How the roots of the 'PayPal mafia' extend to apartheid South Africa | Hacker News Reader

How the roots of the 'PayPal mafia' extend to apartheid South Africa

theguardian.com

14 pointsJensRantil9 comments

I visited SA under apartheid. It was a chilling experience.

Would you care to elaborate?

TLDR; Elon Musk is a nazi because he was born in South Africa. That's literally the content of this new hit piece.

Total 0 substance, "let's play up associations and places against our target" fare:

  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. 
  (...) “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.

And then, casually:

  "Thiel, who moved to the US when he was 10"

A, yes. Almost everybody in the town was a Nazi in the 1980s because some curio shop sold swastika mugs (which are sold tons of places all over the world, including NYC and LA), including people coming in from elsewhere, and a kid who stayed there for a few years and left at 10 "was part of that community".

There's specifics, it's a question of how much weight to give to such things, eg:

  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.

Over on the other side of the family tree, Musk's paternal grandfather was a senior minister in the aparthied SA government, strongly supported and upheld aparthied policy in the face of global disapproval, and also dabbled in antisemitic tropes.

Of course, many say, Elon Musk shrugged all that off ... and then he started boosting neo nazi commentators and tele-attending AfD rallies to tell them to not carry any guilt about their grandparents and the holocaust.

Can't really blame that on the casual racism of his upbringing though, can we?: https://youtu.be/CIGnIvL18_4?t=31

"Had a nazi grandpa" would put 90% of modern Germans in the same category...

Except 90% of modern day Germans would not go out and bring Nazi salutes, dream of empire and try to turn one of the worlds superpowers into a technocracy.

So it's a circular argument

So you're just ignoring the whole part about Thiel growing up in a pro-Nazi mining town in South West Africa (now Namibia) that existed to support an illegal Uranium mine fueled by exploited African labour?

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