Making Sense of Racist Regimes

As far as I know, there have only been three democracies that developed racist "apartheid" type regimes. The Southern USA, South Africa, and Israel. I am against racism, and I consider it to be evil. I believe all citizens born in a given country must have equal rights under the law regardless of parentage. This is the law in Canada, and also now in the USA and since 1991 in South Africa. But the racist system has not yet been abolished in Israel.

As the International Criminal Court phrases it, apartheid is “the systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime.”

If you wish to read more about international law and apartheid and whether or not it applies to Israel, here is a web page.

In any racist society, there is "domination by one racial group over another". There are always some people who will proudly accept their racial status (such as Black, Jew, Aryan, White) but there are many in between types who desperately want to be "certified" as part of the dominant group. So there has to be some official way of keeping up the barrier of separation.

Palestinians are officially defined by the state of Israel meaning they can never "convert" or become like the rest of the full citizens who have rights, due to their birth, and because of their official classification by Israel. The classification is based on keeping records of parentage to ensure that no one can officially move from the subordinate class to the dominant class without authorization. A racist society always has a bureaucracy to accept or reject applicants who wish to be declared as part of the dominant class. "White" (USA, South Africa) or "Jewish"(Israel) or "Aryan"(Nazi Germany) as the case may be. This government body has the power to remove the rights from any person they deem to be from the "inferior" race.

A typical racist society has armed men of the dominant race (and sometimes the inferior race employed by the dominant race), continually checking people's documents. Those documents may be racial certificates or permits to travel. Dead- end racists even demand to see Obama's birth documents, or stand as close as possible to him with loaded assault rifles, even though he is President of the United States. The habits of racism do not die quickly.

In the old days, in the southern USA, a person was deemed black (and could be enslaved or segregated) if just one great-grandparent was black, even though the other 7 great grandparents were fully white. However that person (called an octoroon) could conceive a child with a white person of the opposite sex, (same sex marriages don't work in this case) and the child would be considered white.

In Nazi Germany, to be declared Aryan, you needed a certificate based on birth certificates of grandparents. Hitler personally issued thousands of certificates to mixed race German Jews. The important thing in Nazi Germany was to get this certificate. Without it you were no better than an animal.

"People born from marriages of Aryans with non-Aryans were called in Reich "mischlinge". The 1935 racial laws distinguished "mischlinge" of first level (one of parents was a Jew) and that of the second level (grandmother or grandfather was a Jew). Despite the juridical "imperfectness" of people with Jewish genes, dozens of thousands of "mischlinge" were called up to Wehrmacht, Luftwaffe and German Navy."

http://www.jewukr.org/observer/jo19_38/p0103_e.html

"Hitler's Jewish Soldiers" Bryan Rigg

Check out this page discussing the question if German/Jewishness.

In Israel, the racial rule is that your mother must be fully Jewish in order to be considered a Jew and get all the rights of Jews. There is a well defined conversion process you can go through, but as you could imagine very few Palestinians ever qualify for this process. Strangely enough, many German ex-Nazis could qualify as Jews under the existing laws of Israel.