would like to precipitate a military confrontation and a race war in South Africa. He spoke of ‘the new slavery’ imposed by Soviet imperialism, the essence of which is, that Soviets are not to liberate Africa, but are there to impose minority-rule systems through local puppets that dominate, control, and exploit. The Soviets are aiming at replacing the former white supremacy by a new white supremacy: Marxism-Leninism as directed from the Kremlin. ‘White colonial rule,’ Nixon wrote, ‘is white colonial rule, whether exercised from London or from Moscow.’ I wished some South African

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academics, including those who study Soviet-inspired systems, would take Nixon to heart. Gorbachev did change the tune, but not the communist theme. Please remember that.