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Comment by consilient | Hacker News Reader

> Every single human conflict can be described as "small differences" because humans are very similar to each other.

He's obviously talking about differences which are small by human standards. The rest of the paragraph:

> If you want to know who someone in former Yugoslavia hates, don’t look at the Indonesians or the Zulus or the Tibetans or anyone else distant and exotic. Find the Yugoslavian ethnicity that lives closely intermingled with them and is most conspicuously similar to them, and chances are you’ll find the one who they have eight hundred years of seething hatred toward.

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How were the differences between the colonial SA Afrikaners and the local SA Zulu smaller than the differences between the Yugoslavs and the Zulu, other than proximity?

The relevant outgroups animating Afrikaner nationalism aren't the Zulu (or Xhosa, or Tswana, etc.) as a whole, but rather the rapidly growing black working class on the one hand, and English-speaking elites on the other. Of course Afrikaner society was and had long between hideously racist, but so was the British colonial government. It was the perceived "threat" of racial integration (and the attendant economic competition) driven by English liberals that made race the primary focus of Afrikaner politics.

Of course if you mean smaller differences that weren't in part ultimately caused by proximity, there aren't any, but that's almost tautological.

> The relevant outgroups animating Afrikaner nationalism aren't the Zulu ... It was the perceived "threat" of racial integration driven by English liberals

The article compared "South African whites and South African blacks". It sounds like you're comparing Afrikaners and the English?

The article links "narcissism of small differences" to the wikipedia page which says:

> [It] is the idea that the more a relationship or community shares commonalities, the more likely the people in it are to engage in interpersonal feuds and mutual ridicule because of hypersensitivity to minor differences perceived in each other.

I don't think this even slightly describes the "outgroup conflict" in South Africa. Furthermore, I think that Scott using this as an example minimizes the sources of conflict, e.g. Apartheid, because the rest of the article is solely about outgroup hatred.

I'm comparing Afrikaners to the English and to South African blacks who were integrating into colonial society (among whom the Zulu were likely the largest ethnic group, but certainly not an outright majority). Afrikaner national identity initially formed in opposition to the former and shifted to defining itself against the latter as the country began industrializing.

Sure, in the immediate aftermath of colonization colonial SA Afrikaners and Zulu were about as different as you can get. But then they shared (for some definition of "shared") the same plot of land for literally hundreds of years

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