Harry Turtledove's excellent, award-winning alternate history science fiction novel, "The Guns of the South", is set during the American Civil War.
The story deals with a group of time traveling members of the Afrikaner AWB -- a South African nationalist, white supremacist, and neo-Nazi political party -- from 21st-century (Hey, that's us!) In their timeline, the South African system of apartheid has been overthrown, but these fuckers have access to a time machine. So, in the hopes of saving and spreading their depraved ideology, they travel back in time to the American Civil War and supply Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia with AK-47s and other advanced technology, medicine and intelligence.
Their intervention results in a Confederate victory in the war.
33 years ago, in 1992 when the novel was published, who could have guessed that time travel shenanigans wouldn't be necessary for Afrikaner AWB scum to find safe harbor and political power in the United States? All it took was 40 years of relentless propagandizing from Hate Radio and 30 years of relentless propagandizing from Fox News, and the relentless propagandizing from the rest of Conservative media to sculpt the Republican base into reprogrammable meatbags who adored the idea of a white Christian nationalist authoritarianism, and a few South African billionaires willing to put up millions of dollars to buy the White House for a corrupt degenerate felon who is 100% on-board with the white supremacist agenda.
From The New York Times:
The Road to Trump’s Embrace of White South Africans
The Trump administration’s hostile approach to South Africa was shaped by a convergence of factors.
It was May 2019 and national security officials were in the Situation Room discussing Iran when President Trump abruptly changed the subject. He wanted to talk about granting asylum and citizenship to white South African farmers.
Mr. Trump had floated the idea before, claiming that the farmers were a persecuted minority group being displaced from their land, according to John R. Bolton, his national security adviser at the time, who was at the meeting.
Mr. Bolton said he thought little of Mr. Trump’s wish. The president had embraced fringe ideas and false narratives pushed by white Afrikaner activists, Mr. Bolton said.
“It never amounted to anything, so I just put it as typical Trump,” Mr. Bolton recalled in a recent interview. “Some random person tells him something and he’s obsessed with it.”
Years later, Mr. Trump’s views on white farmers in South Africa are shaping U.S. foreign policy in his second term. On Monday, the first group of Afrikaners, a white ethnic minority that ruled during apartheid in South Africa, landed in Washington, as the Trump administration upended a refugee system that had provided sanctuary for those fleeing war, famine and natural disasters.
The administration is welcoming white South Africans after suspending the program for everyone else, including other Africans who have waited in refugee camps for years and were vetted and cleared, and Afghans who supported the U.S. war in their country...
From The Guardian:
‘Trump and Musk are gaslighting’: anti-apartheid artist on how US president and his billionaire ally are attacking South Africa
From MoneyWeb:
The deep South African ties in the Trump administration
Apart from Elon Musk it’s clear the US president has the ear of South Africans, or those who have lived here.
Everyone by now is aware that Elon Musk has the ear of US President Donald Trump, and is to a large extent shaping US attitudes to SA.
Apart from Musk, there are several others with strong South African ties in Trump’s inner circle, including David Sacks, the US’s new AI and crypto czar; billionaire investor Peter Thiel, a key backer of Trump for many years; and Joel Pollak, who has been tipped as the next US ambassador to SA...
3 comments:
Johnny Clegg is dead, so I sort of don't have a dog in this fight, but I do remember having a South African waiter work at the restaurant where I was a cook in the eighties; he was a straight white guy with anti-apartheid tattoos, who fit in nicely with the staff we hired who had escaped repressive regimes in South America. In the age of Reagan, everyone knew apartheid was wrong.
-Doug in Sugar Pine
It is my understanding that Stephen Miller boarded the South African refugee plane at Dulles Airport, before the passengers began to deplane. He spoke intensely to everyone on board, to make certain that they could properly pronounce the N word, before they were allowed to leave the plane.
Stephen Miller: "Nobody in Alabama uses the K word (Kaffir), you need to assimilate with your new neighbours."
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