The Unexpected Subtleties Of A Nazi Salute

On July 29th, 2024, at a dance and yoga workshop in Southport, England, a 17-year-old named Axel Rudakubana murdered three little girls.

They were six, seven, and nine years old.

Rudakubana seriously wounded eight other girls, aged between six and eleven, and stabbed the workshop instructor and a passer-by as they tried to intervene. And while this is tragic in its own right, the real tragedy is that there were absolutely no signs of this violent, unstable behaviour beforehand.

…I mean, true, in 2019, when Rudakubana was just thirteen years old, he contacted a child helpline and asked, “What should I do if I want to kill somebody?”

But that’s just talk! Imagine if we took every child who asked for help with their murderous impulses seriously. We’d never get anything done!

And sure, later that year, Rudakubana was expelled from school for threatening to stab a fellow pupil with a knife he’d brought into class.

But boys will be boys, right?! What kind of snowflake sounds the alarm because a kid comes to school with a “hit list” and tries to stab one of his classmates?

And fine, maybe it’s significant that over the following years, Rudakubana was investigated five times by the police and received three referrals to the anti-extremism organisation Prevent due to his violent behaviour and being caught researching terror attacks.

But Prevent agreed that his behaviour was “potentially concerning,” they just didn’t do anything about it due to a “lack of clear evidence of terrorist ideology.”

Maybe the authorities thought Rudakubana was making ricin in his bedroom as part of a harmless science project.

Maybe he seemed like one of those knife-wielding, genocide-obsessed teenagers who doesn’t turn out to be a murderer.

Maybe the violence and the arrests and the terrorism research seemed like benign, unconnected coincidences from which no conclusions could be drawn.

But it sure would have been great if somebody, at some point, had asked, “Wait a minute, isn’t that a bit much?”

I found myself thinking about Rudakubana’s case as I watched the reaction to Donald Trump’s “first buddy,” performing Schrodinger’s salute last week.

Elon Musk, the same man who described a conspiracy theory about Jews “pushing dialectical hatred against whites” as “the actual truth,” who has overseen the flourishing of pro-Nazi accounts on his platform, and who recently endorsed the neo-Nazi-friendly AfD party in Germany, capped his speech at Trump’s inauguration with a gesture that looked, walked and goose-stepped exactly like a Nazi salute.

And I mean exactly.

But instead of clearing up the confusion, instead of explaining that his auschwism kicks in when he gets excited, Musk decided to clap back with some Nazi puns.

And quite right too.

After all, according to his defenders, Musk’s emphatic, grim-faced salute is a perfectly normal way to “throw your heart out” to a crowd. He’s just the latest victim of a years-long campaign to brand everybody in Trump’s orbit as a Nazi. Some (like Trump’s VP, JD Vance and former “buddy,” Steve Bannon), have even cast Trump as Hitler himself!

…I mean, true, some people find it worrying that the president of the most powerful nation in the world is calling his political opponents “vermin” and threatening to deploy the military against them (just like Hitler did), they think it’s wildly irresponsible to describe the press as “enemies of the American people” (another move lifted straight out of Hitler’s playbook), and they’re shocked to see him repeatedly echoing Hitler’s racist rhetoric about immigrants “poisoning the blood of the country.”

But that’s just “locker room talk,” right? If we took action every time a world leader exhibited clear authoritarian tendencies, we’d never have any World Wars!

Sure, maybe threatening to take control of a sovereign nation like Polan...excuse me, Greenland is crossing a rather dangerous line. Especially when your refusal to rule out using military force puts you at odds with your allies.

But what kind of snowflake is worried about adding more fuel to the World War III-shaped fire we’re currently facing?

And yes, there are always going to be a few crybabies who think it’s “potentially concerning” that Trump pressured his vice president to violate the Constitution or that he sat in the Oval Office sipping Diet Coke as armed revolutionaries (their word, not mine) stormed the Capitol building and smeared their sh*t on the walls.

But who cares if Trump ended a 248-year unbroken tradition of peacefully transferring power?

Maybe, from your corner of the algorithm, you can believe that a cabal of billionaires who have their own social networks and haven’t set foot in a supermarket for twenty years care about your freedom of speech or the price of eggs.