The Brooklyn Rail

Donald Trump’s disgraceful mugging of South African President Cyril Ramaphosa in a made-for-TV set-up in the Oval Office on May 21 was inspired by his previous ambush of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on February 28. At the start of that meeting, President Zelensky showed Trump printouts of photos of Ukrainian prisoners of war that have been tortured by the Russians, and that gave Trump an idea. At a pause in an otherwise friendly meeting with President Ramaphosa, Trump asked for the lights in the Oval Office to be dimmed and projected a video montage of opposition party leader Julius Malema chanting “Kill the Boer” and other people calling for violence against white farmers in South Africa, followed by footage of many body bags and white crosses stretching into the distance that Trump said was a burial site for hundreds of white farmers. It was not that, and the white crosses were removed after the event. Then he shuffled through a stack of print-outs that he said supported his narrative of white Afrikaner farmers facing “white genocide” by angry Black people.

When Trump showed pictures of people moving body bags, he said “these are all white farmers that are being buried.” But the Reuters news agency confirmed that these were in fact their exclusive videos that were actually taken in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and showed humanitarian aid workers in white protective clothing burying those killed in the conflict between Congolese troops and fighters from the M23 rebel group. “Look, here’s burial sites all over the place,” Trump said.¹

This racist conspiracy theory goes all the way back to 1859, when Afrikaners claimed that their enslavement and disenfranchisement of Black South Africans was a defense against “white genocide.” And it came back in force after the end of apartheid in 1994, even though murders of white people since 1990 comprise only about 1% of all murders in South Africa.

The recent version of this racist conspiracy theory was picked up by Elon Musk and promulgated widely on X, causing Trump to open a pathway to asylum in America for white South African “refugees” fleeing genocide. This fake asylum for white people is part and parcel of Trump’s depiction of non-white immigrants as violent criminals preying on white people to undermine the rule of law and make it possible for MAGA officials to collect and deport migrants without due process.

Elon Musk was in the front row of spectators at the Oval Office for Trump’s meeting with President Ramaphosa. Afterward, author and scholar Daniel Herwitz published an article in the South African publication Daily Maverick, recalling that “Musk’s grandfather was the head of the Canadian branch of a US movement called Technocracy Incorporated that was sympathetic to Hitler and the Nazis.”² The movement Herwitz is referring to here, part of the larger “technocracy movement,” most active in the US and Canada in the 1930s, had a number of tenets and tendencies that reflect on current crises. For one thing, they wanted to merge all of North America into one big nation (annexing Canada, Mexico, and Central America) and extend its borders all the way to the Panama Canal. They even wanted to include Greenland in this single continental unit that they called “The Technate of America.”

They also proposed to run the US on technocratic principles, rather than democratic ones. These Technocrats were the forerunners of the current far-right tech oligarchs. They also believed democracy was obsolete and should be overthrown and replaced with rule by a small technocratic elite. Members wore identical gray uniforms and were encouraged to refer to themselves by a number rather than a name, so Elon’s grandfather became “10450-1.” The Canadian government banned the Technocracy Inc. group in 1940 as a threat to national security.

Musk’s maternal grandfather, Joshua N. Haldeman, was in fact a major figure in the technocracy movement in Canada during the 1930s and he repeatedly espoused racist, anti-Semitic, and antidemocratic views. When he moved from Canada to South Africa in 1950, he was a big supporter of apartheid and also promoted conspiracy theories, including the most virulent ones in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. “Haldeman believed that apartheid South Africa was destined to lead ‘White Christian Civilization’ in its fight against the ‘International Conspiracy’ of Jewish bankers and the ‘hordes of Colored people’ they controlled.”³ He once wrote that Hitler had been installed as führer by “money . . . supplied by international financiers, many, but not all of them Jewish.” He put all of this bilge into a book he self-published in 1960 titled The International Conspiracy to Establish a World Dictatorship and the Menace to South Africa.

After the Sharpeville massacre on March 21, 1960,

Haldeman predicted that there would soon be “an outside invasion by hordes of Colored people.” He blamed the international media for paying too much attention to the African National Congress and other anti-apartheid groups. And he repeatedly returned to the “International Conspiracy” pulling the strings behind it all, sometimes shorthanded as “the Conspiracy” or “the Internationalists,” whom he complained controlled the press and the medical profession.

. . .

Haldeman consistently argues that Black South Africans are happy with their position under apartheid, even grateful for “the protection of the White people,” and that international meddlers are to blame for riling up opposition. “They know that the White man has done so much for them,” he wrote.⁴

Haldeman eventually published a sequel to The International Conspiracy titled The International Conspiracy in Health, in which he fulminates against health mandates, including vaccines (which, he says, “the promoters of World Government have always been behind”) and fluoride in the drinking water (a “brain-washing program of the Conspiracy”). Proto-Elon, meet Proto- RFK Jr.