I’ve told you this story before: how in the spring of 1978, my senior year at Harvard, the university decided to address the increasing controversy regarding its investments in South Africa.

The members of the Harvard Corporation, that’s the group that actually runs the place and manages its enormous endowment, held a town hall of sorts. They invited anyone who wanted to come to speak about the situation in South Africa and advise them about what they should do. I, being mostly clueless about matters in the Big Wide World, decided to find out what all the fuss was about.

I learned a lot during that meeting, and not just about the horrors of life for Black South Africans under the apartheid regime. I learned what the cold hard face of power looked like. I watched these powerful men, supposedly some of the sharpest minds on the planet, listening to what no doubt they already knew, but remaining apparently unmoved and uncaring.

I was astonished. How could anyone react in this way? That moment would be the start of my “radicalization,” if you will, to whatever small extent I might be said to be “radicalized.”

I was reminded of all this by today’s news (5/21), about the visit by South African President Cyril Ramaphosa to the White House. No doubt at the behest of Elon Musk, he wanted to berate Ramaphosa about a supposed campaign of “white genocide.” Ramaphosa was prepared for trouble, though. He brought some white government officiàls, and some others who were friends of Trump, to provide evidence to the contrary. (The irony of it all was awfully thick.)

On reflection, I realize that same horrid face, that same visage of arrogance, privilege and cruelty, has been popping up again and again ever since then. You can see it in the gleeful expressions of the American soldiers in the “enhanced interrogation” photos from Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. You can see it in the pictures of children separated from their parents from the detention centers on the southern border. You see it in the face of Benjamin Netanyahu, and the other supporters of the Israeli campaign against Gaza. You can see it in Kristi Noem’s “photo op” at the CECOT hyperprison in El Salvador, in Marco Rubio’s callous dissing of supposed “gangbanger” Kilmar Abrego Garcia. 

It’s not hard to find more examples, of course, and not only in recent American history. This approach to power is always tempting, though now may be its most blatant and shameless emergence in history.

But history also reminds us that those who fall for this temptation never last for long.