When the world’s richest man takes middle stage, individuals take discover. When the world’s richest man takes middle stage and performs a Nazi salute, that’s when the fascists come crawling out of the woodwork.
On Inauguration Day in the US, tech oligarch and normal societal menace Elon Musk took to the presidential parade stage to congratulate Donald Trump and to thank the group for his or her assist. “It is thanks to you that the future of civilization is assured,” Musk pronounced, extending his arm out straight. He turned and repeated the gesture — ensuring everybody might see.
Then, the web exploded. Was it a Nazi salute? Was it a “Bellamy salute,” a gesture popularized on the finish of the nineteenth century to carry out throughout the newly drafted Pledge of Allegiance? Proper-wing media shops champed on the bit to defend Musk. Even the Anti-Defamation League rushed to defend the gesture as merely “awkward.” European media instantly denounced him and main students of fascism like Ruth Ben-Ghiat decried the gesture as a Nazi salute; others wrote off the gesture as an expression of Musk’s autism.
However a brand new principle got here to the fore when Musk’s shut Italian ally and defender, Andrea Stroppa, posted a now-deleted assertion on X: “Roman Empire is back starting from Roman salute.” Alongside Stroppa’s avatar and alternate identify, Claudius Nero’s Legion, was a wolf emoji. That is seemingly a nod to the “Lupa Capitolina,” a feminine wolf who symbolized Rome alongside its folkloric founders, Romulus and Remus. The dangerous romance between Musk and Historic Rome had reemerged.
Musk has a protracted historical past of referencing the Roman Empire. His model of technocratic despotism and its social media iconography has roots within the work of Twentieth-century European fascists, who have been themselves fixated on Historic Rome. He has lengthy been obsessive about the late Roman Republic dictator Sulla and in December even modified his X avatar to “Kekius Maximus” — a Romanized model of Pepe the Frog wearing navy garb just like that of Maximus within the movie Gladiator (2000). Like Italian dictator Benito Mussolini and Nazi chief Adolf Hitler, the billionaire has ceaselessly expressed admiration for the Roman Empire, posting AI footage of himself cosplaying as a Roman soldier and cooking up theories about why historic Rome fell (reply: extreme decline in delivery fee). He thinks about it each day.
However from the parable of SPQR to the “Roman salute,” the Roman Empire cited by these fascists — together with Hitler — was, the truth is, a contemporary fantasy born partially from artwork and cinema.
Jean-Léon Gérôme, “Ave Caesar! Morituri te salutant (Hail Caesar! We Who Are about to Die Salute You)” (1859), oil on canvas, 36 5/8 x 57 1/4 inches (93.1 x 145.4 cm) (picture public area through the Yale College Artwork Gallery)
The place did the fiction of the “Roman salute” come from, precisely? As navy historian Sara Elise Phang famous in her e book, Roman Navy Service (2008), there is just one obscure reference to a Roman navy salute in historic literature. It was penned by the Jewish historian Josephus in his account of the First Jewish Struggle (66–70 CE), a time when Jews in Judaea rebelled towards the Roman Empire. If the parable of this salute didn’t come from historic artwork or literature, the place else ought to we glance?
In feedback to Hyperallergic, historic navy and movie historian Gregory S. Aldrete defined that, though Historic Romans did carry out “various gestures involving raising the arm,” particularly oratorical gestures when talking, the so-called “Roman salute” was fabricated a lot later by visible artists and filmmakers.
“Jacques-Louis David’s painting ‘The Oath of the Horatii’ [1784–5] seems to have started the idea of it being a Roman thing, but it really took off as a gesture in the 19th century,” he stated. Within the nineteenth century, different work resembling French artist Jean-Léon Gérôme’s “Ave Caesar! Morituri te Salutant (Hail Caesar! We Who Are about to Die Salute You)” (1859) riffed on notions of loyalty and respect accentuated by David simply previous to the French Revolution — this time depicting gladiators.
Classicist Martin M. Winkler took on the trendy creation of the salute in his 2009 e book The Roman Salute: Cinema, Historical past, Ideology, concluding that it started with David’s “The Oath of the Horatii” depicting an early story as described by the Roman historian Livy. Winkler casts this portray because the “starting point for an arresting gesture that progressed from oath-taking to what will become known as the Roman salute” — the precursor to the invention of the “Bellamy salute” in 1892.
Although invented by his aide James Upham, the Bellamy salute is called for the creator of the Pledge of Allegiance, a Baptist minister named Francis Bellamy who pushed to get flags and the pledge into school rooms throughout the US within the late nineteenth century. Princeton historian Kevin Kruse instructed Hyperallergic that the gesture was meant to accompany the pledge, written for the four-hundredth anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s arrival within the Americas.
“It called for a military-style salute which was then extended as a palm-out gesture ‘to the flag’ as those words were recited,” stated Kruse, who additional discusses the pledge in his 2016 e book One Nation Underneath God: How Company America Invented Christian America. “When Italian and German fascists adopted a similar salute decades later, the Bellamy salute came under fire. In 1942, Congress officially changed the salute to a hand held over the heart.” (Musk, alternatively, has not distanced himself from Nazi sympathizing and often jokes about it.)
Picture from the Annual report of the Board of Training of College District Quantity One within the Metropolis and County of Denver, Colorado (1904) (picture public area through the Web Archive on Flickr)
Within the 1900s, the “Roman salute” additional crept into well-liked visible tradition by way of early movies targeted on the fervour of Christ or Christianity in a Roman context and thru artwork. Motion pictures like Ben Hur (1925) and the Italian model of Quo Vadis (1913) had an enormous visible impression, in line with Winkler. Roman oratorical hand gestures with a proper hand-held up for talking had been identified already by way of statues just like the Augustus of Prima Porta and the equestrian bronze of Marcus Aurelius.
Winkler argues that Mussolini and the Fascist Occasion of Italy later drew on movies and misinterpretations of artwork within the improvement of their signature salute round 1925. In Germany, the phrase heil (“hail”) was already used as a type of greeting within the early Twentieth century. A model of the Nazi salute later tailored by Hitler was utilized by Georg Ritter von Schönerer, the chief of the extremist German nationalist get together in Austria, as historian Wolfgang Schieder has written. Hitler, nonetheless, admitted in 1942 that he adopted Mussolini’s lead, including the salute to the greeting.
A racist WWII anti-American Fascist propaganda poster from 1944 by Italian artist Gino Boccasile, studying “Non prevarranno” (“They shall not prevail”), created for the Italian Social Republic, displaying the Augustus of Prima Porta statue with caricatures of Allied troopers under (picture public area through the Rubenstein Uncommon E book & Manuscript Library at Duke College)
Because the starting of Trump’s first presidency, neo-Nazis have used the concept of the “Roman salute” to cloak their violent beliefs in apocryphal historic historical past and make themselves extra palatable to a preferred viewers. In a 2018 article, classics professor Curtis Dozier mentioned using the salute by white supremacists and neo-Nazi teams by pointing to a journalist chatting with Jeff Schoep, former head of the Nationwide Socialist Motion (NSM). Throughout a video of the alternate filmed by the journalist, Schoep disputed the time period “Nazi salute” and claimed the gesture used throughout the rally was as an alternative a “Roman salute.” Dozier identified that Schoep’s insistence that the gesture was distinct from the Nazi salute was “part of NSM’s effort, announced in November 2016, to ‘re-brand’ their movement and ‘launch [the] party into the mainstream.’”
For his half, Musk has not offered a clarification or outright denial that he gave a Nazi salute.
“Frankly, they need better dirty tricks. The ‘everyone is Hitler’ attack is sooo tired,” he wrote on X in a while Inauguration Day. And but, his historical past of antisemitic posts and his latest dialog with Germany’s far-right candidate Alice Weidel already gesture to Nazi sympathies.
Roman navy historical past has lengthy attracted a sure White male demographic, however when politics, energy, and inventive propaganda become involved, issues can take a fascist flip. Hitler famously manipulated the Greek sculptural “Discobolus” determine for his personal ends, simply as Mussolini tapped into his ardour for Roman navy historical past by way of his use of SPQR and development of Romanesque monuments in his identify and likeness.
As Musk and his DOGE taskforce carve out their very own distorted, neo-Roman Empire, just like the one in all fascists previous, we have to be cautious to dispel and query his revisions of historical past. Though the “Roman salute” was a later fabrication of historic historical past perpetuated by artwork, movie, and fascists, using the Roman Empire as a metonymic warrant for unbridled imperialism is alarming. What issues is that college students of historical past be taught to acknowledge the trimmings of this ahistorical propaganda — and refuse to salute it.
