The billionaire has described his grandfather as a risk-taking
adventurer. A closer read of history reveals something much darker.
By [44]Joshua Benton
A collage featuring photographs of Joshua Haldeman and his grandson
Elon Musk
Illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: David McNew / Getty; Haldeman
Papers.
September 20, 2023
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In Walter Isaacson’s new biography, [46]Elon Musk, a mere page and a
half is devoted to introducing Musk’s grandfather, a Canadian
chiropractor named [47]Joshua N. Haldeman. Isaacson describes him as a
source of Musk’s great affection for danger—“a daredevil adventurer
with strongly held opinions” and “quirky conservative populist views”
who did rope tricks at rodeos and rode freight trains like a hobo. “He
knew that real adventures involve risk,” Isaacson quotes Musk as having
said. “Risk energized him.”
But in 1950, Haldeman’s “quirky” politics led him to make an unusual
and dramatic choice: to leave Canada for South Africa. Haldeman had
built a comfortable life for himself in Regina, Saskatchewan’s capital.
His chiropractic practice was one of Canada’s largest and allowed him
to possess [48]his own airplane and [49]a 20-room home he shared with
his wife and four young children. He’d been active in politics, running
for both the [50]provincial and [51]national parliaments and even
becoming the [52]national chairman of a minor political party.
Meanwhile, he’d never even been to South Africa.
What would make a man undertake such a radical change? Isaacson writes
that Haldeman had come “to believe that the Canadian government was
usurping too much control over the lives of individuals and that the
country had gone soft.” One of Haldeman’s sons [53]has written that it
may have simply been “his adventurous spirit and the desire for a more
pleasant climate in which to raise his family.” But another factor was
at play: his strong support for the brand-new apartheid regime.
An examination of Joshua Haldeman’s writings reveals a radical
conspiracy theorist who expressed racist, anti-Semitic, and
antidemocratic views repeatedly, and over the course of decades—a
record I studied across hundreds of documents from the time, including
newspaper clips, self-published manuscripts, university archives, and
private correspondence. Haldeman believed that apartheid South Africa
was destined to lead “White Christian Civilization” in its fight
against the “International Conspiracy” of Jewish bankers and the
“hordes of Coloured people” they controlled.
“Instead of the Government’s attitude keeping me out of South Africa,
it had precisely the opposite effect—it encouraged me to come and
settle here,” he told a reporter for the South African newspaper Die
Transvaler shortly after his arrival. The far-right Afrikaner newspaper
treated Haldeman’s arrival as a PR victory for apartheid. (“PRAISES
ACTION OF NATIONALIST PARTY REGIME: Canadian Politician Settles in
South Africa,” the headline read.)
Musk’s grandfather spelled out his beliefs most clearly in a 1960
self-published book with the weighty title The International Conspiracy
to Establish a World Dictatorship and the Menace to South Africa. (Its
existence was first reported by [54]Jill Lepore in The New Yorker.)
Library databases indicate that there is only one copy in the Western
Hemisphere, at Michigan State University, which is where I obtained it.
In it, Haldeman wrote that there was
a strong possibility that South Africa will become the leader of
White Christian Civilization as she is becoming more and more the
focal point, the bulwark, and the subject of attack by
anti-Christian, anti-White forces throughout the world.
She will fulfill this destiny if the White Christian people get
together; if they realize the forces that are behind these
world-wide attacks; if the people will make a study of who are their
real enemies and what their methods are; if she will seriously
combat the evils of Internationalism that are already taking
cancerous roots in our society.
These views were on display before he set out for South Africa. The
minor political party that Haldeman had led in Canada was [55]notorious
for [56]anti-Semitism. In 1946, when one of the party’s newspapers
[57]printed the fraudulent The Protocols of the Elders of
Zion—[58]arguably the most consequential conspiracy text in the modern
world—he defended the decision, [59]arguing “that the plan as outlined
in these protocols has been rapidly unfolding in the period of
observation of this generation.” A local rabbi described Haldeman’s
political speeches to the local newspaper as “[60]shot through with
anti-Semitic talk.”
Before that, he’d been a leader in a fringe political movement that
called itself [61]Technocracy Incorporated, which advocated an end to
democracy and rule by a small tech-savvy elite. During World War II,
the Canadian government [62]banned the group, declaring it a risk to
national security. Haldeman’s involvement with Technocracy continued,
though, and he was arrested and convicted of three charges relating to
it.
Once he got to South Africa, he added Black Africans to his list of
rhetorical targets. “The natives are very primitive and must not be
taken seriously,” he [63]wrote back to his hometown Canadian newspaper
in 1951. “Some are quite clever in a routine job, but the best of them
cannot assume responsibility and will abuse authority. The present
government of South Africa knows how to handle the native question.”
Of course, the sins of the grandfather are not the sins of the
grandson, and it would be unfair to suggest otherwise. Joshua Haldeman
died when Elon Musk was 2 years old. And Haldeman’s politics were not
universal in the family; Elon’s father, Errol Musk, for example, was a
[64]member of the [65]Progressive Federal Party, the primary political
parliamentary opposition to apartheid. (I reached out to Musk by email
but have not heard back.)
But as Musk carries on his own war of words with Jewish
institutions—[66]threatening to sue the Anti-Defamation League for
[67]$22 billion over its complaints about anti-Semitism on Twitter—it’s
worth pausing on his grandfather, a man whose weakness for anti-Semitic
conspiracy theories and devotion to white-supremacist ideology drew the
worried attention of Jewish groups on two continents.
When Musk [68]tweets that George Soros “appears to want nothing less
than the destruction of western civilization”—in response to a
[69]tweet blaming Soros for an “invasion” of African migrants into
Europe—he is not the first in his family to insinuate that a wealthy
Jewish financier was manipulating thousands of Africans to advance
nefarious goals.
__________________________________________________________________
Joshua Norman Haldeman was born in 1902 in a Minnesota log cabin; the
family moved north to Saskatchewan a few years later. His mother,
[70]Almeda Haldeman, was the first chiropractor known to practice in
Canada. At the time, chiropractic was less than a decade old and still
tightly bound to its origins in [71]pseudoscience and [72]spiritualism;
[73]D. D. Palmer, its creator, claimed that he had received it from
“[74]the other world” and considered it akin to a [75]religion.
Chiropractors believed that the vertebral misalignments they treated
were the cause of all disease.
Haldeman followed in his mother’s footsteps, but after only a few
years, he left chiropractic work temporarily to become a farmer. The
move was poorly timed. The stock-market crash of 1929 was followed by
the beginning of a [76]decade-long drought that hit Saskatchewan in
1930. Haldeman, like many of his neighbors, lost the farm.
The terrible conditions in Canada’s western prairies made it a hotbed
for radical political movements on both the right and the left, each
promising a root-and-branch restructuring of society. At various times,
Haldeman found himself entranced by the promises of several very
different movements. The first was on the political left. The
Co-operative Commonwealth Federation was an amalgam of various
socialist, labor, and farmer groups that advocated for greater state
involvement in the economy to alleviate Depression-era suffering.
Haldeman was one of the federation’s strongest supporters in the
mid-1930s, becoming the [77]local party chairman for the Canadian
equivalent of a congressional district.
But around [78]1936, he moved to Regina and fell into an entirely
different political philosophy—one that believed democracy had failed
as a political philosophy and needed a scientific replacement.
Technocracy as an idea [79]came into public view in one of the most
[80]politically perilous moments of 20th-century American history: the
four months between Franklin D. Roosevelt’s election as president in
November 1932 and his taking office in March 1933. The Bonus Army
(thousands of World War I veterans demanding benefits) had been
violently rousted from its occupation of Washington only months before;
the machinations of the Business Plot (an abortive scheme to overthrow
FDR) were only months away. Herbert Hoover had been defeated soundly at
the polls, but he would spend his last few months in office [81]trying
to sabotage what would become the New Deal. Some Americans craved a
[82]strongman to take control.
Into that maelstrom came a renowned [83]scientist and engineer named
Howard Scott. With a [84]doctorate from the University of Berlin, he’d
commanded complex projects around the globe, including British
munitions plants and industrial projects for U.S. Steel. Scott and a
small group of fellow engineers and scientists had made a diagnosis of
civilization’s ills and a prescription for relief. The current
capitalist system, they said, was irrevocably broken, and—as one
magazine summarizing the movement put it—“[85]we are faced with the
threat of national bankruptcy and perhaps general chaos within eighteen
months.” Scott described the solution in the language of an engineer—a
civilization “operated on a thermo-dynamically balanced load.”
Scott’s Technocracy Incorporated called for the destruction of all
current governments on the continent, to be replaced by the “Technate
of North America,” a new entity to be run by engineers and scientists.
In [86]calling for the abolition of all existing government, the
Technocrats advocated what they liked to call a “functional control
system” modeled on the telephone network and other large corporations.
(AT&T, they noted, wasn’t a democracy either.) The Technate would
measure the total energy output of the continent and annually allot to
each citizen a set number of Energy Certificates, which would replace
money. “[87]It will be impossible to go into debt and, likewise,
impossible to save income for the future,” one Technocracy Inc.
brochure from the period says. “It would be impossible to sell
anything.”
That sort of radical rationing would be acceptable because—once
scientific principles governed the entire economy, and the tech guys
were running everything—it would become so profoundly productive that
life would become mostly leisure. Technate residents could expect to
work only from ages 25 to 45, and even then only four hours a day, 165
days a year. After 45 came retirement, [88]when they could “do whatever
they wish for the rest of their lives, and still enjoy full consuming
privileges,” a Technocracy Inc. pamphlet promised.
It’s not difficult to imagine the appeal of such a vision in the
darkest hours of the Great Depression—especially when laid out by a
genius engineer like Scott. There was a problem, though: Howard Scott
was not a genius engineer. A reporter quickly discovered that [89]he’d
invented nearly his entire backstory. (Among his other tall tales: that
he’d been a football star at Notre Dame; that he’d once had to flee
Mexico after shooting the local archbishop; and that he’d caused a riot
in Montreal by punching some Jesuits who’d shoved his girl off a
sidewalk.)
Others began to point out holes in his Technate plans. Not long after
becoming a true national phenomenon—The New York Times [90]ran 120
stories on technocracy in that four-month period—Scott and his movement
were mostly forgotten. As the political theorist Langdon Winner
[91]later wrote, “In its best moments Technocracy Inc. was an
organization of crackpots; in its worst, an inept swindle.”
But Howard Scott kept pushing his ideas, and they found a fan in Joshua
Haldeman—even as Technocracy Inc. grew stranger with time. Its members
began showing up for events in [92]identical gray uniforms and saluting
one another in ways that to some observers—in an era of [93]Brownshirts
and [94]Blackshirts—had “[95]the tone of an incipient Fascist
movement.” (Later, after Pearl Harbor, Scott issued a press release
suggesting he be named continental dictator.)
Scott also convinced members that they should begin referring to
themselves by a number, not just a name. At one rally, a speaker was
announced simply as “[96]1x1809x56.” Haldeman, for his part, became
[97]10450-1. (According to [98]newspaper accounts at the time, the
number is derived from Regina’s [99]latitude and longitude.) He became
first the [100]local head of Technocracy in his part of Saskatchewan,
then the organization’s [101]top man in Canada. Writing in [102]the
group’s magazine in 1940, Haldeman/10450-1 predicted a coming “smashup”
in society. “Technocracy Inc. is preparing for a New Social Order that
is to come,” he wrote. “If you are a Technocrat, are you doing all that
you can to extend the Organization and discipline yourself to meet its
objectives?”
Technocracy Inc. today might seem more odd than threatening. But the
arrival of World War II changed perceptions within the Canadian
government. Technocracy [103]issued an isolationist statement
proclaiming that it was “unequivocally opposed to the conscription of
the manpower of Canada for any war anywhere off this continent.” Scott
[104]bragged publicly that his group was influential enough that the
government could not go to war “without permission of this
organization.” And Technocracy declared itself the continental
government-in-waiting for the imminent collapse of the current system.
In 1940—using the same war powers under which it had banned the
country’s major communist and fascist parties—the Canadian government
[105]banned Technocracy Incorporated as a threat to national security.
(The United States did not follow suit—not officially, at least. But
when Haldeman tried to drive across the border to give a speech in
Minnesota a few months later, he was [106]stopped and blocked from
entry, despite having been born a U.S. citizen.)
Shortly after the ban took effect, Haldeman [107]took out an ad in the
Regina newspaper defending Technocracy’s patriotism and impugning the
government’s. Days later, Canadian police [108]raided 12 buildings in
Regina related to illegal organizations, including Technocracy. It’s
likely, though not certain, that one of those was Haldeman’s home. And
in October 1940, he was [109]arrested by the Royal Canadian Mounted
Police in Vancouver. He [110]faced charges of “distributing and
publishing documents likely or intended to interfere with the efficient
prosecution of the war, and likely to cause disaffection to His
Majesty.” He was [111]convicted on all counts, earning a fine of $100
plus court costs, or two months in jail.
After his conviction, Haldeman set out to [112]start his own political
party, which he called [113]Total War and Defence, but it gained little
traction. By 1944, he’d shifted his allegiance to another odd spawn of
western Canada’s Depression-era radical ferment—the Social Credit
Party.
__________________________________________________________________
Haldeman’s next intellectual north star was a man named [114]Clifford
Hugh Douglas, the Scottish creator of the economic concept of
[115]social credit. Like Scott, Douglas was an engineer with a plan to
revolutionize society. And also like Scott, Douglas seems to have
[116]concocted much of his past. (He claimed to have been the chief
engineer of the British Westinghouse Company in India; the company
could find no record of his having worked for it. He claimed to have
led an important engineering project for the British postal service;
records showed he was a low-level employee who was laid off
mid-project.)
Douglas believed there was an innate imbalance in the financial system
of his day: Workers were not paid enough to consume all of the goods
they produced. There was always a gap, which he considered waste. His
solution was the issuance of a sort of government-created scrip to all
citizens—something akin to a universal basic income—that would close
the purchasing-power gap.
As with technocracy, the appeal of such an idea in the midst of the
Great Depression is obvious. But again, social credit’s utopian
economic philosophy came with a political one. Douglas saw [117]social
credit and democracy as incompatible. He advocated [118]ending the
secret ballot, making all votes public—and then [119]taxing citizens
differently depending on whom they voted for. He also called for the
abolition of political parties and considered majority rule a form of
despotism; instead, the work of governance [120]should be left to the
experts.
Why was Douglas so skeptical of the secret ballot and majority rule?
Because he viewed them as tools of a global Jewish conspiracy whose
tentacles infested every corner of society. He was a virulent
anti-Semite who consistently traced the rot in the financial system to
a single source: Jews. He cited the Protocols frequently as an accurate
blueprint for the actions of the “World Plotters,” whom he saw as at
war with Christian civilization.
“The Jew has no native culture and always aims at power without
responsibility,” [121]Douglas wrote in Social Crediter magazine in
1939. “He is the parasite upon, and corrupter of, every civilisation in
which he has attained power.” Douglas even, bewilderingly,
[122]considered Nazi Germany to be a creation and instrument of Jewish
power. (He occasionally argued that [123]Hitler was a secret
Rothschild.)
Douglas never had any economic training, and his ideas have generally
been dismissed by those who do. But they were a phenomenon on the
Canadian prairie. A charismatic Baptist radio preacher named
[124]William “Bible Bill” Aberhart became a convert to Douglas’s ideas
about social credit and began blasting Alberta’s airwaves with its
promises. He founded a new Social Credit Party and ran a set of
candidates in the 1935 provincial elections. To his—and
everyone’s—shock, Social Credit won 56 of the legislature’s 63 seats,
and Aberhart was suddenly Alberta’s premier.
Putting Douglas’s ideas into practice proved to be a challenge.
Aberhart’s government tried issuing a sort of social credit it called
“[125]prosperity certificates,” but that was a flop. The Social Credit
Party (Socreds for short) quickly transitioned into a mostly normal
conservative party—with an extra dose of Christianity from Bible Bill
and of anti-Semitism from Douglas. It became standard Socred rhetoric
to rail against the Money Power and World Finance and International
Bankers—with some members more explicit than others about their
targets.
These developments were of significant concern to the [126]Canadian
Jewish Congress, the country’s major advocacy group for Jews.
[127]Louis Rosenberg, the Congress’s research director, described
Douglas as someone who “mumbles mysteriously about the long discredited
Protocols of the Elders of Zion and spices his stew … with a little
anti-semitic paprika to taste.”
And meanwhile, in Saskatchewan, Joshua Haldeman was enjoying a quick
rise within the Social Credit Party. In 1945, he was elected head of
the provincial party; a year later, he was named chairman of its
national council, the party’s top position. That put him at the center
of public disputes over the anti-Semitism in its ranks.
One such case centered on a man named John Patrick Gillese, who edited
the party’s national newspaper, the Canadian Social Crediter. He was a
vigorous anti-Semite who regularly expressed those opinions in the
newspaper, over which he had complete control. He [128]complained in a
memo that the party spent too much time “continually explaining that we
are not anti-Semitic, that we are not fascist.” Gillese didn’t like to
be put on the defensive, he wrote.
The party’s top elected official, Alberta Premier [129]Ernest Manning,
expressed concern that Gillese’s anti-Semitism was hurting the party
and demanded that Haldeman oust him from the newspaper. Haldeman
rejected the idea, saying that he and his fellow Socreds leader Solon
Low agreed that “[130]Johnny Gillese should be retained as editor.” Low
then wrote Gillese a note complaining about Manning’s efforts: “Please
do not worry about the situation. Just go right ahead and continue
doing a good job and I’ll fight the battle to prevent our being
completely muzzled and rendered incompetent.”
The Socreds took another hit in 1946, when it came out that the party’s
Quebec branch was publishing excerpts of the Protocols. A Saskatchewan
newspaper, the Star-Phoenix, [131]editorialized against the scandal,
calling it “home-baked fascism” and calling the concept of social
credit “related directly to the authoritarian ideology of Adolf Hitler
and others of his ilk.”
Haldeman replied in a series of letters to the editor in which he
maintained that the Social Credit Party was not anti-Semitic—while
saying some rather anti-Semitic things, including the outrageous claim
that Hitler had been installed as German führer by “money … supplied by
international financiers, many, but not all of them, Jewish.” He
claimed that Jews created anti-Semitism to generate sympathy. And in
[132]multiple letters, Haldeman argued that whether the Protocols were
fake was beside the point—the ideas they contained were true, even if
they were a forgery. “The point is that the plan as outlined in these
protocols has been rapidly unfolding in the period of observation of
this generation,” he wrote. “This should be fair warning to all of us.”
Haldeman’s letters generated a [133]few angry responses from his fellow
citizens. The Canadian Jewish Congress monitored the situation closely.
“Haldeman was all about dog-whistle politics,” Janine Stingel, a
historian who wrote a book about [134]anti-Semitism in Canada’s Social
Credit Party, told me. “He wouldn’t say ‘Jew,’ but he’d say everything
short of it. He knew what he was saying, and his base knew what he was
saying.”
While active in the Social Credit party, Haldeman ran for the federal
Parliament twice and the Saskatchewan legislature once. He lost badly
each time. He began to see Communists behind every corner. (He was once
[135]shouted down at a gathering of Regina housewives for calling the
group “merely a front for the Communist organization.”) He found
himself unable to revive the fortunes of the Social Credit Party. In
1949, he [136]resigned his post. He was ready for a different move.
__________________________________________________________________
The Haldemans’ 1950 move to South Africa seemed to come out of nowhere.
Haldeman had become something of a provincial celebrity for all his
[137]constant buzzing from town to town by plane for political
appearances. (And, oddly, for [138]his reddish beard—unusual in that
clean-shaven era and mentioned in nearly every newspaper story about
him.)
[139]In her memoir, Haldeman’s daughter Maye Musk—Elon’s mother, who
was 2 years old at the time of the move—ascribes the decision to her
parents having “met missionaries who had been to South Africa, who had
told them how beautiful it was.” In a [140]biography of Maye’s brother
Scott (who himself became a prominent chiropractor), Haldeman’s
decision was prompted by “speaking with an Anglican Minister from South
Africa at an [141]International Trade Fair in Toronto.”
In fact, that conversation seems to have been so meaningful to Haldeman
that he refers to it prominently in The International Conspiracy to
Establish a World Dictatorship and the Menace to South Africa. The
book’s opening epigraph is attributed to “the prophetic and emphatic
statement of an Anglican Minister in Toronto, Canada, 1949” who “had
lived many years in South Africa”:
SOUTH AFRICA WILL BECOME THE LEADER OF WHITE CIVILIZATION IN THE WORLD.
In Isaacson’s biography of Musk, he writes that South Africa in 1950
“was still ruled by a white apartheid regime.” But in reality,
apartheid was only then being established.
The two most foundational apartheid laws—one forcing all South Africans
[142]to register their race with the government and [143]the Group
Areas Act, which segregated housing in urban areas—weren’t enacted
until July 1950, less than a month before Haldeman announced his move
there. In other words, Haldeman was choosing to move into a system of
regimented racial subjugation just being born.
When Haldeman gave an interview to Die Transvaler, he was speaking to
perhaps the [144]most extremist publication in the country, one that
held a special animus for Jews, and whose founding editor, Hendrik
Verwoerd, was known as the [145]architect of apartheid. The paper
regularly railed against “[146]British-Jewish imperialism” and blamed
election losses on “[147]the money of organized Jewry.”
When a rival newspaper in 1941 accused Die Transvaler and Verwoerd of
pushing Nazi propaganda and running falsified news stories, Verwoerd
sued its editor for libel—[148]and lost, with [149]the judge ruling
that “he did support Nazi propaganda, he did make his paper a tool of
the Nazis in South Africa, and he knew it.”
The Die Transvaler article caught the attention of Jews in South Africa
who worried about Haldeman’s splashy arrival, even prompting the
secretary-general of the South African Jewish Board of Deputies to
write to a counterpart in Montreal: “A few weeks ago a paper … carried
a story about the arrival of a new immigrant who had been associated
with the Social Credit Movement in your country. Knowing that that
Movement has from time to time rather favoured anti-Jewish policies, I
thought I should enquire from you whether you have any information on
this person.”
After a few years in South Africa, Haldeman popped up in the news again
for his founding (with his wife, Winnifred) of the Pretoria Pistol
Club, which promoted gun ownership and training for housewives. But he
does not appear to have been particularly active in far-right political
groups in South Africa, at least not as a prominent leader. [150]Milton
Shain, a prominent historian of the South African Jewish community and
the author of [151]Fascists, Fabricators and Fantasists: Antisemitism
in South Africa From 1948 to the Present, said he doesn’t remember
coming across Haldeman’s name in his decades of research into
anti-Semitic groups of the period. But he said the coded anti-Semitic
language in Haldeman’s interview in Die Transvaler would have easily
stood out to Jews who would have “noted Haldeman’s concern about
‘international financial interests’—a discourse common among the white
far-right in South Africa.”
A few months after settling down in Pretoria, Haldeman wrote an essay
for his old hometown paper, the Regina Leader-Post, on his new life
there. He described the lives of Black South Africans under apartheid
as happy, contented, and leisurely.
“We have two native (Negro) garden boys in the summer and one in the
winter and a native girl,” Haldeman wrote. “We give them food and a lot
of their clothing and pay them from $10 to $15 [Canadian] a month.” For
that sum, Haldeman declared that “Black labor in South Africa industry
is found to be the most expensive labor in the world.” (The average
income in Canada in 1950 was about [152]$225 a month.) He went on to
say that “it is impossible to make a native work hard. It takes three
natives to do the work of one white man and the white people here work
about half as hard as Canadians.” With this state of affairs, Haldeman
wrote, Black South Africans were “happy and contented … unless stirred
up and stirring them up is almost an impossible job.”
Haldeman also encouraged Canadians to follow his lead: “This country
seems to have unlimited opportunities for development. The Rhodesias
and South Africa could easily stand 50 million white people. We flew
over hundreds of miles in which we could scarcely see even a native
hut.”
__________________________________________________________________
Over the years, Haldeman’s conspiratorial beliefs seemed only to
deepen. On March 21, 1960, thousands of Black South Africans gathered
at a police station in the township of Sharpeville to protest the
latest cruelty of apartheid. Hendrik Verwoerd, the former Die
Transvaler editor, was now prime minister and had tightened a pass
system that sharply limited the movements of Black residents. The
protesters were there without their passbooks, offering themselves up
for arrest en masse. After attempts to clear the unarmed crowd failed,
police opened fire. In all, [153]69 protesters were killed and roughly
another 180 wounded. Ten of the dead were children. A police commander
on the scene later [154]justified the shooting by saying that “the
native mentality does not allow them to gather for a peaceful
demonstration. For them to gather means violence.”
The world recoiled at the Sharpeville massacre. Days later, the United
Nations passed [155]Resolution 134, the body’s first official
condemnation of apartheid and the beginning of decades of diplomatic
isolation.
Joshua Haldeman, meanwhile, decided to head for the typewriter. A few
weeks later, in May 1960, he self-published The International
Conspiracy to Establish a World Dictatorship and the Menace to South
Africa, a 42-page response to Sharpeville. In it, Haldeman predicted
that there would soon be “an outside invasion by hordes of Coloured
people.” He blamed the international media for paying too much
attention to the African National Congress and other anti-apartheid
groups. And he repeatedly returned to the “International Conspiracy”
pulling the strings behind it all, sometimes shorthanded as “the
Conspiracy” or “the Internationalists,” whom he complained controlled
the press and the medical profession.
Like many of his old Social Credit colleagues, Haldeman is careful to
talk about “International Finance” without speaking openly about Jews.
By my count, he slips only twice in the book: once referring to
communism as a “Jewish moral philosophy for the more equitable
distribution of scarcity” and once caustically labeling the London
School of Economics (a frequent target) “the Zion of Economists.” But
the names to whom he attributes this global control ring throughout:
[156]Jacob Henry Schiff, [157]Paul Warburg, [158]Harold Laski,
[159]Herbert Lehman, [160]Ernest Cassel, [161]Bernard Baruch,
[162]Felix Frankfurter, [163]Samuel Bronfman, and above them all,
[164]Mayer Rothschild, whose family he blamed for the French
Revolution, the American Civil War, the rise of Mussolini, and an
untold number of assassinations.
Like many anti-Semites, Haldeman saw natural allies in two seemingly
opposing forces: communism and capitalist financiers. “Moscow and Wall
Street always work hand in hand at the conspiracy to form a World
Government under their control,” he writes in his book.
In Haldeman’s telling, the International Conspiracy was even behind the
anti-apartheid forces both within and outside South Africa. He said
they had sparked the Sharpeville “riot” on purpose to make money on the
South African stock-market drop that came after it. Haldeman
consistently argues that Black South Africans are happy with their
position under apartheid, even grateful for “the protection of the
White people,” and that international meddlers are to blame for riling
up opposition. “They know that the White man has done so much for
them,” he wrote.
Haldeman closes the book with recommended reading, and the scale of his
radicalism can also be judged by what he suggests. He praises the
magazine of the [165]League of Empire Loyalists, a British group led by
the anti-Semite [166]A. K. Chesterton, a former leader of the
[167]British Union of Fascists. The league later evolved into the
fascist party [168]National Front.
He also recommends that readers subscribe to the [169]South African
Observer, a [170]Jew-hating [171]monthly whose editor S. E. D. Brown
held Haldemanesque views (South Africa had been “[172]marked out … as
an enemy because it is a bastion of white conservatism; because it
believes in national sovereignty and western Christian civilization”).
Shain said he considers Brown the “high priest” of anti-Jewish
fantasists of the apartheid years.
And Haldeman pushes The New Times, the publication of the
[173]Australian League of Rights, whose [174]pro-social-credit editor
published books such as The International Jew, an annotated version of
the Protocols, “[175]168 pages of anti-Jewish venom.” In the United
States, Haldeman recommends [176]The American Mercury, the
[177]anti-Semitic magazine that [178]employed [179]George Lincoln
Rockwell, founder of the American Nazi Party.
At some point after The International Conspiracy to Establish a World
Dictatorship and the Menace to South Africa, Haldeman self-published
one more book: a sequel of sorts, titled The International Conspiracy
in Health. In it, he rails against health-insurance mandates, vaccines
(which “the promoters of World Government have always been behind”),
and fluoride in the water (part of the “brain-washing programme of the
Conspiracy”). By then, he was getting near retirement age. In 1974,
while practicing landings in his plane, Haldeman didn’t see a wire
strung between two poles. It caught his plane’s wheels, which caused it
to flip, and Haldeman was killed. He was 71; his grandson Elon Musk was
2.
[180]What attention Joshua Haldeman has gotten in recent years has
mostly been tied to what Musk called his “real adventures,” the ones
that “involve risk.” He flew his little plane all across Africa and the
world; he went on a dozen journeys to the Kalahari Desert to find a
“[181]lost city” that appears to have been dreamed up by a Canadian
[182]con man.
But his legacy involves a lot more than adventuring. Joshua Haldeman
had a weakness for men with fuzzy credentials and big-picture plans to
turn society upside down. He believed in shadowy forces that were out
to destroy civilization and that manipulated the masses into doing
their bidding. He believed that a good chiropractor could cure any
disease, but vaccines were a front for totalitarianism. And he believed
democracy was for the few, not the many.
About the Author
[183]Joshua Benton
[184]Joshua Benton is a senior writer at Nieman Lab, which he founded
and led for 12 years.
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Categoria: SysAdmin/DevOps
Elon Musk’s Anti-Semitic, Apartheid-Loving Grandfather