Hopefully, that subject line is enough of a warning about the content of this post.
I’m a parent. I have a son who has gone to sleep away camp for several years (minus one, due to the obvious). I don’t know if it is possible to send a kid to sleep away camp without at least entertaining the idea that the kid might not come back. Things Happen.
If you google — and I don’t actually recommend this — deaths at boy scout camps (not in quotes), you will get a lot of recent coverage of deaths at boy scout camps, boy scout camping weekends, etc. You might wonder if I intend to single out boy scout camps as particularly dangerous and evil. If you search on deaths at 4H camps, for example, you find a lot fewer news articles. On the other hand, there are probably more boy scout camps than there are 4H camps? I don’t really know.
I will note that the character, methods and goals of the Baden-Powells were really different from the character, methods and goals of 4H.
Anyway. I know absolutely nothing useful about Veldskool in South Africa. I followed a link in a Matt Levine column to this, in which a reader of Walter Isaacson’s biography of Elon Musk has some Issues with the content of the book. I am absolutely sympathetic to having Issues with the content of a book, and I will note right now that I haven’t read anything by Isaacson in full because samples are more than enough to convince me that actually reading one all the way through will turn into one of those absolutely tedious, huge number of words series of liveblogging posts that are the worst possible combination of infuriating and boring to read (writing them is cathartic, which is why I do it — way better than haranguing anyone unlucky enough to be physically near me).
https://davekarpf.substack.com/p/elon-musk-and-the-infinite-rebuyThe author of this post starts by criticizing a story about poker. The observation that having arbitrarily deep pockets and a willingness to walk away from the table as soon as win big is deeply infuriating to other poker players is not exactly a novel one. I mean, there’s a reason why tournaments don’t let you do this in general. But you know, never mind that.
Extended quote from substack begins here:
The first sign of trouble shows up on page 1 of the prologue. Isaacson opens with an anecdote from Musk’s troubled childhood, relating a story from when Elon was twelve and he was sent to veldskool, a wilderness survival camp:
“The kids were each given small rations of food and water, and they were allowed—indeed encouraged— to fight over them. (…) Near the end of the first week the boys were divided into two groups and told to attack each other. (…) Every few years, one of the kids would die.” (page 2)
The intent of this anecdote is to relate how, when Musk went back to veldskool at age sixteen, he realized he was too-big-to-bully. Isaacson uses this scene to impress upon his readers that (1) Elon learned at an early age that you have to fight to survive, (2) he carries the scars of that childhood with him today, and (3) it drives him to want to control and dominate every situation.
It’s an unbelievable story. And by that, I mean I don’t entirely believe it. Musk grew up rich and white in apartheid-era South Africa. Are you really telling me that rich white kids in South Africa were repeatedly dying, and the camp stayed open?
If veldskool left a trail of child corpses, it would’ve been covered in the newspapers. That’s something a reporter could easily track down. Instead, Isaacson merely confirms the anecdote with Musk’s brother (and frequent business partner) Kimball. Elon says it happened that way. Kimball says it happened that way. Maybe they’re exaggerating a bit, but it’s still a great anecdote!
This marks a fundamental problem that pops up throughout the book: (1) Musk is a serial liar. (2) Isaacson seems utterly disinterested in investigating whether anything Musk says is particularly true.
End of extended quote from substack.
OK. Let’s look into this. What happens if we google veldskool? Well, first, we find a bunch of people reminiscing about their time at veldskool. Definitely, both the people who enjoyed it in the era that Musk would have attended and the people who really, really didn’t seem to agree that the safety standards of veldskool in that era were not what one would expect from a camp in the United States in that era or now. The second thing that I would observe is that the spirit of veldskool in that era is much, much closer to Boy Scouts than, say, 4H. And the third thing I would observe is that people die repeatedly at Boy Scout camps _to this day_ and they don’t get shut down.
I can’t speak to whether South African newspapers would have covered deaths in Veldskool. I think the assertion that they would have covered those deaths is naive and implausible, but I don’t really know one way or the other. The idea that a reporter could easily track that down is ludicrous. While I think you probably _could_ access at least some newspaper archives in South Africa, unless you _immediately_ found deaths of children at veldskool, you would have to search very exhaustively to establish only that there had been no coverage. And remember, thinking that the newspapers of the time would have covered those deaths is naive and implausible.
Finally, and I cannot really emphasize this enough, we’ve spent the last decade or so documenting the horrific abuse in camps in the United States — deaths, maiming, sexual abuse, you name it. _This is an ongoing problem in the United States_, and camps that have deaths, including repeated and multiple deaths, are not automatically shut down. I really don’t understand why the author of this piece thinks that South Africa would magically be safer? But _especially_ I don’t understand why he thinks that a white boy in South Africa would magically be safe from the violence inherent in the Apartheid era. Violent regimes train their elites to perpetrate violence on the oppressed groups by being violent to those elites when they are young. That’s how you do this.
I have no particular reason to think that the book being criticized is accurate in any way shape or form. But the argument that this particular part of the book is wrong displays a degree of delusionality about our world that I find startling.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}