On the Reich track

Earl Fowler

The fury was predictable and entirely justified after U.S. DOGE hatchet man Elon Musk reposted a message on X Thursday declaring that “Hitler didn’t murder millions of people. Public sector employees did.”

In his outraged response, Lee Saunders, union president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees of the AFL-CIO, wrote: “America’s public service workers — our nurses, teachers, firefighters, librarians — chose making our communities safe, healthy and strong over getting rich. They are not, as the world’s richest man implies, genocidal murderers.

“Elon Musk and the billionaires in this administration have no idea what real people go through every day. That’s why he’s so willing to take a chainsaw to people’s jobs, Medicaid, Social Security and Medicare.”

Seemingly spurred on by the ketamine prescribed for his ongoing battle with depression, Musk has displayed a disturbing — shall we call it nostalgia? — for the architect of the Holocaust that killed six million Jews, while lacerating U.S. government workers, whose jobs he has cut by the thousands since Donald Trump took office.

Born and raised in apartheid-era South Africa, Musk triggered an uproar when he notoriously flashed what (more than) appeared to be a Nazi salute at an event marking Donald Trump’s inauguration as president in January.

He mocked the ensuing indignation over the gesture with a series of tasteless puns featuring Hitler’s top aides, including: “Don’t say Hess to Nazi accusations!” and “Some people will Goebbels anything down!”

His real wakawaka boffola: “Stop Gőring your enemies! His pronouns would’ve been He/Himmler!” That was followed up with a hearty “Bet you did nazi that coming,” accompanied by a laughing-to-tears emoji.

Laughing and dying, you know it’s the same release.

Jonathan Greenblatt, head of the Jewish Anti-Defamation League, blasted Musk’s Nazi “jokes,” noting that the Holocaust was a “singularly evil event, and it is inappropriate and offensive to make light of it.”

It’s beyond belief that we’ve reached a point where anyone would have to say that out loud. Particularly to the de facto president of the United States. Particularly at a time when the Trump government is supposedly countering antisemitism by slashing university funding.

Still, it has to be admitted that for the most part, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Augusto Pinochet, Benito Mussolini, Idi Amin, Saloth (Pol Pot) San, the Kim dynasty in North Korea, Muammar Gaddafi, Trump’s good friend Vladdy and the rest of the Dictator’s Row All Stars did not personally carry out the mass executions conducted in their names. They didn’t, except on special occasions, fire the bullets or man the gas chambers or bomb civilians.

Totalitarians are always skilled at delegating that responsibility to psychopathic underlings, their fellow experts at stoking prejudices against minority scapegoats while instilling fear and a desperation for self-preservation among ordinary citizens.

Above all, they have an uncanny instinct for how to take advantage of tribal instincts that we share with all other anthropoids — our tendency to go along with the crowd, to do what others do, to distrust strangers who dress or speak or worship differently, to uncritically believe what neighbours believe and act accordingly. Monkey see, monkey do.

As historian and philosopher Hannah Arendt underscored for us, evil becomes banal when it acquires an unthinking and systematic character: “The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.”

This is from The Origins of Totalitarianism, her influential 1951 analysis of Nazism and Stalinism:

In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. ... Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.

So tonight we gonna, we gonna party like it’s 1939.

And that’s what makes Musk’s smirking schoolboy mirth so freaking harrowing.

Remember that notorious set of experiments carried out in the 1960s by Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram, who monitored the willingness of study participants to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform acts he figured would conflict with their individual consciences?

Here’s a concise summary from philosopher David Detmer:

Milgram informed his subjects that he was conducting an experiment on the nature of human learning. The theory to be tested by the experiment held that people learn correctly and effectively when they get punished for making a mistake.

Subjects were then asked to administer electric shocks to a learner whenever he made a mistake, with the shocks becoming progressively more intense, to the tune of 15 volts, with each mistake. This was to be done by moving from one switch to the next, proceeding from left to right.

The switches were labelled: “Slight Shock,” “Moderate Shock,” “Strong Shock,” “Very Strong Shock,” “Intense Shock,” “Extreme Intensity Shock,” and “Danger: Severe Shock.” The last two switches were simply marked “XXX.”

The “victim” of these shocks (he was an actor who was not really receiving shocks) was kept out of sight of the subjects and instructed, at first, to give them no feedback during the experiment. Under these circumstances, virtually all of the subjects went to the end of the board, perfectly willing to administer 450-volt “dangerous” and “severe” shocks to an anonymous victim.

Then, on later trials (with different subjects), the victim issued mild protests. This effected little change. Finally, trials were conducted (again, with new subjects) in which the victim would, upon receiving a 150-volt shock (after having, at lower levels, grunted, shouted at the experimenter that the shocks were becoming painful, and groaning), cry out, “Experimenter, get me out of here! I won’t be in the experiment any more! I refuse to go on!” And at 180 volts: “I can’t stand the pain.” And at 270 volts, agonized screams.

Nevertheless, even on those conditions, 26 out of 40 subjects obeyed the experimenter to the end, repeatedly punishing the victim with the most potent shock available until the experimenter finally called a halt to the proceedings.

Milgram, who died in 1984, summarized the result in a 1974 article titled “The Perils of Obedience”:

Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.

I vas just following zee orders.

And that’s what makes Musk’s fascistic glee at the culpability of the public servants who did Hitler’s bidding so terrifying.

If anyone thinks there’s the slightest chance that Musk will call a halt to the ongoing razing of the American state — especially given the acquiescent Republican-controlled Congress, Trump’s servile cabinet of warped sycophants and a shamefully supine Supreme Court intent on reversing the civil rights progress of the last 65 years — there’s a 450-volt jolt waiting in your bathtub.

Notwithstanding the howls from (heretofore curiously feckless and fallow) Democrats and union officials, a huge segment of whatever remains of the subjugated U.S. federal workforce when Musk finally lays down the chainsaw will have been bullied and strong-armed into goose-stepping to any and all insane diktats and fiats from the Creature from the Black Mar-a-Lagoon.

Bet you did nazi that coming.