It’s hard to explain the feeling UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer gives me, but here goes.
For me, Keir Starmer is less a politician and more a mid-Ryanair-flight scratch card. A laminated ‘‘Live, Laugh, Love’’ quote blu-tacked to the wall of a Jobcentre. A “conscious” tech company’s big picture mission statement. Or a softly whispered ‘‘you got this’’, delivered with a slow, pitying pat on the back.
If you’re not following: he’s like something supposed to give you a bit of hope, but that leaves you feeling even more bleak and directionless than before. That’s Starmer. A semi-deflated, grey balloon at a resignation party and the UK’s very own numero uno.
Too harsh? I think too kind. Scratch cards, pitying pats on the back, and laminated quotes in Comic Sans are harmless, cringeworthy artefacts of modern life. Keir Starmer’s recent policy swings are harmful and so far, the harm has been aimed at the most vulnerable.
Just last week, Starmer reached a new low, declaring that the UK has become “an island of strangers.” A line so soaked in dog-whistle nationalism it could’ve been ghostwritten by The Sun and premiered on GB News. Which, in a sense, it was.
GB News was the only broadcaster granted access to the press conference where Starmer unveiled his new immigration white paper. Not the BBC. Not ITV. Not even Sky News. Just GB News, a channel where facts go to be softly strangled by bigoted opinions dressed in Union Jack onesies. Fittingly, the white paper itself reportedly reads like Reform UK fanfiction, just with cleaner formatting and no typos.
In its new Labour font, the paper takes a sledgehammer to legal migration: longer waits for settlement, stricter visa rules, reduced access to family reunification, and tougher language requirements. Starmer frames it as fairness—a way to reduce exploitation, boost British wages, and encourage integration—but in reality, it’s theatre. A crackdown crafted for clickbait headlines, not human lives. And the people who bear the consequences—migrants, workers, families trying to build a life—are left in greater precarity than ever.
It’s a clumsy attempt to peel off Reform UK voters by mimicking their language and posture. The problem is, the act doesn’t land. It’s like watching someone attempt to speak fluent populism after skim-reading a scribbled summary of Nigel Farage’s greatest hits off the wall of a pub toilet. The sentiment is borrowed, the delivery is lifeless, and the result is a favourability score continuing to nosedive across almost all party lines: too hardline for the left, too weak for the right, and too obviously rehearsed for anyone to respect.
But the failure of this performance isn’t the real danger, it’s what it enables. When the language of the far right becomes the language of power, hate is legitimised, and cruelty gets policy teeth. It doesn’t win over voters. It shifts the centre of gravity, with the cost most felt by those already living at the edge of safety and recognition.
Depressingly, Starmer’s record makes this shift feel less like a miscalculation and more like a pattern.
On trans rights, he also folded. He once supported gender self-identification but now he backs a legal definition designed to exclude trans women from recognition and protection. It’s not clarity, it’s cowardice, and a deliberate decision to appease a hostile conservative press obsessed with culture war.
A similar evasiveness defines Starmer’s stance on Gaza. Despite the murmurings of restraint and carefully worded appeals for calm, Labour has overseen an increase in UK arms sales to Israel—a quiet but bloodsoaked complicity that renders its appeals for de-escalation, or talk of trade pauses, entirely meaningless.
And even more revealing of Starmer’s character is the bizarre way he speaks about Israel: consistently gendered, imbued with vulnerability, he talks of “her right to feel safe, her need to defend herself.” In contrast, trans women, Palestinians, and asylum seekers, receive no such empathy. A nuclear-armed, genocidal state is granted personhood; real people are denied it, along with their safety, their dignity, and their lives.
For the record, I was never under the illusion that Starmer would return Labour to the Left. The man’s not exactly a Trojan horse for socialism, he’s a former cop in a suit. But there was, perhaps naively, a hope that he wouldn’t bend so completely to the altar of the right-wing press. That he might follow through on his own meagre promise of “evidence-led” policy making. That he’d show a shred of moral backbone or at the very least, behave like someone who understands what’s at stake.
Instead, he thinks the Daily Mail might warm to him if he clicks his heels and whispers “secure borders” three times. And to top it off, he’s not even good at it. He’s doing it with the conviction of a man so unsure of his own message, he could be replaced mid-sentence by a pop-up ad for tax-relief on pensions and no one would notice.
But all jokes aside: the result is politics that are not only empty and embarrassing, but dangerous and inhumane.
We are living through a turning point in global history – a moment of unbearable horror, but also of enormous possibility.
Right now, Gaza is being starved, bombed, and buried alive. Over 54,000 people have been killed. Israel calls this new phase of atrocity Operation Gideon’s Chariots. That name says it all. A chariot isn’t just a weapon – it’s a symbol of empire. It’s what Pharaohs rode into battle. It’s what Gideon rode in the Bible – a divine machine of conquest. This isn’t just militarism. It’s mythology. It’s theology turned into airstrikes. A fantasy of domination dressed up as defense.
Israel’s goal: to crush the Palestinian resistance against the genocide, to cut Hamas off from a prisoners deal, to seize the land. They have already started to expand the buffer zones – areas they won’t return. They are trying to break gaza into isolated pieces. Palestinians are once again pushed to the South, their movement is restricted, Aid is conditional and hunger is the settlers most powerful weapon. They are encouraging what the settlers are calling “voluntary emigration”. We all know it is ethnic cleansing. This is Israel’s blueprint: 77 years of ongoing Nakba.
And like every empire before it, Israel believes it can crush a people’s will — to live, to fight, to dream. But Gaza has not been defeated nor can it ever be defeated.
That is the contradiction at the heart of this moment. After nineteen months of total war, Israel has not disarmed Hamas. It hasn’t broken the resistance. it has lost in ront of the eyes of the whole world. It hasn’t even secured its own soldiers.
If they invade Gaza again, they’ll meet what they met in Rafah, Shuja’iyya, Khan Younis, Beit Hanoun: organized, armed, living resistance.
The misbelief that through absolute destruction and death, resistance will end. But every bomb creates more resistance.
And the cracks are spreading far beyond Gaza.
The Arab regimes that normalized with Israel – the same ones Trump paraded around under the so-called Abraham Accords – are exposed. Their people are in revolt. Protests in Jordan, Egypt, Morocco, Bahrain – not just against Israel, but against the regimes that collaborate with it. And let us not forget Yemen’s friendship and resistance next to Gaza.
Even Netanyahu’s strongest allies are showing strain. The Trump administration is back – louder, crueler, and openly aligned with Israeli apartheid. This is the man who moved the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, normalized ethnic cleansing, deports Palstinian Students and now dreams of turning Gaza into a “freedom zone” – a casino economy built on genocide – while floating plans to deport Palestinians to Libya.
European leaders hedge. They talk peace while signing weapons contracts. We demand liberation while organizing against militarization and fascism. And even the western media, after decades of painting Palestinians as terrorists, is slowly but finally showing the truth: massacres, famine, ethnic cleansing, genocide.
But don’t be fooled. This didn’t come from journalistic integrity. It came from the streets of this world. From the student occupations. From striking dock workers. From migrant protests. From you. From us. From below.
Because Gaza bleeds, Israel imposes a hunger blockade. Starvation is being used as a weapon. Children are dying not just from bombs — but from thirst, from a lack of insulin, from bread that never arrives. This is not a natural disaster. It is a calculated system of extermination. And the world watches as Israel tries to find its very own final solution.
And what do we get from our governments? In Germany, we get bans on protest and special treatments by cops, we get riot police in university halls, we get defamation. You know of all this that is happening.
But let me be clear: We don’t need their permission. We don’t need different slogans. We need new networks. New alliances. New strategies.
We need mass-based, revolutionary, anti-imperialist organizing — not hashtags, not managed grief. But real internationalism from below:
From workers who can shut down weapons shipments.
From students who can occupy the institutions of war.
From tenants, migrants, and the unemployed who can’t be co-opted or bought off.
Because this system that starves Gaza, it can starve all of us. If it can bomb Rafah, it can bomb Khartoum. If it can lie about Palestine, it can lie about all of us.
We need more than protests. We need coordination:
Demonstrate in a connectable way.
Blockade the weapons factories.
Strike the supply chains.
Occupy the offices of war profiteers.
Refuse to let the state define what solidarity means.
Our solidarity must be loud, determined and unapologetic.
And let me say something personal here. For me, Palestine was never just a political issue. It was the place where I first saw and understood empire – and resistance.
Let Palestine not be a victim. Palestine is a teacher. A school of revolution. Gaza is showing the world that even when starved, people fight. Even when buried, they speak. Even the many who are dying – they will live. Through Gaza. Through the child pulling rubble off a sibling. Through the poem smuggled out in the margins of a notebook. Through the fighter who won’t surrender. Through the chant echoing from the streets to campus walls to refugee camps. Gaza is not only where they fall. It is where they rise. Not just in memory – but in our movement. So let us at least bring them honour and glory.
The future will ask us: Where were you when Gaza was burning? Let our answer not be silence. Not a thought. Not a tweet. Not a hashtag.
Let it be a movement.
Free Palestine – from the river to the sea – not in theory, not in words, but in struggle.
Thank you.
German Border Closures for LGBTIQ+ Refugees: A Death Sentence and the End of Salvation
Statement by the Rainbow Afghanistan Organisation on the government decision to stop admission of refugees from Afghanistan
The Rainbow Afghanistan Organisation condemns the governing coalition’s decision to end the humanitarian admission programme, especially the United Nations Resettlement programme which supports people in acute danger. This decision not only invites a humanitarian catastrophe, but also imposes a collective death sentence on thousands of members of the LGBTIQ+ community.
On April 9, 2025, the CDU/CSU and SPD adopted the closure of German borders for many refugees as part of their new coalition agreement. This policy constitutes a humanitarian tragedy in particular for those who are fleeing states which criminalise gender identity and sexual orientation with punishment by death, torture, stoning or long prison sentences.
Thousands of LGBTIQ+ individuals are at present forced to travel via life-threateningly dangerous and illegal routes, not because they have commit a crime, but in order to save themselves. They are threatened by human traffickers, rape, sexual violence, homelessness, illness, and death—through mountain passes and deserts, in overcrowded, sinking boats on the sea, through dark forests and unsafe camps. With no safe and legal means of applying for asylum, these individuals are forced to choose between certain death and risking death.
With this deciscion, the Germna government sends these people the message, ‘’Either you will die, or be subjected to this danger—if you survive, maybe we will listen’’.
The Bundesaufnahmeprogramm f[r Afghanistan [National Admission Programme for Afghanistan] (BAP), realised in 2023, had already promised rescue to to hundreds of LGBTIQ+ Afghanistanis by admission to germany under the previous coalition. This programme was one of the few hopes for those hundreds, still living under threat of extreme danger in Afghanistan. This hope has now been shattered. People in danger who are in need of international protection now more than ever have been abandoned.
We ask the German government: Do you know who the victims of this policy will be? Do you understand that this policy means you have capitulated to the Taliban, to Iran, and to other repressive regimes?
Your decisions are not only a threat to the lives of thousands but also seriously call into question the worldwide credibility of Germany as defender of human rights.
The Rainbow Afghanistan Organisation warns that silence and apathy toward this circumstance constitute partaking in a humanitarian catastrophy. We demand an immediate review of this policy, the reopening of legal pathways to safety and effective protection for endangered LGBTIQ+ refugees and migrants,
Rainbow Afghanistan Organisation
Berlin, April 10th, 2025
For more information and to keep up with Rainbow Afghanistan Organisation’s activities, you can follow them on instagram here.
This statement was originally written in German and translated to English by Shav McKay.
Let’s Discuss the Fascist Elephant in the Room
Report and reaction to the Nakba Day commemoration being met with extreme brutality from the German police, followed by an interview with German lawyer.
On the day commemorating the 77th anniversary of the start of the Nakba, Israel carried out one of the worst attacks in what has been a relentless genocide. For 24-36 hours, it razed schools, hospitals, and what little life remains in Gaza. Preliminary figures speak of 300 people wounded or killed, plus those still lying under the rubble. And just a few hours later, it began its ground invasion with the aim to occupy the entire Gaza Strip and eliminate or expel the remaining Palestinians. However, the German news is not reporting this suffocating assault.
We began the week with news of the trip by the president of the genocidal state, Herzog, to the German capital. There, he was received by the newly elected chancellor Merz of the CDU, and together they discussed future holidays on a wonderful beach in Tel Aviv, a city that a few weeks ago became twinned with Berlin. German media also reported on the state visit to Israel by the president of the German republic, Steinmeier of the SPD. There, the German president had a pleasant meeting with the proscribed war criminal Netanyahu. With these meetings, the new German government has made its international policy clear: total alignment with the fascist and genocidal government of the colonialist state of Israel.
This position was all the more evident at Thursday’s rally commemorating the Nakba in Berlin. This year, pro-Palestinian activists in the city—who have endured institutional and police violence for years, and which has been exacerbated in the last 19 months—issued an international call for solidarity. Groups from different countries responded to the invitation and came to the German capital. The intention to hold a remembrance march was quickly thwarted.
For months now, the police and the Berlin government have unconstitutionally banned marches, meaning that only static rallies can be held, restricting movement and confining oppositional voices. They’ve also pulled various ‘bans’ out of their sleeves, like not speaking any language other than German or English, which excludes languages important to the attendees, like Arabic, Yiddish, and Hebrew. They’ve criminalised certain slogans like ‘from the river to the sea’ or ‘Zionists are fascists’ or ‘children-murder Israel,’ and they’ve “banned” drums and music.
For over a year now, anti-genocide rallies, marches, and events have been surrounded and attacked by violent Berlin police who are out of control and clearly believe they are above the law. And to a large extent, they are.
Photo by Xénia Gomes Adães
This brings us to 15 May 2025. When the organisations of the Nakba demonstrations were notified that they would, yet again not be allowed to march, a group of lawyers promptly tried to defend the freedom of assembly and expression that anyone who considers themselves to live in a real democracy should have. They presented an appeal with the Berlin city administrative court and surprisingly the judges ruled in their favour. The assembly authority, part of the police force, quickly appealed to the higher court instance, where they ruled in favour of the assembly authority and banned the participants from marching just 30 minutes before the demonstration was supposed to begin. The police clearly counted on the judiciary’s support and had already set up cordons around the square and stationed trucks and commandos in all the adjacent streets. Even those of us who have attended anti-genocide demonstrations over the past 19 months were surprised by the incredibly disproportionate presence of riot police, who came prepared with pepper spray, non-regulation gloves, dogs, and water trucks, in addition to their batons and service pistols.
The police obviously had orders to make mass arrests and escalate until the protest became unbearable. At the beginning of the rally, they checked banners and confiscated flag poles so that they could not be used as weapons. During the more than four hours that the rally lasted, the police made frequent brutal incursions into the crowd and took people away in painful manoeuvres designed, among other things, to frighten the rest. After hours of arrests and indiscriminate attacks, the police surrounded the demonstrators. Further, while a Jewish activist from the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network (IJAN), who had come from Great Britain to show their support, spoke of the historic struggle of the Jewish people against injustice and the absolute need for solidarity with the Palestinian people, dozens of police officers climbed onto and/or surrounded the truck where the speeches were being made and arrested some of those present. From then on, it was even more of a bloodbath; so much so that several police officers suffered bruises and injuries to their hands.
Seeing the videos and the brutality with which they beat defenceless demonstrators, who after 19 months of abuse have still remained peaceful, as the videos clearly show, one wonders, with those iron-reinforced gloves, how hard they are hitting them to injure their hands?
Needless to say, over 30 protesters were injured, including some with broken noses, head lacerations, and head traumas, and four were seriously injured while in police custody. Not only that, but the paramedics who came to assist some of the injured people were in many cases denied access to their patients, and in a few occasions the paramedics themselves were also victims of police brutality.
It is estimated that the number of detainees is about 88, in some of the most brutal arrests we have seen so far. Some of whom spent 24-48 hours in detention with literally just hard bread and water.
In true Israeli army style, the police attacked, arrested, and searched independent journalists who were there covering the event, preventing them from doing their job while defending Zionist journalists, including a couple who collaborate with openly Nazi media outlets.
And what does the German press have to say about this? With a few honourable exceptions, such as junge Welt, the German press has done the same as it does with the genocide. It has repeated word for word the information given by the police, without of course checking its veracity, and has flipped the narrative, making the injured police officers the victims of the mob. Not a word about the fact that these injuries were self-inflicted while they were beating up the demonstrators.
This narrative is once again used again by politicians, who claim that the police have defended the German rule of law from dangerous imported antisemitism. They take another step down this racist, Nazi-style path, announcing new measures against these dangerous foreigners and trying to ban all solidarity with Palestine.
Meanwhile, many Germans—misled by state-funded propaganda and confused by the narratives promoted in their media— have found convenient justification to stay off the streets in solidarity with Palestine, even after 19 months of genocide, even though they are privately beginning to think that Israel is going too far.
These, and all the measures announced so far by the new German government, suggest that fascism, at least for the migrant part of society, has already arrived. Freedom of expression, assembly, and the press are clearly being curtailed. And following the rules of all good authoritarians, as Orwell so aptly put it, everything is being sold as actions taken to defend Germany from antisemitism and to guarantee freedom of assembly and expression.
Without immediate and forceful reaction from the German population these measures will soon be applied to other inconvenient groups, from trade unions to climate activists, appropriating even more of the meagre space they have left to dissent.
All this, in addition to the German government’s aspirations to have the largest army in Europe, should make even a nascent historian’s hair stand on end.
It is time to act. Within Germany, join groups and do not stop speaking out, whether on the street, at work, or in your private life.
Outside Germany, boycott. Don’t come. If you are a tourist, make it clear to airlines, hotels, etc. why you are not coming. If the state has invited you to work or study, explain in your letter of resignation that it is all of us, united, who will stop fascism.
Today more than ever, ¡No pasarán!, and with coordination, ¡Berlin será la tumba del fascismo!.
Interview with lawyer Benjamin Düsberg
After the police attacks on the Nakba demonstration, Roser spoke to Benjamin Düsberg, who, among other things, is the lawyer for some of the Berlin 4.
Before the march for the 77th anniversary of the ongoing Nakba, I think one of the solidarity lawyers went to the first court instance to fight for the right to march, which was at first allowed. And then what happened after?
Exactly. For several months now, it’s generally forbidden for pro-Palestinian demonstrations to march at all, which is a scandal in itself. And surprisingly, for the Nakba demo, the administration court overturned the decision of the Berlin police to forbid marching, so it seemed that the Nakba demo was going to be allowed to march. Then, the police complained about this decision, and the higher administrative court overruled the administration court and reinstalled the ban.
But can the police forbid the march? Do they have the power to do that, or is it a court’s decision?
According to the Berlin law which regulates the assemblies, the police, under specific circumstances, may have the power to forbid marching. But, of course, this needs a solid legal justification. This means they must establish why the ban is necessary to maintain public security. But in fact, there’s no valid legal justification for such a ban. There is no empirical proof that a demonstration causes fewer problems because it’s not allowed to march. The opposite is true: the potential for escalation is much higher if the assembly is not allowed to march. Apart from that empirical question, the freedom to march is at the core of the fundamental right of freedom of assembly.
The Berlin police argued that the pro-Palestinian demonstrations, in general, are inclined to break laws and to prevent this, they say it’s necessary to forbid marching. The administration court, which is there to check such decisions of the police, didn’t follow this argument but was then overruled by the higher administration court.
And you were there, no? Do you know how many people got arrested?
According to the numbers from the organizers of the demo, there were about 88 people arrested.
And could you speak to some of them? Could you help them?
Yes, to some of them I had contact, but of course there were too many arrests to have contact with everyone. Two protestors were kept in preventive detention in the police prison, one of them for more than 50 hours. The argumentation was to prevent their participation in other pro-Palestinian demonstrations, which allegedly would instigate them to commit demonstration related crimes.
What were they accused of?
One of those persons was accused of resisting and assaulting police officers.
You’ve been in a few, I guess, pro-Palestinian marches. Did you see an escalation in police violence in this one?
I’m not sure if it was an escalation because the repression against pro-Palestinian demonstrations is generally very intense. But the pictures and videos I saw from this demonstration are really awful. Yes, I have seen a lot, but I was still astonished by this time.
The Nakba demo seems to have been a record day in the number of arrests, but according to some newspapers, we have just about 7000 processes in Berlin. Considering the demos have been largely, if not almost entirely pacifist, what charges are people facing?
At demonstrations, it almost always begins with so-called ‘thought crimes,’ e.g., slogans deemed illegal by the police, such as ‘from the river to the sea,’ among others. Arrests by the police usually happen without warning, so even minor defensive movements by those arrested or bystanders often lead to accusations of resistance or assault, which in turn lead to further violent arrests. University occupations involve charges such as trespassing. In some cases, even linking arms during such occupations is considered resistance to law enforcement officers.
The racial fantasies of white victimhood
Afrikaner refugees are the latest addition to Trump’s tools of white supremacy
A few days ago, Grok started losing it. “HBO’s streaming service has changed names twice since 2020,” Elon Musk’s AI pet responded to an X (Twitter) user inquiry about the latest renaming. But it soon veered into a different topic: “Regardind ‘white genocide’ in South Africa,” Grok mused, the “truth is complex and sources can be biased.”
This pattern was followed in many other posts, as the AI bot introduced the matter of “white genocide” into answers to all sorts of unrelated issues. xAI blamed this behavior on an “unathorised modification.” Authorized or not, Grok’s short-lived crusade to both-side a conspiracy theory about the state of white South Africans fits larger X trends. Musk, himself a born-and-bred white South African, has been using his account to repeatedly claim that his peers who are still in the country are subject to racist discrimination, biased legislation, and genocidal violence from their Black co-nationals and politicians.
What was new when Grok went rogue was that claims of white genocide were no longer just the subject of online rants but official US policy. Afrikaners, the descendants of Dutch settlers in South Africa, are now able to apply for refugee admission to the United States if they can “articulate a past experience of persecution or fear of future persecution.” The first group of such refugees entered the US on May 12.
That white South Africans are on the brink of genocide, or even any sort of systematic oppression, is a tenuous claim, and easily refuted. But the truth has never stopped either X users nor the US administration. The former, a group whose racism has become more and more open since Elon Musk’s takeover, flooded the platform with pictures of Afrikaner families waving American flags. The purpose is to show that this is what “real refugees” look like, in contrast with supposed military-aged young men and economic migrants.
Online racists, however, now speak with the voice of the American state––or maybe it is the other way around. President Donald Trump himself is convinced that post-apartheid South Africa is hell for Afrikaners, a nightmare world in which Black sadists have the power to torture honest white citizens. According to tell-all books from those close to him, a booming genre in the last few years, his preoccupations with the matter go back to the 1990s, when he reacted to a prediction about a non-white majority US with “This isn’t going to become South Africa.” The idea of accepting Afrikaner refugees was already floated by Trump in 2019.
The US far right’s fascination with white colonists in Africa goes back even further than that. More than South Africa, its focus has been the Rhodesian war, in which Black forces defeated a white nationalist holdout government to establish Zimbabwe. This colonial refusal to submit to majority rule is now a romanticized story of resistance for the online and offline far-right in the US, making its appearance in places from “Make Zimbabwe Rhodesia Again” caps to mass shooters sporting Rhodesian flags. The connection is not just symbolic: historian Kyle Burke has traced how US mercenaries who fought on behalf of the Rhodesian regime came back to their country and became founding figures of the contemporary far-right.
For these mercenaries, Burke notes, “the dissolution of Rhodesia after 1978 foretold a frightening future that might befall the United States,” a future planned by “communists, liberals, African Americans, Jews, and foreigners.” For Trump, the dissolution of the apartheid order in South Africa similarly prefigured a world in which white Americans become victims. In the last few months, this specter of white victimhood converged with Trump’s second-term “war on woke” and with the United States’ legitimation of Israel’s war on Gaza to lead to concrete state action.
South Africa was one of the explicit targets of the Trump administration’s concerted effort to cut all foreign aid offered by the United States. In this case, the point was not simply to reduce useless, “woke” spending, but to punish and discipline a state involved in “egregious actions.” These included not only South Africa’s “shocking disregard of its citizens’ rights,” but also its “aggressive positions towards the United States and its allies, including accusing Israel, not Hamas, of genocide.”
Following a history of mutual support between Israel and apartheid South Africa, the post-apartheid state is now being punished for daring to take Israel to the International Court of Justice. Antisemitism and the bolstering of post-colonial racial hierarchies become imbricated, as Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau went even further and compared anti-Afrikaner discrimination with the story of his father, who “was born in Europe and had to leave his country when Hitler came in.” But while antisemitism is invoked to discipline and deport anti-genocide activists in the US, the antisemitic online rants of one of the Afrikaner refugees have had no effect on his admission to the country.
The connection between domestic politics, geopolitics, and diplomacy go even further than that. The White House’s enumeration of egregious actions that it accuses the South African Government of includes implementing “policies designed to dismantle equal opportunity in employment, education, and business.” This is a direct externalization of Trump’s anti-DEI policies and language, one of the principal directions of the new administration. The aggressive gutting of diversity initiatives in US employment and education were justified precisely through the claims that these policies privilege racial minorities in an unfair, even racist manner.
The paranoid assumption underpinning these accusations is that there is a widespread bias against whites in the US and beyond. Anti-DEI measures are meant to correct the ignored plight of white Americans, who cannot get by anymore, not because of capitalism, but because all jobs are offered to unqualified people of color. When addressing the “white genocide” in South Africa, Trump employs the same argument. If it were non-white victims, the media would “talk about it. That would be the only story they talk about.” But because the genocide targets white farmers, “it’s a genocide that’s taking place that you people don’t want to write about.”
The land expropriation bill that US commentators keep pointing to as proof of white discrimination is neither an arbitrary dictatorial measure nor a definitive solution to the lingering racist structures of post-apartheid South Africa. But this matters little. The white victimhood fantasy fulfills several functions, none of which depend on accuracy and truth. It presents colonial and racial hierarchies as natural and merit-based. It transforms any struggle against these hierarchies into a personal attack against white people. And it paints a picture of systemic repression that morally justifies actions supporting white supremacy as acts of resistance.
This worldview is a strong personal commitment for white men in power. Under journalist pressure about the speed and unfairness of accepting Afrikaner refugees into the US, a Department of State spokesperson repeatedly deferred to what the President “has said,” “has identified,” “has been clear on,” to what the President considers “a priority.” No wonder that, in March, South Africa’s ambassador to the US called out Trump’s use of white victimhood in service of supremacism and was promptly expelled. The US President’s personal directive to admit Afrikaner refugees united the domestic dismantling of racial liberalism with an ongoing diplomatic dispute and with what South African journalist William Shoki calls “the administration’s fascination with old-style colonialism.”
As Shoki writes in the same profile of Elon Musk, the South African billionaire turned US Presidential right-hand man “represents an unresolved question: What happens when settler rule fails but settlers remain?” The arrival of Afrikaner refugees in the US inscribes the country’s racist regime into a global colonial order that extends from the US to Africa to Israel. This order has never been uncontested, and settler rule or its legacy continues to be under attack. But the order’s beneficiaries also respond with vicious resistance. The fantasies of white victimhood, reinforced by policies, by the media, and by online AI bots, legitimate this resistance and so legitimate colonial rule itself.
We use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on our website. If you continue to use this site we will assume that you are happy with it.OkNoPrivacy policy
