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Elon Musk lived in apartheid South Africa till he was 17. David Sacks, the enterprise capitalist who has turn into a fundraiser for Donald Trump and a troll of Ukraine, left aged 5, and grew up in a South African diaspora household in Tennessee. Peter Thiel spent years of childhood in South Africa and Namibia, the place his father was concerned in uranium mining as a part of the apartheid regime’s clandestine drive to amass nuclear weapons. And Paul Furber, an obscure South African software program developer and tech journalist residing close to Johannesburg, has been recognized by two groups of forensic linguists because the originator of the QAnon conspiracy, which helped form Trump’s Maga motion. (Furber denies being “Q”.)
Briefly, 4 of Maga’s most influential voices are fiftysomething white males with formative experiences in apartheid South Africa. This in all probability isn’t a coincidence. I say that as a fiftysomething white man whose formative experiences embody childhood visits to my prolonged household in apartheid South Africa. (My mother and father left Johannesburg earlier than I used to be born.) We’d swim in my grandparents’ pool whereas the maid and her grandchildren lived within the storage. These experiences have been so surprising, so completely different from something I skilled rising up in Europe, that they’re my sharpest childhood recollections.
So what connects these males’s southern African backgrounds with Maga at present? Southern Africa beneath apartheid supplied an excessive model of a number of the principal themes of American life at present. First, there was super inequality. The mine the place Thiel’s father labored was “recognized for situations not far faraway from indentured servitude”, writes Thiel’s biographer Max Chafkin. “White managers, just like the Thiels, had entry to a brand-new medical and dental centre in Swakopmund and membership within the firm nation membership.” The mine’s black migrant staff lived in work camps.
To whites of a sure mindset, this inequality wasn’t attributable to apartheid. They thought it was inscribed in nature. Sure individuals have been outfitted to achieve capitalism, whereas others weren’t. That was merely the best way it was, and it was pointless to attempt to mess with nature. Two of Thiel’s contemporaries at Stanford within the Eighties recall him telling them that apartheid “works” and was “economically sound”. His spokesman has denied that he ever supported apartheid.
The white South African nightmare within the Eighties, hanging over the whole lot, was that someday Black individuals would stand up and bloodbath whites. Just like the US, South Africa was a violent society and changing into extra violent within the 80s. Musk’s teenage recollections of seeing murders on trains will not be completely factual, however do evoke the ambiance of the period. He warned in 2023 about potential “genocide of white individuals in South Africa”. Trump’s latest declare about “American ladies being raped and sodomised and murdered by savage prison aliens” preyed on related white fears.
The ultimate commonality between many white South Africans who skilled the top of apartheid and at present’s American proper: a contempt for presidency. The apartheid regime after which the African National Congress left tens of millions of South Africans with out electrical energy, dignity, security or first rate education. That have can encourage anti-government libertarianism. Furber has stated that the primary on-line message of what would turn into QAnon — “Open your eyes. Many in our govt worship Devil” — made excellent sense to him.
In the event you’re a libertarian who believes that inequality is pure and lives in worry of race struggle, you can be drawn in the direction of a sure kind of American politics. You actually received’t need authorities or establishments to attempt to intervene towards racism. In 1995, a yr after the ANC started making an attempt that in South Africa, Thiel and Sacks, who met at Stanford, printed The Variety Delusion within the US. It’s a well-written defence of “western civilisation” towards “multiculturalism” (or what the best now calls “woke”), written by two white twentysomethings who’re positive racism isn’t the issue. Certainly, they clarify: “There are nearly no actual racists . . . in America’s youthful technology.”
Three many years later, this duo and Musk, with whom they united in Silicon Valley’s “PayPal mafia”, are backing a white Republican ticket that peddles made-up tales about Black immigrants from Haiti consuming pets. The opposing Democrats are fielding a Black presidential candidate for the third time in 5 elections. The racial side of politics is nearly as plain because it was in South Africa.
Clearly, Musk et al incurred many different influences apart from apartheid, starting from science-fiction to the billionaire’s worry of the tax invoice. Nonetheless, an previous, white South African mindset lives on in Trumpism.
E-mail Simon at [email protected]
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