Margaret Thatcher supported South African apartheid

This 2013 video from the USA says about itself:

The History Of The Right Wing Rejecting Mandela

Remember it was Ronald Reagan that placed Nelson Mandela and the ANC on the terrorist list. Former U.K. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher also described Mandela’s ANC as a “typical terrorist organization” in 1987, refusing to impose sanctions on South Africa’s apartheid regime. President Ronald Reagan did as well.

In 1986, former Vice President Dick Cheney, then a congressman, voted along with 179 other members of the House, (all conservatives), against a non-binding resolution to recognize the ANC and call on the South African government to release Mandela from prison. The measure finally passed, but not before a veto attempt by Reagan.

In 2000, Cheney maintained that he’d cast the correct vote. Democrats in the Senate initially tried to pass the Anti-Apartheid Act in September 1985, but could not overcome a Republican filibuster. President Ronald Reagan viewed the act as an intrusion on his authority to conduct foreign policy and issued his own set of sanctions, though Democrats considered these to be “watered down and ineffective”.

The bill was re-introduced in 1986 and brought up for a vote despite Republican efforts to block it in order to give President Reagan’s sanctions time to work. It initially passed unexpectedly in the House in June 1986 after Republicans agreed to a voice vote in the hopes that the bill would die later on in the process, thus ending any possibility of sanctions. President Reagan publicly opposed the bill and it was viewed as too extreme to pass in the Republican-controlled Senate.

In August 1986, the Senate passed a version of the Anti-Apartheid Act with weaker sanctions by a margin of 84-14. Democratic leaders in the House agreed to accept the weaker Senate version of the bill in order for it to have sufficient bipartisan support to avert a possible veto. Reagan vetoed the compromised bill on September 26, calling it “economic warfare” and alleging that it would mostly hurt the impoverished black majority and lead to more civil strife. He again offered to impose sanctions via executive order, while also working with Senate Republicans on concessions to avoid them overriding his veto.

Reagan’s veto was attacked harshly by anti-Apartheid leaders like Desmond Tutu who said Reagan would be “judged harshly by history”. In the week leading up to the subsequent vote, President Reagan enlisted South African foreign minister Pik Botha to call Republicans on the fence, though this was seen to backfire.

Contrast that with this.

Twenty years before that on May 5, 1960, JFK addressed in detail how American foreign policy should be conducted towards African nations, in support of modern African nationalism by saying that “For we, too, founded a new nation on revolt from colonial rule“.

From daily The Independent in Britain today:

Margaret Thatcher believed South Africa should be a ‘whites-only state’, says UK’s former chief diplomat

Former head of the Diplomatic Service, Sir Patrick Wright, makes the explosive claims in his diary

Shehab Khan

Margaret Thatcher believed South Africa should be a “whites-only state”, it has been reported.

The former head of the Diplomatic Service, Sir Patrick Wright, has made a number of explosive claims in his account of the former Prime Minister’s time in office.

Sir Patrick also said that Ms Thatcher “loathed” Germans and wanted to “push” Vietnamese boat people into the sea.

Extracts from his diaries have been published in the Mail on Sunday and include claims that Ms Thatcher expressed a desire for a “pre-1910” South Africa.

In the diary entry, Sir Patrick writes the conversation took place over a lunch he was invited to with Ms Thatcher. “She opened the conversation by thrusting a newspaper cutting about Oliver Tambo [ANC president] in front of us, saying that it proved that we should not be talking to him… She continued to express her views about a return to pre-1910 South Africa, with a white mini-state partitioned from their neighbouring black states.”

When Sir Patrick questioned the desire and said it would be an extension of apartheid, he said “she barked: ‘Do you have no concern for our strategic interests?’”

Sir Patrick also claimed that Ms Thatcher was “at her worst” during the Vietnamese boat people crisis in 1989.

… Ms Thatcher’s attitude on foreign matters reportedly led her foreign secretary Douglas Hurd to remark: “Cabinet now consists of three items: parliamentary affairs; home affairs; and xenophobia”, the diary says.