Plain View
'PROGRESS would be rapid,' Lord Montgomery r told Sunday Times readers this week in his Plain View of Apartheid, 'if the racial problem could be removed from the party political arena.' .lord Montgomery is for once absolutely right; as an illustration, he might have pointed to the rapid progress the Nazis were able to achieve in removing the grounds for anti-Semitism in Ger- many when they removed the Jews from the party political arena by way of the gas chambers; given a little more time and there would have been no Jews to be anti-Semitic about. This solution is not available to the South African Government, which needs the native population for cheap labour; but, instead, it can try to cow the Africans by an intensification of the methods traditionally used by the Boer, the sjambok and the lock-up; coupled with weapons which a later generation in South Africa has devised, Treason Trial and exile; and then get Lord Montgomery to tell them that if they put up with this in silence, things will be much more pleasant for them.
It is barely credible that even Lord Mont- gomery, whose wonderful self-satisfaction, un- disturbed by intimations of humility, 'Bernard Levin discusses on another page, should be taken in by the South African Government's pretence that full apartheid woOld 'not be unjust to the native population.' But the moral issue does not really concern Lord Montgomery : he looks at Dr. Verwoerd's campaign, as he himself admits, though the eyes of a general watching a. colleague engaged in a struggle against an enemy force—the force, presumably, of African nationalism. •What he does not realise (nor do the leaders of the South African Government) is that this force is bound in the long run to be too strong for them. It may for a time be contained; it cannot be resisted. Talk about removing the racial problem from the party political arena is madness; for With Africans gradually taking over control throughout their
continent, thz attempt to assert white supremacy in any part of it must eventually breed one of the bloodiest revolutions in history.
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