Politics & Power Quote by Harry Oppenheimer

Oppenheimer’s sentence performs a classic establishment two-step: condemn the brutality just enough to sound humane, then recast the system as a misguided “solution” rather than a moral crime. “It must not be forgotten in fairness” is the tell. He’s pre-loading the reader with the posture of reasonableness, as if the real danger is an unfair assessment of the state, not the state’s violence. In the mouth of a mining magnate, that plea for “fairness” doubles as a defense of stability: keep the economy humming, keep capital confident, keep radicals at bay.

The most revealing maneuver is the reframing of apartheid as an “attempt” to avoid integration “fair to both white and black.” That’s euphemism with a purpose. “Integration” becomes a policy choice on a menu, not the democratic baseline; apartheid becomes an alternate architecture, flawed but conceptually earnest. The subtext is paternalistic symmetry: whites and blacks are positioned as equal parties with competing interests, rather than one group holding the franchise, land, police power, and most of the wealth.

His hedge - “in my opinion” - and the prophecy of failure do more than predict history. They offer a safe dissent for insiders: you can disapprove without taking sides against the regime’s underlying premise that whites must be protected from political equality. In apartheid-era South Africa, liberal business criticism often traveled this route: opposition framed as pragmatism. The line reads less like solidarity with the oppressed than a bid to manage change on terms that preserve the business class’s room to operate.