Imperialist Donald Trump unleashed Elon Musk for a hostile takeover of the US government. (Evan Vucci/AP Photo/picture alliance)
The gradual worldwide shift towards fascism over the past 10 years has significantly elevated the threat of world annihilation. Though this might sound alarmist, as a student of history, there are certainly significant parallels with the 1920s and 1930s one can draw on.
Only today the threat is even greater. With massive stockpiles of nuclear weapons held by at least nine countries, one wrong move could lead to the kind of bloodbath the world has never before experienced. But, even without the nuclear threat, national stockpiles of conventional weapons have the capacity to destroy entire cities hundreds of times over.
The wholesale destruction of Gaza is a case in point. As of November 2024, Israel’s military had, in a single year, dropped more than 85 000 tonnes of bombs on the Gaza Strip, exceeding the amount of explosives used in the entirety of World War II. This is only a small fraction of the bombs available to the world’s largest militaries.
The previous neoliberal order — which began during the 1970s and, arguably, ended with the US’s housing bubble collapse in 2008 — was of course not an era of diplomacy and peace. The US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and its aggressive bombing of over a dozen other countries, portray an era of hawkish Western imperialism in which hundreds of thousands were killed.
And yet, with the second election of Donald Trump, this imperialist crusade is being set into overdrive.
It has only been a few weeks since Trump took office and unleashed Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, to conduct a hostile takeover of the entire US government bureaucracy.
In this time, Trump has already threatened to take over the Panama Canal, floated the annexation of Greenland, suggested that Canada become the nation’s 51st state, threatened tariffs on Mexico, Canada, Colombia and China and cut the “soft-imperial” initiatives of USAid — including its funding of HIV medication and sympathetic investigative journalism — in favour of more aggressive influence strategies and threats of economic warfare and military dominance.
Most recently, with Israel’s genocidal prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, standing next to him, Trump announced the proposed forced removal and ethnic cleansing of millions of Palestinians from Gaza. In his plan, the US would take colonial ownership of the territory to enable his real estate ambitions and turn it into a “Riviera of the Middle East”.
Some have rationalised Trump’s blackmail as merely a bargaining tactic to pressure other countries into a “better deal”. However, even if these belligerent threats are meant to give him an advantage in negotiations, Trump has shown he is willing to follow through with his ideas when given the chance.
This is why caving in to any of Trump’s threats is extraordinarily dangerous. The more his tactics are successful, the more he will continue to use them. Everything he can get away with entices him to try to get away with more.
This has been, and will always be, the modus operandi of such tyrannical politics. Giving even an inch to any aspect of a fascist movement always emboldens it. Just as the establishment politicians of Germany’s Weimar Republic’s appeasement of Hitler enabled him to expand his power and displace them, so too will such capitulation allow the make America great again movement to expand and take over.
Our politics, therefore, cannot simply be non-fascist. We cannot allow for negotiation and compromise when dealing with fascists. We cannot give them any room to expand or any oxygen to breathe.
Nor can we limit our opposition to polite and civil forms. We must employ all possible means to fight back because, ultimately, we are defending our dignity and sovereignty in the face of unrelenting, domineering expansionism.
In other words, we must embrace a politics of anti-fascism.
What does this mean in the context of South Africa?
It means that we demand — even compel — President Cyril Ramaphosa and his government of national unity to resist any show of weakness and any propensity to capitulate to US government blackmail. We cannot compromise by quieting our support for the Palestinians or by revoking the Expropriation Act. Doing so will simply embolden the US to demand even more.
It also means that we need to build solidarity between nations in the Global South. The Hague Group is a start. But it not only needs to expand its membership significantly, its scope should also include political and economic collaboration against US imperial threats. If one nation is threatened with retaliatory tariffs or sanctions for refusing to submit to Trump’s dictates, all nations within this group ought to collectively respond.
What makes a nation like Colombia or South Africa vulnerable to US blackmail is their insignificant economic power in relation to the largest economy and military on Earth. But a collective response from the Global South can ensure that none of us is isolated and that we are not able to be picked off one by one.
Last, and most important, it means that we urgently need to build a huge grassroots anti-fascist movement here in South Africa, in collaboration with similar movements worldwide. This movement must be ready to take to the streets to defend one another. It should find new and creative ways to ridicule, undermine and isolate wannabe fascists like the Patriotic Alliance’s Gayton McKenzie, minister of sports, arts and culture, who are happy to make South Africa a neocolony of the US.
Our movement needs to also physically protect other Africans threatened by xenophobes, conduct citizen arrests of Israeli war criminals who enter the country, block coal exports to the Israeli regime and create an environment hostile to any form that this fascist movement might take.
Working together, we must defend anti-fascist organising in the belly of the beast, support anti-colonial resistance in Palestine and stop right-wing populism in its tracks.
We cannot budge and we cannot allow those with a weak backbone in government to budge either, no matter what threats come our way.