The Myth of the Police State
February 11, 2026 at 04:30PMA year ago, Donald Trump extended expedited refugee status to Afrikaners, based on the lie that white South Africans have been oppressed and targeted for revenge by their Black neighbors since the end of apartheid. But as Eve Fairbanks argues, this isn’t the only lie or misconception about the country she’s called home for the last 16 years:
What is often overlooked in the American fascination with South Africa is the violence the apartheid regime wrought on white people. They were not its main or intended victims; they were supposed to be its beneficiaries. But the apartheid regime became a police state that heavily circumscribed its white citizens’ lives, too. School curriculums were sanitized; the press was cowed. White teenagers were drafted into a brutal military that was perpetually mobilized to fight.
The world that Trump and his acolytes have said they want to build, in fact, bears many striking resemblances to the unbearable policing that happened under apartheid. But the message from the vast majority of South Africans to people in the United States is: You won’t like it.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2026/02/11/the-myth-of-the-police-state/
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