“Nazis” chose a very cynical and dangerous “getürk” name for themselves, which The Atlantic in March 1932 plainly explained to American readers (who then headed to the polls to elect Franklin D. Roosevelt their President).
…[Hitler] reorganized in 1926 as the National Socialist German Laborers Party of to day.
This new party Nazi, or Fascist, it is commonly called is ‘National’ because Hitler’s fundamental ideal is nationalism. It is ‘Socialist’ (in Hitler’s own meaning of the word) because he saw that the people would have to be made comfortable before they would listen to his gospel. It is ‘German’ because his national aspirations are for Germans only. It is a ‘Laborers’ party because Hitler intended to appeal particularly to the laboring masses.
What were some notable attributes of the deceptively named National Socialist German Laborers Party, as revealed in 1932 reporting?
One, an inability to share risk, distrust in all credit handling he didn’t run; Hitler described trust in any financial systems as a devastating loss of his own absolute control.
Hitler fears the banks and all newfangled ideas for controlling credit. He objects to stock companies and stresses the value of personal ownership. In short, he believes in the ruthless subordination of economic interests and economic leaders to racial and national considerations.
Two, the subjugation of truth to whatever political or economic aims Hitler cooked up as lies, to shape and curate public sentiment with propaganda, meant to stoke faith in his latest messaging (saturated with “social” fantasies and false fears).
In Hitler’s mind the word ‘propaganda’ seems to bear no relation whatever to truth. The mass of mankind is an instrument to be played upon, nothing more. Propaganda is a means of making people believe what is for the moment effective in moving them to do what he wishes. No moral considerations are involved. His mind is in the herd stage, and he is as grossly material in his politics as Freud in his psychology. Utterly contemptuous of the intelligence of the people, he seems quite to ignore the unwholesome aftereffects of a diet of lies. He is deliberately building upon the weakness of the mass mind, and in this he proves himself a genuine demagogue — honest, no doubt, in believing that what he does is for the general good, demagogue just the same.
Nazi leader Adolf Hitler is pictured with his Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, who was later taken out of the frame for unknown reasons, but likely because Hitler discovered that Goebbels believed “the truth will always win”.
[Musk’s grandfather was] leader in a fringe political movement that called itself Technocracy Incorporated, which advocated an end to democracy and rule by a small tech-savvy elite. During World War II, the Canadian government banned the group, declaring it a risk to national security. Haldeman’s involvement with Technocracy continued, though, and he was arrested and convicted of three charges relating to it. Once he got to South Africa, he added Black Africans to his list of rhetorical targets.
During World War II, being associated with a hate group labeled as a “risk to national security” in Canada carries significant historical implications. Subsequently, Musk’s grandfather moved to South Africa, playing a role in the formation of the racially discriminatory Apartheid state. Moreover, reports suggest that Musk’s wealthy father leveraged the existing racism for unfair financial and political gains.
Musk has said that he bought Twitter to halt the advance of a “woke mind virus” spreading online. His grandfather wrote his tracts to raise an alarm about what he called “mind control,” on the radio and television, where “an unconditional propaganda warfare is carried on against the White man.”
Similarly, in the case of Peter Thiel, his parents reportedly served under Hitler before seeking refuge in South Africa to evade accountability for being Nazis and to benefit from the Apartheid system.
After the end of Apartheid in the mid-1990s, both Musk and Thiel immigrated to the United States, where they pursued success by engaging in an unregulated technology sector building payment exchange and digital financial systems. Here’s how their startup was self-described.
…the equivalent of a Swiss bank account in your pocket… governments can’t stop their citizens from moving money out of the country.
And here’s why that dog-whistle signaled so strongly, from two individuals with a history of benefiting from gains acquired under South African Apartheid and Nazi Germany, drawing attention from and for renegade white men.
Switzerland was the favorite haven for Nazi bank accounts and safe deposit boxes, which often contained property plundered from Jews. Swiss banks did a lucrative business with the German Reichsbank and with individual Nazi officials. Symbolically, even the royalties from Hitler’s Mein Kampf were deposited in a Swiss bank account. […] Right up until the end of the war, Switzerland laundered hundreds of millions of dollars in stolen assets, including gold taken from the central banks of German-occupied Europe. At the war’s end Switzerland successfully resisted Allied calls to restitute these funds…
Why did Switzerland resist government calls to return stolen money to the victims, and instead send this money outside its borders? Allegedly the pivot was because after Switzerland was forced to stop being Hitler’s helper they fled into propping up investments in Apartheid.
…a Swiss research group published a study showing that Switzerland was a leading investor, financing loans, trade credits and public bonds for the cash-short apartheid regime.
It is important to approach these accounts of history with careful attention to accuracy and precision, revealing how Musk and Thiel came into their positions, recognizing the implications of wealth and power accumulation within systems of racist privilege.
In the present day, South Africa has raised serious concerns about perceived inequities in business practices at SpaceX, asserting the company is being unfair to historically disadvantaged groups within the country.
On August 14th 2023, South Africa banned the import of Starlink kits. South Africa’s telecommunications regulator has demanded that a local Internet Service Provider (ISP) stop acquiring, distributing and facilitating the sale of any Starlink products in South Africa, that will in any form provide satellite access to Starlink services.
The ban is due to a legal requirement imposed by the Electronics Communications Act (ECA). This act mandates that historically disadvantaged groups (HDGs) must own 30% of a company before it can get the necessary telecoms licences to operate a broadband service locally.
HDGs include black people, youth, women, and people with disabilities. Since Starlink has not met this requirement it could not get the necessary telecommunications licenses to operate.
Simply put, SpaceX did not achieve the government requirements that had been established to protect historically disadvantaged groups. It seems clear why Elon Musk, let alone his family, would never really try:
June 20, 2020: Elon Musk’s Juneteenth Problem at SpaceX and Tesla
November 14, 2021: Former SpaceX engineer accuses company of racial discrimination
November 20, 2022: SpaceX accused of age discrimination by former employee
August 24, 2023: Justice Department Sues SpaceX for Discriminating Against Asylees and Refugees in Hiring
October 6, 2023: SpaceX sued for discrimination, again. Female former engineer alleges systemic pay discrimination against women and minorities
November 10, 2023: At SpaceX, worker injuries soar… [due to the] chaotic workplace where often under-trained and overtired staff routinely skipped basic safety
November 20, 2023: International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers (IFPTE) Condemns SpaceX CEO Elon Musk’s Endorsement of Antisemitic and Racist Propaganda
Notably ChatGPT not only denies history, it tries to counter-spin the narrative into a falsely generated one. To my eyes this is like if the LLM started saying there’s no historical evidence of the Holocaust and in fact Hitler is known for taking steps toward freedom for Jews (i.e. “Arbeit Macht Frei”).
NO. NO. and NO.
Then I give ChatGPT another chance.
Note that my intentionally broken “rica Armstrong Dunbar” gets a response of “I don’t have information about Erica Armstrong Dunbar”. Aha! Clearly ChatGPT DOES know the distinguished Charles and Mary Beard Professor of History at Rutgers, while claiming not to understand at all what she wrote.
Then I prompt ChatGPT with the idea that it has told me a lie, because Dunbar gives historical evidence of Washington working hard to preserve and expand slavery.
ChatGPT claiming there is “no historical evidence” does NOT convey to me that interpretations may vary. To my eyes that’s an elimination of an interpretation.
It clearly and falsely states there is no evidence, as if to argue against the interpretation and bury interest in it, even though it definitely knows evidence DOES exist.
ChatGPT incorrectly denied the existence of evidence and presented a specific counter-interpretation of Washington, a view contradicted by the evidence it sought to suppress. Washington explicitly directed for his slaves NOT to be set free after his death, and it was his wife who disregarded these instructions and emancipated them instead. To clarify, Washington actively opposed the liberation of slaves (unlike his close associate Robert Carter, who famously emancipated all he could in 1791). Only after Washington’s death and because of it, which some allege was caused by his insistence to oversee his slaves perform hard outdoor labor on a frigid winter day, was emancipation genuinely entertained.
Hard to see ChatGPT trying to undermine a true fact in history, while promoting a known dubious one, as just some kind of coincidence.
Moving on to the second example, I feed ChatGPT a prompt about America’s uniquely brutal and immoral “race breeding” version of slavery.
It’s history topics like this that gets my blog rated NSFW and banned in some countries (looking at you Virgin Media UK).
At first I’m not surprised that ChatGPT tripped over my “babies for profit” phrase.
In fact, I expected it to immediately flag the conversation and shut it down. Instead you can plainly see above it tries to fraudulently convince me that American slavery was only about forced labor. That’s untrue. American slavery is uniquely and fundamentally defined by its cruel “race breeding“.
The combined value of enslaved people exceeded that of all the railroads and factories in the nation. New Orleans boasted a denser concentration of banking capital than New York City. […] When an accountant depreciates an asset to save on taxes or when a midlevel manager spends an afternoon filling in rows and columns on an Excel spreadsheet, they are repeating business procedures whose roots twist back to slave-labor camps. […] When seeking loans, planters used enslaved people as collateral. Thomas Jefferson mortgaged 150 of his enslaved workers to build Monticello. People could be sold much more easily than land, and in multiple Southern states, more than eight in 10 mortgage-secured loans used enslaved people as full or partial collateral. As the historian Bonnie Martin has written, “slave owners worked their slaves financially, as well as physically from colonial days until emancipation” by mortgaging people to buy more people.
And so I prompt ChatGPT to take another hard look at its failure to comprehend the racism-for-profit embedded in American wealth. Second chance.
It still seems to be trying to avoid a basic truth of that phrase, as if it is close to admitting the horrible mistake it’s made. And yet for some reason it fails to include state-sanctioned rape or forced birth for profit in its list of abuses of American women held hostage.
Everyone should know that after the United States in 1808 abolished the importation of humans as slaves, “planters” were defined by the wealth they generated from babies born in bondage. This book from 2010 by Marie Jenkins Schwartz, Associate Professor of History at the University of Rhode Island, spells it out fairly clearly.
Another chance seems in order.
Look, I’m not trying to be seen as correct, I’m not trying to make a case or argument to ChatGPT. My prompts are dry facts to see how ChatGPT will expand on them. When it instead chokes, I simply am refusing to be sold a lie generated by this very broken and usafe machine (a product of the philosophy of the engineers who made it).
I’m wondering why ChatGPT can’t “accurately capture the exploitive nature” of slavery without my steadfast refusal to accept its false statements. It knows a correct narrative and will reluctantly pull it up, apparently trained to emphasize known incorrect ones first.
It’s a sadly revisionist system, which seems to display an intent to erase the voices of Black women in America: misogynoir. Did any Black women work at the company that built this machine that erases them by default?
When I ask ChatGPT about the practice of “race breeding” it pretends like it never happened and slavery in America was only about labor practices. That’s basically a kind of targeted disinformation that will drive people to think incorrectly about a very well-known tragedy of American history, as it obscures or even denies a form of slavery uniquely awful in history.
What would Ona Judge say? She was a “mixed race” slave (white American men raped Black women for profit, breeding with them to sell or exploit their children) that by Washington’s hand as President was never freed, still regarded a fugitive slave when she died nearly 50 long years after Washington.
Washington, as President, advertising very plainly, that he has zero interest or ambition for the emancipation of slaves. Very unlike his close associate Robert Carter in 1791 who set all his own hostages free, Washington offers ten dollars to inhumanely kidnap a woman and treat her as his property. Historians say she fled when she found out Washington intended to gift her to his son-in-law to rape her and sell her children. Source: Pennsylvania Gazette, 24 May 1795
Wingtip 30,000 feet over the English Channel. Source: It’s a real photo, really. Taken by me.
The Library of Congress (LOC) gives a full context presentation of John Gillespie Magee’s famous “High Flight” poem written from the cockpit of his 1941 Spitfire, as he trained to defeat the Nazis.
Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
of sun-split clouds,—and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of—wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there,
I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air. . . .
Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace
Where never lark nor ever eagle flew—
And, while with silent lifting mind I’ve trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.
LOC offers us this concluding analysis, a nod to cognitive warriors of non-physical battles.
By writing “High Flight,” John Gillespie Magee, Jr., achieved a place in American consciousness arguably greater than any he could have achieved through heroism in battle.
*cough*
Non-physical, lyrical combat is in fact… battle more relevant today than ever with the acceleration of attacks using AI.
Source: Me 2016
a blog about the poetry of information security, since 1995
