The Hitler Salute Was Never German
warcommons.com
warcommons.com
it started during the 18th century in France with The Oath of the Horatii. It is pseudohistorically associated with ancient Rome afterwards.
Ancient Romans did not use that salute.
Mussolini would draw on the greatness of Rome even in architecture and mix it with modern to look towards the future. The lasting empire. Hitler had no such powerful local symbolism so also drew a lot from Rome for his “1000 year Reich”. And what wasn’t really Roman was just called Roman to make it easy.
"It began in ancient Rome."
It's not there as a quote, it's not there as "it was claimed to begin in ancient Rome". It's just the simple assertion: "It began in ancient Rome."
If you didn't really mean to assert that statement or suggest that it's true, then, frankly, you've written that pretty poorly.
"but I never stated this was actually used in ancient Rome."
Now you're saying:
"Yes it did begin in ancient Rome." which the article expressly started with as well.
What are you actually asserting?
>The Nazi salute.
As an opening paragraph to a topic that you're about to educate/clarify your audience on, maybe using a generic word to describe what your article goes into depth is a poor way of going about.. it.
It's not a misunderstanding from readers part. If you write "is started in ancient Rome" and think it does not imply that Romans used it, you have problems in writing.
If I didn’t want people to think that I was suggesting that something began in ancient Rome I would rewrite the first sentence of the article: “It began in ancient Rome.”
And probably this bit, two sentences later: “Its origins go back much further, as it was based on the Roman salute”
As a perfectly reasonable, not-horrifically-pedantic interpretation of those statements would be that you are flat out stating that the salute was used in ancient Rome and then the Nazis later used it.
Pro tip: if you want people to know that the salute didn’t start in ancient Rome, you could change “It started in ancient Rome” to “It didn’t start in ancient Rome”
But I do stand by my wording. As calling it the Roman Salute is genuine. Just Google it. But, more important I never stated that it was used in ancient Rome. The link to Mussolini starts there is the argument. So it did start in ancient Rome, but only if you look at it analytically deeper, like the article does!
How on earth could you possibly know that it was “based on” some maybe-kinda-similar-or-not Roman salute, but it also definitely wasn’t used in Rome? It originated there but wasn’t used there? That isn’t a coherent position.
It seems like you’ve established, with documentation, that an Italian guy saw and liked a painting made by a French guy that lived a thousand years closer in history to Gangnam Style than the fall of Rome. If you did some sort of rich analysis that extrapolates that into the history of the Roman empire it didn’t make its way into your article.
I thought this article was a good fit for critical thinking.
> Although it originated during the 18th century in France, it is pseudohistorically associated with ancient Rome.
> According to an apocryphal legend, the fascist gesture was based on a customary greeting which was claimed to have been used in ancient Rome. However, no Roman text describes such a gesture, and the Roman works of art that display salutational gestures bear little resemblance to the modern "Roman" salute. The salute had in fact originated more than a millennium later, in Jacques-Louis David's painting The Oath of the Horatii (1784)
Given the current rise of fascism around the world, this whole “well, actually, it’s really the Roman salute” discussion feels like a Nebelkerze — a smoke screen that distracts from the symbol’s actual, present-day meaning and function.
Buddhists didnt erase swastikas from their culture - its odd that others have such mindless reflex to reappropriate symbols
https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-a-glass-plate-photograph-o...
https://www.gettyimages.co.uk/detail/news-photo/girls-scouts...
https://www.alamy.com/fine-70s-vintage-black-and-white-lifes...
this last article alleges that the bellamy salute itself was meant to spread national socialist ideology and the police state which is of course absurd, but it has some good historical photos that are worth looking at:
Hitler openly admired the Roman empire and alluded to Germany being the spiritual heir to it. Look at the neoclassical architecture, or the German imperial eagle, or even just identifying as the Third Reich, where the first Reich was the Holy Roman Empire.
If he was misleading about the links with Rome, it was in retconning the founders of Rome as Nordics or "Aryans" rather than the sallow-skinned Mediterranean people everyone else assumes lived there at the time.