Explainer Meme, OC, WiP or Rule candidate.
Text:
Musk's salute at Trump's Inauguration (sic) doesn't make him a Nazi
Musk's $250 Million donation to an autocratic usurper Makes (sic) him a Nazi-producing industrialist
Musk is to Nazis what the Hostess board of directors is to Twinkies
Sorry about the additional caps. I may also darken the background for legibility.
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Yeah, I get where you're coming from, and I like your design (though agree it could be a little easier to read) but feel like this is playing in to the "he's not a nazi" narrative his supporters are trying to push, when he is in fact, a nazi, as well as a regime enabling industrialist. The two aren't mutually exclusive, and we should be calling the nazi spade a nazi spade at every opportunity.
I was trying to play on the current that's a Roman salute. That doesn't make him a Nazi with the point that the salute was only his most recent Nazi-indicating behavior, the most egregious of which was buying and ruining a $40 billion social media platform so he could push his monarchist agenda. (With himself being the final monarch. It's always that way.)
Oh, I get it, I just think it plays in to their rhetoric more than it contradicts it.
They're grasping at any and every "he's not a nazi" straw they can find or make up, this just gives them another one to grasp to, because they wouldn't see or care about your intent, all they see is someone deliberately avoiding directly saying "musk is a nazi" or "what makes him a nazi is..", which is exactly their tactic and feeds in to their cognitive dissonance.
You're giving him the degree of separation they're looking for, which he does not deserve.
So again, I understand what you're trying to do, but I think that not explicitly saying "musk is a nazi because..." is counterproductive.
I don't understand, how does him being a monarchist make him a Nazi?
Nazis are monarchists. Granted, for starters they'll settle for oligarchy or dictatorship but the end result is getting back to classic feudalism.
That was Hitler's fantasy at least, to have his principals become his upper nobility and the SS become their landed knights. He was attracted not only to the wotanic gods, but in fact the Wagnerian interpretation of them. It would be as if MAGAs believed not only in Thor, but the MCU version.
In the case of the new Trump administration, Musk is not the only one who wants to control political power, but the tech bros do as well. Vance is Peter Theil's toady and is Theil's vector to get his voice heard. They want to be kings, and ultimately kings over each other. It may even result in a violent contest. (Not a gladitorial one between them, themselves, but whatever armies and assassins they can raise.)
The horizon point of the far right is the consolidation of all power to one point, and given they are really into passing that power to their next of kin (or trying to live forever, so far failing) it's monarchy.
According to Karl Marx in Das Kapital, this is always the bitter end of capitalism, and so, given an unlimited amount of time, eventually we give up on systems that focus power, or have stratified wealth, for something else that works. Communism, anarchism or something we haven't fully fleshed out yet.
I guess the problem is that I just don't see the desire in modern right wing leadership for passing on their power to their next of kin. Hitler didn't have kids. Elon doesn't seem to have very good relationships with his kids and has stated that he won't be giving his companies to them. And none of Trump's kids are working for the Whitehouse for his second term.
That's because you're thinking in short term. Hitler and his principals imagined German nobility (such as Göring) inheriting the throne. Hitler didn't want a legacy of descendants. He wanted to replace Christmas with Hitler Day, and have the society sing Hitler songs and have Hitler bronze statues in every state park.
These processes of transition take a long time. The French revolution had to go through several stages (the Robespierre's Reign of Terror being only the first one before it established a republic and almost a century before freedom of religion was finally ratified.
The point of right wing politics is to consolidate political power into a single nexus. Typically each despot appoints the next, and sooner or later, it's going to be blood heirs. Trump probably can't see ahead enough to recognize his own death, and his handlers could decide he suffers from diminished capacity as soon as it is convenient to do so. Vance is Theil's stooge, and will be disposed of as soon as he crosses his oligarch masters. They would be next in line.
There are some interesting directions this can take. Borrowing a page from DPRK, they might pretend Trump is still alive and use AI to extrapolate all his public appearances, much the way that Kim Il Sung still rules North Korea from beyond the grave (without the help of AI appearances and speeches)
And the tech oligarchs have a strong interest in anti-aging, so we might see the first computer-simulated billionaire or advancements in keeping billionaires alive for a whole lot longer. Again, though as with Trump, Reagan and Wilson, it becomes the impetus of a leader's kitchen cabinet to handle a disabled ruler, whether he's mad, demented or too incapacitated to communicate, hence how we have geriatric elected officials who really can't make decisions, so their staff decides for them.
In that case, it would be what Jamie Raskin calls neo-monarchy in which successors are still appointed by the current ruler, but also accounts for ideological appointees or kings that don't expect ever to die and be succeeded. Even then, civil wars will occur between those who believe they're on the short list, and industrialists willing to sponsor them.
(Extrapolating to the other side of the graph, far left society would distribute power as much as possible. Marx's ideal was to make everyone politically equal, but we haven't worked out a perfect means to run such a society without corruption rapidly infecting the process. This is why ideology is not something to be loyal to, but a basic model one develops and improves until it can serve as the rules for a functional system of goverenment.)
