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It’s the circle of the right — Elon Musk and the political ossification of democracy

23 Feb 2025

The odious billionaire and the far-right, one-eyed company he keeps are revising history to suit their narrow-minded ideology.

AfriForum, Kallie Kriel, Ernst Roets and their right-wing ensemble have embarked on a “global” land theft tour, having turned down a once-in-a-lifetime, generous offer for refuge in the US. It is one for the history books.

What we hear in the AfriForum marching band and chorus (as in other vocal populist, white supremacist groupings) are echoes of political turmoil in contemporary Germany and wider Europe. There, former east Germans – shaped by 28 years of Soviet propaganda spin cycles – overwhelmingly support the populist, right-wing, anti-immigration Alternative for Germany (AfD).

Germans go to the polls on 23 February, and it is no secret that the AfD is Elon Musk’s favoured political horse in the race. He encouraged those at an AfD rally last week via a videolink: “Let’s go, guys, let’s go – fight for a greater future for Germany.”

Musk told a jubilant crowd at the AfD rally in Halle, a former communist eastern heartland: “It’s good to be proud of German culture, German values, and not to lose that in some sort of multiculturalism that dilutes everything.” He exhorted them to be proud of their “millennia-old culture”.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said he found Musk’s remarks “disgusting” and added that the billionaire was “intervening in favour of right-wing politicians all over Europe”.

Musk’s political psyche was shaped in a wealthy white bubble of privilege in apartheid South Africa before he fled. It is as warped now as it probably was then.

In the same week as the old, tired, blood-soaked continent of Europe celebrated the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, Musk told the crowd there is “frankly too much of a focus on past guilt; we need to move beyond that”.

Now where have we heard that before?

‘History is a needle for putting men asleep’

It is 20th-century troubadour-philosopher Leonard Cohen who wrote that “history is a needle for putting men asleep, anointed with the poison of all they want to keep”.

But what do Trump, Musk, Rob Hersov, The Kiffness, AfriForum and others know or care about 360-degree history? Vladimir Putin is pissed off because Europe fails to acknowledge the role of the USSR in liberating Europe. But that was the USSR. Putin’s Russia is an Orthodox Christian, hypercapitalist, aggressive oligarchy, just like the US.

Support for the far right and populism over complexity have swelled across Germany. Pundits predict that should the federal elections be held today, the AfD would become the second-strongest political group in the Bundestag, the German federal parliament.

“But only in the eastern states can the AfD claim to have a mandate to form the next government, as its Thuringian leader, Björn Höcke, has already done after emerging top in a state election [in September] for the first time ever, on at least 30% of the vote,” writes Philip Oltermann, The Guardian’s culture editor for Europe.

Musk Elon Musk seems to be lending his ears to AfriForum. (Photos: Getty Images)

The oligarch’s oligarch

The world’s oligarchs – Musk is now the oligarch’s oligarch – have clearly not peered long and hard enough into the moral abyss of the world they seek to create.

Perhaps these men find comfort and familiarity in the hectic churn of anger, retribution and revenge; it is how they were brought up by their fathers.

Oltermann highlighted in his article the East Germany-born sociologist Steffen Mau’s idea of ossification for this swing to the right. It is a play on the German “Ost” for “east”.

Mau opined that far from catching up with the former West Germany, the people in the former East Germany are voting differently “precisely because it has already caught up and now claims the right to assert its own distinct identity”.

The ideology of pseudo-freedom of the old German Democratic Republic (GDR) is as stubborn a concept, it seems, as is the pseudo-liberty of the failed nationalist Afrikaner project in the minds, hearts and souls of Kriel, AfriForum et al. In this map of the world there are whole other “independent” countries: Bophuthatswana, Transkei, Ciskei, QwaQwa.

Canada, Greenland, anyone?

Roads well travelled

The politicisation of history in the GDR included educating children about “fascist depravity” (an apt term, we all agree). The narrative was that the primary target of fascists are Marxists and the working class (all lumped into a multicultural mass).

All other victims were just collateral damage in this, Hitler’s anti-communist purge.

The Holocaust, on the other hand, came to dominate post-war democratic western Germany, where citizens were confronted with the depravity they had aided and abetted. The crimes of national socialism were staked out and acknowledged. The concentration camps are still there.

In South Africa, the crimes of the apartheid state have been staked out and acknowledged by the majority of the country’s citizens. But history remains highly selective here, with many benefactors of white supremacy and economic privilege crying victim now that they are part of a constitutional, multiparty democracy.

Come on, wake up and smell the sarin. DM

This story first appeared in our weekly Daily Maverick 168 newspaper, which is available countrywide for R35.

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Opinionistas

‘History is a needle for putting men asleep’

The oligarch’s oligarch