Photograph Source: DonkeyHotey – CC BY 2.0
Leave it to the New York Times to mystify Steve Bannon’s Nazi salute, which was, rather than “resembled,” a Nazi salute – something the cheering crowd at last weekend’s CPAC clearly understood.
Now that Bannon, following Musk, Ingraham, and others, has broken the ice on restoring the salute’s place in mainstream politics, it’s useful to recall what the salute originally meant in its most immediate practical sense.
As recounted in various memoirs of 1930s Germany, those refusing to salute in public faced immediate physical violence in the form of beatings. Those refusing to salute within more private settings tended to eventually yield to the pressure for the sake of appearances but discovered, as described by Bruno Bettleheim, that their assumption that they would be able to maintain their rejection of Nazism while simultaneously performing the salute was psychologically unsustainable. Their minds gave way to their bodies, and these initially reluctant saluters frequently came to justify Nazism, if only its so-called “good parts.”
If fascism represents the limits of revolution within capitalism, the salute symbolizes the freedom to embrace self-enslavement and death. Needless to say, this point is likely lost on imaginary rebels Musk and Bannon.
Musk, an awkward rich try-hard who’s the supposed paragon of human brilliance or something, has in fact become so ridiculous that it is easy to imagine a scenario in which Trump generates great fanfare by publicly firing him.
This would of course change little, although it would be a useful reminder that much of the absurdity and brutality on display today is neither new nor original, phenomena Machiavelli identified five centuries ago as keystones of the modern state:
On taking control of Romagna, Borgia found it had been run by weak leaders who had been stripping the people of their wealth rather than governing them, and provoking division rather than unity, with the result that theft, feuds and all kinds of injustice were endemic. So he decided some good government was required to pacify the area and force people to respect authority. With this in mind, he appointed Remirro de Orco, a cruel, no-nonsense man, and gave him complete control. In a short while de Orco pacified and united the area, establishing a considerable reputation for himself in the process. At this point the duke decided that such draconian powers were no longer necessary and might cause resentment. So he set up a civil court of law in the middle of the territory to which every town was to send a representative and he placed a distinguished man in charge. And since he was aware that the recent severity had led some people to hate him, in order to have them change their minds, and hence win them over entirely to his side, he decided to show that if the regime had been cruel, that was due to the brutal nature of his minister, not to him. So as soon as he found a pretext, he had de Orco beheaded and his corpse put on display one morning in the piazza in Cesena with a wooden block and a bloody knife beside. The ferocity of the spectacle left people both gratified and shocked.
