Remembering All Too Well

Holocaust Remembrance Day is hitting different in Europe as several countries are facing the rise of far right parties. It doesn’t help that the richest person in the world is a major booster. “With less than a month to go before Germany holds a general election, Mr. Scholz, his likely successor, Friedrich Merz, and other mainstream German politicians are scrambling to curb support for Alternative for Germany, a hard-right party known as AfD that is widely seen as a dangerous throwback to the nationalism that brought Hitler to power in the 1930s. At an election rally on Saturday in eastern Germany, AfD politicians and Elon Musk, a top adviser to President Trump, who spoke by video link, urged Germans not to feel guilty for the Nazi-era crimes of their grandparents.” NYT (Gift Article): At Auschwitz, a Solemn Ceremony at a Time of Rising Nationalism.

+ Anne Applebaum in The Atlantic (Gift Article): Europe’s Elon Musk Problem. “Although it’s easy to get distracted by the schoolyard nicknames and irresponsible pedophilia accusations that Elon Musk flings around, these are the real questions posed by his open, aggressive use of X to spread false information and promote extremist and anti-European politicians in the U.K., Germany, and elsewhere. The integrity of elections—and the possibility of debate untainted by misinformation injected from abroad—is equally challenged by TikTok, the Chinese platform, and by Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, whose subsidiaries include Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Threads.”

+ Bill Gates calls Elon Musk’s embrace of far-right politicians abroad ‘insane shit‘.