Craig Shirley, defending Ronald Reagan’s opposition to sanctions against apartheid-era South Africa, offers the following:
“When Mandela came to power, one of the first things he asked for were the sanctions to be lifted. So it’s a very complex issue and they present it [in the film] in a very simplistic fashion.”
The idea that sanctions should be ended after they had achieved their goal is very complex indeed.
I don’t think any of these people have actually seen the movie.
Nancy Reagan comes across great. Ronald Reagan in fact gets credit for something I think LBJ actually did (achieving pay parity between white and black White House domestic staff).
The scene about South African sanctions is a bit contrived, but they all are. It does stack the deck by not explaining the reason for the opposition to sanctions, even if it was incorrect – it was in the context of the Cold War, as everything else was between 1947 to 1989. And the movie has Reagan saying at the end “I think I’m on the wrong side of history”Report
The Zulu tribe, representing 6 million blacks, was vehemently opposed to the sanctions.
This is deceptive. It’s true that Buthelezi and Inkatha (at least its leadership) opposed the sanctions, arguing that it hurt black farmers, but he didn’t speak for all Zulus, and after the fall of the Apartheid regime we learned that the white government was funding Buthelezi and Inkatha because they were actively working against the ANC and other groups who were more militant in their opposition to Apartheid.Report
Conservatives have often found themselves on the wrong side of history.
But it’s only recently that they appear to have become unable to recognize this _retroactively_.Report