Squeezing White Supremacy

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Two enduring forms of totalitarian rule that had shaped modern world history finally fell apart in the early 1990s. One was Soviet communism, whose seventy-year run stumbled in 1989, when Germans tore down the Berlin Wall and Eastern Europeans overthrew their Soviet-backed governments, and ended in 1991, when the Soviet Union itself dissolved into its component parts of Russia and more than a dozen smaller independent nations. The other was white supremacy, distilled in its purest form in South African apartheid, whose four decades ended with the release of long-imprisoned African National Congress leader Nelson Mandela in 1990 and the nation's first democratic elections in 1994. Communist totalitarianism and racial totalitarianism were closely related to each other in southern Africa, where the white supremacist rulers of South Africa, Rhodesia (Zimbabwe after 1980), and the Portuguese colonies of Mozambique and Angola preserved racial hierarchies in part by associating majority rule not with democracy but with communism. The anxious white minority in the region, fearful of losing their economic as well as political dominance, found this association reassuring, as it allowed them to imagine themselves as defenders of freedom against the forces of enslaving Marxist revolutionaries.