Apartheid Denial and the Spectre of the Shoah
In an interesting review of Milton Shain’s ‘A Perfect Storm: Antisemitism in South Africa, 1930–1948’, Michael Cardo recounts how ‘the Jewish Question’ was a politically useful way of channelling the disaffection of ‘poor whites’. “Anti-Semitism was used to paper over the cracks of class divisions and antagonisms in Afrikaner society.”
Cardo also reminds us that anti-Semitism was not limited to Afrikaans speaking whites. He cites a quote from Shain’s book by Liberal Party politician Patrick Duncan which clearly demonstrates the WASP sensibility that would later force affluent Jews to build their own golf courses and country clubs:
I am not anti-Semitic. I have many Jewish friends whom I like and admire. But something in me revolts against our country being peopled by the squat-bodied, furtive-eyed, loud-voiced race which crowds Muizenberg from the upcountry trading stores.
This is textbook bigotry, almost too good to be true. Some of my best friends are X. These people are repulsively exotic, simultaneously too loud and conspiring in the shadows, irremediably working class with pretensions to haut bourgeois leisure.
It also made me laugh out loud, because Duncan is talking not just about a xenophobic abstraction but also about my great-grandparents, whom I imagine, with some pleasure, gossiping in Yiddish at the volume I currently reserve for especially juicy stories at Tashas. And I recall a picture of my great-grandfather, the impecunious Talmudist, posing next to the St James change rooms in black hat and Trotsky spectacles, with the body of a sparrow, but whose black coat was nothing if not squat.
Tony Leon discussed Shain’s book in November, and he and Cardo take from it the same lesson: South Africa’s historic anti-Semitism look an awful lot like rhetoric against whites today. Leon’s piece is entitled “Populist fury against whites resembles past anti-Semitism”. Cardo’s is “Are ‘1652s’ the new Jews?”
Now I obviously disagree, believing as I do that liberal opponents of what they call identity politics fundamentally misunderstand and misread the (heterogeneous) movement(s) they tirelessly fulminate against, insofar as they pay any attention to the actual dynamics and content of what (diverse groups of) protesters actually say.
One of my concerns about Leon’s article was that it trivialised genuine anti-Semitism, which struck me as enormously irresponsible (something, it goes without saying, Leon would never set out to do).
It occurs to me that there may is another reason the comparison makes me uneasy.
What is the function of comparing today’s rhetoric of protest with anti-Semitism of the 1930s and 1940s? If the claim is that some groups of people are used as political leverage to deflect from crises, or to serve special interests, or set opponents against each other, or paper over class divisions, then we can all agree that this has always been a feature of South African politics and will continue to be for the foreseeable future.
But the particular comparison has particular resonance. Political actors who invoked the Jewish question in the 30s and 40s harnessed the popular energy of groups that, as Cardo points out, “took their cue from fascists in Europe and Nazis in Germany”. We are being warned about incipient fascism in contemporary South Africa.
As stated, I think actually looking at the methods and messages most people are employing clearly reveals that comparing protesters to fascists is misguided. But our understanding is also shaped by the context in which we believe protest is occurring.
What is the significance of calling white people 1652s? Is it simple xenophobia, a rallying cry against mlungus who invaded by sea, bringing their weird bodies and customs and capitalism to a land that isn’t theirs? In fact, it’s clear that the term is satirical, if often contemptuous; a joke about how the casually dominant and unrepentant are implicated in a lineage of tainted supremacy.
But we needn’t look so closely to question the casual way we choose to call programmatic attempts to ridicule a still hegemonic group proto-fascism, or to ask how we could be so comfortable about comparing assertions of the dignity of the previously oppressed to sympathy for Nazism.
If we are to take the historical analogy to fascism seriously, we should seriously consider the way we have understood fascism’s aftermath.
Imagine Jews in 1970s and 1980s West Germany, even Jews born after the collapse of the Third Reich, who asserted a Jewish nationalist identity and made up insulting names for Germans, even those born after the war, whom they contended failed to show contrition for a legacy of which they are beneficiaries. Looking back, would we accuse them of , I don’t know, using the tactics of Bolshevism? To many, that would be tantamount to Holocaust denial. (Imagine also that swastikas continued to adorn government building and that Jewish protesters tore these down and burned them. Would we say that was a fascist act?)
If we’re set on searching our past for traces of vicious totalitarian illiberalism, we don’t need to rely on faint analogies: we were in fact a leading proponent of such a system.
We have come to frame apartheid all too often, in the bland parlance of neoliberalism, as a period in which peopled were ‘denied opportunities’. That is an accurate assessment, and we should not underestimate the violence of that denial, but apartheid was also extrajudical assassination, police torture, mass shootings, the hellish hostel system purpose-built to breed violence, part of the gross edifice of migrant labour, forced relocation, the systematic breakup of family and social structures, and all manner of routine humiliations and hardships, and a million other bureaucratically codified indignities and injustices.
In other words, to make what should be a very obvious point, apartheid was extremely evil and the depths of its horrors really are world historical. Segregation and the denial of services was the least of its crimes.
There are two notable differences between our transition and Germany’s. Instead of Nuremberg trials we had amnesty. Rather than a persecuted minority, the apartheid’s officially designated victims comprised a majority of the population. The second point is important because it complicates the process of reparations and makes redistributive justice much harder to attain.
Is it time to get over apartheid? Are avowals of black consciousness solidarity in South Africa in 2016 crypto-fascist acts? Does making fun of white people now constitute Nazi tactics?
Let us take seriously that our history strongly echoes Nazism and take seriously the lessons of anti-fascism and admit that trivialising resistance amounts to a denial of apartheid as a crime against humanity. Just as the most well intentioned underestimation of the harm of Nazi crimes simply is Holocaust denial, frames of reference that diminish apartheid’s legacy will be condemned by history.
