Elon Goes To Germany

It is honestly a shame the history of Germany — a nation which an interesting past and many worthwhile stories which provide amazing insight into why this planet functions like it does today — is commonly boiled down to its worst dozen years. That is the most charitable look at what Elon Musk told the Alternative for Germany party on 1/25/2025, where he encouraged Germans to move beyond the notion of guilt for the atrocities of World War Two and should instead “be proud of German culture, German values, and not to lose that in some sort of multiculturalism that dilutes everything.”

Funnily enough, it is that interpretation of Musk’s statement which I actually find myself in agreement with — I believe Germany should not merely be defined by its worst actions, just as I take the perspective that no nation at all should be looked at exclusively through the lens of their most infamous events. However, I disagree with Musk’s denouncement of multiculturalism and find his separation of what happened during World War Two from “German values” to be historically nonsensical. William Shirer famously showed in his 1960 work The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich how much of what the Nazi party stood for was the end result of cultural attitudes found throughout German history. This is not to say that all Germans were Nazis at the time — Shirer even documented how unpopular the Nazi Party was during its rise to power and…