Complicity with a regime differs from conviction-based commitment to it

Evidence

This instrumentalizing of apartheid, whether through intellectual work or physical violence and terror, is less a matter of complicity than the servicing cogs of conceptualization and its materialization. Complicity is a matter of joining forces with or supporting those who initiate thought and action. There no doubt were many complicit with apartheid, to use Mark Sanders’s term, thus making its extension possible, both across the country and beyond its borders (intellectuals, journalists, corporate leaders, and service providers of all racial backgrounds, indeed, politicians at home and abroad alike). Nevertheless, those complicit with and accordingly complicating apartheid should not be confused with those central to its definition and implementation, those for whom it was first and foremost a commitment of principle, a conviction, a kind of religious embrace if not exactly a conversion, and not just an instrument of profit, commercial or personal. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1563

Categorization

• DEFINE: Distinguishes complicity (joining forces with initiators) from those for whom the regime is a conviction or religious embrace — a useful conceptual distinction for separating ordinary compliance from principled commitment.