Murdock 3

Lauren Murdock

Mr. Van Velzer

Beginning Composition- Block 1

7 November 2014

Hatred

Matk Mathabane, author of Apartheid account, The Cycle of Revenge can be Broken,

as well as Elie Wiesel, holocaust surviver and author of Holocaust biography Night express

through writing a sense of injustice, anger and hatred. Mathabane argues that hatred can be

vanquished only by humanity, and the, recognition that one is not fully human until one

acknowledges and affirms the humanity of others, and I agree because inequality is inevitable

and with it the inevitability of hatred and the repetition of the past.

Hatred can be vanquished only with the absence of inequality and self superiority. These

two forms of prejudice, the ignition of hatred, however, are unavoidable in society. Mark

Mathabane writes the article, The Cycle of Revenge can be Broken as a recollection of his

views and emotions growing up in South Africa under an apartheid. At one point in the article,

Mathabane contemplates how the white people could even be human. He says, If they were,

then why did they not feel my pain? Why were they complicit in an inhuman system that

confined me and my family to a shack without running water or electricity, and made me sleep

on pieces of cardboard, scavenge for food at the garbage dump, wear rags, and watch helplessly

as black children died from preventable dieses? The answer is simple, racial superiority. It is a

never-ending cycle, prejudice feeds the fire of hatred, while hatred satisfies prejudice. Therefore,

it is that inequality is inevitable, and it is that principle which is the cause of war, and all

injustice done to man by man.

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Racism is not only present on an individual or small group basis, but can in fact be

governmental The is know as institutionalized racism, and can be seen occurring repetitively

through history, from Nazi Germany, to South American Apartheid, and even here in America

with racial segregation and Jim Crow Laws. In Germany, to determine who was Jewish, the

Nazis established a set of laws, which eventually come to be know as the Nuremburg Laws.

These laws assumed anyone with three or more Jewish grandparents to be Jewish. Similarly, the

Jim Crow Laws were used as forms of segregation between the colored and the whites

before the civil rights movement. One such clause, the grandfather clause forbid free African

Americans from voting if their grandfather had been inslaved. Conditons during the South

African Apartheid were no better. Mathabane says, My mother had repetitively been denied a

birth certificate for me, a necessary document for school registration because she did not have

a permit proving that our family had a right to live in Alexandra. But we couldnt get the permit

without the birth certificate. All of these cases are examples of discrimination through laws and

other practices, which is by definition institutionalized racism, and the fact of its recurrence in

society proves the powerlessness of the government in vanquishing inequality and with it hatred.

Revenge comes in many ways, shapes, and forms. Sometimes people find revenge in

violence, for others accomplishment, but for many, its the comfort that the past is behind them,

or in some cases the simple fact that they lived to tell tale. People may even attempt to erase

reminders that the event ever occurred. In this way, it is that Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel

describes his return to a normal life in the preface to his novel Night. In the text, Wiesel says,

And now, scarcely ten years after Buchenwald, I realize the world forgets quickly. Today,

Germany is a sovereign state. The German army has been resuscitated. Ilse Koch, the notorious

sadistic monster of Buchenwald, was allowed to have children and live happily ever after War
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criminals stroll the streets of Hamburg and Munich. The past seems to have been erased,

relegated to oblivion. While he knows he will never forget the horrors done to him and his

family, it seems they are trying hard to eliminate it from the history of society as a whole. It is in

this way that Mathabane shows how the Jews sought their revenge on the Nazis, as living prove

to their defeat, and by removing all evidence of their previous work.

Individuals, government, nor revenge cannot overcome hatred. It is only when people

realize the inequality that is human nature in society, that anger and injustice can truly be gone

forever, and this is similar to the views of Mathabane expressed in his article when he says that

hatred can be vanquished only by humanity, and the recognition that one is not fully human

until one acknowledges and affirms the humanity of others.