Clearly, new and used – sorry, used – electric car salesman Elon Musk is at pains to prove that he is more insufferably boastful than his political leader Donald Trump.

After leveraging his corrupt social media platform to help elect the 47th President of the United States, suffering from an executive order, Musk couldn’t resist the spotlight on Inauguration Day – much to Trump’s dismay, I think.

After performing a strange dance at a rally to celebrate Trump’s return to the White House, Musk said… here MAGA regularly shouted a heartfelt gesture that reminded many prominent historians of the fascist salute first made famous by Benito Mussolini’s Blackshirts and later adopted by the murderous psychopath Adolf Hitler and his legion of Brownshirts.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a professor of history and fascism at New York University, took to X to say the gesture was “a Nazi salute — and a very aggressive salute, too.”

The usually outraged Anti-Defamation League – which views anyone who eats Palestinian-made hummus while wearing a keffiyeh on an American college campus as a raging anti-Semite – was more tolerant.

In an uncharacteristic plea for “grace” and “healing,” the Anti-Defamation League motive “It appears that Elon Musk made an embarrassing gesture in a moment of excitement, not a Nazi salute,” Musk insisted.

For his expected part, Musk unacceptable Accusations of the Nazi salute being a “dirty trick” are not worth his time or attention.

“The ‘everyone is like Hitler’ attack is very exhausting,” Musk wrote.

The uproar over Musk’s “strange” behavior or that he condemns it – take your pick – will pass, as all the uproar will inevitably pass.

However, I believe that the charged reaction to Musk’s provocative gesture is a symptom of a deeper and more troubling phenomenon, which cannot be dismissed as a “tired” liar since the world’s richest man and other Trump surrogates have contributed to it – knowingly or unknowingly. You know?

The disturbing corollary to Trump’s return and embrace of fascism is the renewed attempt by unsavory figures and forces in the United States, Europe, and beyond to downplay and sanitize the horrors of Nazism.

Happy, on the verge of orgasm reaction Among self-avowed white supremacists and fascists across Europe and the US, Musk’s salute is proof of how bold they have become.

Exhibit A: In early January, musk king A delightful 70-minute conversation – broadcast live on Channel X – with Alice Weidel, head of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party.

Weidel has attempted to recast the AfD as a conservative, liberal alternative to Germany’s coalition government, led by the Social Democrats, despite the troubling fact that Germany’s domestic intelligence service has taken over. It is said He placed an “extremist faction” of the party under surveillance because it posed a threat to democracy.

AfD elders have sought to relativize Germany’s harmful and not-so-distant past suggestion That “Hitler and the Nazis are just birds in more than 1,000 years of successful German history.”

Also a regional party leader He complained The Holocaust Memorial in the capital, Berlin, was a “monument to shame.” required It is a revolution in the culture of remembrance in Germany, given that “the biggest problem lies in this [it] Hitler is presented as completely evil.

In this horrific context, Weidel often used the discredited metaphor that Hitler was a “communist,” and how the misunderstood National Socialist Führer was labeled a “right-winger” only to discredit “modern conservatives.”

Remember, Musk not only provided an uninhibited platform for this outrageousness, but also threw his significant influence and support behind the rise of the AfD party on the eve of Germany’s federal elections scheduled for late February.

Exhibit B: Not to be outdone in my “I’m just enjoying a fun chat with a historical reviewer,” Fox News host and president emeritus of the Trump fan club, Tucker Carlson, was fired. Invited “Amateur historian” Daryl Cooper appeared on his podcast late last year for a two-hour talk.

Carlson is the childish instigator ever described Cooper as “the best and most honest historian of the United States.”

Look, I’m not the biggest fan of Winston Churchill, but Cooper’s description of the cigar-chomping British resistance leader facing off against blitzkrieg-fighting fascists as the “chief villain” of World War II is so absurd that the slur amounts to an assault on history.

However, as I noted earlier, this is consistent with determined public designs to reshape the disgusting record of Nazism to make the hideous ideology and its iconic figure, Hitler, more palatable.

By a credible allusion, Cooper claimed that the Holocaust was an unexpected byproduct of the Nazis’ early and rapid military success, and not a deliberate plan hatched by Hitler and his murderous followers to wipe out the human race from Europe.

“they [the Nazis] “They waged a war where they were completely unprepared to deal with the millions of prisoners of war, domestic political prisoners, etc. that they would have to deal with,” Cooper told a captured Carlson. They went in without any plan, and they threw these people into the camps. Millions of people ended up dead there.”

Most of these “people” were Jewish children, women and men. The Nazis “dealt” with their “unexpected” problem by exterminating “prisoners” in gas chambers or burning them in ovens.

Musk was very impressed subscriber Carlson posted the interview to his 213 million-plus followers on X, writing that the miserable tete-a-tete was: “Very interesting. “Worth watching.”

The strutting “free speech” warrior later deleted the post after a deluge of criticism for promoting a Nazi apologist and his genial host.

Trump’s vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance He stayed On Carlson’s part, he issued a statement at the time deploring the “cancel culture of guilt by association.”

Vance’s reluctance to criticize Carlson’s “conversation” with his awful guest is a reflection, I suspect, of his likely familiarity with the Republican Party’s long-standing attraction to and sympathy with “America First” populist nationalism and genuine expressions of anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial. That goes with it.

As I did writtenHowever, the roots of this obnoxious and sometimes overt tension within the Republican Party go back to the late 1930s and the first iteration of the America First movement, led by that famous aviator and enduring cultural icon, Charles Lindbergh.

Lindbergh had a large following who were enthusiastic about his isolationist and pro-fascist rhetoric.

He wasn’t alone.

As did writer and editor Jacob Heilbronn male: “Politicians like Herbert Hoover, who addressed the Republican Convention in 1940, praised Hitler as a force for stability in Central Europe. They claimed that Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, not the Third Reich, was the actual totalitarian threat to America.

This distorted thinking has continued to infect the Republican Party over the many decades since, revitalized with the rise of Trump who, according to his former chief of staff John Kelly, He praised Hitler because he did “some good things” and, as commander-in-chief, longed for generals like the Nazis.

Lately, the Nazi horde hasn’t been so bad repetition The old exoneration held that the Allied bombing of civilians in Dresden was a crime against humanity on a par with the Holocaust to absolve Hitler’s willing and complicit executioners from guilt.

The result of this blatant revisionism is to convince the gullible to conveniently set aside the disastrous legacy of the fascist charlatans of this or last century.

The other goal, of course, is to convince the gullible that a strong “populist” man or woman – in Italy, Argentina or the United States – is capable of prescribing easy answers to stubborn and complex problems at home and abroad.

This troubled world must heed the age-old warning: buyer beware.

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Al Jazeera.