ELON MUSK HAS NOT DENIED OR COMMENTED ON HIS INFAMOUS SALUTE. Do you think Elon Musk’s actions and open beliefs lately reveal a predictable, knowable and inevitable political trajectory for him? Musk is pictured gesturing the Fascist salute, which survives with the Neo-Fascists in Italy and among various factions of Neo-Fascists and Neo-Nazis today. When you speak to a Fascist of any kind, he or she greets you in person or digitally by emoji with the salute known mostly as the “Fascist salute” or the “Heil Hitler” salute. The meaning of the salute is in this sense a show of fraternal obedience to the authoritarian state and its totalitarian potentialities — a dedication to the absolute principles of victory or death in the cause.
Historically, a similar salute is depicted prior to the Fascists in Italy in the paintings of Jacques-Louis David, e.g., first in The Oath of the Horatii (1784), and then after the French Revolution, was commissioned to paint The Tennis Court Oath (1792). It was in these depictions, that the salute becomes associated with (i) the Roman republic and (ii) imperial culture, and (iii) fraternal intimacy — the union of minds and bodies in service to a patriotic idea beyond class, family, creed, religion and philosophical schools.
The salute in these paintings represented republican ideals, but in 1810 painting The Distribution of the Eagle Standards, Jacques-Louis David depicts the salute as a pledge to a central authority figure. Italian nationalist Gabriele
D’Annunzio appropriated the salute in 1919 when he led the “Italian Regency of Carnaro” in the occupation of Fiume. Later, Adolf Hitler adopts the salute of the Fascists. Before this, the salute as depicted in the paintings of Jacques-Louis David was used in several films set in antiquity during the 20th century. I will not discuss the Bellamy salute used to accompany the Pledge of Allegiance here between 1892-1942 in the United States.
The salute, that Jacques-Louis David depicts is like the Bellamy salute, whereas Musk’s gesture is exactly the salute of the Fascists and National Socialists or conveying similar meaning in Napoleonic authoritarianism. Elon Musk’s salute is an unapologetic open acknowledgement and acceptance within himself, or a “coming out” atleast of some Identitarian political orientation, with its related influences upon or connections to “right-wing” movements and groups in the United States.
The salute on the world stage, Musk’s open statements to party members of the AfD (Alternative for Germany) recently in Germany about national and ethnic pride therefore signifies his fraternal alliance with these socio-political ideas, hopes and movements in Europe and the United States.
The American Minervan 
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