Apartheid: then and now

In the furore over Jimmy Carter’s use of term “apartheid” in his latest treatise on the Israel-Palestine problem, many strange things have happened. On an international scale, the architect of the Camp David Accords has been branded an anti-Semite (although his work, Joseph Lelyveld claims in the New York Review, “did more to secure Israel’s place and legitimacy in the region than all the diplomacy that preceded or followed it”). And on a personal scale, I’ve been driven to do something no self-respecting Wash U TASPer would ever dream possible: I’ve been referencing Nesbitt. I must admit I have gained a new appreciation for Nesbitt, as I have discovered that his prose is worth its tangled, tortured weight in gold when consumed in small chunks (although all 200 pages of unadulterated Nesbitt was a bit much to land on us at the end of TASP).

At any rate, I turned to Nesbitt because I was curious about the Carter administration’s reaction to the original apartheid (the South African variety, that is). Today, as the current outrage proves, the term “apartheid” packs a punch perhaps stronger even than that of the word “racist,” for “apartheid” suggests the wilful, carefully organized pursuit of freely acknowledged prejudice and hatred to horrible, horrible ends. On one level, it is heartening to see that there is now general recognition of the horrors associated with apartheid. However, it is worth remembering that there was a time when even the Nobel Peace laureate Mr. Carter did not find apartheid so repugnant as we do today. Quoth Nesbitt (starting halfway down page 105):

Meanwhile, the newly elected Democratic President Jimmy Carter appointed an African-American civil rights leader, Andrew Young, as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Despite this appointment and Carter’s human rights rhetoric, however, there was little substantive change in U.S. policy toward the white regimes of southern Africa during his tenure… At a press conference to discuss his appointment as ambassador to the UN on 14 January1977, Young said that he was prepared to veto any resolution calling for the expulsion of South Africa…

When Young later took a more radical line and began to outline a tougher stance on Apartheid during a trip to Africa, he was “snubbed” by none other than, sorry Ryan, Vice-President Mondale whose remarks, according to Nesbitt “indicated the ambivalence of the Carter administration on the issue of apartheid.” (Interestingly enough, Nesbitt mentions the presence of PLO supporters in anti-apartheid marches during this period and notes that Israel was reluctant to attend anti-apartheid conferences for fear of delegates taking the opportunity to equate Zionism with apartheid.)

It is easy enough for us to recoil in horror at the very mention of apartheid today, now that it has been dismantled; however, it is humbling to remember that it was all too easy to turn a blind eye to the abuses taking place only thirty years ago. Today commentators would suggest that apartheid is “too strong” a word to use on any current situation. Nevertheless, we can be in no doubt that there is still massive injustice in the world, injustice to which we are no doubt as ambivalent as the Carter administration was to apartheid. That’s what has been bothering me since the end of TASP, since reading about all those brave activists and disparaging all those who cowered on the sidelines: for all my rhetoric, will I have the nerve to recognize injustice when we see it? And if I have the courage to recognize it, will I have the strength to act?