While the vast majority of the left denounced the USSR...
too many on the right defended and still defend Apartheid South Africa.
http://prospect.org/article/apologists-without-remorse
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Conservatives were in a tight spot after Mandela was released to a hero's welcome. They found themselves on the losing side of history. Their tone became somewhat more equivocal, but the sniping never ended. After Mandela was released from prison, the Wall Street Journal continued to regard him with suspicion, noting on February 13, 1990, that his first speech in Cape Town "failed to reassure non-ANC members that he wants reconciliation with all South Africans." Simon Barber, in the July 23 National Review, asked "whether Mandela is a genuine democrat or, like so many leaders of liberation movements who have come before him, the beguiling salesman of one-party tyranny." In the October 1990 issue of Commentary, Joshua Muravchik wrote that Mandela's radical beliefs would lead his people to ruin and noted that such organizers of Mandela's tour through the United States as Roger Wilkins "tilt sharply to the Left." Now that Mandela has proven to be a magnanimous leader, however, the conservative press has had almost no discussion of his role. Where are the articles in Commentary discussing Mandela's statesmanship? An embarrassed silence seems to prevail.
T he truth is that not a single conservative prediction of doom has been borne out. Mandela, after spending several decades in prison, might well have emerged as an embittered, authoritarian leader intent on settling scores with the minority white populations. Conservative fears of a Marxist ANC were not entirely irrational, but it was wrong to assume that Mandela would automatically become a tyrant. This was a cozy assumption that dispensed with the need to grapple with South African realities. Conservatives were merely applying a formula to South Africa. Defying that formula, Mandela and F. W. de Klerk presided over a peaceful transition of power to the black majority. South Africa has become a true parliamentary democracy no longer based on the racist regime of apartheid."
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