Faithful Servants and Dangerous Beasts: Race,Nationalism and Historical Mythmaking

Quispel explores the relationship between racism, nationalism and historical mythmaking. When comparing the role played by antisemitism and racism in nationalist ideologies in Europe, South Africa and the American South some common features emerge: in all three cases nationalism has employed historical myths to prove not only the superiority of the 'own group', but also the inferiority of 'others'. However, in both South Africa and the American South, there was an important change. At first these myths were used to interpret a recent past in which people of European descent, the English and the Yankees respectively, had been the enemy. During the process of white reconciliation, which gathered momentum in the South during the last decade of the nineteenth century, and more slowly in South Africa during the 1930s, the character of the mythologies started to shift. In South Africa anti-British myths, like Slagtersnek, gave way to myths concerning the battle at the Bloedrivier in which anti-African elements were much more prominent. In the American South pre-Civil War society came to be seen as perhaps as close to paradise as human society could achieve. Even Blacks were depicted as having been happy: being slaves under the close supervision of their white masters helped them to control their dark passions and to perform the task that God had created them for in the first place, hard physical labour to boost the white economy. After emancipation things changed dramatically. Without white supervision Blacks were seen as regressing to a natural primitive state. Historical myths then became an important justification for white supremacy.     

The image of the Jews in Hungarian public opinion

ABSTRACT

Nowhere has the debate about a ‘new antisemitism’ been as fierce and relevant as in France. In recent years this country has witnessed high recorded levels of antisemitism, prompting many commentators to claim the existence of an anti-sémitisme nouveau. Something has indeed changed, at least in terms of the nature, frequency and perpetrators of antisemitic violence in France. Previously connected exclusively to the extreme right, it has now also become associated with a group that is itself a victim of discrimination: ethnic minority youths living in the poor suburbs (banlieues). Peace first discusses and explains the statistics produced by the French watchdog on racism and antisemitism as well as the effects of the Middle East conflict. He then traces the debate on this ‘new antisemitism’ in the French context, contrasting the views of the label's promoters and opponents. He argues that, while antisemitism has undoubtedly evolved, the ‘new’ label is effectively erroneous as it fuses supposedly leftist and ‘Muslim’ antisemitism into one entity when they are not necessarily linked. In addition, he offers vital clarification of the distinction between anti-Zionism and antisemitism along with suggestions for further research.     

Nixon and the Jews

ABSTRACT

In public the 37th President of the United States did not express hostility or disparagement, or show any signs of religious prejudice towards Jews. But inside the White House, Richard M. Nixon's remarks were often scurrilous. His antisemitism was not casual; it was close to compulsive. And it could be coupled with other seething grievances, for example, towards liberals, radicals, the media, Blacks and Italian-Americans. Yet Nixon controlled his antisemitism. It had no adverse effect on Jewish life, either at home or abroad. The malice that he nurtured remained unmobilized. Apart from a few limited personnel instances (mostly but not completely ignored by Nixon's underlings), it is impossible to connect private resentment to public policy, probably because the barriers to the expression of antisemitism in the United States have been so high. The ugliness of his utterances in the Oval Office revealed his character, but did not extend outward to shape the processes of governance. A disconnect can therefore be discerned between what he felt and how he acted. Most American Jews voted for Nixon's Democratic opponents in 1968 and 1972. But even Jews who voted against him, even those who loathed him, have often acknowledged that Nixon's policies fortified the security of Israel; and he was proud of his support for the Jewish state during the Yom Kippur War. What betrayed Nixon, and what forced him to resign the presidency, was his decision to instal a secret taping system in the Oval Office. When the tapes were played in 1974, he showed himself to be conspiring to obstruct justice. In subsequent years, further exposure of the tapes revealed the extent and intensity of Nixon's antipathy to Jews. The expletives that had to be deleted did much to besmirch the dignity of the office. But such was the stigma the political culture attached to antisemitism that, had his bigotry become public before 1968, Nixon's career would have been over.     

Jews in the Christian Gaze: Munich's Churches before and after Hitler

Abstract

Kauders sets out to examine three interrelated topics: the nature of antisemitism after the Second World War; the continuity in thinking about the Jews in the twentieth century; and the problem of responsibility inherent in any analysis of the events surrounding the Holocaust. In what follows, emphasis is placed on the Catholic and Protestant churches in the Bavarian capital of Munich, whose reactions to Jew-hatred before 1933 and after 1945 are studied in some detail. Several conclusions emerge from this investigation. Both churches embraced völkisch thinking before 1933, without approving of violent manifestations of racialist thought. Both Catholics and Protestants, whenever they defended the Jews before the rise of Hitler, did so in order to safeguard Christian dogma, and in particular the value of the Old Testament as well as the Jewish origins of Jesus and Paul. After 1945 clerics employed language that ignored events between 1933 and 1945, describing the ‘Jewish question’ as if the issue was still embedded in Weimar politics; they did so because they assumed that a majority of Germans had been innocent of any wrongdoing, so that a pre-1933 image of ‘the Jew’ (which did not allow for extremism and violence) could be re-adopted with impunity after 1945. Christian views began to change in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when Jews were increasingly seen as Others who were to be respected as such. Although German-Jewish irreconcilability was thereby cemented, this shift also entailed an acceptance as opposed to a denial of the Jew as different from Christians and ‘Germans’.     

Overlapping publics and the negotiation of legitimacy in South African and Namibian sexual politics

ABSTRACT

This article explores how and why social movement organizations negotiate their presence in, and demands on, multiple public spheres. We analyse the strategies of two social movement organizations, Free Gender in Cape Town, South Africa, and Sister Namibia in Windhoek, Namibia. Free Gender elected to withdraw participation from a governmental task team convened to address the issue of homophobic violence, despite the opportunity this offered the organization to participate in national politics. Sister Namibia, by contrast, decided to maintain its public presence despite experiencing political homophobia from the ruling party, the South West African People’s Organisation. We contribute to the literature on public spheres and social movements by demonstrating the need to consider the overlapping nature of public spheres in South Africa and Namibia at the local, national, and transnational levels to account for activists’ strategic decisions.     

The limits of analogy: comparing Islamophobia and antisemitism

ABSTRACT

The predicament faced by Muslims today, either in the United Kingdom specifically or in the West more generally, is often compared with the predicament faced by Jews at some point in the past. Muslims, it is suggested, are the new Jews. Klug's article homes in on one element in this view, the claim that Islamophobia is the new antisemitism, and considers the analogy between them. An introductory section sketches the political context, after which Klug focuses on logical or conceptual issues. The two middle sections contain the core of the analysis: consideration of the two terms ‘antisemitism’ and ‘Islamophobia’ in relation to the concepts they denote, followed by an examination of the concepts as such. Certain conclusions are drawn about both their general logic and their specific logics. The final section returns to the political context and, via critique of a thesis put forward by Matti Bunzl, discusses the uses of the analogy. Klug argues that the question we need to ask is not ‘Are Islamophobia and antisemitism analogous?’ but ‘What is the analogy worth?’ The value of the analogy lies in the light it sheds on the social and political realities that confront us in the here and now. Does it illuminate more than it obscures? These things are a matter of judgement. Klug leans towards asserting an analogy between antisemitism in the past and Islamophobia in the present, within limits.     

Female representation and electoral clientelism: New insights from South African municipal electionss

Do citizens experience less electoral clientelism in polities with more elected female representatives? The current literature is remarkably silent on the role of gender and female political representation for electoral clientelism. Due to gender differences in issue priorities, targeted constituent groups, networks and resources, we argue that voters experience less clientelism in municipalities with a higher proportion of female politicians because either female politicians are likely to engage less in clientelism or women are less likely to be viable candidates in more clientelist settings. Through either mechanism, we expect all voters – and female voters in particular – to experience less exposure to clientelism in municipalities with higher female representation. We examine this idea using survey data from the 2016 municipal elections in South Africa – a country with high levels of female representation in politics but increasing problems of corruption and patronage in the political system. Our findings are consistent with the argument that municipalities with more elected female councilors have considerably lower rates of electoral clientelism and that this mostly affects whether female voters are targeted by clientelist distribution. These findings shed new light on how women's representation in elected political office shapes the incidence and use of clientelist distribution during elections.     

Why Mussolini turned on the Jews

ABSTRACT

Mussolini's abrupt turn towards antisemitism in October 1938 is conventionally explained by virtue of external factors, most importantly, as an aspect of Fascist Italy's strategic alliance with Nazi Germany. Adler explores a complementary hypothesis that accounts for racism in terms of factors internal to the dynamics of Italian Fascism itself, namely, a progressive radicalization of the regime during the 1930s aimed at the realization of a new imperial-totalitarian state, one that, in turn, would create a new homogeneous nation and indeed a New Man, a uomo fascista. Unlike Nazi racism, oriented backward towards the preservation of a given racial purity, Fascist racism categorically rejected Italians as they had been constituted historically. Instead, it was oriented towards a future project, an anthropological revolution that would create nothing less than a new race. Jews were seen as obstacles to this cultural transformation because they were historically bound to the decadent liberal state, as well as to the corrupting bourgeois spirit that informed it.     

Multilingual signage: a multimodal approach to discourses of consumption in a South African township

The paper explores how global commercial discourses and the politics of aspiration in post-apartheid South Africa may be seen as contributing to the restructuring of spaces of multilingualism and the refiguring of indexical values of English and South African languages. The analysis takes its point of departure in how late-modern lifestyles, identities, aspirations and imaginations are represented across local and transnational commercial signage in the Western Cape township of Khayelitsha, focusing in particular on how different languages are multimodally constituted and differentially represented in two different sub-genres of commercial billboards. We suggest that new late-modern multimodal representations of identity, and the way multilingual resources are configured into new repertoires and genres of subjectivity, may be one important factor in how social transformation is mediated in changing perceptions and practices of language, while simultaneously and paradoxically reinforcing traditional conceptions of cultural authenticity and self-representation.     

Apartheid Policing: examining the US migrant labour system through a South African Lens

This article draws a parallel between the Apartheid regime in South Africa and the post-IRCA immigration regime in the USA. I argue that both regimes were organised around Apartheid Policing, which may be defined as a legal process consisting of three mutually reinforcing mechanisms: differentiation of migrants into non-citizen insiders with legal residence rights and non-citizen outsiders without them; stabilisation of migrants as permanent or long-term residents, enabling the growth of the migrant workforce; and marginalisation of migrants as politically vulnerable outsiders, including exploitation at work. But the two regimes were supported by different political and ideological apparatuses. While placing a disproportionate burden on Latino migrants, the post-IRCA immigration regime differed from the Apartheid regime in that it was not organised around an explicit racial hierarchy, and offered non-citizens a greater array of rights. As a result, Apartheid Policing under the post-IRCA immigration regime is potentially more politically sustainable.     

The logic of anti-Zionism: Soviet elites in the aftermath of the Six-Day War

Despite the opening of Soviet archives, and the surge in scholarly interest in anti-Zionism, scholars have not used declassified archive documents to shed new light on Soviet anti-Zionism in the wake of the Six-Day War. Based on such documents, Gjerde’s article challenges a view of post-1967 Soviet anti-Zionism that has been prevalent since it emerged during the Cold War: that it represented a ‘disguised’ form of antisemitism that Soviet leaders used as a political tool. To the contrary, Gjerde argues, the archive documents suggest Soviet anti-Zionism was more than a propaganda invention. Within higher Soviet echelons, a particular logic existed that fostered a view of ‘Zionism’ as an immense, conspiratorial threat to the Soviet Union. In one sense, this logic grew out of a more general tendency to view nonconformity as conspiracy: the Soviets had established extremely narrow boundaries for what constituted acceptable Jewish identity; and, when some Soviet Jews began to voice nationalist sentiments after the Six-Day War, Soviet leaders saw this expression of nonconformity as essentially a hostile act, warranting severe counter-measures. This is not to say Soviet anti-Zionism was not antisemitic but rather that to explain it merely as a propaganda tool is to ignore much of the complexity of its emergence.     

Contours of Memory in Post-Nazi Austria

Knight discusses both domestic and foreign aspects of the post-war Austrian 'landscape of memory', going back to the Anschluss and the antisemitic violence that followed it. In the years after 1945 this memory was sidelined, first by the West in the interests of the Cold War and then by the Soviet Union, although it has persisted in a subterranean sort of way. Since the 'Waldheim affair' it has surfaced to join a new international politics of sensibility about the Holocaust and related issues. Austria started in 1945 from a position similar to that of Germany but thereafter took a different course in respect of the 'national question' and the creation of a governing party coalition. Paradoxically, at a time when Austria has ceased to be exempt from scrutiny, sections of its society have become more sensitive about the magnitude of Nazi crimes than they ever were before.     

Hannah Arendt's analysis of antisemitism in The Origins of Totalitarianism: a critical appraisal

ABSTRACT

Hannah Arendt's seminal work The Origins of Totalitarianism begins with an extended study of the history of antisemitism. Many of Arendt's arguments in this groundbreaking text have been challenged by other scholars. Examining the chief contours of Arendt's account of the rise of modern antisemitism, Staudenmaier offers detailed reasons for approaching her conclusions sceptically while appreciating the book's other virtues. Arendt's repeated reliance on antisemitic sources, her inconsistent analysis of assimilation, her overstated distinction between social and political dimensions of anti-Jewish sentiment, and her emphasis on partial Jewish responsibility for antisemitism indicate fundamental problems with her interpretation of the historical record. A thorough critical appraisal of Arendt's argument offers an opportunity for both her admirers and her detractors to come to terms concretely with the contradictory aspects of her historical legacy.     

So what's new? Rethinking the ‘new antisemitism’ in a global age

ABSTRACT

Judaken discusses the various strands that constitute the so-called ‘new antisemitism’. He argues that this is not the first time a new crisis of antisemitism has been heralded. Indeed, in the wake of every major struggle in the Arab-Israeli conflict since the Six Day War, prominent scholars and advocates have sounded the alarm about a crisis resulting from the rise of what they designated a ‘new antisemitism’. Moreover, what writers point to as the vectors of the new antisemitism—Holocaust denial, the antisemitism of the extreme left, antisemitism in the Islamic world, anti-Zionism as antisemitism, even anti-racism as antisemitism—all have a fairly long history. What has changed are the role of information technologies and the geo-global context in which they function. These technologies have both facilitated the global dissemination of antisemitism as well as furnishing new means of combatting it. At bottom, this electronic warfare is both a symptom and a cause of the global forces at work in antisemitism today. After delineating the constellation of factors in the rise of global antisemitism post-September 2000, Judaken then draws on the work of Léon Poliakov, Judith Butler, Jean-Paul Sartre and the Frankfurt School, among others, to assess what Pierre-André Taguieff most aptly calls the ‘new Judaeophobia’.     

Xenophobic violence and the ambivalence of citizenship in post-apartheid South Africa

This essay examines the way that the language of rights has been used to both justify and challenge xenophobia in South Africa. South Africa has struggled with incidents of xenophobic violence against African migrants, with major outbreaks of violence taking place in 2008 and in 2015, and despite substantial anti-xenophobia efforts, African migrants continue to be subject to discrimination and abuse. Part of the reason for the persistence of anti-African migrant sentiment is a prevailing rhetoric of victimization, which frames irregular African migrants as a threat to the rights of South Africa’s poor. This essay analyzes that rhetoric, as well as analyzing how a grassroots movement of shackdwellers, Abhlali baseMjondolo, has challenged that rhetoric by highlighting the interconnection between the rights of citizens and noncitizens in the country. In examining the contestation over rights in South Africa, this essay seeks to engage with the ambivalence of citizenship in South Africa and the conflict between the human rights framework that has been established in the country and the necessary limitation of the rights of noncitizens.     

On representation(s): art,violence and the political imaginary of South Africa

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this article is to explore the multiple layers of representation which occur in the South Africa Pavilion at the Art Biennale in Venice in order to understand how they constitute and affect the state’s political imaginary. By analysing three artworks (David Koloane’s The Journey, Sue Williamson’s For thirty years next to his heart, and Zanele Muholi’s Faces and Phases) which were exhibited in the 2013 Pavilion, two key arguments emerge: 1) in this context artistic representation can be understood as a form of political representation; and, 2) these artists are simultaneously state and citizenry representatives. A tension emerges between the political imaginary desired by the South African state and the political imaginary enacted by its representatives. The article draws on seven months of participant observation fieldwork at the Biennale, which involved 76 interviews with people associated with the South Africa Pavilion, including government representatives, exhibition organisers, artists, and visitors. Part I explores the concept of representation in order to establish the two philosophical trajectories (political and artistic) with which this article engages – with particular reference to Michael Saward’s framework of the representative claim. Part II explores the multiple representative claims which the three artists and their artworks enact.

Abbreviations: Biennale: Venice Art Biennale; DAC: Department of Arts and Culture; For thirty years: For thirty years next to his heart, by Sue Williamson; TRC: Truth and Reconciliation Commission; US: United States of America     

Decentralization in Post-Apartheid South Africa

Abstract

Decentralization in South Africa was entrenched in the new democratic constitution of 1996 and charged local government with bringing basic and other services to the population. Our in-depth empirical study of 38 municipalities across South Africa indicates that the experiment with decentralization has largely failed to achieve its main aims—democratizing local government and delivering adequate basic services to all communities. In order to provide some answers to the question as to why this failure occurred, we focus attention on the legislative over-burdening of local government and its concurrent lack of institutional capacity to actually turn legal obligation and decentralization principles into practice as two of the main and related causes for this failure. While the South African constitution gave clear mandates to local government, the issue of adequate institutional capacity for municipal government was largely overlooked or ignored altogether.     

Liberation regimes and land reform in Africa. Land politics transcending enmity in South Africa

Truthfulness, the norm of science, is etymologically related to trust. Both concepts are related to ‘tree’, as a symbol for grounded knowledge, for differentiation (the tree of knowledge), for uprightness and reliability (Searle, 1995). Truthfulness generates trust. Trust generates community. The land politics and trust project in South Africa (Askvik and Bak, 2005) investigated how trust relations intervened within and between government institutions engaged in redistribution and management of land. It enquired into trust relations between the land state and stakeholders in land. It assessed how the new ANC‐controlled state intervened into the relation between market‐oriented urban industry and subsistence‐oriented livelihoods on communal land. Could that intervention explain the slow pace of land redistribution? The field work was done in the Northern and the Western Cape provinces. A hypothesis is that unconditional personal trust across institutional boundaries is a condition for post‐colonial, post‐liberation community building. In 2001, aspects of political democracy were in place. Trust relations between government institutions and to stakeholders in land varied, but were limited. Trusted mediators between the institutions, across cultures, were few and far apart. Subsistence‐oriented livelihoods on communal land were there to be transformed to commercial farming. The three‐step Government strategy, growth in the urban economy, commercialisation of rural subsistence production and rural welfare from the urban surplus, augmented separation, disbelief and distrust. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

An analysis of budget compliance measurement in South African local government best‐practice financial management technical assistance programs, 2001—2003

South Africa's local government financial management best‐practice technical assistance program (known as MFMTAP) was to reform municipal financial management; achieve credible, realistic budgets and prevent financial failure. We consider whether a budget compliance procedure, developed by National Treasury (NT) to measure funding requirements compliance with the Municipal Finance Management Act (MFMA) focusing on ‘realistic’ revenue budgeting, improves our understanding of technical assistance effectiveness. We assess a metropolitan municipality's compliance before, during and after advisory assistance. The compliance procedure was robust. Potential exists for wider application to assess best‐practice technical assistance (BPTA) program financial reform effectiveness. The findings from this single, important sample suggest that MFMA funding requirements are not being sustained 4 years after MFMTAP commencement, attributable to either BPTA performance or termination effects. We conclude that MFMA financial performance can be assessed by the procedure, from analysis of the metropolitan municipality performance assisted by a BPTA advisor for approximately 3 years. The analysis raises questions about BPTA program reform sustainability, but we add the caveat that conclusions cannot be drawn from a single sample metropolitan municipality, but a larger sample need be used for further methodology development to confirm its efficacy. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.