Apartheid

outbreak of the Palestinians’ Second Intifada (uprising) in September 2000. In this situation,
the apartheid business elites obviously still want indigenous employees, whose labor
ultimately costs less, but they are overruled by the military and political elites who prefer
gradual expulsion or even annihilation of the indigenous people and their gradual replacement
by a more ‘cooperative’ (docile) labor force and reserve labor force, which, however, first has
to be imported, acclimatized, taught the language, etc. As soon as things quieten down, the
Israeli business elites may find allies among the political or military elites who are ready to
make ‘concessions’ to Palestinians in order to get them back to work.
Furthermore, apartheid was never chiefly a matter of prejudice and cultural or religious
differences, but, a great deal more importantly, concrete and material violence and
exploitation. Apartheid takes place on the ground at least as much as it does in people’s
minds. This judgement is not meant to marginalize the important ideological warfare and
propaganda that, I hope to show, are also defining characteristics of every apartheid society.
Yet, too much emphasis on racism, and a forteriori on apartheid, as a psychological, symbolic
or mental phenomenon, e.g. as ‘prejudice’ or a ‘discourse’, or even as a mental disease, may
indeed skew the understanding of apartheid’s many fundamental material and concrete
aspects. Just because human ‘races’ do not ultimately exist in the real world, but only in
people’s minds, does not mean that racism does not exist in the real world.
Lastly, apartheid was never merely a state of war between different peoples either, but
also a matter of invasion, oppression, theft, intimidation, and exploitative economic and social
relationships. In other words, it does not only consist of endlessly spinning cycles of
retaliatory violence; it has discernible, and indeed identifiable, beginnings, and it is essentially
much more than mere violence. In fact, it is sometimes written off as a war that will never end
and can never end, as something inevitable, something spuriously based in human genes or
culture: Blacks or Non-Whites must fight Whites, and vice versa, Arabs (or Muslims) must
fight Jews, and vice versa.
For reasons such as these, the United Nations (UN) in 1968, as well as South Africa’s
Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in its 1998 Final Report, the International
Criminal Court (ICC), in Article 7 of its 1999 Statutes, and many other authoritative and/or
ethically oriented bodies and individuals have classified and condemned apartheid as a crime
against humanity.
* * *
Apartheid is not a very complicated phenomenon. I already outlined it, in mainly
negative terms, within the space of a few paragraphs above. The essence of apartheid and its
explication in positive terms, however, appear to be more difficult to grasp. Why? In the
course of this investigation, I will deal with several propaganda smokescreens and ideological
traps – more or less consciously devised by the oppressive ethnic minorities and their allies –
in order to obscure the nature of the beast, so that it can remain poised to strike, as it were,
entirely unsuspected, from a well-camouflaged ambush position. Once the system of apartheid
has been formally defeated, personal and institutional responsibility for apartheid is also
shirked with the aid of such manipulations. For example, no civilian members of South
Africa’s white population have been found guilty of apartheid, a crime against humanity, by
any court of law. And in that country, the elites still talk far more often about the ‘apartheid
state’ than about any ‘apartheid society’. So far, consciously intended mystification has
proven to be one efficient, although far from sufficient, way among many of prolonging the
lives of apartheid societies, even beyond their formal or official demise. Apparently, then,
there is life after death for apartheid. This also becomes a burning issue with the current, neoliberal
reforms of South Africa’s post-apartheid economy, which statistically have made white
families richer and black families poorer, at least between 1996 and 2002, though in a manner
fundamentally different from apartheid in the traditional sense. Previously boycotted and
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