Apartheid

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possibly due chiefly to the initially unpredictable growth of the Atlantic system of racist
slavery – it may never have been such an important part of class identity before capitalism,
but ethnicism does go back much further, as will become evident below. Finally, South
African racism stopped being mainly a biologism with the conclusion of the Second World
War. Like elsewhere in the world: after Nazi ideology had become seriously discredited in
Europe in 1945, the ideology of the NP and all other white supremacists became immensely
more culturalist in its racism. It remained so throughout the period of apartheid in a narrow
sense, especially in official statements intended for the outside world. ‘Biological’ racism,
however, was also still sponsored by the apartheid state and by other elements within
apartheid society, though in a less obvious and more clandestine manner. (See Chapter II.9.2,
below.) The decisive implementation of apartheid in the narrow sense in South Africa was
therefore officially postmodern, at least in its international attempt at justification, and not, as
Hardt and Negri appear to claim, modern.
Interesting and alarming as the issue of a postmodern de facto global white hegemony
is, it is not the subject of this investigation. Yet, we will not only be dealing with modern
ethnicism here, but also with premodern – e.g. the Graeco-Roman, chiefly culturally founded
– ethnicism, and with other aspects of postmodern ethnicism that also directly pertain to
traditional, as it were, apartheid societies. An instance of that is the use and abuse of third
ethnic groups – imported laborers who belong neither with the dominant invader ethnicity nor
with the subdued indigenous majority – in underpaid or unpaid service professions in presentday
Israel, which have perfectly matching counterparts in Graeco-Roman Egypt and South
Africa.
As gathered from the outlined examples (and there are others still, as some of my
footnotes explore): the USA, Australia, New Zealand, Nazi Germany, Rhodesia, Guatemala,
Outremer, Ireland, Hong Kong, the Soviet Union, Afghanistan, environmental and global
‘apartheid’, South African apartheid is indeed comparable to, and in form and content at times
quite close to systematic human rights violations elsewhere. I shall argue, however, with an
even wider range of sources to back up my claim, that there are two other parallels, each of
which comes a great deal closer.
5. Apartheid in the Wide Sense: A Preliminary Definition
Throughout this investigation, I will compare the South African apartheid system as
well as the oppressive structures in South Africa which preceded and influenced it, with Egypt
under Greek and Roman rule, from 332 BCE continuously until 642 CE, on the one hand, and
with Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories since 1948, on the other. Both of these
societies have repeatedly been compared to apartheid South Africa in sweeping terms. What I
wish to do here is to provide an analysis to investigate those generalizations, without shying
away from the differences. What the parallels of Graeco-Roman Egypt and modern Israel 75
(there are nearly twice as many Palestinians as there are Israeli Jews 76 ) pre-eminently share
racism in Hardt & Negri’s conception, appearing already in ancient Greece, see Bakaoukas: Tribalism & Racism
among the Ancient Greeks: A Weberian Perspective, 2005; Isaac: The Invention of Racism in Classical
Antiquity, 2004, and Chapter II.9.1, below.
75 as opposed to, for instance, Nazi Germany, USA, Australia, New Zealand and the Soviet Union. Nevertheless,
Whites were once a minority in America, Australia and New Zealand, too; that is, in comparison to the
indigenous populations. During these short, early periods of generally pre-colonialized society, I believe, the
oppressive behavior of Whites were similar to that of the oppressive apartheid minorities studied here, though
generally more genocidal in character as well as consequence. With regard to Blacks however, the Whites were
always a majority in the western European colonies on the North American mainland as well as in the
independent USA.
76 As I already indicated: if one would count all the Palestinians in refugee camps in Palestinian ‘autonomous’
areas and in the re-occupied Palestinian territories, in the adjoining countries Lebanon, Syria and Jordan,