Photograph Source: DonkeyHotey – CC BY 2.0

Leave it to the New York Times to mystify Steve Bannon’s Nazi salute, which was, rather than “resembled,” a Nazi salute – something the cheering crowd at last weekend’s CPAC clearly understood.

Now that Bannon, following Musk, Ingraham, and others, has broken the ice on restoring the salute’s place in mainstream politics, it’s useful to recall what the salute originally meant in its most immediate practical sense.

As recounted in various memoirs of 1930s Germany, those refusing to salute in public faced immediate physical violence in the form of beatings. Those refusing to salute within more private settings tended to eventually yield to the pressure for the sake of appearances but discovered, as described by Bruno Bettleheim, that........

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