Apartheid

exception, since only very few ‘Eastern’, i.e. non-European, Jews have ever made it into the
country’s elites.
With these additional three or four features, we have a wide definition of apartheid,
but it will not include any of the examples that I compared in some detail to South African
apartheid above (USA, Australia, New Zealand, Nazi Germany, Rhodesia, Guatemala,
Outremer, Ireland, Hong Kong, the Soviet Union, Afghanistan, the whole world), examples
that have been labeled ‘apartheid’ by others. In my view, it is therefore a meaningful, useful,
well-balanced, and tempered definition, neither too wide nor too narrow.
If only one of the conditions is missing, such as the absence of cutting-edge military
technology in Outremer, Guatemala, or Rhodesia, then I have nothing at all against the use of
the label ‘apartheid’ to describe that society. I even consider it very useful in such cases, too.
After all, the Whites in Guatemala and Rhodesia were militarily still vastly superior to the
indigenous groups that were defeated and conquered by them. (In Outremer, the superiority
was temporary, and not technological, and thus it was also a far less stable apartheid society
and state.) An exaggerated essentialist attitude which would attempt to draw sharp borders
between genocide, apartheid, and colonialism would in my opinion eventually be found
wanting.
Mine is also a definition that differs considerably from the one first constructed by an
extremely racist South African government and ruling party, which arrogantly made it the
label of its overall policy. With such a biased background to the term, one should in my
opinion be careful not to fall into the ideological traps that the NP government cleverly
intended. In the following two chapters I will attempt to further structure and deepen the wide
definition of apartheid.
6. Differences and Similarities between Apartheid Societies
One of the most inessential differences between the different versions of it is the
nature of one of the linchpins of apartheid itself: the (official or inofficial) identification of
races or ethnic groups, at once so obvious and yet still lacking support in the world of facts. I
will not proceed to criticize the cultural construction of human races and ethnic groups since
this has been done so well by others. The propensity of humans to migrate and to ‘interbreed’
with members from other human groups are the most frequently cited sociobiological and
sociological reasons why genes are so remarkably spread out among human carriers. Almost
half of the volume of our bodies consists of legs, i.e. locomotion devices. With the continuous
technological development of artificial locomotion devices which have so far only led to
increased interaction, it seems that only successful non-discriminatory yet spatial segregation,
over very many generations indeed, probably over tens of thousands of years – for example
through the establishment of human colonies in outer space, outside this planet – could ever
lead to the formation of human races, comparable, for instance, to races of horses, cows, pigs,
and dogs. 82
Ethnicist ‘criteria’ will therefore always vary – i.e. since there are no such things as
human races or ethnic groups in any natural scientific sense. In South Africa there were for
example the notorious ‘pencil tests’: A representative of the race classification authorities
stuck a pencil in a person’s hair to determine whether s/he was black or Coloured. If the
pencil stayed, the person was to be classified and considered black. If it slid through the hair,
82 N.N.: Race Not Reflected in Genes, Study Finds, 2002; Appiah: There Are No Biological Races, 2000: 50-52;
Menozzi, Piazza (Contributor), Cavalli-Sforza: The History and Geography of Human Genes, 1994. A much
earlier statement against biological racism by UNESCO, endorsed by most prominent geneticists and physical
anthropologists in 1950, was not yet strong with compelling physical evidence, but pointed out the utter failure
with finding counter-evidence that white racist scientists had tried to muster (wasting enormous research
resources) during preceding decades and centuries. See Fredrickson 2002: 128.
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