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.
It was no surprise when Haldeman and Fletcher’s daughter, Maye, married a prominent young right-wing politician and emerald mine investor named Errol Musk. Maye Musk herself has remained a steadfast fascist throughout her entire life. She has long supported Donald Trump, and just in October posted on X, asserting that Democrats only obtain votes by shipping “illegal immigrants” across the Mexican border. This sort of argument grows directly from the white supremacist “great replacement theory,” which asserts a Jewish cabal exists that aims to replace all white individuals in the U.S. with Black people and Latin American immigrants.
Errol remains openly right-wing in his views, and his emerald mine investments raised his family’s wealth and influence to a level that only Elon has since eclipsed. Since Elon has established himself as the wealthiest man in the world, he has become more and more emboldened with fascist rhetoric and action. Ultimately, none of this would have been possible without the hyper-exploitation of African people under apartheid and the broader acceptance of fascist politics by Western imperialist powers like the U.S. and Canada.
The Haldeman and the Musk families were not the only supporters of formerly apartheid or fascist states to spread their wings and exert greater racist influence. There is no shortage of examples.
Another prominent example from South Africa is forensic physician David Fowler, who gained widespread condemnation after his testimony in defense of Derek Chauvin, the brutal racist cop who murdered George Floyd. Fowler left South Africa for Baltimore, Maryland, in 1991, just a year after the official end of apartheid. Apparently, the idea of practicing medicine in a country where the indigenous African population held political power did not appeal to an apartheid mad scientist.
Over the next two decades, Fowler would assist the Baltimore Police Department and the Maryland State Police in a large-scale cover-up of racist police murders, most notoriously the murder of 19-year-old Anton Black. Fowler’s career came under increased scrutiny after he testified that Derek Chauvin’s knee on George Floyd’s neck for almost 10 minutes was not the cause of Floyd’s death. For all those reasons, over 1,300 cases of individuals who died while in custody of Maryland police were reopened in 2021.
For the U.S., the most infamous reappropriation of Nazi officials was “Operation Paperclip,” which saw the CIA arrange for 1,600 German scientists, engineers, and technicians to secretly leave Germany and join the U.S. in the cold war against the Soviet Union. Many of these officials were high-ranking members of the Nazi party. Some experimented on Jewish prisoners. None of them were ever brought to justice.
Even Germany itself repurposed Nazi officials into what was known for most of the second half of the 20th century as “West Germany” or the “Federal Republic of Germany. In the mid-2010s, the current German government conducted a series of investigations into the prevalence of Nazi judges and other justice system officials in the West German government. The final report revealed that in 1957, 77% of senior officials at the justice ministry had been members of the Nazi party. A different study found that the justice department was not even a majority non-Nazi judges until 1972. The last Nazi official, a former prosecutor for Hitler, would not leave the German Ministry of Justice until 1992. The Times of Israel referred to this as “recycling Nazis.”
It is beyond telling that all these different imperialist countries and apartheid regimes have such deep problems with fascist infiltration. The fact is that the imperialist ruling class, some of whom, like Elon Musk, are fascists themselves, have historically used and continue to use the fascist mass movement to enforce their plunder of the planet.
The imperialist ruling class constantly tells the world that they are the bringers of democracy and civilization. They insist that their enemies are so savage and barbaric as to justify any force necessary to defeat them. Yet, some of the most powerful imperialists, such as the entire Musk family, are openly and proudly Nazis themselves. The supposed democratic Germany during the Cold War was chock-full of Nazi judges. One of the largest historically Black cities in the U.S. suffered under a recycled South African apartheid medical examiner for two decades.
New boss, same as the old boss.
The working people of the world don’t need Nazi billionaires, Nazi doctors, Nazi judges, or any Nazis at all. The working class needs jobs, land, food, water, health care, and education. Down with the imperialist ruling class. Down with Elon Musk.
Lev Koufax is an anti-Zionist Jewish activist.