The Origins of Totalitarianism
Page 84
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19 This corresponded to as many as 160,000 individuals (Kiewiet, op. cit., p. 181). James (op. cit., p. 43) estimated the number of poor whites in 1943 at 500,000 which would correspond to about 20 per cent of the white population.
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20 “The poor while Afrikaaner population, living on the same subsistence level as the Bantus, is primarily the result of the Boers’ inability or stubborn refusal to learn agricultural science. Like the Bantu, the Boer likes to wander from one area to another, tilling the soil until it is no longer fertile, shooting the wild game until it ceases to exist” (ibid.).
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21 “Their race was their title of superiority over the natives, and to do manual labour conflicted with the dignity conferred upon them by their race.... Such an aversion degenerated, in those who were most demoralized, into a claim to charity as a right” (Kiewiet, op. cit., p. 216).
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22 The Dutch Reformed Church has been in the forefront of the Boers’ struggle against the influence of Christian missionaries on the Cape. In 1944, however, they went one step farther and adopted “without a single voice of dissent” a motion opposing the marriage of Boers with English-speaking citizens. (According to the Cape Times, editorial of July 18, 1944. Quoted from New Africa, Council on African Affairs. Monthly Bulletin, October, 1944.)
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23 Kiewiet (op. cit., p. 181) mentions “the doctrine of racial superiority which was drawn from the Bible and reinforced by the popular interpretation which the nineteenth century placed upon Darwin’s theories.”
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24 “The God of the Old Testament has been to them almost as much a national figure as He has been to the Jews....I recall a memorable scene in a Cape Town club, where a bold Briton, dining by chance with three or four Dutchmen, ventured to observe that Christ was a non-European and that, legally speaking, he would have been a prohibited immigrant in the Union of South Africa. The Dutchmen were so electrified at the remark that they nearly fell off their chairs” (Barnes, op. cit., p. 33).
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25 “For the Boer farmer the separation and the degradation of the natives are ordained by God, and it is crime and blasphemy to argue to the contrary” (Norman Bentwich, “South Africa. Dominion of Racial Problems.” In Political Quarterly, 1939, Vol. X, No. 3).
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26 “To this day the missionary is to the Boer the fundamental traitor, the white man who stands for black against white” (S. Gertrude Millin, Rhodes, London, 1933, p. 38).
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27 “Because they had little art, less architecture, and no literature, they depended upon their farms, their Bibles, and their blood to set them off sharply against the native and the outlander” (Kiewiet, op. cit., p. 121).
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28 “The true Vortrekker hated a boundary. When the British Government insisted on fixed boundaries for the Colony and for farms within it, something was taken from him....It was best surely to betake themselves across the border where there were water and free land and no British Government to disallow Vagrancy Laws and where white men could not be haled to court to answer the complaints of their servants” (Ibid., pp. 54–55). “The Great Trek, a movement unique in the history of colonization” (p. 58) “was the defeat of the policy of more intensive settlement. The practice which required the area of an entire Canadian township for the settlement of ten families was extended through all of South Africa. It made for ever impossible the segregation of white and black races in separate areas of settlement....By taking the Boers beyond the reach of British law, the Great Trek enabled them to establish ‘proper’ relations with the native population” (p. 56). “In later years, the Great Trek was to become more than a protest; it was to become a rebellion against the British administration, and the foundation stone of the Anglo-Boer racialism of the twentieth century” (lames, op. cit., p. 28).
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29 In 1939, the total population of the Union of South Africa amounted to 9,500,000 of whom 7,000,000 were natives and 2,500,000 Europeans. Of the latter, more than 1,250,000 were Boers, about one-third were British, and 100,000 were Jews. See Norman Bentwich, op. cit.
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30 J. A. Froude, op. cit., p. 375.
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31 Kiewiet, op. cit., p. 119.
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32 Froude, op. cit., p. 400.
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33 Kiewiet, op. cit., p. 119.
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34 “What an abundance of rain and grass was to New Zealand mutton, what a plenty of cheap grazing land was to Australian wool, what the fertile prairie acres were to Canadian wheat, cheap native labour was to South African mining and industrial enterprise” (Kiewiet, op. cit., p. 96).
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35 J. A. Froude, ibid.
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36 “The goldmines are the life-blood of the Union ...one half of the population obtained their livelihood directly or indirectly from the goldmining industry, and ...one half of the finances of the government were derived directly or indirectly from gold mining” (Kiewiet, op. cit., p. 155).
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37 See Paul H. Emden, Jews of Britain, A Series of Biographies, London, 1944, chapter “From Cairo to the Cape.”
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38 Kiewiet (op. cit., pp. 138–39) mentions, however, also another “set of circumstances”: “Any attempt by the British Government to secure concessions or reforms from the Transvaal Government made it inevitably the agent of the mining magnates.... Great Britain gave its support, whether this was clearly realized in Downing Street or not, to capital and mining investments.”
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39 “Much of the hesitant and evasive conduct of British statesmanship in the generation before the Boer War could be attributed to the indecision of the British Government between its obligation to the natives and its obligation to the white communities.... Now, however, the Boer War compelled a decision on native policy. In the terms of the peace the British Government promised that no attempt would be made to alter the political status of the natives before self-government had been granted to the ex-Republics. In that epochal decision the British Government receded from its humanitarian position and enabled the Boer leaders to win a signal victory in the peace negotiations which marked their military defeat. Great Britain abandoned the effort to exercise a control over the vital relations between white and black. Downing Street had surrendered to the frontiers” (Kiewiet, op. cit., pp. 143–44).
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40 “There is ...an entirely erroneous notion that the Africaaners and the English-speaking people of South Africa still disagree on how to treat the natives. On the contrary, it is one of the few things on which they do agree” (lames, op. cit., p. 47).
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41 This was mostly due to the methods of Alfred Beit who had arrived in 1875 to buy diamonds for a Hamburg firm. “Till then only speculators had been shareholders in mining ventures.... Beit’s method attracted the genuine investor also” (Emden, op. cit.).
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42 Very characteristic in this respect was Barnato’s attitude when it came to the amalgamation of his business with the Rhodes group. “For Barnato the amalgamation was nothing but a financial transaction in which he wanted to make money....He therefore desired that the company should have nothing to do with politics. Rhodes however was not merely a business man....” This shows how very wrong Barnato was when he thought that “if I had received the education of
Cecil Rhodes there would not have been a Cecil Rhodes” (ibid.).
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43 Compare chapter v, note 34.
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44 The increase in profits from foreign investment and a relative decrease of foreign trade profits characterizes the economic side of imperialism. In 1899, it was estimated that Great Britain’s whole foreign and colonial trade had brought her an income of only 18 million pounds, while in the same year profits from foreign investment amounted to 90 or 100 million pounds. See J. A. Hobson, Imperialism, London, 1938, pp. 53 ff. It is obvious that investment demanded a much more conscious long-range policy of exploitation than mere trade.
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45 Early Jewish settlers in South Africa in the eighteenth and the first part of the nineteenth century were adventurers; traders and merchants followed them after the middle of the century, among whom the most prominent turned to industries such as fishing, sealing, and whaling (De Pass Brothers) and ostrich breeding (the Mosenthal family). Later, they were almost forced into the Kimberley diamond industries where, however, they never achieved such pre-eminence as Barnato and Beit.
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46 Ernst Schultze, “Die Judenfrage in Sued-Afrika,” in Der Weltkampf, October, 1938, Vol. XV, No. 178.
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47 Barnato sold his shares to Rhodes in order to be introduced to the Kimberley Club. “This is no mere money transaction,” Rhodes is reported to have told Barnato, “I propose to make a gentleman of you.” Barnato enjoyed his life as a gentleman for eight years and then committed suicide. See Millin, op. cit., pp. 14, 85.
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48 “The path from one Jew [in this case, Alfred Beit from Hamburg] to another is an easy one. Rhodes went to England to see Lord Rothschild and Lord Rothschild approved of him” (ibid.).
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49 Emden, op. cit.
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50 “South Africa concentrated almost all its peacetime industrial energy on the production of gold. The average investor put his money into gold because it offered the quickest and biggest returns. But South Africa also has tremendous deposits of iron ore, copper, asbestos, manganese, tin, lead, platinum, chrome, mica and graphite. These, along with the coal mines and the handful of factories producing consumer goods, were known as ‘secondary’ industries. The investing public’s interest in them was limited. And development of these secondary industries was discouraged by the goldmining companies and to a large extent by the government” (James, op. cit., p. 333).
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51 James, op. cit., pp. 111–112. “The Government reckoned that this was a good example for private employers to follow ...and public opinion soon forced changes in the hiring policies of many employers.”
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52 James, op. cit., p. 108.
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53 Here again, a definite difference between the earlier settlers and the financiers can be recognized until the end of the nineteenth century. Saul Salomon, for instance, a Negrophilist member of the Cape Parliament, was a descendant of a family which had settled in South Africa in the early nineteenth century. Emden, op. cit.
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54 Between 1924 and 1930, 12,319 Jews immigrated to South Africa while only 461 left the country. These figures are very striking if one considers that the total immigration for the same period after deduction of emigrants amounted to 14,241 persons. (See Schultze, op. cit.) If we compare these figures with the immigration table of note 6, it follows that Jews constituted roughly one-third of the total immigration to South Africa in the twenties, and that they, in sharp contrast to all other categories of uitlanders, settled there permanently; their share in the annual emigration is less than 2 per cent.
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55 “Rabid Afrikaaner nationalist leaders have deplored the fact that there are 102,000 Jews in the Union; most of them are white-collar workers, industrial employers, shopkeepers, or members of the professions. The Jews did much to build up the secondary industries of South Africa—i.e., industries other than gold and diamond mining—concentrating particularly on the manufacture of clothes and furniture” (James, op. cit., p. 46).
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56 Ibid., pp. 67–68.
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57 More than 100,000 Indian coolies were imported to the sugar plantations of Natal in the nineteenth century. These were followed by Chinese laborers in the mines who numbered about 55,000 in 1907. In 1910, the British government ordered the repatriation of all Chinese mine laborers, and in 1913 it prohibited any further immigration from India or any other part of Asia. In 1931, 142,000 Asiatics were still in the Union and treated like African natives. (See also Schultze, op. cit.)
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58 Barnes, op. cit., p. 13.
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59 Kiewiet, op. cit., p. 13.
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60 “When economists declared that higher wages were a form of bounty, and that protected labour was uneconomical, the answer was given that the sacrifice was well made if the unfortunate elements in the white population ultimately found an assured footing in modern life.” “But it has not been in South Africa alone that the voice of the conventional economist has gone unheeded since the end of the Great War.... In a generation which saw England abandon free trade, America leave the gold standard, the Third Reich embrace autarchy, ... South Africa’s insistence that its economic life must be organized to secure the dominant position of the white race is not seriously out of place” (Kiewiet, op. cit., pp. 224 and 245).
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61 Rudyard Kipling, “The First Sailor,” in Humorous Tales, 1891.
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62 In The Day’s Work, 1898.
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63 Lawrence J. Zetland, Lord Cromer, 1932, p. 16.
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64 Lord Cromer, “The Government of Subject Races” in Edinburgh Review, January, 1908.
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65 Lord Curzon at the unveiling of the memorial tablet for Cromer. See Zetland, op. cit., p. 362.
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66 Quoted from a long poem by Cromer. See Zetland, op. cit., pp. 17–18.
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67 From a letter Lord Cromer wrote in 1882. Ibid., p. 87.
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68 Lord Cromer, op. cit.
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69 Bribery “was perhaps the most human institution among the barbed-wire entanglements of the Russian order.” Moissaye J. Olgin, The Soul of the Russian Revolution, New York, 1917.
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70 Zetland, op. cit., p. 89.
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71 From a letter Lord Cromer wrote in 1884. Ibid., p. 117.
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72 In a letter to Lord Granville, a member of the Liberal Party, in 1885. Ibid., p. 219.
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73 From a letter to Lord Rosebery in 1886. Ibid., p. 134.
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74 Ibid., p. 352.
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75 From a letter to Lord Rosebery in 1893. Ibid., pp. 204–205.
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76 From a letter to Lord Rosebery in 1893. Ibid., p. 192.
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77 From a speech by Cromer in Parliament after 1904. Ibid., p. 311.
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78 During the negotiations and considerations of t
he administrative pattern for the annexation of the Sudan, Cromer insisted on keeping the whole matter outside the sphere of French influence; he did this not because he wanted to secure a monopoly in Africa for England but much rather because he had “the utmost want of confidence in their administrative system as applied to subject races” (from a letter to Salisbury in 1899, Ibid., p. 248).
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79 Rhodes drew up six wills (the first was already composed in 1877), all of which mention the “secret society.” For extensive quotes, see Basil Williams, Cecil Rhodes, London, 1921, and Millin, op. cit., pp. 128 and 331. The citations are upon the authority of W. T. Stead.
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80 It is well known that Rhodes’s “secret society” ended as the very respectable Rhodes Scholarship Association to which even today not only Englishmen but members of all “Nordic races,” such as Germans, Scandinavians, and Americans, are admitted.
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81 Basil Williams, op. cit., p. 51.
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82 Millin, op. cit., p. 92.
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83 Cromer, op. cit.
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84 From a letter of Lord Cromer to Lord Rosebery in 1886. Zetland, op. cit., p. 134.
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85 “The Indian system of government by reports was ...suspect [in England]. There was no trial by jury in India and the judges were all paid servants of the Crown, many of them removable at pleasure.... Some of the men of formal law felt rather uneasy as to the success of the Indian experiment. ‘If,’ they said, ‘despotism and bureaucracy work so well in India, may not that be perhaps at some time used as an argument for introducing something of the same system here?’” The government of India, at any rate, “knew well enough that it would have to justify its existence and its policy before public opinion in England, and it well knew that that public opinion would never tolerate oppression” (A. Carthill, op. cit., pp. 70 and 41–42).