Ralph Townsend (1900–1976) was an American author, consul and political activist noted for his opposition to the entry of the United States into World War II. He served in the foreign service as a consul stationed in Canada and China from 1931 to 1933. His most famous book was Ways That Are Dark: The Truth About China. Townsend was strongly pro-neutrality and strongly opposed the Roosevelt administration’s policy which led to the war with Japan.
11,201 Pope’s Head Road Fairfax, Virginia
June 23, 1967
Dear Willis:
From early April until last week I was away, mostly in South Africa and Bast Africa, with some weeks in Rhodesia. I talked at length with most of the leading figures there. The more I saw and learned the more gratified I was. Leaders in Rhodesia see clearly and act with total recognition of realities. Both there and in South Africa the general run of the people you meet are eagerly proud of their government. They present the spectacle, now rare and possibly unique in white civilization, of confidence that their officials at the top are working for and not against them. Support for Ian Smith falls little short of adoration. Every salesgirl in the shops and every clerk in the hotel beams at mention of Smith’s name. There has been nothing lite it since the middle and later 1930’s when Germans witnessed the scarcely believable miracle of promises fulfilled and a nation risen to solvency and self-respect from a morass of moral and political decay, for which all the academic leftmouths had had explanations in terms of trends and phases and economic transitions and the rest of the familiar joogoo, all being but parts of speech in an overall language of surrender….
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