US President Donald Trump. Picture: Andrew Caballero-Reynolds / AFP Apartheid divided South Africans into beneficiaries, victims and bystanders. Today, Trumpism divides the world in the same way – into those who gain from supremacy, those crushed by it and those who pretend neutrality absolves them.
Supporters of apartheid saw no fault in it because they benefited or believed it natural, often invoking scripture to justify oppression. Opponents, including its victims, resisted because the system dehumanised them. Some whites, though not directly harmed, joined the struggle out of conscience, refusing to stand idle.
Many of those continue today to advocate for real change that addresses apartheid’s imbalances. Apartheid was not an isolated invention. It was a by-product of Nazism.
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The National Party’s rise in 1948 was inspired by Hitler’s racial hierarchy, applying his policies to black South Africans as Jews had been targeted in Europe. Both systems thrived on supremacy, oppression and authorised brutality, differing only in intensity. The architects of apartheid borrowed directly from fascism’s playbook, proving that authoritarianism is never confined to one geography– it is a virus that mutates and spreads.
Trumpism now echoes that lineage. His return to power has emboldened fascists worldwide, from neo-Nazis in Europe to right-wing secessionists in South Africa dreaming of a Boerestaat, or an independent Western Cape. Social commentator Donovan E Williams recently told SABC’s Sakina Kamwendo that Trump has built the largest right-wing movement in the world.
He pushes such groups to the forefront, hoping even for a right-wing party in South Africa. In Trump’s America, fascist tendencies are unmistakable.
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