My late poodle used to do this thing with her arms. I say arms, knowing that dogs don’t have arms, just front legs, and I say she, knowing that grammatically, a dog is more of an it. But for the purposes of this story, she had arms. And she would sometimes lift one of them up in this rigid way, with a determined expression on her face. Yes, this fluffy little dog appeared to be heil-ing Hitler.

It was incongruous and therefore funny, in the way of 1967 Mel Brooks comedy The Producers or the iconic Fawlty Towers episode, “The Germans.” There is at this point a long tradition of humour—Jewish and mainstream, professional comedians and everyday chit-chat—about Nazism, and at Nazis’ expense. I think of ‘Allo ‘Allo!, of the “Soup Nazi” from Seinfeld, and of the Waiting for God episode where a stern young German woman comes to work at a retirement home (“I vaz not born during zee war” –“That’s what they all say.”). Also of the phenomenon of the “kitler,” the cats whose colour pattern gives the impression of a Hitler mustache. Do you know where I learned of the “kitler”? On the free trip I took from Birthright. There are cats roaming around in Israel and some of them missed the memo regarding who won the war. It’s hard to hold this against them.

So there’s postwar comedy mocking Nazism. There’s also a now-extensive recent history of people comparing their enemies with Nazis and using Nazi imagery to make their point. Much like the humour mocking Nazis, this usage of swastikas and what have you is not pro-Nazi. The protester with the placard equating an Israeli flag with one of Nazi Germany is doing something abhorrent, but the thing they are doing is not praising Nazism.

Everyone—well, ish—agrees that Nazis were bad, which is why everyone’s always calling people they disagree with Nazis, but also why internet trolls—and their offline teenage equivalents—gravitate to the shock value of Nazi gesturing.

All of this prologue is to get at why, in 2025, when confronted with Nazi symbolism, it’s not immediately obvious what to make of it. They’re joking, and joking because they hate Nazis, right? Right?

So when X owner and electric-car gazillionaire Elon Musk—now a member of the new Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency—doing what appeared to be a fascist salute at a Trump rally, there was no consensus about how to interpret it. The context allowed for plausible deniability—and he denies it. That he also followed it up with a Nazi joke and by uh going to Germany to tell far-right Germans that Germans need to........

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