“Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre
I hate the Ku Klux Klan, but the older I get, the more I have to grudgingly give them credit for at least one thing.
Wait, keep reading!
I assume every member of the KKK to be a dimwitted rube who takes pride in his race solely because there is no other element of his life he could possibly take pride in. But I’ll give the Klan this: if you go up to a Klansman and accuse him of being a racist, he’s not going to argue that you’re misconstruing his message.
Last week, I touched briefly on Elon Musk’s two Nazi salutes at President Donald Trump’s inauguration. It’s a topic that deserves a bit more focus.
I’ve seen the clip of Musk’s two salutes several times. In the video, he’s rambling about how great this victory is, and then he pauses, claps his right hand over his heart, and throws out his arm in what is not merely a Nazi salute, but a seemingly practiced one. And then he turns around and does it a second time. He really puts his back into it both times too, you can hear him grunt. The Hitler Youth couldn’t have done it any better. He then tells the crowd that “my heart goes out to you.”
A lot of people seem to have a vested interest in denying that Musk’s Nazi salute was a Nazi salute. Here are some of the explanations I’ve heard:
- “He was doing a Roman salute!”
The same Roman salute that was co-opted by fascists in the 1920s and ultimately became the Nazi salute?
- “He was doing the Bellamy salute!”
The same Bellamy salute that was used during the Pledge of Allegiance starting in the late 1800s and then formally replaced in 1942 by Congress because it looked identical to the Nazi salute? The one that no one under the age of 90 had ever heard of until last week?
- “He’s just autistic!”
It is difficult for me to express how inaccurate and offensive this explanation is to autistic people without the use of Powerpoint and a table to beat my shoe on.
- “He was just giving his heart to the people and he did it awkwardly!”
I don’t believe this either, but I’ll at least give it some credit since Elon Musk is the single most awkward human being to ever exist outside of a high school anime club formed by the people kicked out of the more popular high school anime club.
But sure, I’ll bite. Let’s say that Musk did just make some kind of weird arm gesture that unintentionally looked exactly like a Nazi salute. You know what I would do if that happened to me? I’d explain myself. I’d apologize publicly. I certainly wouldn’t respond by making a bunch of Nazi-themed puns on Twitter.
“Some people will Goebbels anything down!” Musk tweeted in the aftermath of the controversy. “His pronouns would have been He/Himmler! Bet you did Nazi that coming!”
Boy, you want to hear jokes like that, you normally have to find a fedora-wearing 14 year old boy who really identifies with the Joker.
If I were in Musk’s shoes and trying to deny that I did a Nazi salute, another thing I probably wouldn’t do is make a surprise video appearance at a rally for the German Alternative fuer Deutschland (AfD) far-right party. And while at that rally, I definitely wouldn’t say that “it’s good to be proud of German culture, German values, and not to lose that in some sort of multiculturalism that dilutes everything. … Children should not be guilty of the sins of their parents, let alone their grandparents.”
To be clear, I’m not saying that Elon Musk is a card-carrying Nazi. For one thing, the Nazis designed reliable, affordable cars. However, I am saying that at the very least, Elon Musk supports and platforms Nazis both in person and on Twitter and he literally did two Nazi salutes at the Presidential inauguration, and he knows EXACTLY what he’s doing. He’s pretending his detractors are reactionary little sissies while simultaneously blasting a racist dog whistle at his base.
There’s a reason that it’s illegal in Germany to do a Nazi salute or fly a Nazi flag. The Germans know it’s a slippery slope. They know that these symbols embolden the worst people at the fringes of society, and that a Nazi salute done with a sense of smirking irony is still a Nazi salute. Whether in Germany or the U.S., it is not something that we can allow to become normalized.
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