US president Donald Trump and the fascist billionaire mafia around him are trying to hold South Africa to ransom. And it’s pretty obvious that the country’s international legal case against Israel’s genocide in Gaza is the reason.
Oppose genocide? Face the wrath of the imperial axis of evil.
The toxic alliance of billionaires, imperialists, colonialist war criminals, and the far right is a powerful one. And by challenging a member of that alliance in the International Court of Justice (ICJ), South Africa clearly placed a big target on its back.
That’s why Trump, whose electoral victory further empowered this evil alliance, has started to blackmail South Africa by cutting off aid and offering refugee status to the country’s privileged white people. The fact that he mentioned the ICJ genocide case as he did so, of course, is no coincidence.
So far, South Africa has promised not to drop its genocide case against apartheid Israel, despite Trump’s pressure.
The reality of ongoing white privilege in South Africa
With his executive blackmail order, Trump cited a South African expropriation act from last month which seeks “to redress land inequalities that stem from South Africa’s history of white supremacy“. White people in South Africa represent just 7.2% of the population, but own over 70% of the country’s farmland.
As Al Jazeera explains, this is a legacy of both British colonial rule and a 1950 apartheid-era seizure of “85 percent of the land” which forced “3.5 million Black people from their homes”.
South Africa’s government is seeking to act because, as the World Inequality Lab has highlighted, the stench of colonialism and apartheid remains. The group revealed that, in 2017, 3,500 adults still owned “more than the poorest 32 million people”.
The only difference in wealth inequality since the end of apartheid was that there were more Black people in the top 10% of earners. But “asset allocations before 1993 still continue to shape wealth inequality”. That means that while the white poverty rate sits at just 1%, the Black rate stands at 64%. alists.
Post-apartheid governments have overwhelmingly served the rich while doing little for ordinary people. And in 2024, voters accordingly voiced their discontent. So politicians know they need to do something. And the expropriation act is one possibility.
The super-rich white connection to South Africa
Elon Musk grew up in apartheid South Africa. His bigoted grandfather had settled there just after white colonial elites had instituted their racist system, and was a passionate supporter of the regime.
In the same vein, Musk has befriended far-right groups and figures across the globe while clearly exposing his fascist colours. And now, he and other figures with links to white South Africa seem to be influencing and revelling in Trump’s willingness to challenge South Africa’s anti-apartheid government.
As journalist Chris McGreal told Democracy Now!, financial grifter PayPal served as a meeting point for privileged white people with a “very intimate connection to South Africa”. Apart from Musk, he mentioned Peter Thiel (the close Trump ally whose dodgy company Palantir backs Israel’s genocide), David Sacks (now “Trump’s AI and crypto czar”), and Roelof Botha (grandson of apartheid politician Pik Botha).
McGreal also explained how “a campaign by white Afrikaner farmers, through an organization called AfriForum” has long sought to influence Trump’s circle, pushing “the idea of a white genocide in South Africa”. And this far-right conspiracy theory fits in well with appeals to Trump’s electoral base.
Keeping the far right on side
One US survey found that around a third of people believed in the ‘white genocide’ (or ‘great replacement’) conspiracy theory in some way. The theory claims elites have sought to build a workforce of cheaper immigrant workers and that white people in Western countries will cease to exist in the future because immigrants of colour tend to have more children.
It’s a theory that fits in very well with the type of anti-immigrant dogwhistling of Trump and other far-right figures because it gives working-class white people an extra reason to fear immigrants and focus on them rather than on the actual economic order responsible for their problems.
That’s why media and political elites allude to it, attracting the support of people with numerous problematic psychological traits and violent anti-democratic tendencies in the process.
As openDemocracy has written:
The networked nature of the modern far right means that rather than coalescing around a physical leader, they instead organise around a shared ideology and aim: the Great Replacement conspiracy theory
It added that:
All of this is supposedly being orchestrated by “cultural Marxists”, a catch-all term that includes liberal elites, feminists, Black Lives Matter activists, LGBTQ+ people and Jewish people.
In particular, longstanding far-right agitator Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (aka ‘Tommy Robinson’) has leaned into this conspiracy theory. And it seems like no coincidence that he has recently received significant support from Elon Musk.
Trump’s attack on South Africa, then, is a prime example of the dangerous power that the axis of billionaires, imperialists, colonialists, and fascists wields in today’s world.
Featured image via the Canary
