Did World’s Top Tycoon Just Use South Sudanese Tribal Marks In Satan’s Image

June 2, 2022

This story was rejected by Opera Hub for reasons best known to them.

Faithbook

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The forehead marks in this cartoon that brought uproar against Elon’s tweet are exclusively found with South Sudanese Nuer and Dinka tribes in Africa. (Cartoon courtesy of @elonmusk).

Link: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1531468200847736838?t=91m8AHTyg38OPKeXxE1uog&s=08

Racism is a sensitive matter when it comes to gestures made by world’s celebrities and leaders. “Elon Musk must have offended not only the South Sudanese but also their leaders, who are identified with tribal marks,” said Atem Daniel in a heated discussion over the cartoon used by owner of Twitter, Tesla and SpaceX.

On Twitter, the image and wordings are both corrosive to both Africans in particular and Christian faithful in general.

The tweet has attracted fast and furious sort of public wrath from online followed of the world’s richest man for intentionally using a man’s face with contour traditional marks in a cartoon that contrasts Satan with Jesus Christ.

With his trademark short and comic tweets, the world’s top tycoon tweeted the carricature with this simple labelling: “Literally…”

The inscribed conversational caption between Satan and Jesus Christ that Mr. Musk describes to be ‘literally’…true or relevant to his situation or whatever the experience may be, according to analysts, reads as follows:

“Am I being tested again? Is this one of your hardest battles?” asks the Devil to Jesus in this cartoon, to which Jesus responds;

“You literally just need to put your phone down and go outside.”

This dialogue is not confusing but also controversial, though.

As to why the caption that conveys the message therein matches the chief tweeter’s interest is not known, just as the source of the cartoon is.

In reactions, tweeps condemn him for his habit of using such provocative, hate-speech-loaded, artistic illustrations whose sources are anonymous.

“Dude, just leave the credit/watermark on stuff you enjoy and post or make small effort to acknowledge it after. It doesn’t hurt anyone to do that. Most people would be excited by your engagement if it came in that form and create positive interactions rather than negative ones.” @Mattsaincome

Another follower joins in, making fun that the commenter was kidding, and that Elon’s “taking credit for other people’s work is his brand. That’s why all his followers think he personally builds cars and rockets by hand.”

However, the most concerning bashing comes from South Sudanese, especially those who identify with the near-racist caricature. @Jonnypenny, a South Sudanese running Faithbook News blog on Opera, replied to Mr. Musk, who is a South African white by origin.

“But Mr. Musk, did you notice that kind of a ‘mask’ on the face of Mr. Devil?” Jon Pen tweeted on the cartoon. “Did you realize the contour lines on the forehead mimic those on an African man, exclusively from South Sudan?– a country that came to existence after you ceased to be South African native!”

Besides, other commenters were clearly in condemnation of Elon Musk’s rightist and racist tendencies.

As if that is not enough, Ukraine war enthusiast that goes by the name ‘The Intellectual Mercenary’ or @Intellmercy chipped in with this prosody of Musk’s tweet.

“Or am I being insulted again? Is this one of your harshest tweets? Elon, just put down your phone and mine your space migration craze or fuel-less Tesla’s. You won afford politics and racism as ingredients of your commercialism. No to #racism.”

The post attached here from @aftaboss is equally in further prove of the implied message in the caricature.

Other angry respondents posted their comments in defence of Christianity that seems to be under attack by the rich man, who is probably in the socio-economic class that Jesus Christ once described as whose entry into the kingdom of God is more impossible than the passing of a camel through the eye of a needle. (Matthew 19:24)

Randy Knodle, who also follows the science-reliant Musk, wrote on the controversial tweet, thus.

“It takes way, way, way more faith to be an atheist. Faith in scientists who change their opinions every 25 years. Faith in laws of science that say you can’t have an uncaused effect but yet can’t explain where the first atom came from. I don’t have enough faith to be an atheist.”

The debate rolls down to faith versus science, and onto Elon’s stingeness of not donating to the poor the 44 billion US dollars that he is pouring into the blue ocean of Twittersphere. One guy protested that the donation could have saved the world from hunger.

Beyond that, Elon’s leaning towards the ultra-right wing of the American democracy was questioned. Recently upon tactically acquiring Twitter, he started to attack the Democrats and their leftist following.

He also suggested that he was going to release Donald Trump from this kind of Twitter prison. Mr. Trump, the USA’s 45th president, was banned on Twitter when he fanned the bloody storming of the Capitol (the legislative temple of the American democracy) after losing elections to Joe Biden in November 2020.

With Trump’s recent snubbing of Musk’s enticing to rejoin him on Twitter, Riley reminded Elon, “Trump isn’t coming back to Twitter, he even said, so he is staying on truth social.”

Truth Social is Trump’s new Social Media site that he launched in response to his ban from other social sites. However, the site seems to have been given a cold shoulder by netizens both in USA and beyond.

In conclusion, the reaction to this somewhat racist depiction is associated to Trumpians’ tendency of hating the African Americans, hence the sensitivity in the tweet that not only attacks the Black but also the Christians in America.