The Color of Money

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

>On Thu, 30 Nov 2000, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
>>  What's the point of equating racism with anti-Semitism, though?
>>  Specificities get lost in the equation, and we end up
>>  misunderstanding both.
>
>Eh? Jews (and Bolsheviks, and gays, and lesbians, and Poles, and
>Russians, etc. etc.) were targeted for mass extermination because of
>Nazi Germany's bizarre fiction of a master Aryan race. No racial
>ideology, no Wehrmacht.
>
>-- Dennis

Neither slavery nor extermination in itself has to be caused by racism.

According to Thucydides, in the course of the Peloponnesian war, "the 
Athenians ...killed all the [Melian] males of fighting age they could 
capture and sold the women and children into slavery.  The Athenians 
then occupied the place [Melos] themselves and later sent out five 
hundred colonists" (_The Peloponnesian War_, trans. Walter Blanco, 
NY: W.W. Norton, 1998, p. 231).  This fact, however, does not make 
the Athenians racist.

In contrast to pre-modern & pre-capitalist slavery & extermination 
(e.g., actions of the Athenians & the Spartans during the 
Peloponnesian War), racism, (modern) anti-Semitism, sexism, 
heterosexism, & anti-Communism have the common origin: capitalist 
modernity.  Other than this common origin, however, they differ from 
one another a great deal, so there is no point in stretching the term 
racism so as to cover all of the above, since the equation you posit 
-- racism = anti-Semitism = sexism = heterosexism = anti-Communism = 
Etc. -- does not help us understand the specificities of any of them.

Yoshie