It's so odd how every time there's an instance of a group of people throwing up what looks just like a nazi salute, some people rush in to explain why it's bad to take note of the similarity. It seems to me that if you're in a culture where people are widely familiar with Nazi iconography, and you're not exploring Nazism in some fictional or educational context, then you'd want to avoid doing and saying things that make you look and sound like a Nazi, such as training a crowd of people to do a stiff-arm salute at a political rally for theatrical effect, the same way it's a bad idea to hold up swastika flags and claim you were being 'ironic' or 'trying to provoke a discussion'.
In the sense of what? Raising your right hand? That's basically the only part that overlaps. From wikipedia:
>The salute is performed by extending the right arm from the shoulder into the air with a straightened hand. Usually, the person offering the salute would say "Heil Hitler!" (lit. 'Hail Hitler!', IPA: [ˌhaɪl ˈhɪtlɐ] (listen)),[3] "Heil, mein Führer!" ('Hail, my leader!'), or "Sieg Heil!" ('Hail victory!').
Also, in the video a prayer was performed and afterwards they slammed their hand while saying "as one", both of which are not part of the nazi salute.
>it serves the same psychological purpose
Can you expand on this? What do you mean by "psychological purpose"? Is it just something mundane as "symbol of support in a political rally"?
>but as long as we call it something else it's perfectly OK
I'm certainly not defending the actions that were taken by the participants of the rally, and I suspect neither is the other poster (thepasswordis). The complaint is that the twitter poster decided to sensationalize that rally by calling something it's not. The problem with this is that words have meaning, and if you start using in cases that clearly does not fit the original meaning, then it gets watered down. eg. "nazi" nowadays is synonymous with "white supremacist" (which itself has also been watered down), which is far from the original meaning of "member of the National Socialist German Workers' Party". That's all well and good if you want to demonize those groups, but what do you call people who actually want to systematically murder jews?
>It's so odd how every time there's an instance of a group of people throwing up what looks just like a nazi salute, some people rush in to explain why it's bad to take note of the similarity.
I'm not against taking note of the similarity. I'm against calling it a "nazi salute" with no qualifiers.
It's collective, coordinated, and directs attention toward an individual on stage, as opposed to an individual expression of support like clapping or cheering - which many people might do simultaneously but isn't normally coordinated outside of a music performance. The 'as one' hand slamming you mentioned emphasizes the coordination here; it's novel, but basically an iteration on the original gesture.
> The complaint is that the twitter poster decided to sensationalize that rally by calling something it's not.
The tweet is somewhat hyperbolic and sensationalized, but while it's not exactly the same I really think it's more similar than different - it's a choreographed gesture of support for a political figure at a political rally involving a straight arm salute. As I said earlier, harping on the cosmetic differences sidesteps the very obvious question of 'does this look like a nazi rally to a casual observer?' And that matters, because political rallies aren't intellectually rigorous exercises in philosophical inquiry, they are theatrical performances designed to motivate political behavior through emotional arousal.
> That's all well and good if you want to demonize those groups, but what do you call people who actually want to systematically murder jews?
Groypers (this is an in-joke). We also have open neo-nazis who are explicitly aligned with the historical national socialist movement to the point of fetishizing it. The broader right wing authoritarianism that obtains in multiple countries at present can be generally described as fascism without any loss of precision or clarity. This doesn't have to refer to the-Italian-party-once-headed-by-Benito-Mussolini. Obsessing over typologies is sometimes a coping mechanism to avoid engaging with an issue, like having an argument about meteorology to avoid admitting you should have brought an umbrella.
