Where are the Weathermen?

The Tour looms large over the heads of enrolling students as the national apocalypse approaches. No choice can now be made. The organisational and emotional wheels of pro and anti-tour groups have started turning and will not stop or change direction until the final climax or anticlimax. The tour will be decisive for contact with South Africa and its final end will therefore be of greater significance than the means used to get there. While the conflicts will affect New Zealand, only the cancelling will affect South Africa.

By stopping the tour we aid South Africa's road to majority rule but will create an apartheid-like division in New Zealand. The sooner the tour is stopped the more chance for harmony and peaceful coexistence in this country. The revolutionaries will prosper if the tour comes and too many revolutions are material in process and solely material in effect. The material culture is for the technocrats. True revolution is non-violent and non-material.

Which all brings me anyway to the conclusion that any way of stopping the tour before it comes, before the thinking stops and the bloodlust seeps in, is the right way. Action must take the form of a strong, powerful threat that will destroy any hope of the tour's feasibility. It is not hard in a free country to take action now to forestall wholesale cremation later. Blow up the right girder (however minor it seems) and the whole bridge will lose its support.

Bruce Robinson