by JORDY CUMMINGS
The re-coronation of the lumpen-capitalist Donald Trump as US president is a no-doubt consequential moment. Yet Trump has increasingly been second banana to one of his many Rasputins, the far-right techie Elon Musk. In an objective sense, however, the richest man in the world giving what is inarguably a Nazi salute at the inauguration of the president of the United States is an event of historical and international significance. This gesture from Musk was a crystallization of all that Trump is doing, and in particular, a prime form of the new far right’s aestheticization of politics. The politics of the gesture, the image, that crystalizes what in many ways is a redefinition and narrowing of what constitutes what the American state sees as human. So of course, the international benefactor of the far right is going to give a Nazi salute. This is the same guy who within days of the salute, gave a Nazi-esque speech to the Post-Nazi AFD in Germany, calling on Germans to reject globalism and embrace their historic warrior-like ways, as pointed out by Julius Caesar!
The question here is how its significance is being downplayed, deliberately or not, in an official and unofficial sense, from the pillars of American society, after being given the go ahead by some figures in the Jewish establishment. Musk did not give a Nazi salute, he made an “awkward gesture”. Broadcast journalists like Erin Burnett are exemplars of this pattern. This has been echoed even by Jewish conservative pundits like Ben Shapiro, not to mention some reasonable-doubt-mongers at The Forward. Their raised eyebrows and seemingly verbal scare-quotes when using this phrase reveal them not to be dissenting in an aestheticized sense but rather showing their resignation to the moment and their opportunism, their desire to reproduce themselves and their socially and materially beneficial existence. This goes of course, most shamefully to the Anti-Defamation League which did not condemn Musk, indeed explicitly denied that his gesture was a Nazi salute. The ADL are increasingly echoed in media reports that at first simply didn’t report on it or just referred to it elliptically.
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