Donald Trump, through Joel Pollak as ambassador, will attempt to export the alt-right’s “civilisation of death” agenda, writes Ahmed Haroon Jazbhay.
Speculation is rife that US President Donald Trump aims to send South African-born Joel Pollak as his ambassador to the country.
Pollak is editor-at-large of Breitbart news, a US publication of the alt-right (defined by the Washington Post as a “far-right movement whose followers hold racist, anti-Semitic and sexist beliefs and who desire a whites only state”).
He was once a speech writer for former DA leader Tony Leon and played an influential role in the success of Trump’s campaign through Breitbart’s alt-right reporting agenda.
The alt-right agenda of the Trump administration, part of the wider agenda of Western modernity/coloniality, is nothing but a “civilisation of death” which hides beneath the rhetoric of illegal immigration, “radical Islam”, and the security and sovereignty of Western Europe and the US.
Alt-right politicians and thinkers such as Pollak privilege knowledge and narratives produced by the Western world without any critical thinking.
Trump, through Pollak as ambassador, will attempt to export the alt-right’s “civilisation of death” agenda through advocating an irrational fear of immigrants, Muslims and blacks in general, in the process further entrenching the oppressive agenda of Western modernity.
Although Pollak’s appointment as US ambassador to South Africa is not a certainty, his main challenger is believed to be Mike Cernovich, an equally divisive alt-right politician.
Cernovich has made no quarrels of his attempt to influence race relations when it comes to South Africa’s foreign policy.
His tweet, “the white genocide in South Africa is real”, will resonate deeply among white extremists and fundamentalists in the country who irrationally fear an existential threat.
In anticipation of an alt-right US ambassador, South Africans should begin to engage an alternative decolonial epistemology, one which discusses the nature of knowledge-making.
Latin American decolonial thinker Walter Mignolo writes that “there is no longer a place in the world for only one trajectory to reign over the others.
Imperium has run its course and global futures are being built in which many trajectories and options will be available; however, there will be no place for one option to pretend to be the option”.
South Africans of conscience must continue to lobby the government to reject the alt-right ambassadorial appointments with the contempt it deserves.
Failure to do so will have grave consequences for a progressive democracy such as ours.
* Dr Jazbhay is an executive member of the Media Review Network.