A Nazi Salute By Any Other Name

I spent the week reading about the semiotics of the Nazi salute, far-right extremism, information and society. I very much recommend The Hitler Salute: On the Meaning of a Gesture. And then there was another twenty hours writing and re-writing this piece. Yesterday, this essay it was still over 7,000 words long. Today, it is just 1500. Anyone who has had to synthesize hundreds of pages of research into a readable piece of writing appreciates the effort that word reduction represents. (And maybe I should have gotten it down to 1300? Next time!)

I think this is piece is important. I am grateful I was able to wring it out of myself. And as I worked on it I just kept thinking, I wanted to grow up to be Ray Bradbury, imagining desolate futures from a protected present. I did not want to try to write my way to a protected future from a desolate present. But we mostly don't get the work we want, we mostly get the work that needs to be done. And if we're lucky, we get to do that work with and for people who care. Thank you for sharing this desolate present with me. Let's share our protected future.

I am only able to do this work because of your financial support. Even donating $1 every once in awhile helps!

(I could use some help.)

Hello.

After Donald Trump was sworn in as president, he held his inauguration parade inside the Capital One Arena.  It made some aesthetic sense. Trump is just like such a Commoduscore girlie. When Commodus wanted to hype up a crowd, he’d behead an ostrich. Trump sent out Elon Musk. 

Musk walked onto the stage, doing the white man overbite and flapping his arms. He thanked the crowd for getting Trump into office. And then he performed the Nazi salute. His arm and hand extended upward in a straight line, palm open and down, fingers pressed closed together. He turned around and performed the gesture again. He said, “My heart goes out to you. It is thanks to you that the future of civilization is assured." (Fascists famously never talk about the future of civilization. Ahem.)

Musk has been publicly Nazi-adjacent for a while. When he took over X, the platform became a place where “verified pro-Nazi accounts flourish.”  He’s amplified and agreed with overtly antisemitic posts on X. Musk has been positively bursting with support for Alternative für Deutschland, a far-right political party in German. AfD leadership shouts Nazi slogans and includes Nazi conspiracy theories in speeches. Der Spiegel reported that a study found antisemitism belongs to “the programmatic core” of the AfD.

Nazi! Nazi! as New Girl’s Schmidt would say. 

Nazi salutes only exist in relation to Nazism.  But in the days after the inauguration, my social media feeds were filled with posts claiming there was no way to know if Musk’s Nazi salute conveyed Nazi meaning. Some of the people posting were Musk apologists. But most seemed resigned. They’ve given up on mutual understanding.  Each post shrugged, Who can tell what anything really means in the age of algorithms, troll-speak and data extraction?

It's an unsettling glimpse of the Alienation Loop, a building block of the fascist state.  In this construction, social encounters are mediated by a third party, the present is isolated from the past and future, information is split from human experience and documents are used to generate indifference. Indifference yields distrust, oppression, and annihilation.

The Nazi salute constructed a constant present that could only exist in relation to Hitler.

The Alienation Loop was used to build the Nazi State. Anything that conveys meaning is a document. And the Nazi Salute was a key document in Nazi programming. In The Hitler Salute: On the Meaning of a Gesture, German sociologist Tilman Allert wrote that “the story of Nazi Germany begins with indifference.” 

The Holocaust could only occur in a society where a critical mass of people had allowed themselves to become disconnected from shared meaning. We must understand the Nazi salute as “not only a product of those dark and sinister times but as a contributor to them.” 

The Nazis took the salute from Italian Fascists, who claimed they’d gotten the salute from the Romans. Fascists always invoke heritage as a defense of their modern nationalism. They are always lying. There is no historical evidence of Romans performing any gesture that looks anything like the Fascist salute. Pundits claiming Elon was doing a “Roman salute” are merely repeating 20^th century Fascist talking points. 

The Nazi salute points upward into empty space, designating a fictive realm of possible encounter …Like lines of perspective or the beams of searchlights at Nazi Party rallies that shone into the night sky where they met in an infinitely distant beyond...- Tilman Allert

The Nazi salute took the place of public greetings and public farewells.  Humans have the capacity to conceptualize the past, present and future. Our greeting rituals help us understand our relation to one another through space and time. We come from the past and say hello to one another create a “mutual present.” We say goodbye because we understand what it means to part and we can imagine a future when we will be reunited. The Nazi salute constructed a constant present that could only exist in relation to Hitler.

Compulsory by 1933, the salute inserted Hitler as a “mediating third party” in every human encounter. State police patrolled public spaces watching for non-compliance. Paul Schneider, a Protestant clergyman, refused to salute the Nazi flag on Hitler’s birthday. He was arrested, tortured, and then killed. Paul Schneider understood that gestures have meaning and that meaning is all we have. 

Mostly though the Germans complied, turning their backs on their “own agency in social interactions.” One German child said she walked on her father’s left side if she wanted to hold his hand. He raised his right arm dozens of times during even brief outings. 

With the Hitler salute, the regime intruded into the tiniest elements of everyday life. Postmen used the greeting when they knocked on people’s doors to deliver packages or letters. Customers entering department stores were greeted with “Heil Hitler, how may I help you?” Dinner guests brough, as house gifts, glasses etched with the words, “Heil Hitler”; children were given three-inch-tall plastic figures with pivoting right arms.. - Tilman Allert

The Germans lost the ability to trust the information conveyed by even the simplest gesture.  The dozens of daily encounters that create, maintain and protect community became dangerous. People denounced neighbors who did not salute, or did not salute enthusiastically enough. Every greeting helped transform German society into “the sphere of mistrust,” where other humans “were simultaneously present and absent.” 

Each salute reinforced the alienation loop, helping to create the conditions fascists need to be true. Max Weber wrote that charisma “is a revolutionary force that unleashes a change of direction in people's beliefs and actions as part of a complete reorientation of attitudes toward every individual form of life and indeed the world itself. The Nazi salute was part of that reorientation in Nazi Germany." Hitler’s charismatic authority surged through its constantly constructed network of self-alienation.

It has been six days since Elon Musk performed a Nazi salute at Donald Trump’s indoor parade.

During that time he’s recited Nazi rhetoric at an AfD rally. He also posted a series of Nazi puns on X. 

Don’t say Hess to Nazi accusations! Some people will Goebbels anything down! Stop Göring your enemies! His pronouns would have been He/Himmler! Bet you did nazi see that coming

When Musk posted the puns, I watched the alienation loop began again, Who can tell what anything really means in the age of algorithms, troll-speak and data extraction?

I can. I can tell you what those words mean. 

Rudolf Hess helped write Mein Kampf. He helped draft the Nuremberg Laws, stripping German Jewish people of their rights to citizenship paved the way for the Holocaust. Hess organized the Nuremberg Rallies. He ordered the establishment of racial registries, creating the record system necessary for “mass evacuation” to extermination camps. His grave was inscribed with the words, “I dared it” and it became a neo-Nazi shrine.

He killed himself. 

Joseph Goebbels was the Nazi party’s chief propogandist. He used radio and film to antisemitism and paranoia. He also used propaganda to incite pogroms. He sparked and then inflamed Kristallnacht. During the Night of Broken Glass, hundreds of Jewish people were killed. In the days afterward, at least 30,000 Jewish men were sent to concentration camps. His work was instrumental in sending millions more to the camps. Goebbels controlled the distribution of information across German territories. He advocated for total war. 

When it was evident the Nazis were going to lose, Joseph Goebbels murdered his six children. Helga was 12 when Jospeh Goebbels murdered her. Hilde was eleven when Joseph Goebbels murdered her.  Helmut was nine years old when Joseph Goebbels murdered him. Holde was eight years old when Joseph Goebbels murdered her. Hedda was six years old when Joseph Goebbels murdered her. Heide was four years old when Joseph Goebbels murdered her.

He killed himself. 

Herman Göring controlled the Storm Troopers, the paramilitary wing of the Nazi party that helped Hitler rise to power. He claimed he started the Reischstag fire. He agitated for the invasion of Czechoslovakia and Poland, claiming the Czech people and the Polish people were subhuman and deserved to be liquidated.  Göring created the Gestapo. He required the registration of all Jewish property, engineering a systemic dispossession of the Jewish people. Göring wrote the memo that ordered the organization of the Final Solution.

He killed himself. 

Heinrich Himmler ran the SS. He oversaw the construction of the Dachau, the first concentration camp. Himmler said the “extermination of the Jewish people” was a “glorious chapter” in German history. He designed killing centers with gas chambers because he was worried murdering millions of Jewish people one by one would negatively impact the mental health of men in the SS. When he witnessed a gassing, he was so pleased he gave 28 people promotions. 

Over six million people died in the camps Himmler operated, at least one million of them were children. Himmler commissioned the drafting of the Generalplan Ost – Nazi Germany’s master plan for the “liquidation” of Eastern Europeans the Nazis considered untermenschen. The GPO killed over 14 million people. 

He killed himself. 

Musk is invoking Nazis, supporting Nazis, and doing Nazi salutes because Elon Musk is a Nazi.

He was allowed to stand on Donald Trump’s stage at his indoor parade because Donald Trump – and every person in power around Donald Trump - is fine with Nazis. Nazis and people who are fine with Nazis can only distribute distrust, oppression and annihilation. 

And so? What can we do to resist billionaire Nazis? Let's start by disrupting the Alienation Loop. That part is pretty easy, really. We've just got to recognize the meaning in our shared existence, and share that meaning with the people around us. Help the people around you recognize the Alienation Loop. And let them share meaning with you too.

The rest of the work is going to be a bit harder, I'm afraid. But take heart! The end of indifference is the beginning of the end of Nazis.

Goodbye.