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Racialism

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Racialism is a term used to describe racial policy (a policy whereby racial attributes play a role). Whenever the term is employed, especially in academia, it serves the purpose of a contradistinction with the term racism which goes to indicate racial opinion. It is, however, most widely used simply as a synonym for racism. The two most well known racialist regimes were Nazi Germany and Aparthied South Africa, but there have been countless others throughout history.

File:Hitler-car.jpg
Hitler's Nazi Germany: the epitome of 20th Century racialism

One recent example, was the genocidal policy undertaken by Hutu extremists in Rwanda against Tutsis and moderate Hutus which resulted in the murder (more rapid than that of Nazi Germany's Final Solution) of 800,000 people. In the case of Rwanda, tribalist ideology assumed racist dimensions. That the (mainly-European) developed world failed to intervene in Rwanda, has been also cited by some as a form of racialism directed against Africans in general.

File:Rwanda-graves.jpg
Graves of Rwandan genocide victims

A special use for the term, employed uniquely by white separatists as a lesser form of racism, is based on the claim by separatists that they do not view themselves as superior to — and especially, exhibit hatred towards — other races, but only believe in the separation between races. Since these groups view racial separation as a matter of public policy, their use of the term as such is, technically, not entirely incorrect. Still, the conventional distinction between racism and racialism has little to do with the intensity of hatred or racial superiority, it merely qualifies the attitudinal and policy realms behind racial hatred.

File:Aprt-YStar.JPG
Right: a sign of segregation in Aperthied South Africa. Left: The Yellow Star Jews were forced to wear in Nazi Germany. The most important distinction between racialism in the Republic of South Africa and Nazi Germany, is that with the latter it culminated into a policy of extermination; an unprecedented genocide in which millions of human beings were murdered.

See also

External links

Refernces

  • Kennedy, Paul and Nicholls Anthony (eds.) Nationalist and racialist movements in Britain and Germany before 1914 (Saint Antony's College Press, 1981).
  • Dobratz, Betty A. "White power, white pride!": The white separatist movement in the United States (Twayne Publishers, NY, 1997).
  • Melvern, Linda. Conspiracy to murder: The Rwanda genocide (Verso, London, 2004).

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