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0 pointsdefrost1y ago0 comments

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

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3 comments · 1 top-level

coldtea1y ago· 2 in thread

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

jacquesm1y ago

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.

coldtea1y ago

So it's a circular argument

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

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.