Murray N. Rothbard, “The New York Times, Communism, and South Africa” (1992)

This short single-author polemical commentary from November 1992 is a media critique. Rothbard uses Bill Keller’s Sunday New York Times article on the South African Communist Party as a case study in what he sees as establishment liberal apologetics. The thesis is that Keller’s profile turns Communist influence inside the ANC into a story of youthful idealism, anti-racism, and democratic maturation, while suppressing Communism’s historical record.

The entire article is devoted to praising the merits, the intelligence, the downright lovability, of the Communist Party of South Africa, a possibly guiding powerhouse within the leftist African National Congress that is poised to take over the Republic of South Africa.

The essay proceeds as a sarcastic close reading. Rothbard first recounts Keller’s favorable treatment of Chris Hani and the SACP’s disproportionate influence within the ANC, then attacks the idea that Communist prominence can be explained merely by sacrifice, militancy, or anti-apartheid credentials. His core conceptual move is to refuse Keller’s separation of personal heroism from ideology: what Keller treats as political maturity, Rothbard treats as ideological laundering.

It’s also remarkable how, under the Times gentle aegis, seventy-five years of butchery, of despotism, of enslavement, of mass murder of scores of millions on an unprecedented scale, all this monstrous record of world Communism, just simply washes away.

That passage gives the essay its larger frame. South Africa is not only a local transition from white rule; for Rothbard it is a test of whether post-Soviet liberal journalism will remember Communism as a totalitarian project. He links Keller’s tone to older fellow-traveling myths and to Walter Duranty, arguing that the collapse of Soviet power has not ended the habit of presenting Communists as noble reformers.

The middle section turns to Keller’s handling of de Klerk, Ciskei, Ronnie Kasrils, and ANC-Communist militancy. Rothbard argues that Keller treats warnings about Communist influence as cynical fearmongering, when the political facts themselves warrant concern.

One would think that de Klerk had a point in worrying about Kasrils and the Communist influence.

Rothbard then targets Keller’s claim that raising the “Communist specter” could frighten investors and polarize South Africa. His reversal is blunt: the danger is not anti-Communist rhetoric but the prospect of a leftist government containing powerful Communists. The essay’s political focus is therefore less on apartheid itself than on the terms by which the coming ANC order is interpreted.

The final movement addresses Mandela and the ANC-CP relationship. Rothbard mocks Keller’s assurances that Mandela is not a Communist and that the ANC is becoming respectful of private property. He is especially critical of reducing Communism’s “ultimate goal” to public ownership and redistribution, as though it were only a more radical social democracy.

No mention, of course, of murdering dissenters, totalitarianism, slave labor camps, and all the rest.

The conclusion draws three morals: anti-Communist analysis remains necessary after the Soviet collapse; illusions about Communist idealism persist in elite journalism; and Rothbard sees little deep separation between Communism and social democracy. His most important post-Cold War qualification is that anti-Communism need not serve interventionist foreign policy.

One is that, just because Communism disintegrated in the USSR and Eastern Europe does not mean that we should abandon our insights into the evils of Communism.

The work’s relevance lies in that conjunction: it is at once a South Africa commentary, a critique of New York Times ideological framing, and a libertarian anti-Communist warning against forgetting the twentieth century’s political violence.