Tuesday, January 28, 2025

Nazi billionaires: Fascism in the Elon Musk family tree

 

Canada South Africa apartheid Elon Musk Nazi billionaire family fascism

It’s not a secret that Elon Musk embraces fascist and reactionary political movements. He makes no attempt to hide his political leanings. Musk’s support not just for Trump, but also for the German neo-Nazi party, Alternative for Deutschland or AfD, is open and widely covered in the mainstream press. Musk also financially supports the British Reform Party, another fascist European political party with a deeply anti-immigrant platform. 

In recent years, Musk has become a key public figure in the politics of the global ruling class. However, Musk’s personal politics are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the role fascism plays in ruling-class politics and the United States’ history of recycling different fascist movements and figures to suit the imperialist agenda. 

In fact, Elon isn’t even the first member of his own family to be prominent in right-wing politics and promote U.S. imperialist interests. South Africa itself provided the imperialists with a new bastion of right-wing demagogues and families after apartheid fell in the early 1990s. After Nelson Mandela took power, many white South Africans who supported apartheid found refuge in the U.S. 

But the Musk family’s fascist legacy goes even further back than the 1990s. Musk’s maternal grandparents, Wyn Fletcher and Joshua Haldeman, were wealthy Canadian doctors with openly Nazi politics in the 1940s. In an interview, Elon’s father, Errol, spoke regarding the history of his ex-wife’s Nazi parents: “They used to support Hitler and all that sort of stuff. But they didn’t know, I don’t think they knew what the Nazis were doing. But they [the grandparents] were in the German Nazi party but in Canada. And they sympathise with the Germans.” 

After the defeat of fascism at the hands of the Soviet Union and other allied forces, Haldeman and Fletcher continued their Nazi activism. However, explicit Nazism within Canadian politics was taboo at the time due to the recent war against Hitler’s Third Reich, a war that cost the lives of many Canadian soldiers. 

There is an irony here considering the widespread amnesty Canada granted to hundreds of Ukrainian Nazi SS officers, such as Yaroslav Hunka. The Canadian government was widely criticized after the Canadian Parliament honored Hunka publicly. In addition to the Musk family, which is the focus of this article, the Canadian embrace of Ukrainian Nazis is another pertinent example of how the ruling class recycles fascist masses and institutions in the service of their own imperialist agendas. 

Nonetheless, finding himself maligned and alienated, Haldeman moved his career and his family to apartheid South Africa, where his fascist politics were more openly supported. Once in South Africa, Haldeman stayed involved in political life, giving a speech in the 1950s where he asserted that apartheid South Africa was leading “White Christian Civilization” against the “International conspiracy of Jewish bankers” and the “hordes of colored people” he claimed the Jewish bankers controlled. This is Elon’s grandfather, and we are supposed to believe Elon’s recent Nazi salute was an awkward arm gesture.  (more...)

Nazi billionaires: Fascism in the Elon Musk family tree


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