Propaganda

Another important contribution to the Conference came from Terry Bell who talked about the Apartheid propaganda machine in South Africa. Terry Ball was a journalist in South Africa and now works as journalist in Auckland. He stressed that apartheid is not limited to South Africa. Vorster who was detained during the Second World War for fascist activities had been head of the South African Nazi underground. Apartheid was an expansionist doctrine, and South Africa was selling the Herrenvolk ideal of a world order to the rest of the world. South African propaganda today, he said, was "the same vile pill given a very good sugar coating." Bell analysed four different types of South African propaganda; Firstly the official propaganda mainly through the Department of information. Then there is semi-official and 'independent forms of propaganda by film companies which have supplied the N.Z.B.C. with films.

The South African Race Bureau issues statistics etc., and especially the South Africa Foundation, which has organised links in business and politics throughout the western world with the full backing of the Department of Information. South Africa, he said, has analysed New Zealand and assessed that a substantial reservoir of anti-coloured feeling exists and is shown, for example, by New Zeeland's racist immigration laws. There is also a Kiplinges que British feeling in New Zealand, and Peter Hugh Philip, M.B.E., M.A. (Oxon) is a very suitable propagandist. The fourth type of South African propaganda was the liberal sector of Apartheid which preaches a line of moderation. This, he said, was the most invidious. Mr Marshall's bridge-building with South Africa meant building a toll bridge with the fare dictated by the South African Government. The line of liberal moderation was a sham. For an example the much-publicised walk-off from a cricket field by All Barker, the South African cricket captain, and other white cricketers was purely a piece of show for the rest of the world. The place to build bridges to, Bell said, was the non-racial sporting bodies in South Africa, which were not illegal and despite tremendous pressure still exist. The South African Progressive Party (and its one parliamentary representative Mrs Helen Suzman) and the Rand Daily Mail newspaper were also part of the liberal type of apartheid propaganda. They exist, he said, because the South African Government let them. By allowing this sort of opposition the government are able to preserve a veneer of moderate opposition. Bell pointed out that Harry Oppenheimer, a leading member of the South Africa Foundation bankrolls the Progressive Party and effectively controls the Rand Daily Mail and the United Party's Sunday Times. The line of anti-government moderation, the call "please don't boycott us" was the most dangerous form of apartheid propaganda. After outlining some of the more insidious forms of South African propaganda, such as newspaper articles by bona fide journalists in the pay of the South African Government, Bell concluded "This is war and anybody who does not regard it as such should not be here." The South Africans, he said, sell neutrality. They succeed because they survive, and they survive because we let them.

"Capitalism and racialism go hand in hand" -Moodley