The defence of Elon Musk’s salute is a symptom of a much deeper problem

There is a renewed attempt in the US, Europe and beyond to minimise and sanitise the horrors of Nazism. Still, I think that the charged reaction to Musk’s provocative gesture is a symptom of a deeper and decidedly more unsettling phenomenon that cannot be dismissed as a “tired” canard since the world’s richest man and other preening Trump surrogates have contributed to it – knowingly or unknowingly. AfD elders have sought to relativise Germany’s noxious, not-so-distant past by suggesting that “Hitler and the Nazis are just bird s*** in more than 1,000 years of successful German history.” A regional party leader also complained that a Holocaust memorial in the capital, Berlin, was a “monument of shame” that required a reversal of Germany’s remembrance culture, given that “the big problem is that presents Hitler as absolutely evil.” In this appalling vein, Weidel has often trotted out the discredited trope that Hitler was a “communist” and how the misunderstood National Socialist fuhrer was only tarred as “right wing” to smear modern “conservatives”. Exhibit B: Not to be outdone on the I’m-just-enjoying-a-pleasant-chat-with-a-whackadoo-historical-revisionist score, fired Fox News host and titular head of the Trump fan boy club Tucker Carlson invited “amateur historian” Darryl Cooper on his podcast late last year to drone on for two hours. They claimed that Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, not the Third Reich, was the actual totalitarian threat to America.” That distorted thinking has continued to infect the GOP in the many decades since and was given renewed life with the ascendancy of Trump who, according to his former chief of staff John Kelly, praised Hitler for having done “some good things” and, as commander-in-chief, pined for generals like the Nazis.