United States President, Donald Trump. (File photo)
Modern racism went global after it was invented in the slave colony of Virginia, in what is now the United States, in the latter part of the 17th century.
It is now being actively retrofitted through a set of right-wing networks that have cohered around the White House. It will probably have to be defeated in the US, but with South Africa in its crosshairs we are not mere spectators to the Trumpage.
There can be no equivocation on Trump’s racism. He has made extreme racist hostility to migrants central to his pitch to voters, often using fascist language. He announced his candidacy in 2015 with an attack on Mexican migrants: “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.”
In 2018, now speaking in the Oval Office, he said, “Why do we want all these people from Africa here? They’re shithole countries … We should have more people from Norway.”
His fascist rhetoric continued in his second campaign for the presidency. On 2 April last year he said: “They’re not humans. They’re animals.” On 10 September he said that Haitian migrants are “eating the dogs … they’re eating the cats”. On 16 December he told a rally that “They’re poisoning the blood of our country … all over the world they’re coming into our country from Africa, from Asia.”
Five days after taking office Trump signed two orders for the deportation of migrants, following which migrants from Latin America, Africa, Asia and the Caribbean were targeted for deportation, cuffed at the wrists and ankles in military planes.
In office he has been clear that he intends to internationalise this racism. On 4 February he, sitting next to a smirking Benjamin Netanyahu, proposed that the US take ownership of Gaza, “resettle” Palestinians in neighbouring countries, and turn it into “the Riviera of the Middle East”.
On 7 February, in a general attack on South Africa, he ordered that Afrikaners be welcomed to the US as refugees. Mexicans, Haitians, Africans and Palestinians are worthy of nothing but contempt while Norwegians and Afrikaners are welcomed.
At home much of the blame for Trump’s turn on South Africa has been ascribed to AfriForum. Elsewhere there has been more attention on a set of tech barons with South African roots, including Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and David Sacks. Roelof Botha is also sometimes mentioned.
There is also growing awareness of the influence that Joel Pollak, Tony Leon’s former speechwriter and a hard-right ideologue, has acquired on the American right. It has been suggested that he may be named as Trump’s ambassador to South Africa. We should not forget, though, that the right-wing South African with the closest and longest relationship with Trump is the golfer Gary Player.
There is another set of actors that has not been subject to the same scrutiny at home or abroad. This is the largely English-speaking and white liberal establishment in South Africa, an establishment that enjoys significant international connections.
The dominant figures, organisations and currents in this milieu have always assumed the moral superiority of the West and, on that basis, the legitimacy of its right to rule the planet. This assumption of superiority cannot be disentangled from the racism on which the very idea of the West was founded, and which has always shaped the forms that its power has taken.
Assumptions of Western superiority are often so deeply held that well-reasoned critique is dismissed in quasi-theological terms, as an inexplicable evil, or as the product of conspiracy. We saw this towards the end of last year when the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a US government organisation, held a conference in Joburg.
There are many first-class academic studies, most of them produced from within the US academy, detailing the role of the NED in driving or supporting coups against elected governments. Yet criticisms of the conference were dismissed, in serene self-confidence, as “disinformation”. One prominent journalist was certain that critique had its roots in a Chinese conspiracy.
There was nothing new about any of this. Ethics and reason have frequently run into their limits for liberal figures in journalism, the academy, NGOs and politics, when confronted by principled and rational critique of the West.
It has often been said that the West is the guarantor of a “rules-based” international order while ignoring the many occasions on which the West, or the regimes it supports, has violated international law. The destruction of Iraq, at the cost of more than a million lives, is only one example.
It has repeatedly been said that the West is a democratising force while ignoring US-backed coups against elected governments and its support for authoritarian regimes. The US-backed coup against the elected government in Haiti in 2004 was openly welcomed by leading liberal figures in South Africa. There has been silence about the Western-backed dictatorships in Egypt, Rwanda and Saudi Arabia, among many others.
We have been told that our public sphere is under assault from Russian and Chinese disinformation while no account is taken of the many efforts of the US to shape public understanding and sentiment.
People who hold rational evidence-based views that differ from official Western narratives have been said to be dupes of propaganda, or active agents of conspiracies by the enemies of the West. This includes people who hold views that are commonly expressed in the US itself, and even in the US state, such as the view that the eastward expansion of Nato was one of the factors that led to the war in Ukraine.
Even the simple principle that all political actors and states, irrespective of their geopolitical alignment, should be held to the same ethical and political standards has been met with irrationality. One person who has had some success in shaping liberal media narratives memorably described this view as a “Putin talking point”.
Leading figures in the liberal establishment have often made claims for which they can provide no evidence, such as the claim that the ANC was bribed by Hezbollah through Iran to take Israel to the International Court of Justice (ICJ). In the absence of any evidence to support such claims they are well described as conspiracy theories.
None of this is new, but it came to a head after the invasion of Ukraine in early 2022, a moment in which there was a direct and obvious intersection of geopolitics and race. As a number of commentators have noted, liberal discourse took on a hysterical tone. Something similar happened when Israel was attacked by Hamas, and again when South Africa took Israel to the ICJ.
This tone was in striking contradistinction to the lack of interest in the wars in Ethiopia, Sudan, Yemen and the Congo. By every possible measure lives in Ukraine and Israel have been accorded vastly more weight than lives in Palestine or the Congo.
We all know that if white people in a Western-backed state were treated like Palestinians in Gaza, or women in the Munzenze prison in Goma, it would be declared one of the great crimes of our time. We all know the reason these crimes are defended, downplayed or ignored is that the lives of their victims are not accorded the same weight as white lives.
The hysterical tone that came to mark the public speech of many leading liberal figures and organisations from early 2022 was often accompanied by strident and extremely moralistic claims that South Africa was turning from the West and towards authoritarian states.
It was demanded that South Africa become a proxy state of the West, with Kenya and Rwanda both given as examples to follow. There was a direct link between this language and that of the US state, with both using similar phrases, such as “malign actors”, for similar purposes. There was, in some instances, clear enthusiasm for the idea that the US should discipline South Africa.
In some instances there were direct political links between people and organisations here and the US state. While Trump has introduced new levels of crudity into American politics, his demand that South Africa surrender its autonomy to the US has long been made in South Africa by people such as Greg Mills from the Brenthurst Foundation.
We should ask hard questions of AfriForum, the right-wing South Africans in the US and Gary Player. We should also ask hard questions of the liberal establishment at home.
Richard Pithouse is a distinguished research fellow at the Global Centre for Advanced Studies in Dublin and New York, an international research scholar at the University of Connecticut and an extraordinary professor at the University of the Western Cape.
