CHURCH and state look like they are about to break up after town councillors voted to remove prayers from their agenda.
Romsey Town Council narrowly agreed to remove receiving prayers following a tense debate which even invoked US President Donald Trump.
Cllr Colin Burgess said: "We're not the first council to debate such motions, nor will we be the last, I'm certain."
The motion was proposed by Cllr Burgess and seconded by Cllr Mark Cooper at a full council meeting on Tuesday, January 21.
It called for prayers to be removed from the council (summons) agenda and be held separately before the meeting.
It said five minutes would be allocated for this after which councillors, not attending prayers, could take their places.
Cllr Burgess said: "I suspect the difference with tonight's motion is it's sponsored by two councillors with completely different views on religion."
"As we very much live in a multi-cultural, secular and non-secular society, I commend this motion to you because it gives each one of us the right to choose and express our beliefs in a year when diversity will take centre stage in Romsey."
Cllr Sandra Gidley attempted to block the motion and asserted the issue had been decided at the full council meeting of November 12, 2024.
Minutes of that meeting said: "It was agreed that Cllr [John] Critchley and Cllr Burgess would investigate the options for the council and report back."
Five councillors voted for the motion, five against and one abstained. Cllr John Parker broke with precedent and went with his heart to vote with the motion.
Cllr Parker said: "I would be more than happy to have good words said at the start of a meeting, but inviting me to particularly ask somebody's god to guide us, whether that's an Islamic god, or a Jewish god, or a Christian god ... I have seen and still continue to see far too many very dubious regimes who claim the 'god card'.
"I'm sure we will see the new president of the United States telling everybody that whatever he is doing is in the name of God and I think a good, clean, separation between religion and the state, even at our very small level, is particularly important."
Speaking against the motion, Cllr Ian Culley said: "Firstly, as has been mentioned by Cllr Gwynne, the Church is fundamental to the running of the town and, really, we work in tandem.
"The second point I want to make is, it's not a church service. It's not like when councillors go into the abbey for the Remembrance Service, which is a full service, this is a prayer that is akin to what happens at the Cenotaph when we remember the fallen.
"It's an act of humility and appreciation for the fact that we're trying to help the town for nothing, as it were. We give our service and we ask for nothing back."
We have all earned a break for this week, but as some of you have heard me say, I write these letters with an eye to what a graduate student will need to know in 150 years. Two things from last night belong in the record of this time, not least because they illustrate President Donald Trump’s deliberate demonstration of dominance over Republican lawmakers.
Last night the Senate confirmed former Fox News Channel weekend host Pete Hegseth as the defense secretary of the United States of America. As Tom Bowman of NPR notes, since Congress created the position in 1947, in the wake of World War II, every person who has held it has come from a senior position in elected office, industry, or the military. Hegseth has been accused of financial mismanagement at the small nonprofits he directed, has demonstrated alcohol abuse, and paid $50,000 to a woman who accused him of sexual assault as part of a nondisclosure agreement. He has experience primarily on the Fox News Channel, where his attacks on “woke” caught Trump’s eye.
The secretary of defense oversees an organization of almost 3 million people and a budget of more than $800 billion, as well as advising the president and working with both allies and rivals around the globe to prevent war. It should go without saying that a candidate like Hegseth could never have been nominated, let alone confirmed, under any other president. But Republicans caved, even on this most vital position for the American people's safety.
The chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Roger Wicker (R-MS), tried to spin Hegseth’s lack of relevant experience as a plus: “We must not underestimate the importance of having a top-shelf communicator as secretary of defense. Other than the president, no official plays a larger role in telling the men and women in uniform, the Congress and the public about the threats we face and the need for a peace-through-strength defense policy.”
Vice President J.D. Vance had to break a 50–50 tie to confirm Hegseth, as Republican senators Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Susan Collins of Maine, and Mitch McConnell of Kentucky joined all the Democrats and Independents in voting no. Hegseth was sworn in early this morning.
That timing mattered. As MSNBC host Rachel Maddow noted, as soon as Senator Joni Ernst (R-IA), whose “yes” was secured only through an intense pressure campaign, had voted in favor, President Trump informed at least 15 independent inspectors general of U.S. government departments that they were fired, including, as David Nakamura, Lisa Rein, and Matt Viser of the Washington Post noted, those from “the departments of Defense, State, Transportation, Labor, Health and Human Services, Veterans Affairs, Housing and Urban Development, Interior, Energy, Commerce, and Agriculture, as well as the Environmental Protection Agency, Small Business Administration and the Social Security Administration.” Most were Trump’s own appointees from his first term, put in when he purged the inspectors general more gradually after his first impeachment.
Project 2025 called for the removal of the inspectors general. Just a week ago Ernst and her fellow Iowa Republican senator Chuck Grassley co-founded a bipartisan caucus—the Inspector General Caucus—to support those inspectors general. Grassley told Politico in November that he intends to defend the inspectors general.
Congress passed a law in 1978 to create inspectors general in 12 government departments. According to Jen Kirby, who explained inspectors general for Vox in 2020, a movement to combat waste in government had been building for a while, and the fraud and misuse of offices in the administration of President Richard M. Nixon made it clear that such protections were necessary. Essentially, inspectors general are watchdogs, keeping Congress informed of what’s going on within departments.
Kirby notes that when he took office in 1981, President Ronald Reagan promptly fired all the inspectors general, claiming he wanted to appoint his own people. Congress members of both parties pushed back, and Reagan rehired at least five of those he had fired. George H.W. Bush also tried to fire the inspectors general but backed down when Congress backed up their protests that they must be independent.
In 2008, Congress expanded the law by creating the Council of Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency. By 2010 that council covered 68 offices.
During his first term, in the wake of his first impeachment, Trump fired at least five inspectors general he considered disloyal to him, and in 2022, Congress amended the law to require any president who sought to get rid of an inspector general to “communicate in writing the reasons for any such removal or transfer to both Houses of Congress, not later than 30 days before the removal or transfer.” Congress called the law the “Securing Inspector General Independence Act of 2022.”
The chair of the Council of Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency, Hannibal “Mike” Ware, responded immediately to the information that Trump wanted to fire inspectors general. Ware recommended that Director of Presidential Personnel Sergio Gor, who had sent the email firing the inspectors general, “reach out to White House Counsel to discuss your intended course of action. At this point, we do not believe the actions taken are legally sufficient to dismiss” the inspectors general, because of the requirements of the 2022 law.
This evening, Nakamura, Rein, and Viser reported in the Washington Post that Democrats are outraged at the illegal firings and even some Republicans are expressing concern and have asked the White House for an explanation. For his part, Trump said, incorrectly, that firing inspectors general is “a very standard thing to do.” Several of the inspectors general Trump tried to fire are standing firm on the illegality of the order and plan to show up to work on Monday.
The framers of the Constitution designed impeachment to enable Congress to remove a chief executive who deliberately breaks the law, believing that the determination of senators to hold onto their own power would keep them from allowing a president to seize more than the Constitution had assigned him.
In Federalist No. 69, Alexander Hamilton tried to reassure those nervous about the centralization of power in the new Constitution that no man could ever become a dictator because unlike a king, “The President of the United States would be liable to be impeached, tried, and, upon conviction of treason, bribery, or other high crimes or misdemeanors, removed from office; and would afterwards be liable to prosecution and punishment in the ordinary course of law.”
But the framers did not anticipate the rise of political parties. Partisanship would push politicians to put party over country and eventually would induce even senators to bow to a rogue president. MAGA Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming told the Fox News Channel today that he is unconcerned about Trump’s breaking the law written just two years ago. “Well, sometimes inspector generals don't do the job that they are supposed to do. Some of them deserve to be fired, and the president is gonna make wise decisions on those.”
There is one more story you’ll be hearing more about from me going forward, but it is important enough to call out tonight because it indicates an important shift in American politics. In an Associated Press/NORC poll released yesterday, only 12% of those polled thought the president relying on billionaires for policy advice is a good thing. Even among Republicans, only 20% think it’s a good thing.
Since the very earliest days of the United States, class was a central lens through which Americans interpreted politics. And yet, in the 1960s, politicians began to focus on race and gender, and we talked very little about class. Now, with Trump embracing the world’s richest man, who invested more than $250 million in his election, and with Trump making it clear through the arrangement of the seating at his inauguration that he is elevating the interests of billionaires to the top of his agenda, class appears to be back on the table.
Trump suggests Palestinians leave Gaza and ‘we just clean out’ territory
US president says he wants people to move to neighbouring nations, after resuming shipments of 2,000lb bombs to Israel
Donald Trump has suggested large numbers of Palestinians should leave Gaza to “just clean out” the whole strip, after ordering the US military to restart shipments of 2,000lb bombs to Israel.
The US president said he wanted Gaza residents to move to neighbouring nations, and that they could be displaced “temporarily or could be long-term”, after a phone call with Jordan’s King Abdullah on Saturday.
“I’d rather get involved with some of the Arab nations and build housing at a different location where they can maybe live in peace for a change,” Trump told reporters on Air Force One. “You’re talking about probably a million and a half people, and we just clean out that whole thing and say: ‘You know, it’s over.’”
Gaza has 2.3 million residents. Trump said he asked King Abdullah if the country would take in more Palestinians. Jordan is already home to 2.4 million Palestinian refugees, from families expelled in 1948 after the creation of Israel.
“I said to him: I’d love you to take on more because I’m looking at the whole Gaza Strip right now and it’s a mess, it’s a real mess. I’d like him to take people,” Trump said, when asked about the call.
He also suggested Egypt as a destination for Gaza residents, and said he would raise the issue with President Abdel Fatah al-Sisi on Sunday.
Since the start of the war in 2023, Egypt has warned repeatedly against forced displacement of Palestinians from Gaza, and reinforced its border. Sisi has said any move to push people into Sinai would jeopardise relations with Israel, including the 1979 peace treaty between the two countries.
Mustafa Barghouti, a senior Palestinian politician, said he “completely rejected” Trump’s comments, the Palestinian news agency Ma’an reported. Barghouti warned against attempts at “ethnic cleansing” in Gaza, saying: “The Palestinian people are committed to remaining in their homeland.”
Inside Israel there have been calls since the start of the war for the permanent and forcible transfer of its residents. Trump’s comments were welcomed by far-right politicians who back Jewish settlements in Gaza.
The Israeli finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, described relocation of Palestinians as a “great idea”, and said he would work with the prime minister and cabinet to create an “operational plan for implementation” as soon as possible.
Before Trump took office, an official from his transition team said the administration was discussing relocating 2 million Palestinians during reconstruction if a current tentative ceasefire holds, with Indonesia one possible destination. Jakarta said it was not aware of any such plan.
Trump has not laid out any vision for postwar governance in Gaza. While signing executive orders after his inauguration he discussed the territory as a real estate prospect, praising its seaside location and weather. “I looked at a picture of Gaza, it’s like a massive demolition site,” he said on Tuesday, adding: “It’s gotta be rebuilt in a different way.”
Qatari officials, who mediated the pause in fighting in Gaza, described “any plan that would end with relocation or reoccupation” as a red line.
Trump’s new administration has promised “unwavering support” for Israel, and key positions have been taken by hardline supporters of its expansion. Trump’s ambassador to the UN said in confirmation hearings that she considered Israel had a “biblical right” to the West Bank, which Israel occupied in 1967 but most of the world recognises as the heart of a future Palestinian state.
On Saturday Trump said he had ordered the resumption of shipments of some of the largest bombs to Israel, a widely expected move. Biden had paused delivery of the 2,000lb bombs owing to concerns about civilian casualties in Gaza caused by the powerful weapons, which can rip through thick concrete and metal over a large area.
When asked why he released the powerful bombs, Trump responded: “Because they bought them.”
The Biden administration had sent thousands of 2,000lb bombs to Israel after the war began, before it halted the shipments last year.
Despite his 100m donation from Miriam Adelson, Trump appears to be bending Israel over and shoving a ceasefire down their throat while he’s at it. Zionists are losing their minds on X right now.
This was something Biden was too much of a coward to do. This is on the verge of becoming the Democrats genocide
If Palestine is a red line for you as it is for me, NEVER vote democrat again.
~Benjamin Rubenstein
Donald Trump has suggested large numbers of Palestinians should leave Gaza to “just clean out” the whole strip, after ordering the US military to restart shipments of 2,000lb bombs to Israel.
The US president said he wanted Gaza residents to move to neighbouring nations, and that they could be displaced “temporarily or could be long-term”, after a phone call with Jordan’s King Abdullah on Saturday.
“I’d rather get involved with some of the Arab nations and build housing at a different location where they can maybe live in peace for a change,” Trump told reporters on Air Force One. “You’re talking about probably a million and a half people, and we just clean out that whole thing and say: ‘You know, it’s over.’”
Gaza has 2.3 million residents. Trump said he asked King Abdullah if the country would take in more Palestinians.
Anti-racists outnumbered fascists in Southampton on Saturday. Around 400 people turned out to show up to 100 fascists that they’re not welcome in the city.
The fascists, led by Ukip leader Nick Tenconi, marched to the Southampton cenotaph. Tenconi asked who there was from Southampton—and was met with silence.
Historic Southampton
@historicalsoton.bsky.social
Follow
In 1937, British Union of Fascists leader Oswald Mosley (pictured here doing an instantly recognisable type of salute) tried to hold a fascist rally on Southampton Common. Ordinary Southampton folk came together to successfully disrupt the rally, attack Mosley, and drive him from the town.
The United States will immediately impose a 25 percent tariff on all Colombian imports, and will raise them to 50 percent in one week...
The Trump administration will also “fully impose” banking and financial sanctions against Colombia, and will apply a travel ban and revoke visas of Colombian government officials...
Colombia declared a state of emergency and launched a military offensive against left-wing guerrillas following violence that claimed over 100 lives, threatening the peace process. The unrest spread across three departments, displacing 20,000, fueled by militia turf wars linked to the cocaine trade. President Gustavo Petro's administration faces a significant challenge.
Colombia vowed "war" against left-wing guerrillas Monday, declaring a state of emergency and deploying thousands of soldiers to contain violence that killed at least 100 people and threatens to scupper the country's fragile peace process.
In just five days, bloodshed has been reported across three Colombian departments -- from the remote Amazon jungle in the south to the mountainous northeastern border with Venezuela, where fighting has displaced almost 20,000 people.
Analysts say the spasm of violence was caused by a turf war between rival militias, who see the faltering peace process as a threat to their unity and their profits from the ultra-lucrative cocaine trade.
President Gustavo Petro, who until now had staked his political fortunes on a strategy of de-escalation and dialogue, signaled the crisis would cause a shift in policy.
On Monday, he issued a defiant warning to leaders of the National Liberation Army, or ELN, which is said to have been behind border region attacks on rival leftist groups, killing 80 people.
"The ELN has chosen the path of war, and war they shall have," said Petro, before declaring a localized state of "internal unrest" and "economic emergency."
The declarations give local authorities the ability to restrict movement of people, among other measures.
Some 5,000 troops are already deploying to the border area, hoping to contain some of the worst violence Colombia has seen in years.
AFP reporters in the town of Tibu witnessed rows of heavily armed soldiers amassing in barracks and receiving orders from superior officers.
They have yet to engage guerrilla fighters directly or deploy to the most critical zones, where senior officers say violence is still raging.
How the roots of the ‘PayPal mafia’ extend to apartheid South Africa
Elon Musk grew up with the privileges of a stratified racial order and Peter Thiel lived in a city that venerated Hitler
When Elon Musk’s arm shot out in a stiff arm salute at Donald Trump’s inaugural celebrations, startled viewers mostly drew the obvious comparison.
But in the fired-up debate about Musk’s intent that followed, as the world’s richest man insisted he wasn’t trying to be a Nazi, speculation inevitably focused on whether his roots in apartheid-era South Africa offered an insight.
In recent months Musk’s promotion of far-right conspiracy theories has grown, from a deepening hostility to democratic institutions to the recent endorsement of Germany’s far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). He has taken an unhealthy interest in genetics while backing claims of a looming “white genocide” in his South African homeland and endorsing posts promoting the racist “great replacement” conspiracy theory. Increasingly, his language and tone have come to echo the old South Africa.
He is not alone. Musk is part of the “PayPal mafia” of libertarian billionaires with roots in South Africa under white rule now hugely influential in the US tech industry and politics.
They include Peter Thiel, the German-born billionaire venture capitalist and PayPal cofounder, who was educated in a southern African city in the 1970s where Hitler was still openly venerated. Thiel, a major donor to Trump’s campaign, has been critical of welfare programs and women being permitted to vote as undermining capitalism. A 2021 biography of Thiel, called The Contrarian, alleged that as a student at Stanford he defended apartheid as “economically sound”.
David Sacks, formerly PayPal’s chief operating officer and now a leading fundraiser for Trump, was born in Cape Town and grew up within the South African diaspora after his family moved to the US when he was young. A fourth member of the mafia, Roelof Botha, the grandson of the apartheid regime’s last foreign minister, Pik Botha, and former PayPal CFO, has kept a lower political profile but remains close to Musk.
A smiling woman alongside a book.
‘Reactionary nihilism’: how a rightwing movement strives to end US democracy
Read more
Among them, Musk stands out for his ownership of X, which is increasingly a platform for far-right views, and his proximity to Trump, who has nominated Musk to head a “department of government efficiency” to slash and burn its way through the federal bureaucracy.
Some draw a straight line between Musk’s formative years atop a complex system of racial hierarchy as a white male, in a country increasingly at war with itself as the South African government became ever more repressive as resistance to apartheid grew, and the man we see at Trump’s side today.
The week before the inauguration, Steve Bannon, Trump’s former adviser, described white South Africans as the “most racist people on earth”, questioned their involvement in US politics and said Musk was a malign influence who should go back to the country of his birth.
Others are sceptical that Musk’s increasingly extreme views can be tracked back to his upbringing in Pretoria. The acclaimed South African writer Jonny Steinberg recently called attempts to explain Musk through his childhood under apartheid “a bad idea” that resulted in “facile” conclusions.
But for those looking to join dots, there is fodder from Musk’s early life with a neo-Nazi grandfather who moved from Canada to South Africa because he liked the idea of apartheid through his high school education in a system infused with the ideology of white supremacy.
Musk’s formative years in the 1980s came amid a cauldron of rebellion in the Black townships which drew a state of emergency and a bloody crackdown by the state. Some whites fled the country. Others marched with the neo-Nazi Afrikaner Resistance Movement against any weakening of apartheid.
The South Africa into which Musk was born in 1971, and to which Thiel moved as a child from Germany, was led by a prime minister, John Vorster, who had been a general in a fascist militia three decades earlier that allied itself with Hitler.
The Ossewabrandwag (OB) was founded shortly before the second world war. It opposed South Africa entering the war as an ally of Britain and plotted with German military intelligence to assassinate the prime minster, Jan Smuts, as a prelude to an armed uprising in support of Hitler.
Vorster made no secret of his sympathy for Nazi, or National Socialist, ideology which he compared to the Afrikaner political philosophy of Christian nationalism.
“We stand for Christian nationalism which is an ally of National Socialism,” he said in 1942. “You can call this anti-democratic principle dictatorship if you wish. In Italy it is called ‘Fascism’, in Germany ‘German National Socialism’ and in South Africa ‘Christian nationalism’.”
Smuts’s government took a dim view of that and a few weeks later interned Vorster as a Nazi sympathiser.
a person flies a KKK flag
KKK distributes flyers in Kentucky telling immigrants to ‘leave now’
Read more
At the end of the war, the OB was absorbed into the National party, which then won the 1948 election, in which Black South Africans had no vote, on a commitment to impose apartheid. In 1961, Vorster joined the government as minister of justice and five years later became prime minister.
Nazism may have been defeated in Europe but Christian nationalism was alive and kicking in South Africa under Vorster, with its own brand of racial classification and stratification justified by the need to keep the “swart gevaar”, or black danger, at bay.
In schools, Christian nationalist education sought to forge a South African identity around a singular version of the country’s history. Musk and Thiel were taught that the Afrikaner, mostly the descendants of Dutch colonisers, was the real victim of South Africa’s strife whether at the hands of grasping British imperialists or treacherous Zulu chiefs.
The truth is we didn’t see Black people quite as equals. We didn’t think about it
“It was a strange mix of ‘we got fucked up by the British in the [second Boer] war, and our women and children died in thousands in the concentration camps’ so we are going to rebuild our nation and make sure that that we are invincible. And we’ll do that by extreme means,” she said.
Schooling, like much else, was segregated by race for most of the apartheid era and, on paper at least, white pupils across South Africa were subject to the same Christian nationalist education. But white society was itself divided and the historical narrative embraced in Afrikaans-speaking schools could often became the basis for an implicit rejection of apartheid philosophy in English-speaking ones.
Musk attended a Johannesburg high school and then the Pretoria boys high school, an institution whose other alumni include students who went on to become leading anti-apartheid activists such as Edwin Cameron, a South African supreme court justice after the collapse of white rule, and Peter Hain, who moved to Britain, where he became a leading campaigner against apartheid and then a Labour government minister.
Phillip Van Niekerk, former editor of the leading anti-apartheid Mail and Guardian newspaper in Johannesburg, had Afrikaner parents but attended an English-speaking school. He recalled that the official version of history did little to engender support for the apartheid system among a lot of English speakers even if they benefited from it and did little to challenge it.
“We hated the National party government. Even our teachers were kind of hostile. It was seen almost like an imposition. Yet you imbibe things through the culture. The truth is we didn’t see Black people quite as equals. We didn’t think about it,” he said.
Thiel got all that and more at schools in South Africa and its de facto colony, South West Africa, which became independent as Namibia in 1990.
South West Africa had been a German colony until the end of the first world war and Thiel lived for a time in the city of Swakopmund, where he attended a German-language school while his father worked at a nearby uranium mine.
At that time, Swakopmund was notorious for its continued glorification of Nazism, including celebrating Hitler’s birthday. In 1976, the New York Times reported that some people in the town continued to greet each other with “Heil Hitler” and to give the Nazi salute.
Van Niekerk visited Swakopmund during South African rule.
“I was there in the 1980s and you could walk into a curio shop and buy mugs with Nazi swastikas on them. If you’re German and you’re in Swakopmund in the 1970s, which is when Thiel was there, you’re part of that community,” he said.
Thiel, who moved to the US when he was 10, has described his schooling in Swakopmund as instilling a dislike of regimentation that steered him towards libertarianism.
Thiel’s father worked at a uranium mine in Rössing where, as in the gold and coalmines of the Reef around Johannesburg, Black laborers were paid just enough to survive, living conditions were dire and the work dangerous. White managers, on the other hand, lived a lifestyle of neo-colonial luxury with servants at the ready.
Musk’s father, Errol, was also in the mining business among other interests. He once boasted that his stake in Zambian emerald mines made him “so much money we couldn’t even close our safe”. Musk’s mother, Maye, has said the family owned two homes, a plane, a yacht and a handful of luxury cars.
Errol Musk has said that he opposed apartheid and joined the Progressive Federal party but then left because he didn’t like its demand for one person, one vote, and instead favored a more gradual reform with separate parliaments for different races. That was the liberal position inside the Musk family.
Musk’s maternal grandfather, Joshua Haldeman, moved from Canada to South Africa in 1950 because he liked the newly elected apartheid government.
In the 1930s, Haldeman was the Canadian leader of a fringe political movement originating in the US, Technocracy Incorporated, that advocated abolishing democracy in favor of government by elite technicians but which took on overtones of fascism with its uniforms and salutes.
The Canadian government banned Technocracy Incorporated during the second world war as a threat to the country’s security in part for its opposition to fighting Hitler. Haldeman was charged with publishing documents opposing the war and sent to prison for two months.
After the war, Haldeman led a separate political party that among other things promoted the antisemitic forgery the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. When that went nowhere, he moved to South Africa because he said he liked the core National party philosophy of Christian nationalism that Vorster likened to Nazism.
Errol Musk described Maye’s parents as so extreme he stopped visiting them.
We white South Africans, by the very nature of our privileges and our place in the racial hierarchy, grew up believing we were the master race
Phillip Van Niekerk
“They were very fanatical in favor of apartheid,” he told Podcast and Chill. “Her parents came to South Africa from Canada because they sympathised with the Afrikaner government. They used to support Hitler and all that sort of stuff.”
Haldeman was killed in a plane crash when Elon was three years old but the boy remained close to his grandmother and mother. He is estranged from his father, whom Maye has described as abusive of her and their children. Errol Musk once claimed to have shot and killed three people who broke into his house.
Musk has described his father as a “terrible human being”.
“Almost every evil thing you could possibly think of, he has done,” he told Rolling Stone without elaborating in 2017.
What is indisputable is that Musk and Thiel grew up amid incredible privilege where the racial hierarchy was clear. Those who claimed to reject apartheid sought to explain this privilege not as the result of systemic racial oppression but the natural order of things thanks to their own abilities. That in turn led some to regard all forms government as oppressive and true liberty as an individual battle for survival.
The biography of Thiel said he held a view common among apartheid’s supporters at the time that Black South Africans were better off than Africans in other parts of the continent even if they were systematically denied their rights. Thiel has denied ever having supported apartheid.
Van Niekerk said that opposition to apartheid did not necessarily mean rejection of white supremacy or privilege, a point made in a 1968 British television documentary the year before Thiel was born.
The commentary observed that the English-speaking mining barons and other industrialists in Johannesburg usually claimed to be “hostile to apartheid, call themselves liberal” but did little to oppose the system while profiting from it.
Helen Suzman, at the time a member of the South African parliament who was often a lone voice in opposition to apartheid, was critical of these powerful industrialists and businessmen, saying “people who do nothing are responsible”. She accused them of hiding behind apartheid to exploit Black workers.
“I see no reason why the industrialists should not improve the living conditions of their workers,” she said.
In the documentary, Stanley Cohen, the managing director of the OK Bazaars supermarket chain owned by his family, was asked why he only employed whites behind the counter and no South Africans of other races even though many of the customers were Black. Cohen acknowledged that it was not a legal requirement, but did it to indulge the racist prejudices of white customers.
“There is no reason why they [Black people] can’t work behind the counters. There’s no law against it. But there is this natural prejudice in this country which you can’t legislate for or against,” he said.
A decade later, power was shifting. The uprising that began in Soweto in 1976 had become a full-blown national crisis for the apartheid system by the 1980s. A low-level civil war was under way. In response, the state grew even more violent and repressive. White paranoia was fed by the creep of independent Black African states under Marxist-leaning governments ever closer to South Africa’s borders, with Angola and Mozambique in the 1970s followed by Zimbabwe in 1980.
Talk of white genocide emerged, a conspiracy theory that has taken on new life in recent times with the killings of white farmers in South Africa and Zimbabwe. Support surged for the neo-Nazi Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB), or Afrikaner Resistance Movement, founded in the early 1970s to oppose any relaxation of apartheid.
The AWB, founded by Eugene Terre’Blanche, an imposing and flamboyant figure given to riding around on a horse from which he occasionally fell off, made no secret of its model with a badge strikingly similar to a swastika in design and colors. It’s supporters were also fond of the stiff-armed Hitler salute as they paraded on the streets of Pretoria. At its peak, the AWB appeared to have the support of more than 10% of white South Africans.
Roberts said life for privileged whites in particular was “definitely a bubble, and one filled with self-belief”. But she said that it became increasingly difficult to ignore reality.
“I think Musk in Pretoria in the 1980s must have had a sense of what Black people were experiencing and why they were angry. I grew up fairly conservative but I was able to change my views. I think you have to be fairly rigid in the 80s to still cling on to the belief that the apartheid system was fine and correct and in everybody’s best interest,” she said.
Musk left South Africa in 1988 in the midst of this ferment, two years before FW de Klerk carved out a path to freedom by releasing Nelson Mandela. Had he stayed, Musk faced being conscripted into the military for two years, an obligatory service for white men, that could well have meant fighting in the “border war” in Angola and Namibia or being sent to put down Black protests in the townships.
Instead, Musk took Canadian citizenship through his mother and moved to Ontario. Van Niekerk said that, whether he wants to admit it or not, Musk also took a part of South Africa with him.
“We all [white South Africans], by the very nature of our privileges and our place in the racial hierarchy, grew up believing we were the master race, even if we didn’t actively think about it,” he said.
Chris McGreal is the Guardian’s former Johannesburg correspondent
