Tragic Intransigence

THE ENDLESS SERIES OF NEW RESTRICTIONS and repressions in South Africa should not numb the world to the significance of each new abuse. In the last two years the white government has progessively heightened restrictions on the press and has arrested thousands of opponents, but a new crackdown last week is a milestone in the Pretoria government's retrenchment against change. Last Thursday the government announced new press restrictions that destroyed any pretense of a free press, and on Friday the police carried out a self-proclaimed "swoop," rounding up not only opposition activists, but also reporters and even two Swiss citizens in neighboring Swaziland.

These most recent events are not just another round of deplorable abuses. By combining unprecedented censorship with Gestapo-like mass arrests, the white regime has demonstrated its determination to deny reality--to isolate South African whites from the war raging around them and to hide that struggle from the world. But in the attempt to preempt what a government spokesman termed the "revolutionary onslaught" of resistance groups, the white regime is forcing the country down the path to precisely such a violent and catastrophic revolution.

Reporters in South Africa are now prohibited from writing articles which might incite anyone to oppose the regime. Newspapers can no longer even leave spaces where material has been removed. The restrictions are too Byzantine to describe in full, but the net effect is that the South African government now controls everything that is published or broadcast from that country. The government's intent is clear: to censor the fact of censorship, to so limit access to information that whites will have no idea of the scope of unrest in Black areas. That goal may seem implausible to foreigners, but apartheid means "separation" for a reason. With few exceptions, there is no indication of unrest in the areas in which whites live and work.

The restrictions do not stop with the press. It is now illegal for South Africans even to speak in opposition to government policy or to discuss "unrest" in a private conversation--that is, not without prior permission from a government official. Big Brother could not have imagined more thorough subversion of freedom of thought and of conscience.

The tragedy of these latest moves is that they continue to deny white South Africans the opportunity to see what is happening to their country before it is too late. The only evidence whites have of the increasing level of violence and desperation in their country are the bombings that have become more frequent in recent months precisely because resistance groups have found no other way to influence the white population. If the South African government is successful in its attempt to build a wall around the revolution in its midst, it will have also dug the grave of that country's white minority. When the violence finally bursts through that wall, the government will no longer be the only group unwilling to compromise.