Politics & Power Quote by Helen Suzman

“Tool of Communist agitators” is the kind of smear that tries to do three things at once: delegitimize dissent, scare the nervous middle, and keep the moral debate safely out of reach. Suzman’s reply punctures it with a cool, almost bored incredulity: “it’s really a joke, isn’t it?” The line isn’t just wit; it’s strategy. By refusing the frame, she denies the accusation its oxygen. She doesn’t litigate whether she’s a communist “tool.” She ridicules the premise and reasserts the only identity that matters in a constrained political arena: “a party of real moderates.”

The subtext is sharp-edged. In apartheid-era South Africa, “communist” functioned as a catch-all for anyone challenging white minority rule, a rhetorical truncheon used to paint reformers as foreign, dangerous, and un-South African. Suzman signals she knows the game, and she plays it back with a reversal: the true extremism isn’t in pushing for rights and accountability; it’s in needing conspiracy labels to defend the indefensible.

“It just shows how little they understand” lands as both dismissal and indictment. Dismissal, because the propagandists are unserious. Indictment, because their “misunderstanding” is willful: a refusal to recognize moderation when it threatens power. Suzman’s intent is to reclaim the reasonable center while exposing how authoritarian systems manufacture paranoia to avoid confronting reality. The joke, she implies, is on a regime so brittle it hears criticism and reaches for the Red scare.