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Well, Steve Bannon just threw a Roman salute at CPAC.
I know some people may have reservations in claiming that Elon didn’t mean to do what people thought he did, and many will scream until their hearts give out that he did it emphatically due to some inherent impulse to troll. Bannon doing this (a month no less) after Elon’s own stunt not only means that this was probably in response to that, but also Bannon didn’t even do the same winding motion which was the cover; no, ‘my heart goes out to you’, or, ‘I am reaching out to you’, or any superficial justification, just an unbridled arm stretched out for the purposes of salutation. Accompanying this a proclamation that Trump is a great man of history, no less, someone whose coming is augured only twice in the history of a country, with Bannon proclaiming that only Trump is worthy to be the Republican Party (and therefore President) even in 2028.
The Rubicon seemingly is continually crossed ever-so-slightly, or at least, it is being approached for the purposes of eventually making it to the other side. This comes after the news of the Napoleon quotation posted on the date of Mark Antony offering Ceasar the title of King, and the White House social comms posting Trump as King. Obviously, the former is enigmatic as a function, and the latter humorous. It’s just an interesting start to a new regime seemingly radicalized by its previously downtrodden nature; defeated, the bloodied and uncowed rejects are now reveling in their victory beyond even the limits of their persecutors’ sense of regality.
It’s funny seeing Richard Spencer being a decade early to the seeming new tradition of Trump orbiters, and only if he had bid his time he would potentially have been capable of releasing his true feelings had they not been mellowed in time. Nick Fuentes, on the other hand, is late: stating his sensing of some ulterior goal behind this style of communication being only discomforting. This is basically like the twilight zone at this point in that, although these points don’t seemingly add up to one singular great attractor at the end of whatever this Presidency even is, it’s entailing something completely different.
Ave Trump, Emperor of the Americans.
We need to have a discussion some day about what was the actual bad thing about the Nazis.
Was it the Hugo boss uniforms?
The music?
The German language?
Swastikas maybe?
Is nationalism itself bad?
I’ve always understood that the bad thing the Nazis did was load 6 million people or so onto train cars and drive them to industrialized killing factories. The bad part was hunting down people they didn’t like and killing them. It was all the torture and death and so forth.
edit: guys I'm being a little hyperbolic here. Of course the atrocities of the Nazis went substantially beyond just the holocaust. I'm saying that it wasn't the uniforms, or the colors red black and white, it was the violence. When people call Elon Musk, for instance, a Nazi, it comes across as stupid.
I keep seeing people get called “Nazi” for like…waving at a crowd? Which is very clearly what Steve Bannon, an explicit Zionist, is doing here.
I’ve listened to hundreds of hours of him taking. I like Steve Bannon quite a bit. He is definitely not a “Nazi” in any meaningful way that aligns with anything the Nazis did which was historically significant. Bannon is a pro workers rights, anti big government, anti CCP, Christian Nationalist. The first speech he gave after prison was about how the justice system is racist against black people and we need to fix that. During the summer of Floyd he was taking about George Floyd as a victim of globalism, and while he obviously condemned the riots, he was sympathetic to that exact same things the rioters were upset about.
When Ukraine was invaded, he gave a long monologue about how Zelensky was being brave and defending his people, and how the US was leading him down the primrose path towards the place he is now.
He literally went to prison for his principles.
Bannon is one of the good guys. Hard to put into any of the buckets commonly talked about around here. He was definitely not giving any sort of Nazi salute here.
The bad thing about the Nazis was that they started WWII. Everything they did before the start of WWII was within the envelope of typical right-wing authoritarian governments. Most people would cite the Holocaust as the bad thing about the Nazis, and yeah, it was bad, but the over-emphasis of it ironically plays right into the Nazi Propaganda that WWII was a war launched against Germany for the benefit of the Jews.
"Who started WWII" is more ambiguous than that. WWII started with England and France's declaration of war on Germany. Germany had a reasonable casus belli on Poland, and England was pressuring Poland not to negotiate with Germany. Even more important are the many peace proposals Germany offered England, which entailed Germany fully pulling out of France, and Churchill not only rejected them but even hid them from the public. Ultimately Churchill and the United States would set the only war aim as Unconditional Surrender, which is what ultimately led to the mass murder and destruction.
Furthermore the tall tale of Germans tricking millions of Jews into walking into gas chambers that had been disguised as shower rooms is a fantasy meant to justify this one-sided WWII narrative. Incidentally, Grok 3 is the first LLM I've seen explicitly take the Revisionist side of a core argument regarding that narrative, even going so far as to criticize the Narrative's sole reliance on witness testimony over any other form of evidence. Also first that has accurately summarized the mainstream position on an issue, accurately summarized the Revisionist position on an issue, and explicitly concurred with the Revisionists that the "official claim is not plausible under scrutiny." The days of that narrative are numbered, and other WWII Revisionism is going to come along with the collapse of that narrative.
Germany's war on Poland provides no justification for England and France to ally with the Soviet Union in a catastrophic war aim of unconditional surrender on Germany.
On that note, normalize the Roman Salute. It's just a cool pose. It evokes emotions in people and that makes it powerful.
Leaving aside for a second the more odious points of this comment, this is preposterous. Britain had no justification for attempting to stop Germany attempting to make itself the pre-eminent power in Europe by conquest? Almost as if it was the guiding principle of the British to prevent such a state of affairs emerging for centuries prior. This was precisely the argument Napoleon tried to give at various - Britain had no need to meddle in continental affairs rather than attending to its overseas possessions and trading activities and had ruined itself for the sake of a conflict it had no interest in. It was preposterous then and equally so in 1939. And indeed the conduct of Hitler and the and the Nazi government before and during the war proved that they could never be tolerated as a major element of the European order.
This is the Revisionist position. And no I do not think it had a justification to do so with the threat of the Soviet Union and the human and cultural cost of destroying Old Europe in a war of unconditional surrender. And ultimately Britain lost its own Empire. But yes Britain did start WWII in order to prevent Germany from becoming the pre-eminent power in Europe. That's the real reason WWII started and Britain allied with the Soviet Union to make it happen. It wasn't over Danzig, all of Poland was conquered by Britain's ally at the end of the day.
The Treaty of Versailles was an attempt to make sure Germany never become the pre-eminent power in Europe. But it was unenforceable. So they waged war ostensibly over Danzig, but then retconned it ultimately to be about the Holocaust narrative to try to post-hoc justify the war and solely blame Germany for the utter destruction and death.
Very funny that Britain makes the claim Germany wanted to "make itself the pre-eminent power in Europe by conquest" over Danzig. Germany offered to fully evacuate from Western Europe for peace and England said no.
But yes, the real reason for the war was Britain didn't want Germany to become the largest power in Europe. No that is not at all a justification for their alliance with the Soviet Union, the demand for unconditional surrender, and mass death and destruction of Europe to realize that objective. Germany is today arguably the largest power on the European Continent anyway. No it was not justified.
As @johnfabian said, you must think we're complete fucking mongoloids if you expect us to buy that.
Contemporary articles have Sir John Simon and Anthony Eden both drawing parallels to Napoleon and the 30 years war in thier opposition to appeasement, and you can find speechs from Churchill about the German/Nazi Menace going back the early 30s. There's also the 390 years of observable foriegn policy between the end of the English Civil War and the start of World War Two.
Might makes right, i dont think the historical semantics really matter. Who ever won the conflict would have gone down in history as the "justifed" one.
That's the bone of contention isn’t it?
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