Apartheid

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It might seem vastly exaggerated and dangerous to refer to thought as a gross human
right violation. Yet I do not mean that individuals should be held responsible alone for
thinking in favor of apartheid. As with the case of the rabid racist and Nazi publicist, Julius
Streicher, who was sentenced to death by the US-led allies in the Nuremberg trial and
executed in 1946, incitement and instigation to violence can be abetting murder. 576 If thoughts
are conceived and consciously devised, expressed and publicized to cause murder and other
kinds of violence to take place, and especially if they succeed in doing so, then criminal
liability must apply. And conversely, if thoughts of ethnic equality and human rights for all
people are punished by death, such as in the case of Steve Biko and countless other victims of
apartheid, then criminal liability must also apply, although in this case for the punishing agent,
not for the publicist.
As we have seen, the distinction between apartheid and genocide is often blurry, and
that grey area is where thought, accompanied by such seemingly innocent actions as talking
about it or publishing it, can become a crime, a human rights violation and even a gross
human rights violation. Both apartheid and genocide are states of war. Apartheid thought may
indeed be able to exist without apartheid violence, and then it is not a gross human rights
violation. But apartheid violence will not happen without at least some measure of apartheid
thought: conscious, subconscious, or unconscious.
Like apartheid violence, apartheid thought differs from all the other kinds of apartheid
phenomena in being a human rights violation that can be perpetrated by members of all ethnic
groups involved in the conflict. As with violence, however, the vast majority of offenses are
committed by members of the oppressive majority.
Lastly, apartheid thought, like apartheid as a whole, is as much a process as it is a
structure. It is basically a strategy of attacking rather than a system to defend – whatever
biased journalists and politicians may say to the opposite effect (in favor of the ‘besieged
minority’). Thus, South African Whites would switch to ‘culturalism’ after ‘biological’ racism
had become increasingly discredited on a global scale in the 1940s and ‘50s. In a desperate
attempt to postpone the inevitable end of South African apartheid, the crumbling edifice was
broadened in 1983 to include Indians and Coloreds into the electorate. In Egypt, the Romans
would switch, even more dramatically, from persecuting Christians to persecuting non-
Christians within a very short space of time, during which their apartheid system was also
somewhat relaxed, at least legally.
9.1. Zero-Sum Competition and the Height of De-Secularization
The starkest contrast between the conquerors’ attitudes towards the conquered before
and after conquest is in Egypt. The Greeks were inspired by, admired and even copied
elements of all main aspects of Egyptian culture, at least during the eighth, seventh, sixth and
parts of the fifth century BCE, and possibly even for many more centuries prior to that.
During this period, the archaic or ‘pre-classical’ period, Greece was on the periphery of the
civilized world, and it was influenced mainly by the Egyptian and West Semitic cultures,
without giving them much in return, in terms of culture.
Among the numerous Greek mercenaries who served in Egyptian armies during the
(Greek) classical period were many officers who belonged to the social elites back home in
Greece. They started marrying Egyptian women once the first Greek colony in Egypt,
Naucratis in the Nile Delta, had been given to the Greeks around 650 BCE by King
Psammetich for their mercenary services against the Persians. Many Greek mercenary officers
then married into the elite families of Egypt. 577
576
About, The Human Internet: The Accused of the Nuremberg Trial, Courtesy of: ‘Encyclopedia of the
Holocaust’, 1990.
577
Haider: Griechen im Vorderen Orient und in Ägypten bis ca. 590 v.Chr., 1996: 111ff; Assmann: Weisheit und
Mysterium: Das Bild der Griechen von Ägypten, 2000: 10ff; Bernal 2001