ummmm.... take a deep breath please. Nobody here is "defending apartheid".
There's a HUGE difference between simply saying that the crime situation has gotten dramatically worse in SA (I've never heard anyone suggest the contrary) and saying "apartheid was cool".
"I don't think that you'll be able to find many who can convincingly argue that South Africa has improved since the end of apartheid."
You seem to be saying that South Africa today is, at best, as bad as apartheid South Africa. More likely, it's worse:
"... spiralling down into a turgid cauldron of breathtakingly violent and vicious crime and my guess is that a nation that is unable to maintain even a semblance of order within it's [sic] own borders is not going to have the backbone to stand up for comparatively esoteric principles and intellectual concepts such as freedom of the press."
My point is that these same arguments are being used by the left to criticize our mission in Iraq, which under Saddam was a well-ordered nation (although certainly lacking "comparatively esoteric principles and intellectual concepts such as freedom of the press") that, after its liberation, has seen an exponential rise in "breathtakingly violent and vicious crime" -- beheadings, suicide bombings, car bombings, urban warfare and political assasination. This is just three years after liberation and the first free elections seen in Iraq in decades.
Over 40 million people were liberated with the end of apartheid in South Africa, which held its first democratic elections ever in 1994. I support a free South Africa and a free Iraq.