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Will Elon succeed in making the Roman salute cool again? Reddit is predictably going apeshit over his gesture that can be construed as one. I mean, I doubt he's done that deliberately, it's a natural gesture in the same way a bendy cross is a natural ornament, but I doubt he's the kind of person that will mumble an apology and withdraw from the public eye for a while. If anything, I expect him to double down and insist it's been 80 years and people should be free to reappropriate the gesture.
If you search YouTube for “Nazi salute”, this is also almost every result.
The reason I’m searching is: I don’t actually know what a “Nazi salute” looks like. From what I can tell, it doesn’t really have any specific characteristics other than holding your arm out with your palm flat. But this is basically identical to the way that anybody would wave at a crowd.
The whole thing is so stupid. The bad part about the Nazis was the whole extermination of the Jews thing, not the Hugo Boss uniforms, or the hand gestures.
And there’s really no question that Elon Musk is not trying to exterminate all the Jews. It seems like he was waving in a weird spergy way.
I think that there are solid reasons why democracies have developed cultural antibodies against Nazi aesthetics.
Now, I get not leaving everything which has ever been used by Nazis barren. For example, there are only so many two-letter acronyms, not using SS for something useful seems a bit of a waste, so I am fine with you Americans abbreviating social security thus. Likewise, just because some Neonazis like 18 and 88, even the Germans will not go all tetraphobic (yes, I know) on these numbers.
On the other hand, if someone were to say that we should reclaim "Heil Hitler", because after all, what made the Nazis bad was not their greetings but their genocides, I would reply that this is a terrible idea. It would be like saying that glowing cigarette butts -- unlike wildfires -- are generally not dangerous to humans, and thus we can throw them away without a care.
Of course, Musk's salute is a lot more ambiguous than "Sieg Heil", but in general I think that the gesture should better stay in the cordon sanitaire for a few more centuries.
My theory is that Musk did this deliberately to troll people. I disapprove.
(Also, I re-read SSCs parable of talents from 2015 recently. Scott mentions Musk no less than nine times, as an example of someone who is clearly gifted and doing good on a scale most of us could never hope to do. With a decade of hindsight, this reads somewhat bizarre -- sure, Musk did some great stuff, like making electric cars cool and establishing reuseable first stages, but he also did quite a few things which do not seem worth emulating.)
Don't people refer to the Secret Service as the SS, at least in contexts where the referent is clear?
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