Roman Cabanac, one of the leading alt-right pod-bros in South Africa, showed us.
It’s been seven years since a crass demagogue named Donald Trump rose to the pinnacle of America’s idiocracy.
Trump stirred economic protectionism, white nationalism, religious conservatism and irrational prejudices of various kinds into a noxious, neo-fascist political concoction that came to be described as the alternative right, or new right.
Some members of South Africa’s commentariat enthustiastically took the ‘red pill’, which is cant for believing and expounding the tenets of the populist alt-right. Resistance to pandemic lockdowns accelerated the slide down the alt-right chute.
Typical views include a simplistic, reactionary and pathological distrust of establishment institutions, including the media; undisguised prejudice against an imagined ‘gay agenda’; anti-vaxxery and Covid denial; belief in pro-Russia, anti-Ukraine propaganda; conspiracy theories about an elite global cabal that secretly controls the world through governments, NGOs, corporations and the media; assorted other conspiracy theories; and a crude, tribalistic sort of nationalism to which they cling despite denouncing the identity politics of the left.
Memes
In much the same way the far-left used to call themselves ‘woke’, the alt-right calls themselves ‘based’. A great many of its memes and vocabulary are derived from image boards such as 4chan and 8chan, where racism, misogynistic ‘incel’ culture, anti-Semitism, anti-gay bigotry and conspiracy theories are played for laughs, and are often seriously promoted.
The alt-right has adopted an image of being cool, modern, rebellious, irreverent and unafraid to ‘speak truth to power’.
The movement appealed particularly to those who define themselves in opposition to socialism, left-wing identity politics, and what they call ‘cultural Marxism’. Many of them formerly identified as libertarians.
What happens when you jump down that alt-right slide, however, and just keep going?
Thanks to Roman Cabanac, the founding host of the YouTube-based podcast Morning Shot, which bills itself grandly as ‘news analysis from Africa’ and has just short of 50 000 subscribers, we now know.
It is possible to go so far right that you emerge on the far left, railing against free speech and praising the ANC’s chief petty tyrant, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma.
Foreign NGOs
Last week, Cabanac and his co-host, Byron Shepherd, proposed that the solution to foreign or foreign-funded NGOs that advocate policies they don’t like, is simply to silence them.
‘We’re a democratic country,’ said Cabanac. ‘We vote for our government. Our government has a mandate to rule. That mandate to rule is being stopped, changed and retarded by these foreign funded NGOs.’
Follow India’s example and ban foreign-funded NGOs, he says.
This is an outrageous limitation on freedom of speech, of course. I agree that some foreign NGOs, or foreign-funded NGOs, promote awful policies. I agree that our government shouldn’t let itself be influenced by people – foreign or domestic – who promote awful policies.
My contribution to the fight against those NGOs is to challenge their awful policies, and explain why they are awful. Not everyone agrees with me, but that is how a free democracy operates, with a contestation of ideas.
Many domestically funded journalists also challenge the ANC’s right to rule as it sees fit. Would Cabanac propose shutting up disloyal media, too?
It is illiberal to silence ideas merely on the basis of who states them. (Full disclosure: the Institute of Race Relations, which publishes this newspaper, is in part funded by foreign sources.)
Civil society
Most developing countries do not have a well-developed philantropic sector. Much of South Africa’s independent media, for example, could not have been founded, or would not have survived, without foreign funding of some sort.
Many other NGOs and civil society organisations, promoting a wide variety of causes from fighting AIDS, TB and malaria, to education and improved nutrition for the poor, to disaster aid, to assisting victims of rape and domestic violence, to anti-corruption advocacy, to watchdogs for democracy, liberty and human rights, wouldn’t survive without foreign funding.
A thriving civil society sector and media have been a bulwark against unaccountable, unconstitutional and corrupt rule.
In a similar vein, foreign influence and foreign money were critical in convincing the National Party to abandon its policy of apartheid.
The notion that any government ought to be respected, and not influenced or criticised, merely because it was democratically elected, is absurd.
Civil society ought to be large and vibrant, and in relatively poor countries, that inevitably requires foreign funding.
If one has a problem with a particular campaign, or organisation, then that particular campaign or organisation ought to be tackled in our free and foreign-funded media.
What you don’t do is give government the power to decide who can and can’t speak on policy matters in South Africa.
Mandela
What is really strange about this obsession with foreign-funded NGOs is that it originated with the left. Nelson Mandela, back in 1997 in Mahikeng, in his report to the 50th National Conference of the African National Congress, kicked against ‘watchdog’ NGOs and accused many of being funded by foreign governments. ‘[T]hese NGO’s … work to corrode the influence of the movement,’ he said.
Other ANC figures, like Gwede Mantashe, have likewise voiced concern about the influence of foreign NGOs.
Some of their criticism is entirely justified. I happen to agree with Mantashe that foreign or foreign-funded NGOs are behind astro-turfing environmental protests and obstructionist legal action that prevent economic development.
I would favour taking them a lot less seriously, and ruling a lot more litigation to be vexatious, but I would not for a minute advocate silencing dissenting voices or depriving them of their sources of funding.
To find Cabanac on the same side as Nelson Mandela is, to be honest, startling.
Praise ‘based’ Dlamini-Zuma
Not as startling as yesterday’s podcast title, however: ANC Is Becoming Based?
In this episode, the co-hosts praise minister in the presidency for women and other people with disabilities Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, describing her keynote speech to the BRICS Youth Summit, currently underway in Durban, as ‘based’ and ‘radical’.
Cabanac says he ‘can’t disagree with anything in the speech whatsoever’.
Shepherd starts by quoting her to the effect that the fall of the Berlin Wall wasn’t the end of the Cold War but led to the emergence of the ‘Hegemonic West’. This West now had the strength to ‘impose its neoliberal world order’ (Cabanac’s phrase) on developing countries, ‘and extract a lot of wealth from those countries, to the detriment of those countries’.
‘Sounds very much like South Africa,’ he adds.
This is a curious reading of history, to say the least. It certainly fits the anti-imperialist rhetoric of the far left, with which we’re intimately familiar thanks to the ANC and its socialist ideology.
They also use terms like ‘neoliberal’, which are usually used by the left – people like Lord Peter Hain – to disparage the classical liberal policy ideas of the free-market capitalists.
It doesn’t, however, gel with reality. South Africa, to the extent that it implemented ‘neoliberal’ policies and traded with Western countries, did very well for itself. Especially during commodities booms, our extractive industries provide a welcome fillip to both GDP and the fiscus.
Cabanac and Shepherd complain about this like anti-capitalist left-wingers.
‘Green agenda’
Shepherd claims that thanks to the global ‘green agenda’, we’re experiencing load-shedding ‘because coal is out of favour’.
Uh, no. I don’t want to defend the ‘green agenda’, but South Africa hasn’t yet shut down any coal-fired power stations, and has hardly begun rolling out renewable energy.
It is experiencing load-shedding because it didn’t build enough new capacity, was way over deadline (and budget) with the new capacity it did build, and neglected to maintain the rest of the coal-fired fleet.
We’re experiencing load-shedding not because ‘coal is out of favour’, but because ANC misrule broke our coal-fired power stations.
Pride Parades
‘Another example’ of the foreign imperialist neoliberal influence of the West, says Shepherd, is ‘all the Pride Parades we’ve been experiencing’.
According to my (admittedly cursory) research, there has been exactly one Pride Parade in South Africa this year, in Cape Town, in March. Joburg has its Pride Parade in October.
Some retailers exploited Pride Month for nakedly capitalist marketing purposes in June, but Pride Month has been a thing since 1968, so that’s hardly new.
Imagine how colourless your world must be to fear that we’re being over-run by a relentless army of happy gay people with a rainbow agenda.
Shepherd seems to argue that because South Africa is a largely Christian, conservative country, Pride shouldn’t really be happening here, and if it is, neoliberal imperialism must be to blame.
Autarky
‘With regard to agriculture,’ said Dlamini-Zuma, ‘I expect your summit to reflect on how, amongst ourselves, we should be able to produce what we consume and consume what we produce.’
‘We completely agree with this,’ says Shepherd. Imports are ipso facto bad, he says, especially when we can produce the same (or similar) goods locally.
Not a murmur about the possibility that foreign producers might produce those goods at better quality, or at lower prices, than domestic producers, and that domestic consumers shouldn’t be forced to pay higher prices to artificially keep inefficient local producers afloat.
Or that domestic manufacturers might be able to source better and cheaper parts from overseas than they can locally, so that they can in turn offer lower prices and better quality to their customers, foreign or domestic.
Cabanac goes on to explain that our economy is ‘broadly extractive’, and bemoans the fact that raw materials are exported rather than processed into manufactured goods within our borders.
Again, if it was more efficient to beneficiate our natural resources domestically, the market would have ensured that this gets done. The reason it isn’t getting done is because it is less efficient, more expensive, or entirely impossible.
And the reason for that isn’t foreign imperialist neoliberal hegemony, but poor domestic policies enacted by our own government, such as high minimum wages, inflexible labour laws, onerous empowerment requirements, and having broken our coal-fired power stations.
Apparently, because it’s getting difficult to extract minerals, we have to change the economy to use those minerals locally, Cabanac says. And we can’t do that, because of ‘Western rules’ and the ‘green agenda’.
Nope, I don’t see the logic here, either.
However, this kind of talk about autarky (self-sufficiency) is not unusual, either on the fascist, socialist left, or on the fascist, socialist right. Cabanac and his mate are sounding exactly like Ebrahim Patel, and like PW Botha, for that matter.
Two countries that put some real effort into autarky are Nazi Germany and North Korea.
The idea that free trade is bad for countries, and that self-sufficiency is good, is an idea firmly stuck in the 1960s.
Monetary theory
Then, Cabanac raises the monetary system, quoting Dlamini-Zuma: ‘The dominant Bretton Woods system and its subsequent neoliberal order have been based on rules that were not only imposed on us but have also been strictly applied only to the extent that they benefit Western corporations regardless of the immediate and/or future detriment of developing countries. Moreover, the West’s expressed belief in the developmental models they imposed on us has been a case of do, as I say and not as I do.’
Now I have my own views on the virtues and failings of multinational financial institutions, but let’s give the Morning Shot pair some rope.
‘When the Soviet Union fell,’ says Cabanac, American consultants recommended ‘a new way to do the economy’, including ‘privatisation of all state-owned enterprises, lowering taxes, austerity measures, and all the rest of it’.
He proceeds to blame all the ills of the Russian economy under Boris Yeltsin in the 1990s on this supposed influence.
‘It took someone like Putin to undo all of that,’ he claims, with dubious regard for historical truth.
He adds, venturing ever-deeper into the weeds: ‘That’s what she [Dlamini-Zuma] means by the neoliberal order: the imposition of rules that don’t apply to the context of the country’.
Shepherd says this is all a lot easier to understand than one may think. In his version, the US went to Russia in 1991 and said, ‘Hey guys, we need a currency backed by gold, and this currency based on gold could be used in order for us to all set our inflation rates and our economic targets and exchange rates to. So what we’re going to do is we’re going to use the dollar, because the dollar is backed to gold, and you all want gold, right, so let’s do that. Then America dropped the gold standard, and kept the dollar standard, and all of the global institutions have continued to align with the dollar even though the dollar isn’t backed by gold… So effectively the Americans set the value of their own currency and everbody else had to follow. So why is that important? Well, if I’m an American and I tell you, well, your Russian rouble, that was worth two roubles to my one dollar, is now worth 200 roubles to my one dollar, you don’t really have much of a choice and a say in what happens there. That ultimately leads to currency depreciation which leads to hyper-inflation in terms of pricing in your country. Hyper-inflation leads to loss of wealth. Loss of wealth leads to businesses collapsing, and so forth. You can see how this all occurred.’
Apologies
If you’re an economist, I apologise for putting you through such rank ignorance about monetary matters.
If you’re a historian, I also apologise for exposing you to this chap’s belief that 1933, when the US came off the gold standard for domestic transactions, and 1971, when it ended international convertibility of the dollar to gold, came after 1991, when the Americans told the Russians what’s what and how it was going to be.
Literally everything in that lengthy explanation of monetary history is wrong.
It is from that unsound footing that Shepherd agrees with Dlamini-Zuma, when she says: ‘Each of the Bretton Woods Institutions (WTO, WB, IMF) has served the enduring and hegemonic principles of unipolarity, principally in pursuit of Western dominance and control of wealth-producing resources from the developing world.’
Alt-right and far left
Cabanac agrees: ‘So basically, this speech says quite a few things that we like.’
Its talk of multipolarity is ‘right up our alley’, and Cabanac ‘can’t disagree with anything in the speech whatsoever’.
The alt-right dudes at the Morning Shot are now on the same anti-American, anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist, anti-liberal page as the ANC.
So, what happens when you fall all the way down the alt-right rabbit hole? You emerge in exactly the same place as the illiberal, economically illiterate socialists of the far left, praising the architect of lockdown.
One hopes that finding themselves in this unfortunate position will prompt them to pause and reflect on the lazy thinking that got them there.
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR
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