Elon Musk’s Anti-Semitic, Apartheid-Loving Grandfather

  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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182. https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/82182/retrobituaries-great-farini-canadas-most-fascinating-man
183. https://www.theatlantic.com/author/joshua-benton/
184. https://www.theatlantic.com/author/joshua-benton/

  Hidden links:
186. https://www.theatlantic.com/
187. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/
188. https://www.theatlantic.com/
189. https://www.theatlantic.com/