Ah, the Elon stans—how delightful their contradictions are! First, they deny: “It wasn’t a Nazi salute!” And yet, in the same breath, they invoke the shadow of Wernher von Braun, the man who quite literally rocketed from the swastika to the stars. Here lies the paradox of modern techno-fetishism: the absolute refusal to reconcile the roots of innovation with the ideology from which it sprouted.
This is ideology at its purest, my friends. The Elon stan does not see a salute, does not see history, only the myth of progress embodied in their techno-Messiah. Von Braun? Oh, he was just a man of his time, they say, as though the V-2 rockets were merely innocent sparks of genius, detached from the rubble of London and the forced labor camps. Likewise, the Nazi salute? Just a misunderstood gesture, like one of Musk’s awkward memes, surely nothing to overanalyze!
What is at play here is the disavowal of history: “Yes, yes, von Braun worked for the Nazis, but let’s not dwell on the unpleasant details—look at the stars!” The genius of capitalism, of course, lies in its ability to sanitize such contradictions, to commodify even the remnants of fascism. Von Braun’s rockets, once symbols of Nazi terror, become the foundation of NASA’s triumphant quest for the moon, and now, in Musk’s hands, the rockets become the ultimate fetish object: the means by which humanity will escape itself.
This is not to accuse Musk or his fans of fascism outright—no, no! The genius of ideology is subtler than that. It is to point out how the sanitized past feeds the fantasies of the future. To worship the rocket while ignoring the Reich is to embrace progress as though it were pure, apolitical, untainted by the horrors of its own genesis.
So, when the Elon stan says, “It wasn’t a Nazi salute,” they are not simply denying—it is not that they don’t know, but that they know very well, and yet they continue to act as though they don’t. This is the essence of ideology: to know and disavow simultaneously, to erase the contradictions of the past in order to dream of an unbroken, immaculate future.
In this way, the Elon stan becomes the ultimate subject of late capitalism: one who sees the cracks in the myth but chooses to believe nonetheless. Progress, rockets, Mars—these are no longer the means to an end but ends in themselves, the ultimate commodities, sold with the promise that they will liberate us from the very world we have ruined. And yet, as von Braun himself might have said, we aim for the stars, but our gaze is still firmly fixed on the ground—on the ruins we refuse to acknowledge.
It is fascinating, no? Everyone who has seriously thought about space travel knows that rockets are an antiquated concept, a primitive phallic obsession from the mid-20th century. We are not getting to Mars with these oversized fireworks, these glorified Nazi-era technologies refined only to look sleeker in a Silicon Valley PowerPoint presentation. And yet, Elon—and let us not forget his stans!—they proceed as if the memo never arrived. Or perhaps they received it but, in true ideological fashion, simply chose to ignore it.
This is ideology at work! Rockets are not a solution—they are a spectacle, a fetish object designed to obscure the fundamental impotence of the project itself. SpaceX does not represent the future of interstellar travel; it is a reenactment of the past, a repetition of the Cold War space race, but with private corporations standing in for nations. We know rockets are insufficient; we know that without new propulsion systems—nuclear, electromagnetic, or something we cannot yet imagine—we are not going anywhere beyond our celestial backyard. Yet Elon clings to the rocket, just as his fans cling to their Teslas, precisely because it allows them to dream without truly thinking.
What is important here is the narrative function of the rocket. It is not a tool; it is a symbol of progress, an object that tells us, “Yes, humanity is still capable of transcending its limits.” The question of whether it works, of whether it is the right tool for the job, is irrelevant. Like von Braun’s V-2 rockets, it serves a purpose beyond its immediate utility. For von Braun, the purpose was military domination; for Musk, it is the domination of imagination itself.
But here is the twist: the obsession with rockets is not just about Mars; it is about Earth. Musk’s promise of Mars colonization is not a genuine proposal for human survival—it is a marketing campaign for his earthly empire. The rocket is not a vehicle for exploration; it is a justification for endless extraction, for the continued destruction of this planet in the name of a hypothetical escape plan.
The Elon stan does not care if we reach Mars. The Mars colony is irrelevant. What matters is the fantasy that it represents: the fantasy of escape, of a second chance, of a new frontier where the sins of Earth can be left behind. This is why the Elon stan clings to the rocket despite its obsolescence—it is not about transportation; it is about absolution.
And so, they look at the rocket, and they see not the limitations of 20th-century technology but the limitless possibilities of the future. They do not ask, “How do we get to Mars?” but rather, “What does the rocket allow us to believe?” In this way, the rocket becomes a totem of denial, a monument to humanity’s refusal to confront its own failures. We aim for the stars, but only to avoid looking at the ground beneath our feet.