In regards to the Czar‘s post on the typology of various South African terrorist groups as left or right, the Volgi would like to add that it shouldn’t be forgotten that apartheid, like most social-engineering projects, was a result of intellectuals using the state to attempt to perfect social arrangements. H.F. Verwoerd, generally regarded as the architect of apartheid, was a professor in the social-psychology department at Stellenbosch University, where the theory of apartheid was worked out, before serving as Minister of Native Affairs (1950–58) and Prime Minister (1958–1966).

In theory, apartheid—like segregation in the U.S., “segregation” being a perfect translation for “apartheid”—was designed to minimize intercommunal friction by giving each community a set of parallel institutions. The direct precedent on which Verwoerd, et al., drew was the Dutch concept of verzuilung, or pillarization. While pillarization worked reasonably well in the otherwise very homogenous Netherlands up until World War II, when the Dutch began to think in terms of national unity as a political desideratum. So verzuiling was on its way out in the Netherlands even as its intellectual admires tried to resurrect it in South Africa. The resulting revivification was worthy of Herbert West—or George Romero. (Indeed, South Africans might have been well advised to examine the collapse of the millet system in the late Ottoman Empire, in which theoretically parallel communities became an engine of social strife and ultimately secession.)

So, returning our topic, the association of apartheid with parties of “the right,” might make some sense in the South African context, where you had an avowedly socialist ANC and a Communist Party (whose despicable leader was seemingly decent liberal pundit Peter Beinart’s childhood hero).

But, like segregation in the U.S., apartheid was a project of statists who wished to use government to order peoples lives properly. This is the polar opposite of what is today called “the right” in America, which is the attempted conservator of Classical Liberalism, which holds that within the constraints of polity-sustaining behavior, people should be free to run their own lives.

Apartheid is what happened when intellectuals with race theories (like this guy), had the power of an modern government unfettered by constitutional constraints (like the ones this guy got rid of), and a philosophy of social engineering backed with the (unwarranted) prestige of the “social sciences” in the postwar era. It is a classic analogue of Progressivism, in this respect—a technocratic, intellectualized philosophy of society enforced with the apparatus of the modern state. Sure, by the end of the regime, the parties of the Left opposed it—but they tellingly opposed how society was being organized, not the government’s right to treat people as subjects.

Any time this kind of society is cited as “right-wing” in the American context—it’s only accurate if you accept the premise that everything Evil is of the Right, and everything Good is of the Left.

Confucius, Œc. Vol.

Don’t ask impertinent questions like that jackass Adept Lu.