Musk and the History of the Nazi Salute
Elon Musk allegedly giving the Nazi salute is a perfect example of the boy who cried wolf. Or rather, the leftist who cried Nazi. We heard it for years. All white people are racist. America is a white supremacy. Trump is a literal Nazi. Now Musk, who says he used to be a Democrat “because they were the kindness party,” is a Nazi.
Hours after Trump was inaugurated as the 47th president of the United States, the tech billionaire hailed the outcome as “no ordinary victory.” Speaking to the crowd at the Capital One Arena in Washington, DC, he added, “This was a fork in the road of human civilization. This one really mattered. Thank you for making it happen!”
Musk then slapped his right hand over his heart and extended his arm up with his palm down and fingers together, saying, “My heart goes out to you!” No doubt, this did unmistakably resemble the Roman salute. But that doesn’t make Musk a Nazi.
The Roman salute originated with Jacques-Louis David’s 1784 painting The Oath of Horatii, in which the three Horatii brothers pledge their lives to Rome and volunteer to fight three brothers from the opposing army, thus sparing a costly battle between their two peoples. Later, this symbol of masculine self-sacrifice was adopted by Italian fascists, and then famously the Nazis.
Because the Nazis adopted the Roman salute, Americans decided to change their own flag salute, which was identical. When I was a kid, the Pledge of Allegiance was accompanied by the hand-over-heart salute. But this wasn’t always the case. The original salute for the Pledge of Allegiance was known as the Bellamy salute, named after the author of the Pledge itself, the socialist and Baptist minister Francis Bellamy.
Yes, the Pledge of Allegiance was written by a socialist.
The gesture was officially changed when Congress amended the Flag Code in 1942, in order to distance ourselves from what had become known as the “Nazi salute.”
But what has happened since 1942—or rather, since 2022—is exactly what I have longed warned would happen. The accusation no longer cuts. Progressives have engineered the semantic expansion of “fascism,” and helped normalize fascism itself in the process. As I recently wrote, Musk’s supports for AfD is concerning, as is the notion that he had no idea how this gesture would come off. But more likely than this being an example of neurodivergent social communication is the possibility that he and his new boss have nothing but disdain for the media and are consciously trolling, with the ancillary benefit of dominating the news cycle.
Still, though Trump has been known to talk pretty about dictators, the idea that Musk is winking at neo-Nazis to own the woke is a stretch, to say nothing of the unhinged accusation that he is announcing his Nazism on the global stage. Nevertheless, after diluting words like racist, sexist, fascist, and genocide into a post-modern soup of nihilistic morphemes, some folks still haven’t learned the lesson. Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a history professor at New York University, writes, “Historian of fascism here. It was a Nazi salute - and a very belligerent one too.”
Historian of woke hysteria here. It’s not 2020, and we’re not falling for this again.
I’ll just say here what I said on Facebook and what surprisingly many of my leftist/progressive friends seem to agree with:
I shouldn’t be surprised that people arguing whether or not Yilong Ma made a “Nazi salute” are completely missing the point. Either he didn’t and he’s just an insufferably cringe dork who doesn’t know how to move his hands or arms like a normal human being, or he did and he’s just an insufferably cringe dork who couldn’t resist making a blatant attempt to troll everyone into reacting just as they are now.
Take it from the history dork that has spent the better part of seven years now (not to mention a good portion of grad school) researching the rise, fall, and various permutations of Nazism: it doesn’t matter either way what Elon did because the 20th century’s genocidal right wing totalitarian state didn’t begin and end with the Roman salute (which by the way Americans were doing during the pledge of allegiance until Hitler ruined it for everyone). When he actually secures some kind of office, gets Trump to retire or waits for him to die, dissolves the office of the president and declares himself the CEO of the American people, and starts giving prophecies that some diasporic minority will pay for plunging the world into another global war, then maybe I’ll be worried about whether or not his weird hand motions actually carry any significance.
I served in the Army. I am more sensitive than the average person to signals that a person may be betraying the idea of America. My commitment to the American idea was bought and paid for with the labors of an Infantry Officer - not an absolute protectant against error, but certainly a much higher bar than, “writes long-winded comments on social media.”
Your whiny, handwringing complaint (Michael, the commenter’s, not the author’s) is a sterile gesture. I have no evidence that you care about America or Americans. My greatest suspicion is that you merely desire to be seen as “the right sort of” person. To you I say, “take the log out of your own eye, before you attempt to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.”