Appearing by video link, Musk told the 4500 Alternative für Deutschland members present that Germany had to move beyond its Nazi past and stop feeling bad about the Holocaust:
“Children should not be guilty of the sins of their parents, let alone their great grandparents,” the White House official said. “There is too much focus on past guilt, and we need to move beyond that.”
Hot on the heels of his Sieg Heils at Donald Trump’s inauguration, if you had any doubts about Musk’s politics, by this point, there should be no doubt.
Forgetting is a key element in the conceptual arsenal of the modern far right. The more we forget, the easier it is to repeat the past – in this case, the nationalism and genocide of Nazism.
Unsurprisingly, figures on the right immediately rose to Musk’s defence.
Podcaster Joe Rogan predictably called the Nazi charge “bullshit”, and Elise Stefanik, now Trump’s UN Ambassador, denied it at her Senate confirmation hearing, calling Elon Musk a “visionary”.
Most disheartening was Anti-Defamation League (ADL) head Jonathan Greenblatt’s response, describing Musk’s Nazi salutes as “an awkward gesture”.
As the head of America’s foremost Jewish civil rights organisation, Greenblatt let millions down. Not just the Jewish community but other minority groups as well.
The fact that Musk performed his Heil Hitler salute twice and then proceeded to Tweet Nazi puns made the ADL leader look even more foolish.
Another defence heard from rightwing quarters was that Musk’s gesture was not a Nazi salute but was, in fact, an Italian fascist Roman salute.
Given Mussolini’s genocidal behaviour in Libya and Ethiopia, his 1938 racial laws depriving Jews of their civil rights, and his cooperation with Hitler in exterminating Italian Jewry, it’s a poor defence.
Memory and forgetting are always intertwined. We remember some things and forget others. The problem isn’t just denial; it’s what we choose to ignore.
One of the many horrifying ideas proposed by posthumanists is that brains might eventually be rejigged so that they never forget anything.
Still, there is a lot to be said for remembering, even if not being able to recall life’s most painful moments with immediate clarity is probably for the best.
Memory is central to learning, and learning is important if we hope to avoid the same mistake, such as electing Adolf Hitler.
Musk didn’t explicitly reference that aspect of the bad old days, but he did stress how wonderful German culture was and how great it would be if Germans were proud of it.
That may be a shot in the arm to German fascists struggling to pay their bills. But that’s a sick thought if you’re a Jew, a Roma, or a Muslim striving for equality in today’s Germany.
This plays quite nicely with the desires of many on the para-fascist right in Germany, from which AfD has freely drawn support.
In that neck of the ideological woods, National Socialism was going great until it got derailed by the war.
The autobahns were getting built, unemployment was down, and nobody was talking about the war-guilt clause in the Treaty of Versailles.
It was long ago, so perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised if some salient facts were omitted. Things were better if you weren’t a communist, or gay (at least in most cases).
For minorities and leftists, the experience of the rise of National Socialism ran the gamut from unpleasant to lethal, with results increasingly bunching at the latter end as time went on.
These are not the only matters allowed to fall by the wayside. Although Germans welcomed the improvements in conditions and outlook created by the Nazis, they were predicated on expropriation.
The war for race and space launched by Hitler and his cronies in 1939 was not an unfortunate coincidence. It was an ineluctable consequence of the fact that the National Socialist model of expansion was predicated on the murder and looting of the lives of minorities and the political opposition.
The memory of these events is important in its own right. However, it is also essential as a measuring point by which one might assess the threat posed by movements like Alternative für Deutschland.
The far-right party’s politics have little in terms of underlying substance except for xenophobia.
Once one gets past “close the borders”, AfD’s political program is a mishmash of defunct economic ideas (return to the Deutschmark, burn more coal) and militarising German society.
Sadly, most of this has already been tried with less glowing results than those projected by the party bigwigs.
As in the United States, any time a crime is committed by someone with even the vaguest connection to a foreign country, the AfD leadership tells the press that closing the borders would cure the problem.
Why bother with the fact that immigrants don’t offend at significantly higher rates than native citizens – especially when the mere fact of being undocumented is excluded from the mix?
At moments like this, one is tempted to ask whether, or in what way, things would be better if outrageous acts were committed solely by those born within the bounds of the state.
Elon Musk’s project of selective memory in Germany conforms in most ways to that being undertaken by the right in the United States.
The slogan “Make America Great Again” is a surreptitious reference to an era of American history when so many of the troubles that seem to beset the nation now were not yet in evidence.
The leading role of the US was assented to by its Cold War allies in the North Atlantic world.
The economy was growing. American television was replete with programs focusing on families in which the income of one (white and male) earner was enough to support a wife, children, and various household pets.
There was no trans to contend with, no Black Lives Matter and no #MeToo either.
As with the German case, bathing this history in a happy glow requires as much forgetting as remembering.
Women and non-whites were not satisfied with their condition but prevented by laws and the threat of violence from stepping outside it. If incomes were rising, this was a result of higher union density.
In the case of Donald Trump’s newly minted second go-round in the presidency, a further act of forgetting (or misrepresentation) is required to get him from the enormous surplus mortality that resulted from his mishandling of the early stages of the COVID pandemic.
One of the defining features of authoritarianism is the capacity of the ruler to govern untrammelled by any need for consistency.
What the leader says is true today is true. Tomorrow, it might be something different if circumstances require it. At that point, that will be the truth and will always have been.
In the 1950s, the United States exported capital to Europe via the Marshall Plan. This played a key role in allowing European states to rebuild their economies and, in the process, prevented the spread of the idea that Stalinism was a good idea.
Now, the United States is content to export brownshirt populists and their half-baked views.
Under present circumstances, with Russian imperialism and climate change looming ever larger, Europeans might be forgiven for wanting to limit the influence of American authoritarianism.
It is incumbent upon them to remember the many reasons why.
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Photograph courtesy of Joel Schalit. All rights reserved.
