In The Man in the High Castle, the dystopian novel by Philip K. Dick, Nazi Germany and Japan have won the war and divided the US between them. So it’s 1960 and all over the Eastern United States people are flicking Nazi salutes. Some readers may have seen the Amazon Prime series based on the books. Perhaps Elon Musk watched it and perhaps he didn’t. In any case his salute was as perfect as any member of the fictional American SS could have hoped to execute.
Except was it a fascist salute? Jews might be expected to be especially sensitive to such a phenomenon so was it should have been reassuring that the prime minister of the Jewish state declared that those accusing Musk of making such a salute was “falsely smearing” a “great friend of Israel”. And if that didn’t mollify the descendants of those persecuted by the salute-merchants who have not made it yet to the Promised Land, there was the Anti Defamation League declaring that it “seemed” as though Musk “made an awkward gesture in a moment of enthusiasm, not a Nazi salute”.
Musk’s “awkward gesture” (mostly awkward for the ADL since it was
David Aaaronovitch
immediately repeated) was given to one of the big, expensive right-wing gatherings that seem to happen every weekend on both sides of the Atlantic. Two weeks later another such conference in the US another slightly sheepish “awkward gesture” was made by a soi-disant evangelical clergyman from England, Calvin Robinson.
Robinson believes that gays, women, pre-marital sex and drag queens (despite the fact that he always dresses up in a frock) are displeasing to the Lord and was addressing a huge anti-abortion conference. His gesture was greeted by laughter and applause by the militant anti-abortionists in attendance. His church, however, sacked him and last week his US visa was revoked, leaving him tweeting delightedly about his martyrdom.
The awkward gesture trifecta was achieved by the far right gadfly Steve Bannon addressing the “conservative” CPAC conference in Washington DC. The conference had already listened to a speech by Nigel Farage and would go on to hear from Donald Trump. The attendees applauded Bannon’s salute, which however cost them the chance to listen to the leader of France’s Rassemblement Nationale, Jordan Bardella, who loudly pulled out; France still apparently remembering the last time that salute was common.
Elon Musk delivers a salute at a Trump immigration rally. Inset: Musk’s Holocaust joke post. (Screenshot)
We can dismiss Robinson – an absurd attention-seeker who has transitioned through just about every right-wing party in the UK, each of which has been temporarily delighted to boast an exculpating mixed race cleric in their otherwise undiverse ranks. He did it because Musk did it and it got losts of attention.
Why a whole lot of Catholic and evangelical anti-abortionists would think that a fascist salute was a good or funny thing to do is another matter.
Bannon is a whole different animal. An admirer of Leni Riefenstahl, indeed compared by colleagues to that execrable genius, Bannon is reported to have remarked on the parallel between Trump’s famous descent on the golden elevator to Hitler’s arrival at the Nuremberg rally.
I’m pretty sure that Bannon will have read the memoirs of Richard Nixon’s most notorious Watergate burglar, G. Gordon Liddy. Liddy used to show Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will to his team in the White House. In his autobiography, titled Will Liddy wrote about growing up prewar in a pro-German area of Hoboken. This is Liddy remembering how the German nuns at his school had them salute the flag:
“At the words to the flag we shot out our right arms in unison, palms down, straight as so many spears aimed directly at the flag. It was the salute of Caesar’s legions, recently popular in Germany, Italy, and Spain. I enjoyed the mass salute and performed it well, unexcelled in speed of thrust and an iron-shaft steadiness throughout the remainder of the pledge.
That habit became so deeply ingrained that even today, at assemblies where the pledge is made or the national anthem played, I must suppress the urge to snap out my right arm.”
Now play back that Musk salute. It is only a “gesture” in the same way that a punch in the face is a gesture, and it gets worse every time you see it. It isn’t just the effort he puts into it, but the look on his face. It’s him celebrating the triumph of his will, conscious or not.
Jews per se aren’t the target this time, but just the collaterally offended. But please don’t make the ADL’s mistake of believing that because these people admire a militant, iron-shaft steady Israel that they like the rest of us Yids.
