Apartheid

42
Roma and Sinti (‘Gypsies’), the Communists and the homosexuals. 42 Nazi ideology was also
partly and loosely based on an irrational anti-immigrant platform, which referred to ethnic
‘immigration’, or rather ‘infiltration’, that had presumably gone on since the Middle Ages at
the latest, whereas South African Whites would mostly rather forget about who had
immigrated in what temporal order to what was to become their country.
It should be added that Nazi Germany – like the USA, Australia and New Zealand, the
USA with regard to its indigenous population as well as its imported one 43 – was essentially a
genocidal system, whereas South Africa was essentially apartheid. There are, however, many
instances of overlapping between these two realms of systematic human rights violations. As
we shall see, especially South Africa and modern Israel display many documented genocidal
features, although they are (so far) basically and substantially ‘only’ apartheid systems, i.e.
second-rate – but by no means last-rate – crimes against humanity. We turn now to the
somewhat less genocidal instances of comparison with apartheid South Africa.
Comparisons with Other Apartheid Societies:
From Zimbabwe to Rhodesia, and Back Again
In 1890, Cecil Rhodes and his British ‘pioneer column’ invaded and conquered the
42 One could just as easily have started this list with Jews, Slavs, Communists, or with Soviet citizens. Twentyseven
million Soviet citizens were killed in Hitler’s war. Many of the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis
were the victims of unprecedented industrialized mass murder. There are several dimensions to evil. People with
certain mental and physical disabilities, however, were the first group to be slaughtered systematically by the
Nazis. For further arguments in favor of mentioning first the ‘handicapped’ and ‘retarded’ as victims of the
Nazis, see Ofstad: Vårt Förakt för Svaghet: Nazismens Normer och Värderingar – och Våra Egna (‘Our
Contempt for Weakness: Nazi Norms and Values – and Our Own’), 1987. For arguments placing Nazi genocides
squarely within an already quite well-established western European tradition and thus contradicting an often
falsely assumed uniqueness in kind and absolute incomparability, see Lindqvist: Exterminate All the Brutes! One
Man’s Odyssey into the Heart of Darkness and the Origins of European Genocide, 1998 (1992). The title of this
book refers to a central statement in Joseph Conrad’s novel, ‘The Heart of Darkness’, and reflects a common
attitude about the supreme goal of white or European civilization among Belgian colonialists in the Congo
around the last but one turn of the century, during which around ten million Congolese lost their lives mainly due
to white policies and practices, and among many other white colonialists and their supporters during the pre-Nazi
era. Although the Germans were not quite as genocidal in deed as their western neighbors had been until the
Second World War, they did practice genocide before the Nazi era, namely from 1904 to 1908 in South West
Africa (today’s Namibia), especially during the 1904 slaughter of an estimated 65,000 members of the rebellious
and heroic Herero people. See Zimmerer & Zeller (eds.): Völkermord in Deutsch-Südwestafrika, 2003. One
could easily go even further back in history and point out the genocides carried out by western Europeans and
their descendants in the Western Hemisphere and elsewhere as precursors of Nazi crimes. According to
Churchill 2001: 214, Hitler did indeed “explicitly anchor his concept of [L]ebensraumpolitik (‘politics of living
space’) directly upon U.S. practice against American Indians.” Other inspirations for the Nazis included ancient
Greek philosophers such as Plato (see Chapter II.9.1) and the Stalinist purges in the Soviet Union. See also
Podur: Letter to a Zionist, 2003. These remarks are not meant to trivialize Nazi crimes against humanity, they are
meant to help us understand them in order to contribute towards preventing anything similar from happening
again.
43 With a mere one per cent minority left of the current total US population, and an estimated mere 16 to 42 per
cent of the number of indigenous American people who had been alive when the Whites first landed on North
American shores, Native Americans were finally given some rights and privileges during the course of the 20 th
century. For instance, they were now finally allowed to leave their reservations, to vote, etc. By then, Whites and
other non-indigenous groups had long made up a crushing majority in the US. See footnotes 33-34, above. The
result was a broken nation of broken people, victims of a singularly brutal genocide who simply will not be able
to bounce back. During the last few centuries, nearly half of all languages of the indigenous North Americans
have become or been made extinct. See John: Native American Families, 4 1998 (1988): 382f; Churchill 1997.
The Nazis, if successful in the Second World War, might have done something similar with their victims, i.e. left
a tiny minority of Jews, Roma, Sinti, Slavs and others alive, e.g. for propaganda and research purposes. Based
upon some knowledge that we do have of senselessly brutal experiments, often designed to prove some kind of
genetic or organic inferiority of the victims, one shudders at the thought of what kinds of research that might
have been. Fredrickson 2002: 4, and Churchill 2001: 214, even assign part of the blame for the origin of Nazi
practices and thought to the older obsession with race purity and to racial discrimination in the USA and the
preceding and co-existent western European colonies in the Americas, respectively. See also footnote 42.