Apartheid

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in China at approximately that time. 763
On the whole, ethnicism seems to have been overcome by the Muslims in Egypt, for
the time being. They would later also use and exploit Sudanese slaves on cotton plantations
and for the industrialization of the country. But Islam is one of the non-ethnicist religions par
excellence. Due to the complex interaction of all these factors, there was for the first time in a
thousand years no longer apartheid in Egypt, at least for several centuries to come. There was
no longer a perpetual state of war, other than the struggles of the sexes and the economic
classes, within Egyptian society.
What could South Africa and Israel learn from this? If apartheid is abolished in
political spheres only, the masses will get scant comfort from the fact that there is a new,
small indigenous political elite and a new, small indigenous plutocracy alongside the old one,
as long as the old one did not just take its money and run. Liberation from apartheid must be
an economic, social, and cultural as well as a political phenomenon.
Furthermore, liberation from apartheid must also include an end to femicide. In this
important regard, even Egypt is still not liberated. Although femicide in Egypt is not unrelated
to patriarchalism before the Greek conquest, and although it took on a life of its own which
nobody, so far and as far as I know, has considered related to Graeco-Roman rule, I hope to
have shown that it is a legacy of that rule and that it urgently needs to be relegated to the
dustbin of history along with all other aspects of apartheid.
Both sides in apartheid conflicts frequently voice a claim to a monopoly on suffering,
even Israeli Jews (mainly due to European racists) and Afrikaners (mainly due to British
atrocities in the Anglo-Boer War). But nobody can sustain such a claim, even black South
Africans and Palestinians are so far lucky, as whole ethnicities, compared to most Native
American ethnicities.
Perhaps the fate of apartheid in Egypt can also teach us something more positive and
general about the future: that there is hope, somehow. Things do change, and people do, too.
And still more can probably be learned, as well.
Cultural diversity, for one thing, is a basic value, comparable to nothing less than that
of human rights as a whole. Variety is the spice of life, but it is also much more than that.
When UNESCO adopted its Declaration on Cultural Diversity in 2001, the organization’s
Director-General, Koïchiro Matsuura, poignantly expressed hope that it would ‘one day
acquire as much force as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights’. 764
No wonder that only the USA and Israel voted against UNESCO’s adoption of the
legally stronger Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural
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Reader 1998 (1997): 217ff; Oliver & Fage: A Short History of Africa, 1995: 59ff; McIntosh: Early Urban
Clusters in China and Africa, 1991: 199-212
764
N.N.: Press Release, General Conference Adopts Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity, November 2,
2001. The full text of the declaration is also available on that page. If a democratic world state ever materializes,
then cultural diversity and biodiversity should, in my opinion, have equal status to human rights as top priorities
in its laws and in its constitution. See, further, Löwstedt 1995: 20ff; Giddens & Hutton: Fighting Back, 2000:
213-223; Held: Cosmopolitanism: Ideas, Realities and Deficits, 2002: 305-324. Only a democratic world state
can in my opinion overcome the undemocratic and pro-NATO – i.e. the practically ethnicist and classist –
deficits of the United Nations. These deficits are partly to blame for the establishment of a racist state in Israel,
and for many other misfortunes and injustices. Yet the UN should also be lauded for the Universal Declarations
of Human Rights and on Cultural Diversity, among many other things. The UN can therefore, from my
perspective, not be dismissed entirely. The realization of its ideal successor, a democratic world state – it is to be
expected – would continue to be sabotaged and vigorously prevented by the most wealthy and powerful nations
and organizations in the world today. The reasons are obvious, especially perhaps the basic political economic
one: the majority of world parliamentarians as well as the first democratically elected world president are more
than likely to be non-Whites, and more in favor of wealth redistribution than wealth concentration, as opposed to
the leaders of today’s world, who are of course mainly unelected, or only elected by privileged minorities, from
the global perspective. In this important regard, there is global apartheid. Due to the global reach of their
influence and power, the owner of News Corporation (Rupert Murdoch) and the president of the USA should
otherwise be electable by a global constituency.