Apartheid

74
others’) structures and acts of oppression at home. No doubt, colonial powers were always
class societies, and they do not necessarily seem to favor their own underclass any more than
that of the colony. But that is beside the point. Not only the quantity, but the quality of
systematic human rights violations is apt to vary, perhaps chiefly between:
Colonial, e.g. India, Nigeria or Hong Kong under British rule, Equatorial Guinea under
Spanish rule, England under Roman rule, ancient Egypt under Assyrian and Persian rule,
Indonesia under Dutch rule, Chechnya or even East Germany under Soviet rule, or Brazil
under Portuguese rule;
Apartheid, e.g. white-ruled South Africa, Graeco-Roman Egypt, present-day Israel,
Outremer, Guatemala and Bolivia from soon after the conquest by the Spanish,
independent Cuba and independent Brazil, both at least until the middle of the 20 th
century, Rhodesia, independent Paraguay, Tunisia under Phoenician rule, Anglo-Saxon
kingdoms in the British Isles prior to the Viking and Norman conquests, independent
Viking kingdoms in the British Isles and Normandy;
Genocidal 97 , e.g. the Caribbean islands under European occupation in the 15 th to 19 th
centuries, Nazi Germany, Patagonia, Tierra del Fuego, and other large parts of North and
South America, especially of the USA and of Canada, New Zealand and Australia,
97 Like apartheid, genocide is not only about physical violence. The German Nazi courts would condemn people
to ‘death through work’, a particularly brutal kind of slavery. Other economic dimensions of genocide include
the land and property confiscations for which genocide has often been perpetrated, as well as the infamous
collection and use of gold tooth fillings from Nazi gas chamber victims, of their skin for lampshades and soap, or
the British use of Tasmanian people’s skin for tobacco pouches, etc. Furthermore, Nazi and Japanese scientists
would use live humans as guinea pigs for excruciatingly painful ‘scientific’ experiments during the Second
World War, often leading to the slow death of the subject. The ideological and psychopathological dimensions of
genocide (repression, ethnocentrism, megalomania, de-humanization of the victims, sadism, inferiority
complexes, etc.) are additional common aspects of genocidal oppression. See Diamond 1993 (1992): 276ff;
Löwstedt: Über die Verdrängung der künstlichen Ausrottung im Darwinismus: Ursachen, Vorläufer und
Alternativen, 1998: 197-209. Tasmania ran the whole gamut from colony to apartheid to genocide of the
indigenous, carried out in tandem by the British settlers and the army. In 1803, the white ‘civilian’ settlers were
brought in, and three years later, the systematic killings began. See Stone 1999. (Incidentally, the founder of
modern evolutionary theory, Charles Darwin, was a witness (first- or second-hand) to this as well as to the
genocide of Khoikhoi in the Cape Colony and of Native Americans in Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego. It is
increasingly becoming clear that his theory of evolution was conceived and formulated both to explain such
events and to justify such practices, i.e. different varieties of artificial elimination, invariably carried out by
Whites against non-Whites, as well as natural selection, although the former were played down and even
repressed by him and by his followers. Instead, the birds and turtles of the Galapagos Islands have been
emphasized as decisive for Darwin’s insights and his formulation of the theory of evolution. See Desmond &
Moore: Darwin, 1991: xxi, 141ff; Löwstedt 1998: 202ff. on the theoretical implications of downplaying and
marginalizing elimination in favor of selection for both anthropology and evolution theory.) The indigenous
inhabitants of every single country in the Western Hemisphere have gone through prolonged horror and misery
as a colonial and/or apartheid and/or genocidal society. Most of them probably experienced and died from all
three forms of ethnicist human rights violations. For example, Guatemala during the 1980s could fit in with
genocidal as well as apartheid societies, with an estimated 200,000 of the oppressed indigenous Maya, Garifuna
and Xinca being killed off quietly – i.e. without much fuss in international relations or in the mass media – and
mostly indiscriminately, by neo-fascists of mainly Spanish stock, who in their turn depended crucially on support
from the USA. See footnote 45, above, and further Miller, T.C.: Guatemalans to Sue Top Lawmaker Over
Genocide, 2001; Chomsky: Year 501: The Conquest Continues, 1993; Herman & Chomsky: Manufacturing
Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, 1994 (1988): 73ff, 104ff. Racism against the indigenous
majority remains a great problem in Guatemala today. The situation there resembles South Africa, though the
indigenous could currently to some extent even be considered to be worse off in the Central American country.
The United Nations has urged private and public institutions to counteract discrimination (like in post-apartheid
South Africa) by employing more members of indigenous groups through introducing affirmative action
programs and also to ‘...consider legislation that would for the first time make racial discrimination a criminal
offense. Such reforms have previously met opposition in a country dominated by an economic elite that has
historically exploited the Mayans as a source of cheap, and at times forced, labor.’ Brosnan: Guatemala Must
Remedy Inequality of Indians - UN, 2001