Apartheid

Third Reich Racism
The South African NP had close ties with the Nationalist Socialists in Germany and
openly supported them, but the former were not yet in power when World War II broke out.
The slightly less racist Union Party, which had strong ties to Britain, formed the government
at the time, and South Africa, a dominion of the British Empire, joined the war on the allied
side against Nazi Germany. After the war, however, the NP unexpectedly won the 1948 all-
White elections – they were to stay in government until 1994. Already in their first few years
in power, the NP freed and rehabilitated South African Nazi supporters, some of whom had
been incarcerated, including prime minister-to-be John Vorster, and (re-)introduced racist
laws and covert operations reminiscent of Hitler’s ‘master race’ policies. Indeed, the racist
regimes of the Third Reich and South Africa are commonly considered the worst outgrowths
of white racism. 39
The ideology was also strikingly similar in these cases. Winners rewrite history, but
oppressors do so even more. In order to elevate themselves to superhuman or divine status, the
oppressive elites even construct or re-construct religion and science. The centuries-old
Afrikaner Dutch Reformed Church idea of the white invaders being ‘God’s Chosen People’ 40
– which of course goes back to the millennia-old Jewish Biblical idea, if not even further –
was mirrored in the Nazi notion of Aryans or Germans being ‘Nature’s Chosen People’, the
insanely supposed be-all and end-all of natural selection. Especially anthropology and
biology, but also the whole range of social sciences and the humanities, were systematically
misused and distorted, even invented to a great extent, in order for Whites in South Africa and
Germany, as well as in the rest of Western Europe, in North America and elsewhere, to
earnestly and systematically attempt to prove this kind of preposterous idea. 41
Again, as Whites were quickly to become in Australia, New Zealand and the USA, the
German Nazis and their fellow travellers, who had after all voted Hitler into power, were a
majority against their preferred victims – the ‘retarded’ and ‘handicapped’, the Jews, the Slavs
(both within the German Reich and eventually throughout its conquered Lebensraum), the
39
Mandela 1995 (1994): 110ff; McGreal: Brothers in Arms – Israel’s Secret Pact with Pretoria (Israel and
Apartheid: Part 2), 2006. The 1935 law forbidding intermarriage between Germans and Jews, for example, has
few parallels aside from South African laws, and Graeco-Roman parallels in law and an Israeli parallel in
institutional practice. See Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour of 15 September 1935,
in Wikipedia: Nuremberg Laws, no date. Handicapped or disabled people, and other carriers of what the Nazi
state decided to consider ‘hereditary degeneracy’, were also prohibited altogether from marrying from 1935
onwards. See Finkelstein, M.: The Other Victims, 2000. Already in 1933, an order was circulated forbidding
Germans to marry ‘Gypsies, Negroes, and their bastard offspring’. By 1938, a “person could be judged as having
too much ‘Gypsy blood’ to be allowed to live if two of the individual’s eight great-grandparents were even part
Gypsy.” Miller, S.: The Road to Porrajmos: the Gypsy Holocaust, no date; see also Section II.2, below. See
Kaufman: Kristallnacht, 2003: 318, for a likening of apartheid South Africa with Nazi Germany prior to the
Second World War, and Mandela 2002 (1965): 30 for a likening of South Africa’s National Party government
with the Nazi government of Germany.
40
Mandela 1995 (1994): 111. In Graeco-Roman Egypt, the qualification ‘divine’ for designating people was
formally reserved for the royal families who were absolute rulers. However, many other members of the Greek
upper classes also appear to have considered themselves divine or superhuman, as opposed to how they
considered other people, including, especially, the indigenous Egyptians. Moreover, the general trend in Egypt
during this era was the ‘de-secularization’ of society, which reached a peak during the Graeco-Roman era and
could be correlated with the increasing degree of oppression. Assmann: Ma`at, Gerechtigkeit und Unsterblichkeit
im Alten Ägypten, 1995 (1990): 9, 287f; Assmann: Religion und kulturelles Gedächtnis, 2000b: 204; Green:
Classical Bearings: Interpreting Ancient History and Culture, 1998 (1989): 183; Gehrke: Geschichte des
Hellenismus, 1990: 78ff; Kemp: How Religious were the Ancient Egyptians? 1995: 25-54. See also Chapter
II.9.1, below.
41
Hardt & Negri: Empire, 2000: 125f; Gould: The Mismeasure of Man, 1981. On the idea of a human population
being God’s Chosen People, see Section II.9, below.
41