The title’s a bit disingenuous, I know: this didn’t come out of nowhere. White supremacism is as American as Manifest Destiny and has been heavily intertwined with Nazism from its inception. That overlap with the Republican party, and their gradual slip into the extreme far-right, is evident.
But Seig Heils? Even the most dense among them must know that blatant Nazism hurts their legitimacy in the eyes of the public, even among MAGATs (as is evident right now if you peek at their echo chamber on Reddit). Surely they would have a much easier time pushing their rhetoric and establishing their agenda by keeping a purposeful distance from that sort of indefensible imagery and symbolism. How do they expect to keep cohesion in the military when you imply to the soldiers that they are Nazis now, seig heils and all.
Why Nazis?
Any theories as to where this is coming from? Follow the ketamine-fueled leader? A directive for operative Krasnov, from Putin himself, to implode the country? True Nazi beliefs among the Heritage Foundation, Proud Boys, etc? I just don’t understand how they thought this would fly. I don’t understand anything anymore lol.
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it’s a combo of trolling and attention seeking. “there’s no such thing as bad press” and all that.
we should point it out, condemn it, but not engage in arguments with them about what is and isn’t a sig heil.
and when they pop up in other places trying to talk about other stuff, just bring up the fact that they threw a Nazi salute from time to time.
the most important thing is to focus on their evil policies and actions. but we can’t forget their performative evil.
“suddenly”
It’'s because the overall intent is not to unify the country under one government. It’s to keep the America fighting with itself so that it can’t interfere in Russian, Saudi and Chinese ambitions for an autocratic oligarchy. It’s in their best interests if America descends into the worst version of fascism that the world can dream up, and Trump’s GOP is entirely on their payroll.
Any potential positive government action by the GOP for the American people runs contrary to those goals, so they’ve turned to the tactics of fear and intimidation to maintain their hold on the population. Each public nazi salute is intentional, designed to strike fear and controversy into the hearts of the citizenry and publicly tarnish America’s image on the world stage.
Look at how Trump ran on inflation, but the only actions he’s taken have been to attack people’s livelihood or erode trust in federal and state institutions. He’s literally dismantling the federal government from the inside, but all anyone wants to talk about is the nazi salutes.
This is an intentional distraction.
This sort of thing doesn’t work in a strong democracy with an un-compromised media, but our democracy has been hollowed out by the cancer of Citizen’s United, rendering the power of a citizen’s vote near worthless, and by the likely election fraud performed by Musk. So they’re gloating and glorifying the symbol as a sign that no one can stop them.
See, the people in charge right now don’t care if the US collapses. They WANT it to. America has been the symbol of democratic freedom for the entire world. With the US abandoning that fight, there’s no real geopolitical power strong enough to take its place.
Which is exactly what Russia, China, and the Saudis want.
Fascism shouldn’t be thought of as a static “thing” or an object of ideology. Peoples beliefs come from their environment. We are so individualized as a society that often we as progressives take “personal responsibility” too far, we buy the premise implicitly without realizing there are flaws with thinking in this way. Every logical system has flaws and contradictions, its proven mathematically though I think some systems are more rigorous and based on evidence.
GWF Hegel’s philosophy of Right was written in 1820, and influenced political thought ever since. Liberalism was still in it’s revolutionary phase and theories about it were still fairly new, the Wealth of Nations was written just 50 years before, and Karl Marx was like two when it was released, although it would serve as the basis for much of his work analyzing the hidden relationships of Capital, and ethical political philosophy on the whole.
The book is the closest I think someone can honestly get to an actual “horseshoe theory” because not only did it influence the left but it also influenced the far right. Hegel, using the works of other great liberal philosophers such as Locke and Kant, who Hegel was always working to surpass, applied his dialectical philosophical methods to the writings of liberalism.
What he discovered was a natural tendency toward what we would calll fascism. Like he prefigured fascism by 100 years. He wasn’t a fascist, there was no such thing. He was just exploring the ideas of this revolutionary philosophy, one that purported to liberate the mind, body and spirit, and discovered the oppressive seeds which might grow into something quite different.
This isn’t to call liberals fascists, I’m a communist and 20th century communism had a lot of problems, to put it mildly. I would say confidently that progressive liberals are not crypto fash, in fact the term “progressive” is a typically left-Hegelian ideal, in that it describes human progress and development as the subject of history. Instead it challenges the idea of the liberatory nature of private property, a key component of liberal thought. Of course this is all depending how you look at it, right-Hegelians see this same formulation as proof of the inevitability of their ideas and justification for their actions.
You’re getting a lot of different opinions about this stuff so I’m trying to make sort of a different point about philosophy, history and action. Other reading for a deep dive on fascism is the essay Ur Fascism by Umberto Eco (great empirical analysis, but the least scientific IMO), Trotsky’s pamphlet Fascism: What it is and How to Fight It, and HA Roy’s Fasism, Its Philosophy, Professions and Practice.
In a way, fascism has always been there below the surface, informally shifting the sands of history until it was formalized in the early 20th century. I don’t think you can have a society based on private property without some elements of fascism somewhere. Mostly “western democracies” will outsource their extreme cruelty to other countries where it doesn’t affect their citizens.
But in summary, Fascism is the realization of the contradictions inherent in liberal ideology, its liberalism turned inside-out, with all its appearances of justice and freedom cut away, leaving only the logic of expansion and domination that most liberal democracies do their best to hide. This is how fascists are able to hide in our society, their individual beliefs are not completely unpalatable to centrists and conservatives who have also started to dispense with justice and freedom in the interest of national greatness. Its what makes their beliefs so malleable, and its also why liberals have such a hard time defining it. But fascism isn’t an individual’s beliefs, if it was it would be just regular bog-standard chauvinism. Fascism is a mass movement which will use charismatic leaders amenable to their politics to rally the masses.
In our society, the middle classes are the “battery” for fascism. Middle classes are constantly under attack under capitalism and the individuals often feel this and become paranoid (doomsday prepping, etc.,) and this paranoia and real social pressure to produce or be wiped out, the fear from the constant threat of precarity and uncertainty fits hand in glove with the aims and means of fascists.
It’s not a new thing, and while I don’t think it can be easily distilled into a social media reply. I’ll do my best.
This has been a 40-year process, beginning with Ronald Reagan and continuing incrementally with every president since, including Obama unironically. (Remember how he crushed Occupy and ignored Ferguson and legalized torture on New Years Day?) It’s become stronger as people have become poorer and more willing to not give a shit about the quality of our country’s leadership. Now every person not only has personal biases, but a computer in their pocket constantly telling them everything they think is correct and actively angering them. Hitler would have creamed himself at the thought of being able to dictate social media algorithms.
If people can’t afford to feed their kids or see a doctor, they’re not going to give a shit about fascism, and no matter who we elect, most people can’t afford to see a doctor and adequately feed their kids.
It’s going to be worse now than it had to be. In 2016 people were willing to punch Nazis. Now, you can render a Nazi salute twice, in the seat of government, in front of the entire Democratic leadership… and they will fucking clap and smile.
It’s funny, the posters over at r/conservative truly believe they aren’t nazis and say thing like why is the left so violent, you do anything and they call you a nazi etc etc.
Crazy they can’t see the wood for the trees. Maybe they should have a bit of introspection, like maybe look in to why everyone calls the leaders and followers nazis…
Ironic coming from the “sheeple” crowd.
But Seig Heils? Even the most dense among them must know that blatant Nazism hurts their legitimacy in the eyes of the public, even among MAGATs
“hE wAs jUSt joKING 😡😡😡” -every magat ever
Nazis are a symbol of power and authority for the far right the same way every international dictator has used hilters style of government to rule and oppress. They aspire to build a country similar to the one of the Nazis. Elements of this include: “christian” values, centralisation of power, uniting of the country, removal of “impures” (trans people).
Eugenics and the idea of a ‘chosen’ race is also powerful - you might be genetically destined for greatness, and the fact you have not achieved it is due to systematic oppression by a hidden conspiracy. People love that shit.
I think OP is asking why narratives around that theme keep coming back to the Nazi narrative, specifically. Why not another example of populist authoritarianism, unburdened by the systematic murder of millions of civilians? Why not invent a new narrative rooted in their own national history?
I think the answer to that is: creativity is hard. Once people have a successful first draft, they tend just to edit that draft rather than pitch it and come up with something completely new. People recognize any borrowed elements and return to the archetype. If you’ve every tried to write anything by committee or group project, you’ve probably seen people choose to edit a horrible first draft, retaining the same basic structure (however flawed) rather than start over. Committees where someone finds an existing, related text online, which then becomes an anchor for whatever the committee had planned to draft.
In short, Nazis serve as ‘best practices’ example for any new ethnic nationalist group by the simple fact of their existence.
Plenty of answers here but I don’t think anyone has answered this part:
Surely they would have a much easier time pushing their rhetoric and establishing their agenda by keeping a purposeful distance from that sort of indefensible imagery and symbolism.
So here’s my take …
Musk did the sig heil as a fuck you to everyone that doesn’t like him. That’s it.
They just won the election by basically lying, ignoring, and playing for time. They can literally do whatever the fuck they like for the next n years with impunity.
Imagine if Harris had won and in her victory speech said something like “Don’t worry Don, I’ll make sure they give you diapers in jail.” It would’ve been a low blow but we would’ve loved her for it because it’s poking fun at the conservatives for no other reason than to stir them up.
I think there’s another, longer conversation to be had about why racism (and by extension nazism) resonates with voters in 2025, but I’m too weary for that I think.
It’s always been there. Just now that people in power are the Nazis ppl can come out
My theory is that they try to push the line on what is acceptable. For example, if you want something say you want 11 but what is acceptable is between 1 and 10. Then an 11 is not possible. But if you normalize 15 and keep pushing that, then 11 doesn’t seem so unreasonable after a while.
I see this being done constantly. Say that your plan is to do something extreme (take Canada), everyone panics and then get what you actually wanted. If nobody reacts, do the extreme thing.
This is it, and we (in the west) have gone so far to the right that the richest man of the world, with a powerful position (formally) near government can do the Hitler salute and the established media just shrugs.
Doing the Hitler salute used to make you a pariah. Now, it’s just a thing the extreme right does to ‘provoke’ (that word I saw used to describe Bannon’s salute in a German newspaper title). In a couple of years, it is normal that the right does this, and the established media doesn’t bat an eye anymore.
It’s clear that you still can’t trust established media to be a force against nazism. They’ll start analysing the nazi takeover as nazi only when it’s much too late, out of fear of not being ‘neutral’.
The fact that the salute is so offensive, they did it so blatantly, and their denial was so disingenuous is the point. It’s a demonstration of power. They can do a Nazi salute and their opponents can’t punish them. They can deny that they did a Nazi salute and their opponents can’t control the narrative. If they did something more subtle, then people might think that they weren’t facing any consequences because their opponents were giving them the benefit of the doubt. With the Nazi salute there is no doubt. The only explanation for why they aren’t facing any consequences is that their opponents are powerless.
I wish I could find it now, but there was a quote attributed to someone suffering under an oppressive regime which would blatantly lie, and yet it remained accepted: “The lie is the insult.”
Happy cake day!
I kind of feel like anybody who can get insulted by the likes of a lying nazi cunt deserves to be insulted. It isn’t insulting if you don’t get insulted. Call them stupid lying bitches and ask them how come tell truth make pee pee smol.
There are many other problems that are harder to solve, but that one’s trivial to solve, and it occupies a weirdly obsessively large portion of what nazis are chasing, so it can waste a surprising amount of their focus.
On one hand, yes, these people are pathetic and have little idea what the symbols they’re playing with truly mean beyond white supremacy. And yes, it is useful (and fun) to mock farcists.
On the other hand, some of these people are (literally) astronomically rich, in bed with leaders of one of the most powerful military forces ever to exist, and the others are those supported by these rich haute-booj oligarchs (just like the original Blackshirts and Brownsharts were supported by landowners and maginates). A Nazi salute, understood with respect to history and the powerplay of today, is personal to many people. If it’s a teenage edgelord fucking around to get a reaction, sure, dismiss them or let them ‘find out’, but Musk and Bannon are people with huge influence over politicians and mass media. Elon Musk, for example, literally owns a pervasive media platform. They can start sizable rallies gathering both the batshit unhinged and the ideologically driven, armed and hungry.
So if you’re someone who the Nazis would have sent to the extermination camps (and there are many, many groups that were, basically most of humanity), then that salute is someone with state power declaring they want you dead. I wouldn’t call it insulting as much as a credible death threat.
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Non-American here. My brother and dad STILL cling the the narrative of “He’s autistic, he was excited.” and nothing will disusde them from that.
What about steve bannons salute? He’s neither autistic or excited?
Same with my partner’s American family. They dont believe a word about what’s happening. And if we can’t turn the domestic terrorists in our homes back to reality what chance do we stand turning back the country.
I wonder the same, my theory is that this gesture is used both as a loyalty test and a way to further polarize society.
Making this gesture draws clear lines in society: those who say it was fine, those who say it wasn’t, those who don’t take a stance (ie the media calling it a “controversial gesture” or similar). So Musk & al now have a clearer idea of who stand where. It also cleaves those “for” and those “against” further away, solidifying their base.
Another explanation is this is part of the normalization of extreme rethoric and symbols. I doubt he could have gotten away with it ten years ago; who knows what they’ll be able to do and say in 2035?
Yet another possibility, he did it on a whim and the neo-nazis like Bannon are now seizing the opportunity. It’s unclear how planned this was and how intentional the consequences were.
(And all might be true at once)
They’ve been doing Zeig Heils for years.
I wish I could find the documentary, about a woman who dated some alt right weirdo and he started taking her to like Turning Point USA meetings and other groups meetings and she describes how the first time she did Zeig Heils, and they just did this shit like it was normal. She describes going to a book burning, thinking it was a joke, and then it was like an actual book burning.
It’s all nudge nudge wink wink. They’re doing Nazi salute because they are Nazis.
Edit: Believe the documentary is called "White Right: Meeting the Enemy." Available here: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GJ0rhh5mbnA
Reminds me of the Rule of Goats:
If you fuck a goat ironically, you’re still fucking a goat. Same goes with ironic Hitler salutes.
Reminds me of McGregor the Goat Fucker.
Nobody called him McGregor the bridge builder, despite a long and successful career as a bridge engineer. But he fucked one goat…
Makes me think of my younger days hanging out on 4chan, thinking I was having ironic, satirical laughs with my fellow anons until eventually realizing most of them actually believed what they were saying
Yeah, old 4chan was definitely something. You had some of the absolute funniest shitposting imaginable, right next to some shit that no amount of eye bleach and showers could cleanse you of. Like, it was fun every once in a while for shits and giggles, but it started messing with your psyche after even an hour. The casual racism alone was in no way ironic. And So. Much. CP; to the point where most of the images aren’t even worth a glance because there’s a good chance it’s underage revenge porn. I genuinely don’t know how that site is still up.
Nowadays it’s pretty damn tame, at least compared to how it used to be. And the wicked thing is, there are people who legit live on there, as in it’s damn near all they do with their lives, both then and now. I’ll go peek in every few months for a nostalgia trip, but I’m out after 10 min on average, it’s still toxic as hell.
It’s still pretty bad, but they recruited jannies recently and it seems to have a small effect.
I just don’t get how you can be a nazi and be ok with yourself. I can kinda understand how someone ends up an alt-right weirdo thinking that minorities are inferior but nazism is THE bad guy in so much media. Its like admitting that you kick puppies so hilariously evil that most people would think you were joking if you expressed that kind of mindset.
Cognitive dissonance is a lot of it.
Maybe don’t actually realize they are Nazis. I like to talk to these types and describe the events of the Boston Massacre (kid got shot after throwing snowballs and possibly rocks at the police, then a riot broke out and some rioters got shot) the Boston Tea Party (government raised taxes in an obvious money grab, so a bunch of protesters broke into a warehouse and destroyed a bunch of private property). Get them to take the side of the British, then tell them which events I’m talking about. They know from school, hopefully, at least as to those two events, how they felt about them when they learned about them, and you can see the dissonance contorting their faces.
Others are Nazi sympathizers. I knew a dude who felt that the coolest thing he owned was a Nazi dagger from WW2. It was his “everyday carry” knife. Only visible as a Nazi knife if you looked at the hilt. He thought the Holocaust was a ln exaggeration and that the Nazis had a lot of good ideas that would translate well to today’s problems; he thought Jews controlled the media, that blacks and browns were taking jobs from better qualified white people (hated “DEI”). He was delusional, living in a world that wasnt real. Brainwashed. Maybe not his fault, but he’s responsible for his behaviors. If an alt right style cleansing or war breaks out, he’ll be the first non-open Nazi to get excited to kill minorities.
Then there are actual Nazis. Two types. Dumb, racist poor people who feel comforted by Nazi rhetoric. And intelligent, wealthy people, who want to steal all wealth from minorities and send them to ghettos (or worse), so their companies and investments have no competition and their personal wealth may go unhindered. These are people who want to use racism to bring about oligarchy and a new age of imperialism, and they recognize the oath of least resistance is a friendly dictator, brought to power based on Nazi rhetoric. This is Musk and Bannon. The people who now feel emboldened to do Nazi salute in public, as a homage to the group above, who might get caught up doing them in private.
My hot take, anyway.
It’s mainly a mix of economic frusturation and a divide and conquer strategy by the rich in order to have the masses blame immigrants and people of other races/religions/genders/sexual orientations/etc. for all of their problems instead of blaming the elite class and capitalism. The lie of meritocracy being real also plays a big role here (“temporarilly embarrassed billionaires”).
There is another angle, though, and that’s sexual frusturation. When a teenage male has issues getting laid and they look online for some kind of support, they find people like Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson who tells them that men who “get laid” are “alphas” or whatever and that women should be treated as subhuman or as slaves. These incels have likely never actually attempted to make friends with any women outside of a sexual or romantic context, because if they did, they would learn that women are the same as them, even when it comes to their struggles (even pertaining to dating/sexual frusturations).
I think the latter reason (specifically Gamergate) sparked the fire that made the first truely possible on a scale that we haven’t seen in our lifetimes.
There is also the additional piece of info that the majority of people won’t take action against what is happening in politics until it personally affects them, which is a very unfortunate reality.
Fucking GG and its consequences.
There are people who proud themselves in kicking puppies and more would come forward if they felt it’s acceptable.
Sorry to be pedantic, but it’s “Sieg Heil”.
Sieg means Victory, so it means “Hail victory”.
Thank you.
Curious to hear more about this documentary
Me too, I’d love to watch it again, but I can’t remember where I saw it.
The girl may have been a blogger or journalist at the start of it. It had something to do with Charlottesville. If anyone has any luck finding it, please ping me.
Edit: I asked duck.ai and it seems to have identified it:
The documentary you are referring to is likely "White Right: Meeting the Enemy." In this film, the director, Deeyah Khan, explores the world of white supremacists and far-right extremists. One of the key narratives in the documentary involves a young woman who becomes romantically involved with a member of the alt-right. Throughout the film, she witnesses disturbing behaviors, including Nazi salutes and book burnings, which challenge her perceptions and beliefs.
The documentary aims to provide insight into the motivations and ideologies of those involved in the alt-right movement while also highlighting the personal struggles of individuals who find themselves entangled in these extremist circles. It emphasizes the importance of dialogue and understanding in addressing the issues of hate and extremism.
Available here: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GJ0rhh5mbnA
