Harry Turtledove's excellent, award-winning alternate history science fiction novel, "The Guns of the South", is set during the American Civil War.
The story deals with a group of time traveling members of the Afrikaner AWB -- a South African nationalist, white supremacist, and neo-Nazi political party -- from 21st-century (Hey, that's us!) In their timeline, the South African system of apartheid has been overthrown, but these fuckers have access to a time machine. So, in the hopes of saving and spreading their depraved ideology, they travel back in time to the American Civil War and supply Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia with AK-47s and other advanced technology, medicine and intelligence.
Their intervention results in a Confederate victory in the war.
33 years ago, in 1992 when the novel was published, who could have guessed that time travel shenanigans wouldn't be necessary for Afrikaner AWB scum to find safe harbor and political power in the United States? All it took was 40 years of relentless propagandizing from Hate Radio and 30 years of relentless propagandizing from Fox News, and the relentless propagandizing from the rest of Conservative media to sculpt the Republican base into reprogrammable meatbags who adored the idea of a white Christian nationalist authoritarianism, and a few South African billionaires willing to put up millions of dollars to buy the White House for a corrupt degenerate felon who is 100% on-board with the white supremacist agenda.
From The New York Times:
The Road to Trump’s Embrace of White South Africans
The Trump administration’s hostile approach to South Africa was shaped by a convergence of factors.
It was May 2019 and national security officials were in the Situation Room discussing Iran when President Trump abruptly changed the subject. He wanted to talk about granting asylum and citizenship to white South African farmers.
Mr. Trump had floated the idea before, claiming that the farmers were a persecuted minority group being displaced from their land, according to John R. Bolton, his national security adviser at the time, who was at the meeting.
Mr. Bolton said he thought little of Mr. Trump’s wish. The president had embraced fringe ideas and false narratives pushed by white Afrikaner activists, Mr. Bolton said.
“It never amounted to anything, so I just put it as typical Trump,” Mr. Bolton recalled in a recent interview. “Some random person tells him something and he’s obsessed with it.”
Years later, Mr. Trump’s views on white farmers in South Africa are shaping U.S. foreign policy in his second term. On Monday, the first group of Afrikaners, a white ethnic minority that ruled during apartheid in South Africa, landed in Washington, as the Trump administration upended a refugee system that had provided sanctuary for those fleeing war, famine and natural disasters.
The administration is welcoming white South Africans after suspending the program for everyone else, including other Africans who have waited in refugee camps for years and were vetted and cleared, and Afghans who supported the U.S. war in their country...
From The Guardian:
‘Trump and Musk are gaslighting’: anti-apartheid artist on how US president and his billionaire ally are attacking South Africa
From MoneyWeb:
The deep South African ties in the Trump administration
Apart from Elon Musk it’s clear the US president has the ear of South Africans, or those who have lived here.
Everyone by now is aware that Elon Musk has the ear of US President Donald Trump, and is to a large extent shaping US attitudes to SA.
Apart from Musk, there are several others with strong South African ties in Trump’s inner circle, including David Sacks, the US’s new AI and crypto czar; billionaire investor Peter Thiel, a key backer of Trump for many years; and Joel Pollak, who has been tipped as the next US ambassador to SA...
C'mon! Wake up sheeple! Do I need to draw you a picture?
It happened today as we were driving back from a short trip to northern Illinois to visit relatives old and new.
My wife was in the car, on her Space Age phone, simultaneously FaceTiming with two younglings, one in a different state, one halfway around the world. At that exact moment we were driving through one of Illinois' many wind farms: a widely spaced forest of bright, white windmills that tower 400 feet from their base to the apex of a blade at 12 o'clock.
To make this happen we had to pause the science fiction audiobook we had been listening to on our trip (Andy Weir's "Project Hail Mary", which is pretty terrific so far) because we weren't listening to the novel on via terrestrial radio or satellite radio, but via some science fiction dark magic that allowed my wife's phone to talk to the car's media center so that we could listen to the story of a man in a spacecraft traveling at .9-something of the speed of light, while we sailed down this smooth highway (Thanks, Biden!) at a constant speed slightly above the limit, knowing that the alert system on my phone would tell us of any speed traps ahead.
At that moment I was transported back to the late 1970s, to our Volkswagen Fastback with Mom and my brother, driving down the same I-80 we had just left to take us back to Springfield. That would have been summer -- she was a teacher, so we were all on summer break -- and ungodly early because Mom always had us up and on the road well before sunrise so that we could make camp before it got too hot outside.
Our nav system was a paper map, which, unless we took side trips, we didn't really need since we knew the way. Our entertainment was the License Plate Game, a magnetic chess board, a deck of cards, AM/FM radio, and an 8-track tape player with played one of the four or five tapes Mom had on hand. Not sure what listening to the cast album of "Cabaret" and "Fiddler on the Roof" over and over had on my me and my brother, but I'm sure it had some.
The car was packed so tight with sleeping bags, tent, cooler, food, clothes and essential whatnots and dog bowls and doggie provisions, that my brother and I (and our very good dog) sort of wound ourselves into whatever space remained. The first time we made this trip this way, the Coleman stove Mom had just bought just would not fit. And we were excellent packers. If we'd been in charge of packing the Apollo missions, I'm almost positive we could have found room to provision the astronautes with some extra bologna sandwiches, Hi-C, and a nice sheet cake. But our little stove just would not go in...until we took it out of the box. Just that little bit of space-saving allowed it to drop into the slot we had for it like a Tetris piece.
Front seat co-piloting duties consisted of keeping Mom supplied with hard candies (Brach's Butterscotch) and coffee from the Girl Scout thermos (being careful not to drop it because it was glass lined.) Mom drove with a tea towel draped over her left arm -- the sunward arm -- to avoid sunburn.
We'd picnic off the road somewhere, use the toilets, walk the dog, stretch, and then power on. Before sundown we'd be at some campsite -- usually a Jellystone -- get the tent up quick, fire up the little Coleman stove and make something for dinner. Next morning, make breakfast, feed and walk the dog, strike camp. Then back to the road and "Cabaret" or whatever was on local radio.
And I was almost always packing a book. Science fiction, no surprise. Probably by Bradbury or Asimov. I'd read in the back seat when my brother and I swapped the co-piloting duty. And here I was, all these years later, older than my Mom was then, driving through a world that is now so casually upholstered with wonders (any one of which could have been its own Golden Age science fiction short story) that most people barely notice the miracles all around them.
“Arrakis teaches the attitude of the knife - chopping off what's incomplete and saying: 'Now, it's complete because it's ended here.'” -- from "Collected Sayings of Maud'Dib'' by the Princess Irulan.
