Latest news with #TheContrarian
Yahoo
17-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Jim Acosta Signs With WME (EXCLUSIVE)
Jim Acosta, a former chief White House correspondent and anchor for CNN, has signed with WME for representation. Acosta joined CNN in 2007 after beginning his career in local radio and television and with CBS News, where he covered issues including the 2004 presidential election, the Iraq Qar and Hurricane Katrina. He covered Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton's campaigns for the 2008 presidential election at the beginning of his time at CNN before becoming a national political correspondent and covering Mitt Romney's 2012 presidential campaign. He was promoted to senior White House correspondent during Obama's second term as president, then became chief White House correspondent in 2018, during Donald Trump's first term as president. More from Variety Chris Rock Signs With WME Daniel Kaluuya Signs With WME (EXCLUSIVE) WME Revenue Spikes in Q4 as Endeavor Prepares to Go Private Again Acosta left CNN in January of this year, and has since pivoted to doing independent journalism on Substack, where he has more than 300,000 subscribers, more than 10,000 of which are paid. There, he does daily live broadcasts, having featured guests including Pete Buttigieg and Leader Hakeem Jeffries. On Tuesday, he hosted his first in-person event, a town hall featuring Don Lemon and Michael Cohen. WME will work with Acosta on building out his independent journalism business through additional partnerships, digital distribution and live events. In addition to Acosta, WME represents journalists including Robin Roberts, Kaitlan Collins, Joe Scarborough and Rachel Maddow. The agency has also supported Substack launches for Norm Eisen and Jennifer Rubin (The Contrarian) and Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman (The Capital Offense), as well as a newsletter platform for Oliver Darcy (Status). Best of Variety New Movies Out Now in Theaters: What to See This Week What's Coming to Disney+ in April 2025 The Best Celebrity Memoirs to Read This Year: From Chelsea Handler to Anthony Hopkins
New York Times
21-03-2025
- Sport
- New York Times
The Contrarian: Alex Ovechkin's goals record chase is bad, and other fake NHL arguments
Welcome back to The Contrarian, the feature where you state the obvious and then I argue against it, because I'm a sportswriter and that's just what we do, whether we mean it or not. This time around, you want to debate Alex Ovechkin, Connor McDavid, the playoff format and the Olympics, among other topics. Or then again, maybe you don't. Let's wade into the mailbag and find out. Note: Submissions have been edited for clarity and style. Alex Ovechkin's quest for the all-time goals record is good for the NHL. — Kyle N. On the contrary, Kyle, you dunderhead. Oh, sure, it will get the league some attention. Ratings will go up, a little. And the record-breaking goal might even deliver a moment worth remembering. Emphasis on the 'might,' because this is the NHL, and we all know that they'll probably mess it up. But sure, let's assume Ovechkin breaks the record soon, with a classic one-timer seen around the world, including by plenty of sports fans who don't usually pay attention to hockey. Advertisement Great. Now what? Here's what: We'll be left with one of the greatest records in all of sports being held by a one-dimensional, overrated winger who'll never be regarded as a truly elite player no matter how many goals he scores. Think about it. Even assuming he breaks the record, and maybe even shatters it by the time he's done, will Ovechkin ever be viewed as one of the five best players in hockey history? The 10 best? Remember, goalies and defensemen count too. It's certainly not hard to come up with 10 or 12 or 15 names that have an excellent case to be made for them as better players than Ovechkin. Yet he's going to be the guy who retires with the goals record. Why? Because that's all he does. Ovechkin has never bothered with playing defense — he hasn't appeared on a single Selke ballot in 15 years and counting, because most of his shifts in his own zone look like this. He's never been much of a passer. He's big and strong enough to play a power game but rarely does. He's not even a guy who creates his own chances. Instead, he stands in one spot and waits for his teammates to do all the work and feed him for an open look. Doing literally anything else to help his team win? He's not interested. This is a player who does exactly one thing well, or even better than average. Yes, that thing is very important, and he's truly phenomenal at it, which is why he's been able to last this long in a league where most players are expected to have more than one skill. But the all-time record-holder? This is going to be like if baseball's home-run record fell to Adam Dunn. And as for all that worldwide attention, is this really the guy you want to be the new face of your sport? Even putting aside his politics, is Ovechkin going to stick around to promote the game in North America for decades to come the way that Wayne Gretzky or Mario Lemieux have? Or will he take his record back home to Russia in a year or two, essentially disappearing from the NHL radar once he's filled his coffers with enough cash and individual glory? Advertisement We'll find out. But not before we have to watch Gretzky and Gary Bettman follow Ovechkin around the continent, watching him score empty net goals and pretending to be happy for him while knowing deep down that his record will be a disaster. Full credit to the league for squeezing as much short-term marketing juice out of the chase as they can, because you might as well make the most of a bad situation. But for the rest of us who don't have to pad their PR, it's OK to admit that Ovechkin is over-hyped and always has been, and is nowhere near a worthy heir to goal-scoring throne. And that will be true no matter how many ignorant dummies want to overrate him. Sidney Crosby has had a better career than Alex Ovechkin. — Anonymous On the contrary, 'Anonymous,' you clod. First of all, put your real name on your dumb opinions, you gutless invertebrate. If I wanted to waste my time on the ramblings of anonymous cowards, I'd go back to my cubicle in 2003 and read Slashdot. Grow a spine. But more importantly, how dare you impugn the career of Ovechkin by comparing him to Crosby, a player he's been superior to by almost every measure. Even now, as he's on the verge of breaking the most important record in the hockey world, Ovechkin still has to deal with dullards who can't recognize his greatness. You're certainly not alone. Most fans and media seem to agree that Crosby has been the better player, and in some cases don't seem to think it's all that close. Even our own ranking at The Athletic has Crosby multiple spots ahead. Then again, that was two years ago. Surely now that Ovechkin is about to assume the goals crown, we can reevaluate. So let's do that. First things first: Ovechkin leads the duo in goals, while Crosby has more points. But entering Thursday, that points gap is only 64, or roughly three or four per season. Meanwhile, Ovechkin's 271-goal edge would account for over 44 percent of Crosby's career total. Nice job racking up a few more secondary assists each year, Sid, but we'll take the player who actually changes the scoreboard. Advertisement Ovechkin also has more MVPs, which should tell us which player was the best at their peak. Crosby has just one more Art Ross, and one more Conn Smythe (that we shouldn't even count because he stole one from Phil Kessel). Meanwhile, the Rocket Richard race is nine to two in Ovechkin's favor. When was the last time you went to see an NHL game that finished 9-2? I'm guessing you didn't drive home debating which team was better. So why does Crosby get all the love? Even putting aside the obvious and indisputable fact that he's a good Canadian boy being compared to an enigmatic Russian, it seems to end up coming down to three main areas. The first is that Crosby has more Cups, with three compared to Ovechkin's one. So sure, congratulations to Crosby and his many Hall of Fame teammates for that. Give Ovechkin an MVP-winning co-star and a 500-win goalie instead of Nicklas Backstrom and the barely animated husk of Jay Beagle to drag around and you can bet that plays out differently. Next up is Crosby's position, with centers seen as more valuable than wingers. And they are. But the flip side of that is that Crosby is, at best, the third-best center the sport has ever seen, and that's assuming you put him ahead of names like Steve Yzerman, Marcel Dionne, Ron Francis and Mark Messier, who all have more points, not to mention Jean Beliveau, Phil Esposito, Bryan Trottier, Stan Mikita, Connor McDavid … you get the picture. Meanwhile, Ovechkin is so far ahead of everyone else at left wing that it's pointless to even list any other names. Yes, centers might matter more than left-wingers, but there's still one of each on the ice at a time. I'll take the guy who laps the field at his position over the one who's barely in the conversation for a bronze medal, thanks. The final point is defense, which is admittedly not Ovechkin's strong suit. But it's hardly Crosby's either — he has as many years as a Selke finalist as Ovechkin does. And that's despite the very obvious recent desire from the PHWA to hand him a lifetime achievement award as a going-away present. Meanwhile, Ovechkin is a human wrecking ball who can hit, fight and maybe most importantly stay healthy while doing it, to the point where it's headline news when he misses any time at all. (That would be earlier this year, when he broke his leg and then missed like a week.) That durability, which is absolutely a skill, has allowed him to chase Gretzky's record despite Bettman's efforts to shut down the league every few years in his prime. So no, Crosby isn't better. He never has been. But keep pretending otherwise if you want. Ovechkin will just have to stay focused on his record chase, followed by a Presidents' Trophy and then a lengthy playoff run that will take place while Crosby sits at home for a third straight year because only one of these two can actually carry a team to success. And that will be true no matter how many ignorant dummies want to underrate him. Shootouts should be eliminated completely. — Alex K. On the contrary, Alex, you dolt. The shootout stinks, we all agree. Nobody likes the gimmick anymore, especially those of us who stopped watching years ago. But does that mean we should get rid of them entirely? Only if we bring back ties. I'm not against that, personally, especially in an era of three-on-three overtime where we're far more likely to get a sudden-death winner. If you wanted to get rid of the loser point and go back to wins, losses and (rare) ties, I'm fine with it. But a lot of fans aren't, especially the newer ones who weren't around two decades ago. At some point, we decided that hockey games had to have a winner, and maybe that ship has sailed. Advertisement If so, you have to have shootouts, if only as a last resort. Unlimited overtime is great in the playoffs, but it wouldn't work in the regular season. We can't have some random Minnesota/Philadelphia game going to quintuple overtime in mid-November when both teams play on the road tomorrow night. It's not worth it. No, the answer here is the obvious one: Extend three-on-three overtime to 10 minutes, and accept the tiny number of shootouts that would still happen. That's not all that insightful, because everyone has already figured out that it's the obvious answer. Well, almost everyone. Connor McDavid is the best player in the world. — Kristopher B. On the contrary, Kristopher, you peon. It's indisputably true that McDavid is the best forward in the world, even in an off-year like this one. But maybe try watching a game or two, and you'll be shocked to learn that there are other positions. That includes the two defensemen back there, who never get Hart votes because all hockey writers are morons. And it definitely includes the goaltender. You've heard of them, right? Big weird guy, way too much padding, always faking interference? He's kind of important. And right now, the best of them all is Connor Hellebuyck. He won the Vezina last year as the league's best goalie for the second time. As an encore, he's having an even better season this year, so much so that nobody is even debating the Vezina this time. That race is already over. Has been for months. I'm not sure about other sports, but when one guy is indisputably the very best at the single most important position, that's your best player. Today, that's a Connor. But it's Hellebuyck, not McDavid. Why don't we ever think about it this way? Because the NHL has a very messed-up awards system, with individual overall honors for goalies and defensemen but not forwards. (The Selke is specialized and doesn't count.) That means that for reasons nobody is completely clear on, we've all apparently decided that only forwards can win the MVP. And since 'MVP' is a synonym for 'best player' in every sport, hockey fans have mind-melded the best player debate into one that can only include forwards. It's been that way since Bobby Orr's knees gave out, with a brief (and far from unanimous) break for Dominik Hasek in the late 90s. Other than that, only forwards can be the best. Advertisement It's nonsense. And that's especially true this year, where one guy is almost single-handedly carrying a team nobody really believed into first place overall. Hellebuyck should win the MVP, but not because of any weird semantics over 'value.' He should win because, right at this moment, he's the best hockey player in the world. Olympic Hockey is better than the 4 Nations Face-Off. — Mike C. On the contrary, Mike, you humanoid. Although I'll be fair here, and point out that Mike sent this question in before the 4 Nations was played. Back then, when we were all performing variations of the 'glorified All-Star Game' concern trolling, this probably felt like an impossible challenge for even the most blatant contrarian. Now it's close to a slam dunk. The only question is how to go about it. I could mention that the Olympics are in Italy, meaning they'll be in a different time zone and the biggest games will be played in the afternoon while you're at work, if not in the morning when you're asleep. The crowds will be fine, but nowhere near the level we saw in Montreal and Boston. The IOC will own everything, so highlights won't go viral and take over your feed like they did in February. The rules will be different. Everything, from the way the broadcast looks to how it sounds, will be just a bit off. I could mention all that stuff. Or I could just remind you that in the 4 Nations, we got this: Yeah, that's not going to happen in the Olympics. That's not to say the intensity won't be high, because it will be. The players will care deeply. Team Canada will be looking to defend its crown. Finland and Sweden will be looking to avenge some tough losses. Other countries, excluded from 4 Nations, will be itching to show that they belong. And Team USA might even decide that this tournament is 'the big one,' although we'll have to wait until it's over and we know the result to find out for sure. It's going to matter, a lot. But it won't be like the 4 Nations, which turned out to be a perfect storm of pent-up frustration after a near-decade wait, fantastic hockey and yes, politics. We should all hope that the last part isn't front and center a year from now, for all sorts of reasons. But it's almost impossible to imagine the passion we just saw being repeated in Italy. The Olympics will be great. But compared to what we just saw last month? It might feel like a glorified All-Star Game. A conference-based 1-through-8 playoff format would be a huge improvement over the current division-based format, and far more fair to teams such as Dallas and Colorado who might have to meet in the first round despite being two of the best teams in the league. — Kevin S. On the contrary, Kevin, you milk drinker. Look, if you prefer 1 vs. 8 to the current 1 vs. 4, I'm not even going to argue with you. As a fan who grew up in the 1980s, watching the 1 vs. 4 format serve up repeat playoff matchups that led to intense rivalries such as the Battles of Alberta and Quebec, I'm fine with the current system. But I acknowledge that the days of those kinds of rivalries are over, and we've hit a point of diminishing returns with 1 v. 4. Shayna lays out the case against keeping it here, and I get it. At this point, I'm not sure I have strong feelings one way or the other. Advertisement Except … can we please stop with the tears for teams like the Stars and Avs who might have to play each other a round earlier than they would under other systems? Same goes for the Leafs or the Lightning or whichever other teams inevitably end up playing a tougher opponent under 1 vs. 8 than 1 vs. 4. It's not 1984, when a powerhouse like the Oilers or Islanders could run through the league and earn a cupcake matchup with some 50-point weakling in what was essentially a first-round bye. In the parity era, every playoff team is good. Not necessarily great, sure, but good enough to beat any other team if things break right. There are no more easy paths through the playoffs. And if you're the Stars, your path is going to involve the Avalanche eventually. Or if not, it's going to involve the team that beat them. Either way, if you're not better than Colorado then you don't deserve to win the Stanley Cup. And that's ultimately what the playoffs are all about, we're constantly told. One winner, 15 losers. OK, fine. But that means it really doesn't matter if you lose a round earlier than you were meant to. Yes, longer playoff runs are better for fans, not to mention the bottom line. But if it's really just about the Cup, then everyone has to beat four good teams to get there. The current system doesn't change that. All it does is occasionally guarantee that we'll get a heavyweight tilt like Stars vs. Avs, rather than risking an upset coming along and messing it up. I don't know about you, but I can live with that.
The Guardian
26-01-2025
- Business
- The Guardian
How the roots of the ‘PayPal mafia' extend to apartheid South Africa
When Elon Musk's arm shot out in a stiff arm salute at Donald Trump's inaugural celebrations, startled viewers mostly drew the obvious comparison. But in the fired-up debate about Musk's intent that followed, as the world's richest man insisted he wasn't trying to be a Nazi, speculation inevitably focused on whether his roots in apartheid-era South Africa offered an insight. In recent months Musk's promotion of far-right conspiracy theories has grown, from a deepening hostility to democratic institutions to the recent endorsement of Germany's far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). He has taken an unhealthy interest in genetics while backing claims of a looming 'white genocide' in his South African homeland and endorsing posts promoting the racist 'great replacement' conspiracy theory. Increasingly, his language and tone have come to echo the old South Africa. He is not alone. Musk is part of the 'PayPal mafia' of libertarian billionaires with roots in South Africa under white rule now hugely influential in the US tech industry and politics. They include Peter Thiel, the German-born billionaire venture capitalist and PayPal cofounder, who was educated in a southern African city in the 1970s where Hitler was still openly venerated. Thiel, a major donor to Trump's campaign, has been critical of welfare programs and women being permitted to vote as undermining capitalism. A 2021 biography of Thiel, called The Contrarian, alleged that as a student at Stanford he defended apartheid as 'economically sound'. David Sacks, formerly PayPal's chief operating officer and now a leading fundraiser for Trump, was born in Cape Town and grew up within the South African diaspora after his family moved to the US when he was young. A fourth member of the mafia, Roelof Botha, the grandson of the apartheid regime's last foreign minister, Pik Botha, and former PayPal CFO, has kept a lower political profile but remains close to Musk. Among them, Musk stands out for his ownership of X, which is increasingly a platform for far-right views, and his proximity to Trump, who has nominated Musk to head a 'department of government efficiency' to slash and burn its way through the federal bureaucracy. Some draw a straight line between Musk's formative years atop a complex system of racial hierarchy as a white male, in a country increasingly at war with itself as the South African government became ever more repressive as resistance to apartheid grew, and the man we see at Trump's side today. The week before the inauguration, Steve Bannon, Trump's former adviser, described white South Africans as the 'most racist people on earth', questioned their involvement in US politics and said Musk was a malign influence who should go back to the country of his birth. Others are sceptical that Musk's increasingly extreme views can be tracked back to his upbringing in Pretoria. The acclaimed South African writer Jonny Steinberg recently called attempts to explain Musk through his childhood under apartheid 'a bad idea' that resulted in 'facile' conclusions. But for those looking to join dots, there is fodder from Musk's early life with a neo-Nazi grandfather who moved from Canada to South Africa because he liked the idea of apartheid through his high school education in a system infused with the ideology of white supremacy. Musk's formative years in the 1980s came amid a cauldron of rebellion in the Black townships which drew a state of emergency and a bloody crackdown by the state. Some whites fled the country. Others marched with the neo-Nazi Afrikaner Resistance Movement against any weakening of apartheid. The South Africa into which Musk was born in 1971, and to which Thiel moved as a child from Germany, was led by a prime minister, John Vorster, who had been a general in a fascist militia three decades earlier that allied itself with Hitler. The Ossewabrandwag (OB) was founded shortly before the second world war. It opposed South Africa entering the war as an ally of Britain and plotted with German military intelligence to assassinate the prime minster, Jan Smuts, as a prelude to an armed uprising in support of Hitler. Vorster made no secret of his sympathy for Nazi, or National Socialist, ideology which he compared to the Afrikaner political philosophy of Christian nationalism. 'We stand for Christian nationalism which is an ally of National Socialism,' he said in 1942. 'You can call this anti-democratic principle dictatorship if you wish. In Italy it is called 'Fascism', in Germany 'German National Socialism' and in South Africa 'Christian nationalism'.' Smuts's government took a dim view of that and a few weeks later interned Vorster as a Nazi sympathiser. At the end of the war, the OB was absorbed into the National party, which then won the 1948 election, in which Black South Africans had no vote, on a commitment to impose apartheid. In 1961, Vorster joined the government as minister of justice and five years later became prime minister. Nazism may have been defeated in Europe but Christian nationalism was alive and kicking in South Africa under Vorster, with its own brand of racial classification and stratification justified by the need to keep the 'swart gevaar', or black danger, at bay. In schools, Christian nationalist education sought to forge a South African identity around a singular version of the country's history. Musk and Thiel were taught that the Afrikaner, mostly the descendants of Dutch colonisers, was the real victim of South Africa's strife whether at the hands of grasping British imperialists or treacherous Zulu chiefs. Bea Roberts, who grew up in an apartheid-supporting family but came to oppose the system and later worked for the Institute for a Democratic South Africa, remembers a heavy emphasis on Afrikaners as victims pursuing apartheid in order to protect their culture and even their very existence. 'It was a strange mix of 'we got fucked up by the British in the [second Boer] war, and our women and children died in thousands in the concentration camps' so we are going to rebuild our nation and make sure that that we are invincible. And we'll do that by extreme means,' she said. Schooling, like much else, was segregated by race for most of the apartheid era and, on paper at least, white pupils across South Africa were subject to the same Christian nationalist education. But white society was itself divided and the historical narrative embraced in Afrikaans-speaking schools could often became the basis for an implicit rejection of apartheid philosophy in English-speaking ones. Musk attended a Johannesburg high school and then the Pretoria boys high school, an institution whose other alumni include students who went on to become leading anti-apartheid activists such as Edwin Cameron, a South African supreme court justice after the collapse of white rule, and Peter Hain, who moved to Britain, where he became a leading campaigner against apartheid and then a Labour government minister. Phillip Van Niekerk, former editor of the leading anti-apartheid Mail and Guardian newspaper in Johannesburg, had Afrikaner parents but attended an English-speaking school. He recalled that the official version of history did little to engender support for the apartheid system among a lot of English speakers even if they benefited from it and did little to challenge it. 'We hated the National party government. Even our teachers were kind of hostile. It was seen almost like an imposition. Yet you imbibe things through the culture. The truth is we didn't see Black people quite as equals. We didn't think about it,' he said. Thiel got all that and more at schools in South Africa and its de facto colony, South West Africa, which became independent as Namibia in 1990. South West Africa had been a German colony until the end of the first world war and Thiel lived for a time in the city of Swakopmund, where he attended a German-language school while his father worked at a nearby uranium mine. At that time, Swakopmund was notorious for its continued glorification of Nazism, including celebrating Hitler's birthday. In 1976, the New York Times reported that some people in the town continued to greet each other with 'Heil Hitler' and to give the Nazi salute. Van Niekerk visited Swakopmund during South African rule. 'I was there in the 1980s and you could walk into a curio shop and buy mugs with Nazi swastikas on them. If you're German and you're in Swakopmund in the 1970s, which is when Thiel was there, you're part of that community,' he said. Thiel, who moved to the US when he was 10, has described his schooling in Swakopmund as instilling a dislike of regimentation that steered him towards libertarianism. Thiel's father worked at a uranium mine in Rössing where, as in the gold and coalmines of the Reef around Johannesburg, Black laborers were paid just enough to survive, living conditions were dire and the work dangerous. White managers, on the other hand, lived a lifestyle of neo-colonial luxury with servants at the ready. Sign up to This Week in Trumpland A deep dive into the policies, controversies and oddities surrounding the Trump administration after newsletter promotion Musk's father, Errol, was also in the mining business among other interests. He once boasted that his stake in Zambian emerald mines made him 'so much money we couldn't even close our safe'. Musk's mother, Maye, has said the family owned two homes, a plane, a yacht and a handful of luxury cars. Errol Musk has said that he opposed apartheid and joined the Progressive Federal party but then left because he didn't like its demand for one person, one vote, and instead favored a more gradual reform with separate parliaments for different races. That was the liberal position inside the Musk family. Musk's maternal grandfather, Joshua Haldeman, moved from Canada to South Africa in 1950 because he liked the newly elected apartheid government. In the 1930s, Haldeman was the Canadian leader of a fringe political movement originating in the US, Technocracy Incorporated, that advocated abolishing democracy in favor of government by elite technicians but which took on overtones of fascism with its uniforms and salutes. The Canadian government banned Technocracy Incorporated during the second world war as a threat to the country's security in part for its opposition to fighting Hitler. Haldeman was charged with publishing documents opposing the war and sent to prison for two months. After the war, Haldeman led a separate political party that among other things promoted the antisemitic forgery the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. When that went nowhere, he moved to South Africa because he said he liked the core National party philosophy of Christian nationalism that Vorster likened to Nazism. Errol Musk described Maye's parents as so extreme he stopped visiting them. 'They were very fanatical in favor of apartheid,' he told Podcast and Chill. 'Her parents came to South Africa from Canada because they sympathised with the Afrikaner government. They used to support Hitler and all that sort of stuff.' Haldeman was killed in a plane crash when Elon was three years old but the boy remained close to his grandmother and mother. He is estranged from his father, whom Maye has described as abusive of her and their children. Errol Musk once claimed to have shot and killed three people who broke into his house. Musk has described his father as a 'terrible human being'. 'Almost every evil thing you could possibly think of, he has done,' he told Rolling Stone without elaborating in 2017. What is indisputable is that Musk and Thiel grew up amid incredible privilege where the racial hierarchy was clear. Those who claimed to reject apartheid sought to explain this privilege not as the result of systemic racial oppression but the natural order of things thanks to their own abilities. That in turn led some to regard all forms government as oppressive and true liberty as an individual battle for survival. The biography of Thiel said he held a view common among apartheid's supporters at the time that Black South Africans were better off than Africans in other parts of the continent even if they were systematically denied their rights. Thiel has denied ever having supported apartheid. Van Niekerk said that opposition to apartheid did not necessarily mean rejection of white supremacy or privilege, a point made in a 1968 British television documentary the year before Thiel was born. The commentary observed that the English-speaking mining barons and other industrialists in Johannesburg usually claimed to be 'hostile to apartheid, call themselves liberal' but did little to oppose the system while profiting from it. Helen Suzman, at the time a member of the South African parliament who was often a lone voice in opposition to apartheid, was critical of these powerful industrialists and businessmen, saying 'people who do nothing are responsible'. She accused them of hiding behind apartheid to exploit Black workers. 'I see no reason why the industrialists should not improve the living conditions of their workers,' she said. In the documentary, Stanley Cohen, the managing director of the OK Bazaars supermarket chain owned by his family, was asked why he only employed whites behind the counter and no South Africans of other races even though many of the customers were Black. Cohen acknowledged that it was not a legal requirement, but did it to indulge the racist prejudices of white customers. 'There is no reason why they [Black people] can't work behind the counters. There's no law against it. But there is this natural prejudice in this country which you can't legislate for or against,' he said. A decade later, power was shifting. The uprising that began in Soweto in 1976 had become a full-blown national crisis for the apartheid system by the 1980s. A low-level civil war was under way. In response, the state grew even more violent and repressive. White paranoia was fed by the creep of independent Black African states under Marxist-leaning governments ever closer to South Africa's borders, with Angola and Mozambique in the 1970s followed by Zimbabwe in 1980. Talk of white genocide emerged, a conspiracy theory that has taken on new life in recent times with the killings of white farmers in South Africa and Zimbabwe. Support surged for the neo-Nazi Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB), or Afrikaner Resistance Movement, founded in the early 1970s to oppose any relaxation of apartheid. The AWB, founded by Eugene Terre'Blanche, an imposing and flamboyant figure given to riding around on a horse from which he occasionally fell off, made no secret of its model with a badge strikingly similar to a swastika in design and colors. It's supporters were also fond of the stiff-armed Hitler salute as they paraded on the streets of Pretoria. At its peak, the AWB appeared to have the support of more than 10% of white South Africans. Roberts said life for privileged whites in particular was 'definitely a bubble, and one filled with self-belief'. But she said that it became increasingly difficult to ignore reality. 'I think Musk in Pretoria in the 1980s must have had a sense of what Black people were experiencing and why they were angry. I grew up fairly conservative but I was able to change my views. I think you have to be fairly rigid in the 80s to still cling on to the belief that the apartheid system was fine and correct and in everybody's best interest,' she said. Musk left South Africa in 1988 in the midst of this ferment, two years before FW de Klerk carved out a path to freedom by releasing Nelson Mandela. Had he stayed, Musk faced being conscripted into the military for two years, an obligatory service for white men, that could well have meant fighting in the 'border war' in Angola and Namibia or being sent to put down Black protests in the townships. Instead, Musk took Canadian citizenship through his mother and moved to Ontario. Van Niekerk said that, whether he wants to admit it or not, Musk also took a part of South Africa with him. 'We all [white South Africans], by the very nature of our privileges and our place in the racial hierarchy, grew up believing we were the master race, even if we didn't actively think about it,' he said. Chris McGreal is the Guardian's former Johannesburg correspondent
