Three men ended three evil systems: slavery in the United States, communism in Russia, and apartheid in South Africa.
Abraham Lincoln died on 15 April 1865, F W de Klerk on 11 November 2021, and Mikhail Gorbachev on 30 August 2022 – last Tuesday.
Each did immense good and improved the world. Each inherited an abhorrent institution, and each abolished it. But each had his mysteries and uncertainties, and I don’t think anyone knows what each of them had in mind when he began his programme of reform.
What were President Lincoln’s intentions when he began the US Civil War in April 1861? It is clear that Lincoln hated slavery all his life and that the fundamental reason for the Civil War was slavery, but just before the war Lincoln declared he did not want to end slavery where it existed in the original states of the US; he only wanted to stop it extending into the new western territories. So what happened?
What were President de Klerk’s intentions when he made his famous speech on 2 February 1990, which unbanned the ANC, essentially ended apartheid and paved the way for negotiations for black majority rule? It is clear he wanted to end apartheid, and indeed he proceeded to repeal the most hateful apartheid laws before the ANC came to power. But did he want to end National Party rule? Did he want to surrender power?
What were the intentions of the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, from 1985 when he began his series of reforms and relaxations that eventually ended communism in Russia and the Soviet Empire in Eastern Europe and Asia? Did he intend to end communism, or did he just wish to make it more efficient and friendly?
There was nothing inevitable about the ending of any of the three evils. In 1860, slavery in the US had never been more successful and prosperous, bringing vast wealth to the southern states. Slavery was constitutional and many of the Founding Fathers had been slave owners. It could have gone on for decades more without the Civil War and without Lincoln.
All the physical means
In South Africa in 1989, the white rulers had all the physical means they needed to crush any black resistance (the ANC armed wing was utterly useless) and continue minority government indefinitely. There were formidable white politicians with considerable white support who wanted to do exactly that. Without De Klerk that might well have happened.
In 1989, communism was bringing poverty and tyranny to Russia. But, from the moment of Lenin’s coup in October 1917, communism had always brought poverty and tyranny. Gorbachev had far greater powers of continuing communism in 1989 than Lenin did in 1918. He chose not to.
(I once spoke to a Czechoslovakian professor who had defected to the US. I asked him when communism would die. He said, ‘It can’t die because it’s not really alive. It’s a walking corpse. It’s like the undead.’ This was in 1987, only two years before Gorbachev proved him wrong.)
The more I study the US Civil War, the more confused I am about what started it. In 1860, most whites in north and south were racists, believing blacks to be inferior, and very few (about 3% I often hear) were in favour of black emancipation. They didn’t want to end slavery. When the Civil War began, Lincoln said that its purpose was to preserve the union, not to end slavery. Historians say that if the north had won quickly, the union would have been preserved and slavery would have continued.
This very nearly happened had it not been for an extreme irony, the sudden coming to power of the south’s great military leader, Robert E Lee. In May 1862, the north was within an inch of total victory when the south’s General Johnston was wounded and replaced by Lee, who swiftly turned the war around and led the south to victory after victory. He lost at Gettysburg in July 1863, but this huge and bloody battle had no decisive effect on the outcome of the war.
It was only much later, in September 1864, when Sherman captured Atlanta, and Sheridan the Shenandoah Valley, that victory for the north was certain.
Bullied and coaxed
In October Lincoln was re-elected by a landslide. Lincoln knew he had won the war and had guaranteed the union would be kept. He now had no need to abolish slavery. He did so nonetheless when he bullied and coaxed the Congress into passing the 13th Amendment.
I don’t know whether De Klerk entered politics in the National Party of apartheid because he was simply an Afrikaner career politician and the NP was the obvious place for such a career, or because he believed ‘separate development’ was the best solution for SA’s race problems. At any rate he certainly came to regard it as a cruel failure, and quite suddenly (and to my complete surprise) emerged as the man to reform it. He himself later said that it could not be reformed but only ended. If he believed that in the election of September 1989, he certainly didn’t say so, but maybe, like Lincoln, he was hiding his true intentions to help him realise them. When he began negotiations for full democracy, everybody knew that a black party would win any free election because blacks were in the majority and people always vote by race when racial differences are conspicuous. De Klerk must have known this and known he was negotiating the end of white power and of his own power. Was he pretending to his white supporters that it could be otherwise? Was he pretending so that he could bring about a good outcome?
Gorbachev became General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party (in other words, head of the Soviet Empire) in 1985. He saw about him a failing economy, grime, poverty and decay, a listless population, and a country falling further and further behind the capitalist West. Nonetheless, he was in control of massive powers of suppression.
The Soviet Union was founded on terror thanks to Vladimir Lenin, who knew that communism would never be accepted voluntarily by ordinary people; it had to be imposed upon them by force and fear. Lenin spent most of his five years in power building up an enormous apparatus of terror.
Gorbachev inherited it, and so could have suppressed any popular uprising with ease. He chose instead to start freeing up and reforming the communist system. De Klerk said apartheid could not be reformed but only ended. I don’t think Gorbachev ever said that about communism.
Paved the way
But by allowing some free speech (glasnost) and a degree of democracy (perestroika), he paved the way for the collapse of communism. Information about the capitalist world is dangerous for any communist country, which is why they all try to censor it. The greatest threat to Soviet Communism was not to show the public a picture of an American nuclear missile but to show it a picture of an American supermarket. Under Gorbachev, communism crumbled, and when the Soviet colonies demanded independence, he allowed this to happen peacefully. He did not seem to have the political skills of De Klerk, and so was unable to manage the feuding factions within his ranks, all jostling for power and enrichment in the new open order. Mafia-like gangsters took over from the KGB; oligarchs took over from commissars; the economy went from despotism to plunder. There was chaos and collapse. I suppose that is why all the Russians I have spoken to (both of them, Andrew? well, a few dozen of them, I suppose) hate him. It was Putin who, ten years later, brought some sort of order and prosperity to Russia.
In China, in the 1980s, the great Deng Xiaoping kept strict communist control of the government but opened up the economy to the freest free-market capitalism the world had ever seen, with wonderful results for Chinese people and consumers worldwide. Gorbachev could not, or did not want to, do anything of the kind in Russia.
Communism set Russia back a century. Had there been no 1914 First World War, and thus no 1917 communist coup, Russia would probably now be a prosperous industrial democracy. Lenin took her back to the dark ages. With apartheid in South Africa, it is not so clear. Under the racial dictatorship of apartheid there was rapid economic growth in its early years and advanced industrialisation.
Eskom provided the world’s cheapest electricity very reliably. When apartheid ended, South Africa had the biggest, most developed economy in Africa. Most disturbing of all is the fact that throughout the 42 years of apartheid, black Africans in the rest of Africa were trying to get into South Africa, and no ordinary black people were trying to get out (only political activists were).
Always try to get out
This is the opposite of all communist countries where the people always try to get out. Communist East Berlin built a concrete wall to stop people getting out; apartheid South Africa built an electric fence on the Zimbabwe border to stop people getting in. If in 1948, there had been full democracy and free elections, and thus black majority rule, would the country now be better off than it is? The history of post-colonial Africa suggests not. The ANC has repeated all the failures of most of independent Africa south of the Sahara. Is this a justification for apartheid? Certainly not! It is just a rather difficult moral question, which few people would dare to answer.
In the US, the ending of slavery was an unqualified good. Free black people did not want to be slaves, and slaves did want to be free. It is true that emancipation was followed by the clumsy, sometimes callous period of reconstruction, and this was followed by Jim Crow and horrible, restrictive, systematic racism against blacks, which only ended in the second half of the 20th Century.
But eventually it did bring complete freedom and equality of opportunity to all races in the US, and helped make her the greatest power on Earth. This is why black people in the US do not want to go to Africa, and black people in Africa do want to go to the US. (I’d like the proponents of Critical Race Theory to discuss this.)
Lincoln is universally revered. I believe he was the greatest president of the US. De Klerk does not get the credit he deserves. I hold him in the highest esteem, a great South African hero, without whom our country would be poorer. Gorbachev is held in quite high regard outside Russia but it seems he is reviled in Russia. This seems quite unfair to me (I wonder what the ex-Russian colonies, who owe their independence to him, think of him now.)
What was the force, the essential part of their character, that drove each of these men to do what they did? I think the answer is simple for all of them: decency. They were all at heart just decent men.
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR
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