m.Gill's Reflection

--The Apartheid in South Africa tells us that human rights are still being taken away and not acknowledged by other human beings that expect to have these rights secure in their own lives. It shows that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that was issued by the United Nations will always be broken. The leaders of countries will always try to overrule these rights with national sovereignty. The nation will say that it is up to their government how things are run within that nation and that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights will not take a place of having high authority over how the country is run because it was not passed by that specific nation. The apartheid was like a much less severe Holocaust. As in the Holocaust people were legally persecuted when they had done nothing wrong. In the apartheid blacks were forced to move out of their homes and live in certain areas that were generally poverty stricken to some extent which can be compared to the ghettos that Jews were forced to live in during the Holocaust. Although many blacks were killed during this event, there were nowhere near as many killed as there were during the Holocaust, and blacks were not forced into concentration camps, death camps or labor camps. During the Holocaust the Nazi's goal was to completely eliminate Jews, but in the Apartheid the government's goal was only to make black citizens socially, politically and economically inferior to whites.

--The Apartheid definitely denied the idea of humanism. The South African government did not seem to acknowledge that black individuals mattered or even really existed as individuals. They were seen as a single group of people that all needed to be stopped from getting too much influence or power in any way in South Africa. They were not even given the chance to succeed or even given opportunity based on their intelligence or talents. They were all viewed as the same and as inferior. Looking back on this event and how terrible it was strengthens the concept of humanism in our minds though because we see how terrible and wrong the government was to treat those people as one group of inferior people instead of how they as an individual deserved to be treated. The Apartheid itself denied the idea of humanism, but the memory of it emphasizes its importance.

--The government during the apartheid was unjust and terrible to be prejudice against black citizens and take their rights without them doing anything illegal or wrong. They were very close minded and did not listen to any reasoning or opposition against their bad and unfair decisions, they just killed or imprisoned anyone who stood up against the new racist laws. I definitely pity the victims of this terrible time in history. They had done nothing to deserve the treatment they recieved. I have great respect for those who were brave enough to stand up against the government for the rights of themselves and their fellow black citizens with the knowledge that they could be killed.

--I fully support peacekeeping efforts by the United Nations in soveriegn countries. I believe that every country should have the right to mostly control what goes on within its borders, but when it comes to human rights there should be guidelines for what is acceptable treatment of fellow human beings. If a nation's government is not respecting the rights of a group of people the United Nations should definitely interfere and try to reverse that because no group of people deserves to have their rights taken away as long as they have done nothing that is against the law or taken someone else's human rights from them. Everyone deserves equal treatment and opportunity to become successful. During the Apartheid the United Nations should have interfered with the laws of the country that segregated and degraded the black community. At the point where national sovereignty is unjustly discriminating against people and taking away rights the government should no longer be allowed to continue the way it is unchecked.

--If the United Nations were to step into the sovereignty of the U.S. I probably would still support it, or at least not have a problem with it. It would be hypocritical of me to say that I would support the United Nations interfering in other countries when they make unjust laws that take away or limit people's rights and not still support it if they think there is something wrong with laws in the U.S. We are no different from any other country and have just as much possibility of making mistakes and making unfair laws as any other country and therefore deserve the same treatment as other nations by the United Nations. If there were unjust laws here in the U.S. I would want someone to do something about it, because I strongly believe that everyone deserves the same treatment and chance to succeed and if there was any doubt in anyone's mind that that was happening then I think it should be at least checked out.

-----m.Gill