It’s an interpretative claim
Jane Clare Jones on Musk’s Nazi salute and the quarrels over whether it was or was not a Nazi salute.
There seems to be a common conviction among several commentators in and around the anti-woke sphere that Elon Musk’s ‘awkward gesture’ at Trump’s inauguration on Monday could not possibly have been a Nazi salute and that anyone who thinks it was is probably a) stupid b) nuts or c) a sanctimonious virtue-signalling wanker posturing for woke-points. I find this easy dismissal troubling.
There’s a lot of that kind of thing around. I think the Left has lost its tiny mind when it comes to women and trans ideology, but thinking that doesn’t make me think Elon Musk couldn’t possibly be a Nazis-admiring ratbag.
JCJ points out that Musk did make the gesture and the gesture was what it looked like.
The claim that ‘that isn’t what that was’ can’t then be a claim that that isn’t what Musk did, or isn’t what people saw, but rather, a claim that that isn’t what he meant. That is, it’s an interpretative claim, and interpretation can be a somewhat nebulous business, and is probably not something people should be making such cut-and-dried pronouncements about.
As in…he did just happen to make a very Nazi Nazi gesture, but he didn’t make a Nazi gesture.
I don’t claim to know what is in Elon Musk’s soul. All I, and other concerned observers, can do, is interpret the performance of a particular gesture within its political context, and be explicit about why we are reading the context in a certain way. That context is enormous, and unpicking its strands is one of the main things I want to do with this project. It involves, among many factors, Musk’s turning of Twitter into an engine of far-right radicalisation, to the extent that the last two years have been like watching a lot of people you thought had their heads screwed on being slowly boiled in increasingly fascist-flavoured water. It includes his many recent interventions in European politics, his support of far right and populist parties, his efforts to whip up racially motivated civil unrest, and to undermine the democratically elected government of Britian (twice!). It includes what we know about the anti-democratic, techno-feudalist, anarcho-capitalist, white supremacist, neo-reactionary ideologies that inform the worldviews of Silicon Valley’s broligarchy, many of whom lined up, literally, behind Trump on Monday. And it includes Musk’s central role in an incoming administration that has already set about rounding people up, shredding government departments, threating other sovereign nations, and releasing convicted criminals who were involved in trying to violently overturn the results of a democratic election.
Read the whole thing; it’s excellent.
It is excellent. This part particularly impressed me for reasons I shan’t go into:
“Trolling is basically a form of bullying, a form of bullying which, like most bullying, consists of a flagrant display of viciousness or domination, which then disavows itself as such, in order to get away with it. The point is getting away with it, while laughing at people for taking it seriously, although it is, in fact, an entirely serious effort to bulldoze boundaries.”
Hur hur, not all that partisan, eh wot?
Whether or not the behaviour is part of a pattern might have some bearing on the plausability of any denial. If you do a lot of quacking, you shouldn’t be surprised when others start mistaking you for a duck, especially actual ducks. Some dog whistles are duck calls. Accusing opponents of overreacting to shitposts shifts the Overton Window whether the shitposter is sincere or “just joking.” The accusations help to disarm and defang all critics, not just the crazy ones who see Nazis (or wokesters) everywhere. Each successfully excused transgression serves as a foothold and jumping off point that allows future actions to push the boundaries a little farther, c.f. “Trump being Trump.”
Back in my movement skeptic days I once wrote a blog post on the difference between skepticism (or critical thinking as I would say nowadays) and denialism. In it I commented (among other things) on the denialist tactic of focusing narrowly on one piece of evidence at a time, while ignoring the larger picture, and inventing separate, ad hoc reasons for dismissing each piece of evidence in isolation (in violation of Occam’s Razor).
On the same note, I was a creator of “memes” before they were called that. One of these featured a drawing of a goat with a jigsaw puzzle grid superimposed over it. The text said:
Indeed another common denialist tactic is demanding to see “just one proof” of x, which is more or less equivalent to asking you to show me a single piece of the jigsaw puzzle that unambiguously proves it’s a goat. Outside of formal logic and pure mathematics there is, of course, never “proof” of anything, which is why a sufficiently motivated denier will never run out of excuses for refusing to see any larger pattern in the endless stream of unrelated factoids*.
All we can ever do is try to put the available pieces of the puzzle (i.e. evidence) together into the most coherent, least ad hoc, picture possible. As Jane Clare Jones points out, Musk has been displaying a consistent pattern of contempt for democratic norms and support for, if not outright nazis, then at least illiberal individuals (Donald Trump comes to mind) and parties that goes far beyond criticism of the excesses of wokeism (if that was all, I don’t think many readers of B&W would be too bothered). You can insist that:
But the rest of us are free to interpret the data for ourselves and make up our own minds.
* It’s interesting to compare it to what conspiracy theorists are doing: The latter start from the assumption of a pattern, and force the pieces to fit, whereas the former start from the assumption that there’s no pattern, and, once again, interpret the data to support the pre-determined conclusion.
Does this gesture look like gratitude?
Seems to me hands folded over the chest, or perhaps brought together as in a bow, or even a simple thumbs up reflect an attitude of thankfulness — these gestures alone would convey the idea without explanation or context. What Musk does here is say one thing and gesture something quite different.
Sounds like the intro to a video game. A video game where the objective is to WIN, and most video games, including the one Musk is ranked most proficient at, are won by destroying as many Enemies as possible. This was not a benign expression of thanks, it was a declaration of victory (which is what the Nazi salute literally means). Yay Team! (oh, and by the way, Sieg Heil!).
The gesture is what it is, and the subtext is clear. Musk’s dishonesty is revolting, he doesn’t mean what he says, and he’s too stupid to know what he means. His answer to critics? Jokes. Well not really jokes as such, more like lame excuses for him to laugh at other people, and show his deep contempt for them. The “thanks for being stupid enough to believe that I’m a savant” type of contempt, or the “thanks for being envious of how rich I am” type of contempt, or “thanks for believing my cavalier, adolescent lying is some kind of gospel” type of contempt. This is what he’s thankful for.
You can fool some of the people some of the time, asshole.
It’s what I was trying to say in the other post. You can’t just look at the final raised arm and say “oh, but so-and-so did the same”. It’s the whole gesture–the chest slap, the thrust, the downward-facing palm. It’s the difference between saying “hey, you” and “fuck you”. Yes, they both end in “you”, but they are very different messages.
Again, see the similarity. You don’t need to be a Musk hater to think that perhaps it was intentional. And if it wasn’t intentional, you’d think he’d be mortified.
Snotty six-word taunts are subject to deletion.
Philip Low (a childhood and business friend of Musk’s) wrote
In my view, this amounts to arguing that Musk is not “technically” a Nazi, which is a distinction without a point.
Refer Popehat’s Rule of Goats.
Or, as the Onion, put it: Hitler’s affiliation with Nazis greatly overstated.