It’s difficult to feel much sympathy for a centibillionaire who’s helped radicalise millions of young men online and wants to maroon humanity on a dead rock 250-milllion kilometres away, but as a glassy-eyed Elon Musk is ejected from the White House I would like to propose the possibly less-than-popular view that he is being used as a scapegoat by elements of what passes for the American left.
I say less-than-popular because to many progressives the Musk narrative is carved in stone, especially since he performed his Nazi salute: he is an apartheid princeling, inured to humanity by his wealth and the fascism of the country he was born in, determined to propagate in the US every idea Nelson Mandela dedicated his life to defeat.
Some of that might be true. I personally suspect Musk believes in almost nothing except the abstract bits of vainglory teenage boys cling to: that it would be great if he was popular, that it would be cool to have a Mars settlement named after him.
But what is definitely true is that by focusing so heavily on his foreignness, and on the history of apartheid in SA, his US critics are using him as a sin-eater; someone sinister, even alarming, but reassuringly foreign; someone whose alleged fascism is a distasteful import and not something inherent to US culture.
Which, of course, is self-delusion. Hendrik Verwoerd might have sympathised with the Nazis, but it was the scientific racism of English, European — and above all American — eugenicists and like-minded quacks that formed the quasi-intellectual bedrock of apartheid.
Likewise, it wasn’t an SA author that Hitler read and re-read: it was Madison Grant, an American who invented the myth, now popular among the incel right, of the “Nordic race”, and who, in his 1916 book The Passing of the Great Race wrote: “Mistaken regard for what are believed to be divine laws and a sentimental belief in the sanctity of human life tend to prevent both the elimination of defective infants and the sterilisation of such adults as are themselves of no value to the community. The laws of nature require the obliteration of the unfit and human life is valuable only when it is of use to the community or race.”
Even this justification for genocide was at the relatively sophisticated, modern end of the scale: Grant himself was born into a country in which just 15 years earlier the likes of Samuel A Cartwright, a highly regarded doctor, had invented a mental illness named “drapetomania” which, he reported to the Medical Association of Louisiana, afflicted enslaved people and triggered in them the wildly irrational desire to flee their enslavement.
To be clear, none of this was considered quackery. In the 19th century pseudoscience was part of mainstream science, and when the 1840 US census claimed (based on God knows what evidence) that freed slaves in the north suffered a greater prevalence of mental illness than those still enslaved in the south, many respected and upstanding American thinkers seized on this as proof that being a slave owner was a humanitarian calling.
I am not claiming that all Americans are white supremacists and fascists: in 1939, when 20,000 American Nazis attended a rally in Madison Square Gardens, about 100,000 anti-fascists were kept at bay by armed police outside. But it is a fact that the US has been an inspiration and justification for both Nazism and apartheid, and if it continues its slide to the right the opponents of fascism will need to look far closer to home than Musk’s Pretoria boyhood.
• Eaton is an Arena Holdings columnist.
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