South Africa’s March 17 referendum led the government to toughen its position against the ANC. Within a month after the results, Mr. de Klerk got the ANC at the Convention for a Democratic South Africa (CODESA) to agree to the election of a transitional; government, the interim government the ANC had wanted appointed. The ANC...
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Law Survives
Winnie Manela’s recent conviction shows that something like the rule of law survives in South Africa after the unconditional release of her husband. On a visit to Johannesburg several months ago, I found myself more than once, to my amusement, arguing the court had to convict Winnie Mandela, to South Africans who smiled at me...
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Education in an Age of Haste
Not much more than 24 hours ago, one of many of you who could get away with it asked me to speak to you on Class Day. It hit me that for a tutor who insists on students meeting deadlines, the situation has the best of comic myth: you got yours back, and at the...
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South Africa
Everybody knows somewhere inside him that South Africa, since 1984, and really for a generation, has been a set piece in the bloody farce we call “revolution.” The one-sidedness of the farce betrays our unacknowledged unease: except for a classic article in Commentary by Paul Johnson and a few other pieces, not a word has...
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The Way We Do It
This book gathers important information on the politicization of the schools, even the elementary schools, at the cost of facts—and flight from the world. The means of politicization: “nuclear education” is widespread, according to London’s rudimentary evidence. He contacted over 300 major school districts, and 16 of the 162 districts that answered had formal nuclear...
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Whose Voice Counts?
“I am teaching you to use a tool more deadly than a pistol.” This is the message beginning journalism students hear from an instructor who spoke last year at a conference on “Our Enemies’ Use of the Media,” sponsored by Accuracy in Media. In a world of Goliaths, count Accuracy in Media as one of...