Apartheid

Yet, slavery in general is a classist crime (slaves always make up a distinctive
economic class) as much as it is a racist one, whereas genocide and apartheid are generally
more racist than classist (or sexist or anything else). For instance, under South African
apartheid Whites and Blacks would sometimes do the same work, which was paid unequally
to the vast benefit of Whites, whereas Blacks in the Americas did slave work, while the
Whites were the only ones to get paid. Though in both cases divided ethnically, the economic
classes were thus even more separate, in an economic and social sense, under slavery than
under apartheid. And, because of that, there was less direct competition between them during
slavery.
Even more importantly, the Atlantic system of slavery must also be seen as essentially
genocidal. As such, it could be considered as the worst genocide, the worst known crime in
human history. In my opinion, only the genocides of Native Americans perpetrated by western
European invaders and their descendants and the Nazi genocides of Jews, Roma, Sinti, Slavs
and others could match those horrors. Apart from the actual violent deaths of many tens of
millions of Africans and African Americans during capture or captivity, during transport or
unpaid work, the Whites who authored the crimes that make up the 400 years of the
transatlantic slave industry also intentionally and systematically robbed tens of millions of
Africans of their languages, their religions, their music and other essential aspects of their
culture and humanity by forbidding them to practice any of them. Moreover, they purposely
and systematically broke up families and cultural groups, especially in North America and the
Caribbean. The latter are in fact all crimes that have been classified by the United Nations as
genocide, albeit of a different kind than what we usually understand under that term, namely
as ‘cultural genocide’. I will return to these issues in the course of the investigation.
* * *
Although not as devastating as genocide per se, the wide concept of apartheid involves
even more serious human rights violations than those taking place under apartheid in the
narrow sense. In more than one way, the traditional concept of apartheid, created by white
supremacists, implicitly treats Whites as being no less indigenous to South Africa than
Blacks, since it does not refer to events prior to 1948. It therefore ignores and exonerates most
of the invasions and confiscations by white conquerors of land previously owned and tenured
by Blacks in South Africa or its predecessor states and polities. It also ignores the most
complete cases of ethnic cleansing and physical and cultural genocide of Blacks by Whites
and their assistants and allies in South Africa, which all occurred prior to 1948. Outside of
South Africa’s state borders, however, the South African apartheid regime committed
unprecedented atrocities during the last three decades of its existence, especially in Angola
and Mozambique, as we shall see.
When the concept of apartheid is applied to present-day Israel, as seems to be
happening now on a daily basis in the realm of somewhat marginalized publishing and in
unpublished communication, the initial de facto invasion of Palestine by immigrant, refugee,
and Zionist Jews during the course of the last century is often implied, but seldom, if ever,
explicitly compared to the white invasion of South Africa. One of the main reasons behind
this is of course that many of the Jews in Palestine before 1948, the year of the creation of the
modern state of Israel, were law-abiding immigrants and refugees rather than invaders. Yet,
some were not, and they were later to become the new country’s elites. Another, no less
important, reason is that South African Whites invented the term ‘apartheid’ to refer to policy
and practice after 1948 only, in effect sweeping their initial crimes and ill-gotten gains under
the carpet. I hope to have dug a level deeper with my analysis, exposing the necessity of an
initial invasion, or at least a de facto invasion – that is, the violent or ‘peaceful’ takeover of
the land by one group of foreigners from another – for the establishment of apartheid. Egypt
was conquered by the Greeks in a manner more similar to Palestine by the Jews than to South
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