"Elon Musk lived in apartheid South Africa until he was 17. David Sacks, the venture capitalist who has become a fundraiser for Donald Trump and a troll of Ukraine, left aged five, and grew up in a South African diaspora family in Tennessee. Peter Thiel spent years of childhood in South Africa and Namibia, where his father was involved in uranium mining as part of the apartheid regime’s clandestine drive to acquire nuclear weapons. And Paul Furber, an obscure South African software developer and tech journalist living near Johannesburg, has been identified by two teams of forensic linguists as the originator of the QAnon conspiracy, which helped shape Trump’s Maga movement. (Furber denies being “Q”.)
In short, four of Maga’s most influential voices are fiftysomething white men with formative experiences in apartheid South Africa. This probably isn’t a coincidence. I say that as a fiftysomething white man whose formative experiences include childhood visits to my extended family in apartheid South Africa. (My parents left Johannesburg before I was born.) We’d swim in my grandparents’ pool while the maid and her grandchildren lived in the garage. These experiences were so shocking, so different from anything I experienced growing up in Europe, that they are my sharpest childhood memories. "
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@per_sonne I lived in post-Apartheid South Africa for a year, teaching at UWC in the Capetown flats. It was eye-opening. The similarities between the USA and the RSA were too many and too uncomfortable to ignore.
Both are colonialist projects, steeped in racism, deeply religious. But ZA was a funhouse mirror -- what the USA might have been if the local diseases struck the settlers more than the natives, if the settlers warred amongst themselves as much as they warred with the natives, if geography made manifest destiny impossible, if the first nations were centralized and militarized.
As a dark mirror, it illuminated uncomfortable and terrible truths about just how deeply racist the USA is, and always has been. But it also served as an object lesson in how those ideologies corrupt and debase a society. ZA is desperately poor, largely illiterate, filled with shantytowns that stretch as far as the eye can see. That's what these people want to turn the USA into.
We can't let them.
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