So much good info here that I hate to do this, but…
L’Allemagne is the French word for Germany. Deutschland is what the Germans call it.
Thanks msgotrocks - 'twas slip of the keyboard as it were ;).
- Tamerlane
I must disagree 100% on this. In Germany, there were work camps and extermination camps. ALL were Death camps. (Try explaining this to a Jew.) Similarly with Lord Kitcheners “refugee camps” If you’re going to take care of refugees, then do so. But if your purpose is ethnic cleansing and genocide, then you don’t. If the Boer “refugee camps” weren’t death camps, then Andersonville was a YMCA summer camp.
You are absolutely right, rampisad, on this. I defer to you here. But remember that hindsight is 20/20. The fear of Commie revolution was real.
Sorry, I should have said that the British had no problembeing aggressive about asserting the territorial integrity of their claims, and thus truly impinging on native sovereignty. Remember Rorke’s drift.
Also, I still say apartheid is essentially a political expedient that is racist in its implications, but not in its reason of being, any more than religion is the cause of the strife in Northern Ireland – in both cases race and religion form the basis of the social cleavage upon which the political organization of the nation lies. The struggles really aren’t about race or religion, but about political disenfranchisement…
Anyway, this is a great board, glad I found it. You folks are quite knowledgeable… So Tamerlane… know any good gin joints or cat houses in Samarkand?
Eurotrash of the World, Unite!
Eh, I’d still have to disagree. Separating races for whatver reasons ( even if it is “separate but equal” - and in this case one race was clearly regarded as “superior” ) is ipso facto racist, any way you cut it. I really don’t believe the National Party was only concerned by getting out-voted by black Africans. Racial superiority definitely seems to enter the picture, in one facet or another.
But I’ll agree to disagee if you like.
Would that I did - I’d have better stories ;).
- Tamerlane
You may disagree, if you choose. However, the phrases “death camp” and “concentration camp” have fairly regular use in English and “death camp” is not commonly used for either the concentration camps set up by the British in South Africa or the work camps set up by the Nazis. I have not denied the horror of the camps; I only point out that your terminology, while evocative, would be confusing to someone who was less familiar with history and went searching for information on the British “death camps” of South Africa.
I have not made any attempt to minimize Roberts’s actions and I consider Kitchener an incompetent monster, but the phrase applied to those camps (and so, the phrase on which other readers of this thread would find the most information if they sought it) was concentration camp.
gonzalo de cordoba
I think what you and tomndebb are arguing about is the term used to denote the camps, rather than the effect. I must say that I never heard of (or thought of) the Boer War camps as anything other than concentration camps. I even think the term was invented for this purpose, and was only used as a convenient handle in Germany later for constructs that had very different purposes.
Tamerlane
I agree in so far as it’s pointless to try to describe apartheid without attributing to it racist atttributes. However, the question remains whether the driving force was predominantly racial (as say was Nazi anti-semitism) or was based on a complex mix of political, economic, racial and social factors. Also, there was an important religious element. The strictly Calvinist Afrikaners viewed the Blacks in biblical terms people who were destined by G-d and the church to fulfill the roles of “hewers of wood and drawers of water”
I suspect we’re getting caught in a sematic tangle. I consider it pointless to say something has racist attributes and not call it racist. Nazi antisemitism also had roots in economic, social, and political factors. Racism of all sorts usually does.
I simply don’t buy the argument that Afrikaners considered Africans just as good as they were, but felt racial separation was the best and most expedient way to run the country. They may have believed the latter, but it was disbelief in the former that informed that decision.
Err…But this is not a defense of Afrikaners against racism - It’s an indictment against them. Someone who says someone has a lower, distinct role to play because their church tells them that that is the lot of people of his race, is not absolved of the charge racism. It just demonstrates that they believe in a racist theology. One can be a perfectly sincere racist - But they’re still a racist ;).
I think you, me, and gonzalo are picking minor nits here with each other, while generally agreeing.
But I’m right :D.
- Tamerlane
Tamerlane
There, there - of course you are.
And if I gave the impression that I was denying in any way that Afrikaners (or most of them; let’s not slip into stereotyping) were rabid racialists, then I’ve been misunderstood. Defending them is the last thing I want to do. Understanding them however is a different thing, because only by doing that can we see (and prevent) it happening again.
Also, the Calvinism thing was a prop that they could use to justify the racialism - how else to be a good Christian and do what they did. I’m sure there were many Nazi SS troopers who went to church every Sunday.
We must recognise, however, that the Brits were just as good (?bad) at it as the Boers. They also managed to fit in racialism largely without the Christianity, in fact in what they thought of as a liberal, democratic society.
Captain Amazing
America was not a strong influence in SA, because the British Empire overwhelmed. Knowledge of conditions in the South, the Civil War and all the rest was minimal - they never studied American history in school.
Apartheid as a formal concept, rather than as an inherited social structure, sprang from the twisted mind of Hendrik Verwoerd, the third Afrikaner prime minister (and he was actually born in Holland so wasn’t strictly speaking an Afrikaner). Until his ascent, the stuff had been pretty much made up ad hoc, largely to meet the needs of the economy (as I think I said in an earlier post). Verwoerd sat down and set out a whole political structure, which he called “separate but equal”. In reality, neither of these things could ever have happened. The separation couldn’t occur because the Black labour was a vital component of all aspects of the economy. The equality wasn’t there for all the racist, social and economic factors that have been outlined in this thread. All that Verwoerd did was to give the defenders of the oppression some theoretical justification for a system which was becoming distasteful to the rest of the world.
curly chick
BTW - welcome to SD.
I’m not sure how to answer this - do you mean in the SA context? The term “segregation” doesn’t fit in exactly, to me it’s more of an American concept. I’d be glad to try and do better if you could expand a bit.
- The Afrikaners are neither German nor Dutch; they are their own nation, with ancestors from Germany, the Netherlands, France and other countries. They also have their own language called “Afrikaans,” which is descended from Dutch.
- Dutch and German do not mean the same thing. The Dutch and the Germans are not only two different nations, but they also speak different languages - Nederlands (Dutch) and Deutsch (German).
- Afrikaners (also known as “Boers”) have a large variety of names, including Botha, Pretorius, Cloete, Terre’Blanche, Van Ronge, Marais, Van der Westhuizen and others.
- Apartheid was started in 1948 by the National Party, which was dominated by Afrikaners.
Zombie thread from almost 12 years ago.