Apartheid

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may yet take a long time until it is overcome in a similar way to the traces of the Graeco-
Roman system of apartheid in Egypt, which are now all but a memory. The main leftovers of
apartheid in South Africa are wealth distribution and land ownership – these two were
certainly intended by the apartheid elites to be lasting legacies – and to a lesser but still
noticeable extent: access, violence with impunity, repopulation, education, language, and
thought.
[D]evelopments since 1994 have gradually reduced the capacity of
South Africa’s participatory democracy to breach the barriers to
economic power for the benefit of the majority. Indeed, for the
majority of South Africans, the South African success only becomes
obvious when compared to the Palestinian case. 728
The system of gross human rights violations that makes up apartheid must not be seen
as universal. 729 There is not more or less apartheid everywhere. 730 No doubt, there is more or
less racism and more or less discrimination by ethnicity everywhere, but not apartheid. In fact,
it only appears in a minority of societies, most, if not all of them, apparently associated with
European or white military and demographic expansion and, in some instances, with slave
labor-based economies. The Europeans, the Whites, did not determine that outcome in any
biological sense, and neither did the Jews. Only the last 500 years and the ancient period of
Graeco-Roman dominance happened to be times when the west’s dramatic advances in
military technology were linked with geographic expansion and a perceived lack of laborers.
They also happened to be times when elitist, social Darwinist, and ethnicist ideologies were
predominant.
Most importantly, an apartheid society will exhibit instances of all nine of my
structural, defining categories. In 1968, the United Nations condemned apartheid in the
narrow sense as a ‘Crime against Humanity’, i.e. not just a crime against South African non-
Whites, not just a crime against all South Africans, but also a crime against you and me,
against any human being. 731 Five years later, the UN General Assembly strengthened its
opposition to apartheid by passing the ‘International Convention on the Suppression and
Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid’, 732 in my terminology: to cover apartheid in the wide
sense. The aims and goals of this convention, however, can only be said to have been
Clinton Sees Vietnam War’s Painful Legacy, 2000; N.N.: Old Cluster Bomb Kills Three Children in Vietnam,
January 17, 2003; Mulvihill: More Agent Orange Sprayed in Vietnam Than Thought, 2003. The Vietnam
scenario for the USA has, incidentally, been compared to the Palestine scenario for Israel. The militarily superior
powers in each case won all the battles but would ultimately lose the war, according to the Saudi Arabian
ambassador to the USA, Prince Bandar bin Sultan. See Fenwick: Saudi Compares Israeli Conflict to Vietnam
War, 2002.
728
Younis 2000: 175. See also Mseteka: Seven Years On, South Africa Black Empowerment Stalls, 2001
729
Do compare this statement, however, with the Selassie-Marley quote at the beginning of Part II, above.
Apartheid in the (post)modern world is universal in the globalized economic sense that South African and Israeli
products and services were/are being sold all over the world, bringing profits to and thus supporting and
strengthening apartheid perpetrators. In the moral sense, too, people abroad who do not act against it, e.g. by
mindlessly breaking economic sanctions, for instance by buying South African or Israeli arms, gems, fruit, etc.,
help to perpetuate the system. See Reinhart: Stop Israel, 2001. On the broader ethical issue, see King Jr: Letter
from Birmingham Jail, 4 2001 (1963): 197: ‘Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.’ Apartheid as
injustice is a crime against humanity, and apartheid is permeated by injustice, but it also has other aspects.
Moreover, doing nothing when one can do something, such as the US and the UK and their allies paying nothing
but hypocritical lip service to human rights concerns with regard to the victims of both South African and Israeli
apartheid, but also when one despairs and cynically denies the possibility of changing things, seem to be further
global effects (rather than features) of modern apartheid.
730
See footnotes 58-64, above.
731
N.N.: A United Nations Priority: Universal Declaration of Human Rights, no date
732
N.N.: The International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid, November
30, 1973. See also footnote 3, above.