Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
POD: Canadian conservatives' dirty history as supporters of apartheid
136 Plays3 years ago
The recent deaths of both Ted Byfield and Desmond Tutu has brought to light some historical amnesia on just who exactly supported apartheid South Africa and who fought against it. Michael Bueckert joins us to discuss the the many conservative journalists, politicians and activists who supported apartheid.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Guest Introduction
00:00:00
Speaker
Hey folks, Duncan Kinney here to say that the Progress Report is a proud member of the Harbinger Media Network, and a part of the network that I want to highlight is the latest from our friends at the Alberta Advantage, where they dive into the legacy of Roy Romanow, the NDP premier of Saskatchewan for a whole last decade between 1991 and 2001.
00:00:17
Speaker
Also, if you like what we do with the progress report, please support us. There is a link in the show notes, or you can just go to theprogressreport.ca slash patrons, put in your character card and donate five, 10, $15 a month, whatever you can afford. It really does mean a lot to us. Now onto the show.
00:00:45
Speaker
Friends and enemies, welcome to the Progress Report. I am your host Duncan Kinney, recording today here in Amiscotihuahua Sky again, otherwise known as Edmonton, Alberta, here in Treaty Six territory on the beautiful banks of the Cassis-Cassau, Wannasippie, or the North Saskatchewan River, which of course is currently
00:01:01
Speaker
frozen solid. Well, not all the way through, but the top at least. Joining us today from Montreal is Michael Bewkert. Michael is a vice president with Canadians for Peace and Justice in the Middle East, as well as a man with a PhD in sociology from Carleton University. And Michael, today you actually get to use your PhD in a non-academic setting. How do you feel about that? Well, that is quite a treat. I really appreciate you having me on.
COVID-19 and Daily Life Under Curfew
00:01:26
Speaker
So yeah, we're having, we have Michael on today because today we are talking about how the conservative movement in Canada supported apartheid South Africa. That is the apartheid state of South Africa. But before we get into that, Michael, how are you doing? Have you managed to dodge Omicron? It seems like this particular wave is incredibly ubiquitous and like more people I know and more people in my orbit are getting
00:01:53
Speaker
a hit with it, is that the same for you? I've been pretty good. I haven't been sick and I know of some people who have, but it hasn't hit home that hard for me yet.
00:02:05
Speaker
In Montreal, the government does have pretty intense restrictions. We're back under our curfew and bars and things are closed down again. So we're sort of living like we were a year ago to an extent. But yeah, in spite of that, I do hear people getting sick. So it does seem like it's definitely more transmissible and we're seeing that.
00:02:27
Speaker
Quebec seems to love this curfew thing as a COVID restriction. I don't know if any other province has really jumped on it the way Quebec has. I don't really know what it does to stop the spread of COVID. I don't think there's any evidence that it does anything, but it's certainly quieter out in the evening. That's not too bad. I got to go home to Saskatoon for the first time in two years to see my family.
00:02:48
Speaker
And I think they have the least restrictions in the country here or around there. So, and then, and then I got back to Montreal just as they were putting the curfew in two hours before New Year's Eve. So it's been weird. It's been pretty weird. Yeah. Yeah. You can say that it's, it does feel like two years ago.
Contrasting Desmond Tutu and Conservative Support for Apartheid
00:03:05
Speaker
replay it again but enough fucking covid omicron doom chatter the reason we're here today talking about conservative support for apartheid set south africa is because over the holiday we saw the deaths of both um ted bifield and
00:03:23
Speaker
just a few days later, archbishop Desmond Tutu. And, you know, honestly, putting those two people in the same sentence hurts because the head bifield was, you know, a putrid, hateful piece of shit. One of the worst people that Alberta has ever produced.
00:03:40
Speaker
And if you don't know, he was a journalist and the publisher of a variety of hateful rags. He called residential schools a genocide myth. He constantly fomented hatred against queer folks. And he was a proud and long-time supporter of the apartheid state of South Africa. He's also essentially one of the key figures in the formation of the Reform Party, which eventually became the Conservative Party of Canada. And yeah, just an all-around piece of shit and the world is a better off place with him dead. But then a few days later,
00:04:06
Speaker
there was the death of someone that was actually like sad and not something to be celebrated, and that was the death of Desmond Tutu. Desmond Tutu was of course the Archbishop of Johannesburg, and he was a fierce opponent of apartheid South Africa. He was an instrumental figure in eventually bringing the regime down. And before we get into the podcasts, Michael, do you have any favorite memories of Desmond Tutu? I know you've studied kind of
00:04:31
Speaker
Uh, you know, the movement, uh, against apartheid South Africa quite deeply as part of your PhD, but like, is there any kind of Desmond Tutu memory you want to highlight? Well, I, I think that, yeah, Desmond Tutu was such a prominent moral voice, uh, for the anti apartheid movement. And it really is, uh, sad to see him go. I do want to maybe.
00:04:54
Speaker
just give a shout out to some of the work he's been doing since the fall of apartheid. He's sort of kept up his energy and has focused it elsewhere. He's been campaigning for many different struggles, including indigenous rights in Canada. But he's also been very outspoken about human rights in Palestine, which he said that in some respects, the situation facing Palestinians is worse than under apartheid in South Africa. He even wrote an article in 2014
00:05:24
Speaker
urging people to support the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement, urging people to basically take up the same non-violent strategies that were used in the struggle against apartheid in South Africa and redeploy them and use them to bring freedom for Palestinians as well. So that's a part of his legacy that has moved me a lot. And you're not likely to have seen any of the obituaries in the Globe and Mail or National Post or elsewhere.
00:05:52
Speaker
So I did want to bring that to people's attention. He was a very important voice.
00:05:58
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, and some of the hardcore Zionists, pro-Israel types were actually on their hind legs calling Desmond Tutu an anti-Semite after he died, which was just the peak insanity. But I think my favorite Desmond Tutu memory, I have a couple, but one is definitely in 2014 as well, he came out against the oil sands and he stood in solidarity with
00:06:24
Speaker
land offenders and people who are struggling for and fighting for indigenous sovereignty with respect to how their lands are developed. And there was like, who was it? It was some journalist who pulled up the op-ed page of the Calgary Herald in 2014, like the day after or a couple of days after Desmond Tutu kind of very publicly called out the oil sands and the oil sands companies.
00:06:49
Speaker
And it was essentially like four fifths of it was dedicated to blasting Archbishop Desmond Tutu as like out of touch or like didn't know what the hell he was talking about or an idiot. And it's like, fuck, the Calgary fucking Herald is just evil and must be destroyed. That's amazing. That's the same kind of stuff they were saying about him back in the, back in the eighties. Oh, the same things Ted Byfield. I mean, it's hilarious. Yeah. Right. Like, like literally 20, 30 years ago, Ted Byfield will be saying the exact same shit about Desmond Tutu, but, but not about because he said mean things about the oil sands, but because he was standing up against apartheid South Africa.
00:07:19
Speaker
And am I correct in remembering that that 2014 article or whenever it was, it was sort of saying, you know, how dare you criticize the oil sands or the tar sands when the, you know, look at the resource industry in South Africa, why doesn't he criticize that? Suggesting that this man who dedicated his life to justice in South Africa should really criticize, you know, his own backyard.
00:07:44
Speaker
The classic, do you know South Africa has problems, Desmond Tutu? How dare you? Yeah, exactly. Amazing. A classic.
Tutu's Activism and Collaborations
00:07:51
Speaker
My other favorite Desmond Tutu quote is, I pulled this up after his death. It's a quote from a book, The Spirit of Freedom, South African Leaders on Religion and Politics, published by the University of California Press in 1996. They have a chapter in this book,
00:08:07
Speaker
dedicated to Desmond Tutu, and this quote from him is, quote, I have the greatest admiration for people like Joe Slovo and Chris Haney. I walk arm in arm with them. Communists and Christians have cooperated in the struggle against apartheid, and I see no reason why we cannot work together for justice in the future. And just a bit of context there, Joe Slovo and Chris Haney were not just communists and part of the South African Communist Party, but they were also the leadership of the armed wing of the African National Congress, an organization we'll get into a little bit later.
00:08:35
Speaker
And it's that quote, I think shows why someone like Ted Byfield and his ilk and his supporters would have despised Desmond Tutu.
00:08:47
Speaker
And that's partially why we're doing this podcast is because after Ted Byfield died and then, you know, he had Jason Kenney on his hind legs saying, oh, it's a sad day, a political legend has died, blah, blah, blah. I can't remember his exact quotes, his exact words, doesn't fucking matter. But then a few days later, Desmond Tutu dies and Jason Kenney's back on his hind legs saying, oh yes, a legend has passed, it's very sad, blah, blah, blah. And it's like motherfucker. Like Ted Byfield was pro apartheid South Africa. You cannot,
00:09:15
Speaker
for one day praise Ted Byfield and two days later praise Desmond Tutu. It speaks to an incredible amount of historical amnesia on the part of the conservative movement, and purposeful, right? They would much rather not remember this part of their history, but that is partially why we're here today, Michael. Partially why we're here is to remember these, is to remind these motherfuckers that they were on the wrong side of history, and a lot of them did support apartheid South Africa. Ted Byfield was no aberration.
00:09:42
Speaker
the Conservative Movement here in Canada, especially the Reform Party, were vociferous supporters of the apartheid state of South Africa. And so that is where you come in. What is the title of your PhD thesis and why is it relevant to today's discussion?
Canadian Opposition to Boycott Movements
00:09:57
Speaker
Sure. Yeah, the title of my thesis, which
00:10:00
Speaker
I finished that up actually two years ago today, so that's neat. Boycotts and backlash, Canadian opposition to boycott divestment and sanctions, or BDS movements from South Africa to Israel. And basically I'm looking at the different boycott campaigns that have really taken place in Canada, specifically focused on
00:10:23
Speaker
human rights in South Africa in the 1970s and 80s, and then the current boycott of Israel today, and looking at some of the, you know, specifically the backlash, the organized opposition from domestic lobby groups who are opposed to companies divesting from companies in these that are, you know, complicit in these human rights abuses, but also state-run propaganda campaigns. And South Africa had a
00:10:53
Speaker
poured tons of resources into international propaganda. And so looking at these dynamics, try to get a sense of why did the anti-apartheid movement appear to have been so successful and popular while the current boycott of Israel, though it has many of the same features,
00:11:12
Speaker
is it's much harder to get it going and it struggles to become popular. So I think why it's relevant, as you already said, there's a lot of historical amnesia here, where at least certainly the way that I grew up thinking about, or I guess learning about the history of apartheid and the anti-apartheid movement was sort of that everyone in Canada was on the same side.
00:11:34
Speaker
that clearly apartheid was a hideous moral evil and everyone was on the same side and we forced the end of that and now
00:11:45
Speaker
you know, when someone passed away, Desmond Tutu, everyone across the political spectrum comes out to say how much, you know, their legacy means to them. When, you know, 30 years ago, these people, many of the same people were opponents of people like Desmond Tutu and actually weren't on the same side at all. It was intensely contested in Canada, especially within the Conservatives, the Conservative movement, but not exclusively there.
Apartheid's Racial Segregation and Resistance
00:12:12
Speaker
And so, yeah, I think
00:12:14
Speaker
And further, I think even more disturbing is when some of these people pass away, journalists like Ted Byfield or like Peter Worthington, you see these very glowing tributes and obituaries
00:12:29
Speaker
That's sort of, I mean, Peter Worthington, I think the Globe and Mail said he, he stood up for the little guy or something along those lines. And like, this is one of the biggest boosters of apartheid South Africa and Canada. So yeah, there's, there's this amnesia that, that gives a pass to all of these people who stood on the wrong side. Uh, you know, they were on the wrong side when it actually mattered. So, so yeah, so I'm really glad that we have a chance to talk about this today. Yeah. And let's, let's get into the realities of what you called like a,
00:12:58
Speaker
historical moral evil of apartheid. I mean, I was born in 1983. I'm, you know, nearing my 40s. And I and still I was on the tail end. I was only a kid in 1994, when like Mandela was elected president. Like, you've studied this, right? What were the defining features of apartheid South Africa? What was it like? Why was it this grand moral evil? Right. So I guess to try to sum up apartheid succinctly, it's it was a regime of
00:13:27
Speaker
institutionalized racial discrimination, which was officially launched in 1948, but it built on previous patterns of segregation in the country. And there is different elements to it that I think sometimes get lost. There's petty apartheid.
00:13:43
Speaker
which is things like the segregation of public space. It's the really obvious forms of discrimination that I think is more stereotypical people. Separate roads, separate doors, separate bathrooms. Yeah, separate park benches, that kind of thing.
00:14:00
Speaker
which are the more obvious in your face stuff, but there's this other aspect which was grand apartheid, which was really about the separation of racial groups, these new classifications of racial groups into different social spaces, into different territory even. So it came with severe limitations on freedom of movement, it came with restrictions on the ability to own land in certain areas, it came with restrictions and
00:14:26
Speaker
even the elimination of voting rights for Black South Africans. And there was this sort of strategy of trying to divide society according to these racial groups and to eventually create separate states for different people. So with the homeland system, the South African government created these
00:14:52
Speaker
these homelands or these Bantu stands, which were supposed to be sort of the traditional homeland of these different tribal peoples. And so they divide black South Africans into 10 different racial groups, put them in 10 different territories and say, this is where you belong. You don't belong in white South Africa itself. And that would justify denying them citizenship and other rights. That came with a lot of mass evictions and forcible displacement, moving people out of white areas into these
00:15:20
Speaker
as you know, so-called homelands. And the idea was that these would eventually become nominally independent, almost like countries, like people would think of it as
00:15:31
Speaker
uh, you know, 10 or 12 different nation states, uh, a 12 state solution. Uh, and that this would sort of solve the problem of apartheid for white South Africa because they would have, you know, given up their responsibility for these people who are denied rights by saying they can fulfill their political rights in their own society, in their, in their own homeland. And so it's obviously nobody bought this, almost nobody sort of fell for this. Clearly this was the continuation of apartheid.
00:16:00
Speaker
And it clearly continued to be a vast injustice and the liberation movements were insisting on a goal of one person, one vote in a single country. So this idea never really won anybody over, but that's sort of the historical rejection of apartheid. And because it was white supremacy, white minority rule over a black majority, it was
00:16:27
Speaker
you know, incredibly violent. And there were multiple massacres and uprisings, you know, where, you know, South African police simply murdered many people. In 1960, there was the Sharpville Massacre. And I know you wanted to mention the Soweto uprising. Yeah. So one thing that really, I think,
00:16:50
Speaker
sticks in my mind as a particularly horrifying case was in 1976 in Soweto, tens of thousands of students, Black students were going out in the townships protesting the imposition of Afrikaans instruction in schools of being forced to speak, to be taught in the language of their oppressors. And so they were out, they were protesting and they were met by extreme police violence. I think hundreds of people were killed.
00:17:19
Speaker
The South African police shot directly at children. One of the first people to be hit was Hector Peterson. He was only 12 years old and he died.
Global Impact of the Soweto Uprising
00:17:30
Speaker
There's actually a really great memorial to him and museum in Suedo, the Hector Peterson Memorial, that is worth checking out if you're ever in the country.
00:17:39
Speaker
Yeah, I think that was one of the events along with the Sharp Film Massacre that really got the attention of public opinion around the world. It was broadcast on the news. People finally got to see sort of really how violent apartheid was and kind of galvanize the anti-apartheid movement. Again, for white society, South Africa was basically a democracy, but for everyone else, it operated as a dictatorship.
00:18:10
Speaker
Yeah, and there are two events that really stick out for me, and one is the assassination of Ruth first by the South African police via a letter bomb. They sent a letter bomb to her. She was a professor at a university in Mozambique.
00:18:24
Speaker
and the South African police murdered her via a letter bomb. And Ruth First was an incredibly influential figure in the anti-apartheid movement, just an investigative journalist and an organizer with the Communist Party and then the various other kind of iterations of the Communist Party because it was outlawed, of course. And just the fact that they would go to those ends to murder one of their ideological enemies,
00:18:56
Speaker
I would encourage you to look up Ruth first as a figure. She has written some incredibly influential work on working conditions and social movements in South Africa. And the other case that jumps out to me about the kind of
00:19:09
Speaker
you know, the atrocities and the lowlights of this South African apartheid regime was the case of Wooter Bassen, or as he is sometimes referred to, Dr. Death. This was the man who was in charge of South Africa's chemical and biological warfare program. And there is a behind the bastards episode on Wooter Bassen that was published in January 2020, that goes into incredible detail about this incredibly evil person.
00:19:37
Speaker
I will give a very brief summary now, but essentially this man who was responsible for the South African Chemical and Biological Warfare Program was deeply embedded in these assassination attempts of African National Congress or other anti-apartheid activists abroad. He was deeply involved in murdering hundreds of SWAPO. So SWAPO is the Southwest African People's Organization, which is a black liberation movement.
00:20:03
Speaker
in Namibia and he provided the poison. Essentially what they liked to do to inflict terror was to inject a massive amount of muscle relaxants into captured Swapo captives and they would die because their lungs would eventually collapse. It was an incredibly brutal and gruesome way to slowly kill someone.
00:20:24
Speaker
He developed it's toxic nerve gas. He developed toxic botulinum stuff that could like a leader of this stuff could would kill like a million people he
00:20:36
Speaker
And the reason why, actually, it's related to the Soweto Uprising, post-Soweto Uprising, the South African government tasked Obutabasan to actually start up their chemical and biological warfare program because they realized that they couldn't just go around murdering everyone like they did at the Soweto Uprising and that they needed to be a quieter way of doing it. And one final Dr. Death anecdote, which is that
00:21:02
Speaker
one of the things that started in the 80s was a program that they started that was an attempt to sterilize black women via a fake vaccine.
00:21:16
Speaker
Essentially, they were trying to slowly commit genocide on the black South African population via stealth sterilization. Of course, they quickly realized that they were unable to target only black women with their research, but that didn't stop them. They, of course, continued.
00:21:35
Speaker
But anyways, I encourage you to read that episode or listen to that episode. It's quite gruesome and good. But that's just, again, we could talk about the atrocities of the South African regime for a long ass time, but we're not here to talk about that. We do want to get to Canada eventually. But before we get to Canada, we also need to set the stage for who the players were on the black liberation side.
The ANC's Liberation Movement
00:21:54
Speaker
And so who, Michael, who were the African National Congress and how did it work against the South African apartheid regime? So in brief, the ANC, the African National Congress,
00:22:05
Speaker
really was the main liberation movement coming out of South Africa. It was non-racial, it had an inclusive vision of the future of South Africa, and it involved the participation of people from all backgrounds, defying the segregation of society. It was ultimately banned by the South African government in 1960, forcing the movement to go underground.
00:22:28
Speaker
key figures in this included, of course, Nelson Mandela, many other people. And then shortly after it formed a guerrilla wing to carry out armed struggle. This was called Spear of the Nation. And so it was carrying out armed struggle on the one hand, and it also developed an international, essentially, program of going to other countries and encouraging people around the world to adopt boycotts, to
00:22:57
Speaker
to put for sanctions against the South African government as a way to
00:23:02
Speaker
to isolate the country and to, yeah, to put pressure on the country to help in their struggle against apartheid. So there were lots of other groups that were important, but you know, some of them were more pan-Africanist, liberation groups and others were, you know, the trade union movement was really important. But the ANC, I think, became really the central reference point for the anti-apartheid movement. They came to represent the voice of South Africans themselves and were very
00:23:30
Speaker
You know, even if people didn't necessarily like everything about the AMC, including its close links to communism or whatever, you know, maybe they were uncomfortable with armed struggle, they were still willing to give full support to the AMC and to push for their demands of total economic sanctions.
00:23:51
Speaker
Yeah, and I think it's worth taking a minute to just appreciate the scale and success of this international anti-apartheid solidarity movement, right? It was churches, it was labor movements, it was random people in the street, it was schools, it was elected officials, it was nearly ubiquitous in the 80s. Yeah, it was really incredible. And I think one of the most incredible parts about it is that, yeah, you had mainstream churches like the United Church,
00:24:21
Speaker
You had labor unions, you had mainstream international development organizations like Oxfam Canada or QSO. These groups were giving financial support to the ANC and other regional liberation movements as they were engaged in armed struggle.
00:24:41
Speaker
which is something that I just don't think you'd see. I just don't think you'd see that today. It seems like it's from a completely another era, but that was how important the ANC was as a figure that people were willing to support it, even as it was engaged in acts of sabotage and violence against the apartheid state.
00:25:04
Speaker
And because this movement was so large and successful, the apartheid state of South Africa reacted, right?
00:25:14
Speaker
created this huge international propaganda machine to try and counter the ANC. It largely wasn't very successful and it was very easy to kind of see what was being done, but it doesn't mean that they didn't fucking try. And reading your thesis, I was really struck by the similarities in the propaganda war that the apartheid state of South Africa employed that are so similar to the efforts seen that were either running either in advance of or concurrently
00:25:42
Speaker
with the efforts we saw by Big Tobacco to try and contain the fact that cigarettes cause cancer, or oil companies spinning climate denial, or even the similarities that we're seeing to the oil companies and the ethical oil shit we're seeing throughout Alberta and the war room right now. South Africa was using South Africa Astroturfing.
00:26:06
Speaker
They were funneling money to front groups. They were finding wedge issues and wedge figures within affected communities. They were flooding the zone when it came to op-ed pages and letters to the editor. It really was a modern propaganda war. They were buying up or creating newspapers and magazines and foundations and non-profit. They had created a whole ecosystem. Can you walk us through a brief summary of these various propaganda efforts by the apartheid South Africa and then we'll segue
00:26:34
Speaker
into our Canadian, the Canadian allies that they had. Yeah. I mean, especially after 1960 with the sharp film massacre, the South African government was very concerned about its deteriorating reputation around the world. And so it just poured resources into these international propaganda campaigns. But this really intensified in the 1970s.
00:26:57
Speaker
when you have officials coming up with this plan for what they called a propaganda war, that would be a covert war. And it would be through the creation of different front groups, including magazines, think tanks, NGOs and foundations, which would be funded and directed by South Africa, but without being openly tied to the government. So, for example, well, there's so many examples, but one like the International Freedom Foundation in Washington in the late 80s was a
00:27:25
Speaker
was a front organization for the South African government and had lots of. I love freedom. I want to learn more about their work. And, you know, they had like prominent individuals on their board of directors and they may have not even known that it was a front organization.
00:27:41
Speaker
They might've even been kept from them. The checks cash all the same, I suppose, right? Exactly. It was very stealthy, but in addition to that, there were other black ops which are, I guess, more menacing. The South African government was infiltrating anti-apartheid groups.
00:27:57
Speaker
It was assassinating ANC leaders. You mentioned Ruth first, but also I think of Dulce September in Paris, France. Although we don't know exactly who pulled the trigger on that one. It's pretty clear that she was on the kill list for the South African government and the South African government has been confirmed in violent attacks on offices in other countries in Europe. So that stuff was going on as well as it really treated this, really treated it as a war.
00:28:27
Speaker
on the anti-apartheid movement. And in Canada, locally in the late 1980s, the South African embassy actually operated a front network of phony Friends of South Africa groups, which it financed and operated. It was disguised as a grassroots movement.
00:28:47
Speaker
And as part of that, the NBC actually set up fax machines in the houses of volunteers in different cities, gave them directions for how to write letters to the editor, that kind of thing, other responses for this organization to do. And it also asked volunteers to infiltrate and spy on the anti-apartheid groups in different cities. So this was the kind of stuff the South African government was up to. In addition, that's just the government. That's in addition to all the genuinely grassroots
00:29:16
Speaker
pro-South Africa lobby groups that did form in Canada. I guess most of them were composed of essentially business people, political elites, academics, and that kind of thing, who would sort of speak out, write letters, that kind of thing, have luncheons to learn more about South Africa.
00:29:35
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, I think those people fell into either two camps, right? They were either like international businessmen types who had business interests in South Africa, or they were just out and out like white supremacists, white national types. Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
00:29:50
Speaker
And this brings us, of course, to Ted Byfield and his Confederates. You know, there was this international effort by South Africa had friends and allies in Canada, one of whom was Ted
Conservative Support for Apartheid in Canada
00:30:04
Speaker
Byfield. So why don't we run down the list of kind of like known supporters of apartheid South Africa? Let's start with Ted Byfield. What do you got on him? Sure. And I'll just say, like, upfront that not
00:30:15
Speaker
Not everyone who supported apartheid was a conservative necessarily, like there were, again, sort of business and economic reasons why liberals and other elites would be, you know. Capital had a vested interest in the ongoing existence of apartheid South Africans. Exactly. One person who was a director of a pro South Africa group was actually a former liberal cabinet minister who was married to the governor general at the time, Jean Sauvé.
00:30:42
Speaker
That's a whole other story. But yeah, within the conservative movement, I would say that South Africa was a motivating cause. It was sort of one of the key foreign policy issues animating conservatives at the time, especially in a time of division between conservatives, it became sort of a wedge issue. So, especially for people who are more aligned with the
00:31:05
Speaker
reform party, I would say really adopted the issue of South Africa and took it on. Especially for a father of the, one of the fathers of the reform party itself, right? Ted Byfield, right? He used it as a wedge issue to be like, look folks,
00:31:20
Speaker
The progressive conservatives and Brian Mulroney have gone soft on South Africa, essentially. I'm paraphrasing, of course. But that was the general thrust, all right? Because Mulroney brought in sanctions and all these fucking conservatives freaked out. And it was a wave for the reform party to attract supporters of apartheid South Africa to their cause.
00:31:40
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. And I think, well, I guess one example is that he had an article in this special pro South Africa issue of International Conservative Insight magazine, which was based in
00:31:53
Speaker
of Vancouver and edited by Doug Collins, another one of these figures. The issue title was called South Africa Hope Amidst Controversy. And I mean, it's kind of like in a backhanded way, it was like a series of questions to Joe Clark, who was Foreign Affairs at the time.
00:32:10
Speaker
Look, Michael, they're just asking questions about South Africa. They don't necessarily support the apartheid South African regime. I mean, you know, they do. But like, we're just asking questions about why you would introduce sanctions to one of our dearest friends.
00:32:24
Speaker
Exactly. So he said he's raising these alarming questions about Canada's position on South Africa, really taking issue with this notion that some people had that Canada was sort of leading the international struggle. He's sort of like, what kind of leadership is this? And he repeats all these false claims about how sanctions would be hurting Black workers. He basically characterizes the ANC is on a mission to murder white civilians and questioning whether South Africa is apartheid. His human rights record was really so bad.
00:32:59
Speaker
Exactly in that same magazine. There's actually an article by Peter Brimlow as well who's another one of these sort of reform party founding fathers And this his articles called South Africa shrugs at sanctions South Africa shrugs at sanctions which argues that sanctions have been basically a boon for white businesses and
00:33:21
Speaker
and say that actually they hurt blacks more than whites. And that if it wasn't for the white economy, blacks in South Africa would still be living in primeval poverty. I don't know, not good stuff.
00:33:34
Speaker
No, of course not. Also, a friend of the show, Conrad Black, has a known history of supporting the apartheid state of South Africa. What can you tell us about our good friend, Conrad? Well, there's a few things to say about him. He was a supporter of alternatives to the ANC like Chief Budalezi.
00:33:53
Speaker
who was the leader of one of these homelands that the South African government had created. He was, again, officially opposed to apartheid, but people like to support him because he was opposed to efforts to boycott the country. And, you know, he was the leader of the Spandustan. He supported the homeland system, essentially.
00:34:10
Speaker
So as an alternative to the ANC, if you can't support apartheid, or you don't want to support apartheid, but you hate the ANC, Budalezi is your guy. He's the guy that you want to put for it as the actual representative of South Africans. So Black, for example, brought him to Toronto once to give a speech.
00:34:32
Speaker
As did the Frasier Institute, actually. No more friend of the show. Yeah. He was, his chief booty lazy figure was a very key kind of like wedge figure for the conservative movement here in Canada to kind of like use against the ANC because the ANC was this essentially like the big legitimate voice for black liberation in South Africa. This was one of the like ways to try and create division, right?
00:34:57
Speaker
Yeah, and Budalezi didn't threaten Canadian business interests in South Africa because he opposed sanctions. So another thing to say about Conrad Black is that he has some of the worst comments on record about this. So Renata Pratt wrote this book about her time with the task force of Canadian churches on corporate responsibility. I don't think I quite have that correctly, but it was this church group that was trying to get churches to
00:35:26
Speaker
to divest their funds from businesses in South Africa. And they reached out to Massey Ferguson, which was chaired by Conrad Black in 1979. And they asked him to stop providing equipment to South Africa.
00:35:41
Speaker
And he actually has a quote that it might be worth reading because it's just terrible. So he's talking about white South Africans here. He says, like all other peoples, they have a perfect right to self preservation. And like all other respectable nationalities, they should be commended for having the collective pride and motivation to defend themselves. I have not the slightest doubt that where your recommendations to be followed by the international community and the white population of South Africa left without any modern means of self-defense
00:36:11
Speaker
They, who almost alone have populated and developed that remarkable country, would be eliminated as an ethnic entity by the gruesome combination of subjection, massacre, and expulsion. The blacks would do a genocide on the white people in South Africa if we let them, essentially. It's basically that South Africa has a right to exist argument.
00:36:37
Speaker
Yeah, Connor Black, bad person. Steven Harper. This link hasn't been fully developed, but I know Murray Dobbin with Taiyi described the Northern Foundation.
00:36:52
Speaker
which is something that Stephen Harper was involved with early on in. It was described as a pro South Africa group, but we don't really have a ton of info. It appears to be lost to the sands of time, what the Northern Foundation was up to and what it actually wrote about South Africa. Is that true? Yeah, I think certainly in sort of the archives I was going through, I didn't find a lot about this, but yeah, Murray Dobbin talks about the Northern Foundation as
00:37:16
Speaker
essentially founded as a pro-South Africa group that took on these other causes. Certainly, the other people associated with the institution like Bifield and Brimalow, they were outspoken for South Africa, and certainly it was operating in this milieu where, again, South Africa was sort of the foreign policy wedge.
00:37:35
Speaker
to distinguish the real right from Mulroney's conservatives. So definitely I think we'd find some interesting stuff if we can get some archival documents from their early days.
00:37:48
Speaker
if anyone knows where any archival northern foundation shit lives uh... let me or michael buker now um... i if the other of again the the reform party existed in this miasma of kind of pro-apartheid south africa sentiment and that was no better expressed through uh... someone who is near and dear to my heart of course uh... who stan waters the very first elected senator in alberta and so stan waters was this uh... figure he was like uh... kind of a major domo like
00:38:17
Speaker
spokesperson and like old head respected person within the the Reform Party and obviously key to its foundation.
00:38:27
Speaker
He never ended up running for MP, but he did end up running in the very first Senate election in Alberta, which of course is fake. And we all know that Senate elections are fake and we don't elect senators in this country, but he ended up winning. And this guy who was incredibly pro South Africa
00:38:48
Speaker
apartheid state of South Africa, ended up becoming a senator. The happy ending to this story is that shortly after becoming a senator, Stan Waters got a brain tumor and died. But there is a quote from him.
00:39:04
Speaker
that I'll just read right now that it was again quoted in that Murray Dobbin piece, which we will put in the show notes, quote, South Africa should think twice before allowing majority rule because most black African countries live under tyranny. And, you know, that was a really common argument at the time. It was.
00:39:21
Speaker
South Africa might have its problems, but none of these other African states have democracies. In some cases, you have people saying that blacks can't govern themselves, they can't govern a modern state. That was actually something that someone, Mackenzie Porter, columnist in the Toronto Sun and the Calgary Sun actually wrote,
00:39:42
Speaker
He said, men aren't all born equal and Africans, they can't govern a modern state. If you put them in charge, it'll lead to bloodshed. He was the most explicitly racist of these figures, but this argument that fundamentally, South Africa is too complex, it's too diverse, these people can't live together. You need, stop looking for a Western solution for an African problem, all sorts of stuff like that. Anything to justify not supporting one person, one vote.
00:40:13
Speaker
Yes, there's another figure who we would be remiss to not mention. That is, of course, Tony Clement. He was a cabinet minister under Stephen Harper's prime ministership. He was, of course, the cabinet minister for Gazebos and sliding into young staffers DMs. What was Tony Clement's involvement with, you know, this pro apartheid South Africa movement?
00:40:38
Speaker
Well, Tony Clement is kind of a fun story. He was a law student in 1986 at the University of Toronto when there was this huge controversy in the city about the law society at the school had invited
00:40:52
Speaker
the South African ambassador, Glenn Babb, to a debate, giving him a platform to speak. And there were lots of protests about this. A couple of professors tried to get that shut down. And eventually, the Law Society did revoke the invitation to the ambassador.
00:41:09
Speaker
Agreeing that you know it was inappropriate to give it to a representative of the apartheid regime so Tony Clement and Alan Riddell Saw this and they actually decided to break away and form a new law society For the specific purpose of inviting the South African ambassador back to a debate
00:41:28
Speaker
And so they just love debate. The debate was very important to them. And they really needed this. The guy whose entire job was to defend apartheid South Africa needed to be on a stage to espouse his views. Yeah, they claimed that, you know, they believed apartheid was reprehensible, but that they were opposed also to suppressing the ambassador's freedom of speech. So that was sort of their intervention into this.
00:41:58
Speaker
an article for the website Africa is a country. And Tony Clement was very upset in my mentions saying that, you know, he never supported apartheid, all of that kind of thing. All I'm saying is that he formed a law society for the specific purpose of giving a platform to apartheid, which was directly at odds with the goals of the anti-apartheid movement at the time. That's all. Yeah. Yeah. The ANC was very specifically not interested in platforming this guy. And they said they told everyone who would listen, like, don't platform this guy.
00:42:18
Speaker
And I wrote about this in...
00:42:27
Speaker
Exactly. And it wasn't just Toronto. There was a couple of other events that took place, including a controversy in Queen's, a controversy at Carleton University. In some cases, were successfully de-platformed. And it was a huge moral crisis about freedom of speech on college campuses, which really just shows you that nothing changes.
00:42:52
Speaker
No, the time is a flat circle, fuck. There are two other, we're going long here, so I do want to kind of just gloss over these two figures, but Peter Worthington, a former longtime columnist with the Toronto Sun and the Sun Papers, was a huge, long time, very, very,
00:43:07
Speaker
the most prosperous supporter of apartheid South Africa, and this fucking barnacle on Canada's ass who will never go away. David Froome even had a little ... What was his line about- Well, David Fromsing was that when he was trying to encourage
00:43:23
Speaker
Basically conservative voters in 93 not to vote for reform but to vote for Mulroney So he wrote an article sort of saying that he's sort of trying to appease these people saying understanding that they're upset with Mulroney and that Mulroney was worried far too much about placating liberal opinion opinion mongers in Toronto
00:43:42
Speaker
on issues ranging from homosexual rights to sanctions against South Africa. So kind of, yeah, giving a little bit of a nod to those people who thought that Mulroney should never... Look, we know you think that Mulroney has been soft on South Africa and I hate South Africa too, but...
00:43:58
Speaker
But put that aside, essentially, was his interventions. And that's funny. I do want to go back quickly to Worthington because it was really significant. He gave a huge profile to Glenn Babb and his influence magazine. He was a big supporter of Budalezi, wrote lots of articles about it. And he produced this documentary called the ANC Method Violence, a documentary and a booklet, which the whole thing was about demonizing the ANC
00:44:23
Speaker
calling into question the integrity of Desmond Tutu, his bookleted articles like Nelson Mandela is no Martin Luther King, stuff like that. It was sent to all MPs and the costs were paid by Paul Fromm of the Citizens for Foreign Aid Reform, which fun fact is today known as a white supremacist. Very prominent white supremacist. Paul Fromm is a neo-Nazi.
00:44:46
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, fun fact, not fun fact. I mean, and this is par for the course, right? All of these people and organizations, institutions in some way opposed and demonized the ANC. They supported this booth of lazy character as an alternative to the ANC. They opposed boycotts and sanctions and ultimately the ANC was effective and they won. Booth of lazy was a wedge figure. Boycotts and sanctions are incredibly effective when deployed at scale against
00:45:12
Speaker
a state and at the scale it was deployed against
Economic Sanctions and Boycotts Against Apartheid
00:45:15
Speaker
South Africa. There was a reason why they were fighting against these tactics is because they were effective, right? Yeah, absolutely. Again, because of business interests that some of them might have had and just the fact that South Africa as a topic was within this milieu of conservative issues and that worldview, anti-communism was really prominent in that. It was just a natural thing for conservatives to jump on.
00:45:40
Speaker
And of course, because we are an Alberta-based podcast, we must of course note that Calgary was, of course, a bit of a hotspot for pro-apartheid activism. What can you tell me about Don Carter and the Friends of South Africa Network?
00:45:53
Speaker
Yeah, so remember how earlier I said that the South African embassy had created this front network of phony South Africa sort of grassroots groups. So I guess the main person that the embassy had recruited to organize this was this guy Don Carter in Calgary. He formed his own little Calgary group called the Western Canadian Society for South Africa.
00:46:22
Speaker
He had a cable program called John Carter's Southern African Report. He helped to lead delegations on behalf of South Africa.
00:46:30
Speaker
on behalf of the tourism board to South Africa. So he was pretty active on this, and he was exposed by the CBC's Fifth Estate as a paid agent for the South African government, working with embassy officials to establish the series of front groups across Canada, disguising it as grassroots, recruiting supporters in organizations in Toronto, Montreal, Winnipeg, Saskatoon, Edmonton, Lethbridge, Calgary, Vancouver, and Vancouver Island,
00:47:00
Speaker
I think in lots of the cases, these were probably lone volunteers who just were given this name like Friends of South Africa of Edmonton or whatever. And then yeah, Don Carter put this fax machine in the basement of these people's homes, give them daily requests to go and write letters to the editor, that sort of thing. Eventually he was sort of let go and the embassy took control of that sort of more directly. But yeah, he was South Africa's man for a while.
00:47:28
Speaker
Man, Calgary, this story, that story is insane. And like, of course this person lived and worked in Calgary. He just loved apartheid so much that he turned it into his fucking full-time job. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So we've focused kind of on conservative journalists. We've talked a little bit about that, conservative activists, this fucking Dan Carter, Don Carter loser, but within the conservative party itself, I guess the progressive conservative party at the time, Don Morrini, sorry, Brian Morrini was a bit ahead of the curve.
00:47:57
Speaker
sanctions and against apartheid South Africa in the 80s, really against a large percentage of his party. Again, as we were talking about, this is one of the foundational splits within the conservative movement. It was like the key foreign policy issue of the reform party as it was getting off the ground.
00:48:19
Speaker
And so what can you tell me about this kind of like, who within the Progressive Conservative Party, what elected officials were speaking out in defense of South Africa, who was on the side of good? Can you kind of walk me through the political side of things?
00:48:34
Speaker
Yeah. So again, because it was, yeah, as you mentioned, a big issue in the conservative movement, it obviously had, this had ripples throughout the conservative party at the time. You know, Mulrooney is often understood or sort of celebrated as someone who really took a strong stand against apartheid by adopting a series of sanctions in 85, 86.
00:48:57
Speaker
And there is, to an extent, some truth about that because he didn't have to do that. There were people like allies like Reagan in the US or Thatcher in the UK opposed sanctions very bitterly, so there's no reason why Mulroney had to take that approach.
00:49:17
Speaker
But he did for whatever personal reason, and according to sort of, I guess, the person who really wrote the definitive history of this period, political scientist Linda Freeman, that yeah, there was a major split within the party.
00:49:32
Speaker
She writes, there's no question that the prime minister was well ahead of his party on the issue and in some respects almost alone. And so other people who supported Mulroney's position on South Africa included Joe Clark, his minister of foreign affairs, although he apparently had some doubts about it. Walter McLean in Cabinet was an enthusiastic supporter of sanctions. He was sort of, I think, a key figure in pushing the government on this.
00:49:58
Speaker
But then there was a whole coterie of conservative MPs who are on the other side of this, right? And it's not like they would just stand up on their hind legs, right? Like these people were going on junkets to South Africa.
00:50:11
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. It was actually very common for conservative MPs to go on fully paid trips to South Africa, these fact-finding tours, see it yourself and come back and say, oh, it really wasn't so bad. Like, you know, they're really trying down there. Like, oh, there's lots of misinformation in the media, that kind of thing. And there are lots of these people and actually some people even like one thing that Mulroney did was I think in 86, he imposed this voluntary ban sort of saying to his caucus,
00:50:39
Speaker
like stop taking these trips to South Africa. And some people actually continue to go and to defy that order from Mulroney. This was how important it was to them. Some of these people who sort of were willing to speak in defense of South Africa in different ways. I'm not familiar with a lot of these people, but MPs, Robert Coates, Dan McKenzie, Lloyd Crows, Donald Monroe, Ronald Stewart, Jake Epp, Robert Wenman, David Nickerson, William
00:51:10
Speaker
So I don't know, there's a bunch of people, John Crosby as well, who in the early 80s, he was sort of being criticized. He was very pro-apartheid and he was being criticized by Bob Ray in the NDP at the time. He says in parliament, he kind of, he has this rhetoric, he says, I've gone there and seen you big loudmouth. Have you been there? You keep your mouth shut till you go and learn for yourself, you professional bleeding heart.
00:51:35
Speaker
And that's kind of the tone that he took on these things. You love to see it. Yeah. So anyways, if you know, uh, anyone who was a conservative, uh, like a conservative elected official or worked for a conservative elected official in the eighties, ask them if they knew about these people, ask them if they knew what their feelings about South Africa were because, uh, decent odds, pretty good odds that they were on the wrong side of history. And really that's why we're doing this, right? Like this is.
00:52:05
Speaker
the important part of this conversation is that these motherfuckers would love for us to forget about their support for apartheid and white supremacy in South Africa. But it is incumbent upon us to refuse to forget and to continue to remind them that like you supported white supremacy in South Africa, you supported apartheid South Africa, a brutal, violent, nasty, like criminal regime that fell apart.
00:52:32
Speaker
peacefully in 1994, all the while you were working to demonize the folks who were working for Black Liberation and to prop up the evil motherfuckers who were keeping the system going. And, you know, do you have any, like, thoughts? I mean, I think broadly speaking, the Left is pretty bad at memory projects and at memorializing
Reflecting on Conservative History with Apartheid
00:52:57
Speaker
you know, figures and events that are important to it. And do you have any like kind of like thoughts about how we should be thinking about this and remembering the struggle? Well, I mean, at the bare minimum, it should be included in the public memory. So I mean, this isn't necessarily like the left's fault. I think this is a problem more than anything, or at least one source of the problem is with newspapers and in mainstream media.
00:53:26
Speaker
that whenever these major figures pass away, there are all of these obituaries that totally ignore the negative things, the very negative aspects of their legacy. Whether it's someone like Peter Worthington or it's a mining magnet like Peter Monk, for example. There's so many people who think it's just not the right time to talk about this.
00:53:49
Speaker
But, you know, those are the moments when the legacy is sort of memorialized. That's when that is the moment for talking about the legacy of these people. So if it's not then then when is it? It's never, in fact.
00:54:01
Speaker
And of course, yes, I mean, it's never the right time to talk about the inconvenient fact that a huge chunk of Canadian elites supported apartheid South Africa. That's why it's incumbent upon us to remind these people that they did. And honestly, the best time to defame someone is after they're dead because they can't sue you. And two, it's not defamation to just recount the facts about their support for apartheid South Africa. That is also just not defamation.
00:54:28
Speaker
So I really want to thank you for coming on the show, Michael. I think your insight and research into this subject is incredibly important. I enjoyed reading your thesis. I think it's a worthwhile historical document for
00:54:44
Speaker
people to understand how sanctions and boycott divestment sanctions work as a movement. It really was encouraging for me to go back and read that and just see the size and scale and success of the international anti-apartheid solidarity movement. There's really no modern analog at the moment. I just want to thank you again. If people want to follow along with the work that you do professionally and personally, what's the best way for people to do that?
00:55:13
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, thanks so much for this opportunity to talk about my dissertation, which, you know, that's not usually something you get to do as an academic. So I really appreciate that. Uh, yeah, you can check me out on Twitter at, uh, at mbukert, or you can, uh, check out the website that I work for, which is Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East at cjpme.org. We actually have, uh, launched recently a podcast to talk about some of these issues related to Canada.
00:55:42
Speaker
Palestine and the broader Middle East, including talking about things like boycotts and questions about apartheid. We recently had an episode with Libby Davies, a former NDP MP, who was talking about her time on the hill as sort of a lone voice for Palestinian human rights, especially during the dark days of the of the Harper era. So yeah, if you want to check that out, that's the CJPME debrief. And other than that, yeah, I guess that's it.
00:56:10
Speaker
Awesome. Well, thanks so much. If you're listening, you have any notes, thoughts, comments, things you think I need to hear, I am very easy to get ahold of. I am on Twitter far too much at Duncan Kinney, and you can reach me by email at DuncanKatProgressAlberta.ca. Thank you to Jim Story for editing this podcast. Thank you to Cosmic Family Communist for our amazing theme. Thank you for listening, and goodbye.