how aparthed is against to Humanism
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AfriForum triggered a media controversy last week over the thesis that, while apartheid was wrong, and they disagreed with it, it should not qualify as a crime against humanity. In drafting a response, I sought the views of a range of South Africa's top thinkers; what follows is influenced to a significant extent by what they told me.
A first cautionary note was that much of the debate of this week has revolved around the United Nations convention on apartheid as a crime against humanity, the initial versions of which were put forward by the Soviet Union and Guinea in 1971, and ratified some years later. The UN of the 1970s was, however, a cesspit, and the sponsors and most ratifiers of the apartheid convention were serial rights abusers in their own right – on par with the apartheid state, and often worse.
So, it is in many respects a mistake, and defames the memory of the victims, to use that convention, and whence it came, as the moral lodestar against which to benchmark or memorialise the deprivations of apartheid.
A second cautionary note was the risk of diluting the meaning of the term "crime against humanity" as it was employed at Nuremberg in the prosecution of those individuals who had been responsible for the greatest act of state-sponsored murder the modern world had ever seen, where, over a period of five years, two thirds of the Jewish population of Europe were murdered.
Most recently, Oxfam in South Africa is reported to have described capitalism as "a crime against humanity". Throwing the term around loosely risks defaming the memory of the millions of victims of Nazi Germany.
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A first cautionary note was that much of the debate of this week has revolved around the United Nations convention on apartheid as a crime against humanity, the initial versions of which were put forward by the Soviet Union and Guinea in 1971, and ratified some years later. The UN of the 1970s was, however, a cesspit, and the sponsors and most ratifiers of the apartheid convention were serial rights abusers in their own right – on par with the apartheid state, and often worse.
So, it is in many respects a mistake, and defames the memory of the victims, to use that convention, and whence it came, as the moral lodestar against which to benchmark or memorialise the deprivations of apartheid.
A second cautionary note was the risk of diluting the meaning of the term "crime against humanity" as it was employed at Nuremberg in the prosecution of those individuals who had been responsible for the greatest act of state-sponsored murder the modern world had ever seen, where, over a period of five years, two thirds of the Jewish population of Europe were murdered.
Most recently, Oxfam in South Africa is reported to have described capitalism as "a crime against humanity". Throwing the term around loosely risks defaming the memory of the millions of victims of Nazi Germany.
I hope this will help you
if not then comment me
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