The retweeted post read, ‘Stalin, Mao, and Hitler didn’t murder millions of people. Their public sector employees did.’
By Vered Weiss, World Israel News
Tech billionaire Elon Musk shared a tweet alleging that public sector employees, and not Hitler, Stalin and Mao Zedong, were responsible for killing millions of people.
The retweeted post read, “Stalin, Mao, and Hitler didn’t murder millions of people. Their public sector employees did.”
The context of the retweet was Musk’s belief that the public sector is over-funded and his proposal to dramatically reduce the number of civil servants.
However, there is a widespread feeling that Musk was minimizing historical atrocities committed by the three autocrats.
The original poster added context to their tweet, saying that individuals who testified at the Nuremberg trial, rather than Hitler, were responsible for their crimes.
They tweeted, “After the Nuremberg trials, the so-called ‘superior orders’ defense – ‘I was just following orders’ – is considered invalid under international law. Individual rather than collective responsibility for your actions is enshrined in law.”
This isn’t the first time Musk has created controversy regarding expressed attitudes towards Nazism and the Holocaust.
In January, Musk addressed a gathering of a right-wing German party, calling on Germans to look beyond the national guilt associated with the Holocaust and embrace “German pride.”
In his video message, Musk emphasized “that people take pride in Germany and being German.”
Speaking just two days before International Holocaust Remembrance Day, Musk appeared to reference the legacy of the Holocaust, telling attendees that in Germany “there is too much focus on past guilt, and we need to move beyond that.”
“Children should not be guilty of the sins of their parents, let alone their great grandparents.”
“We need to look at the future of Germany with optimism and enthusiasm. It’s important to be proud of German culture and values. It’s about preserving German culture and protecting the German people. Convince people to vote AfD.”
The Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party Musk was endorsing has a history of antisemitic rhetoric and has generated significant controversy over its perceived white nationalist element within the party.
Musk was thought by many to have given a Nazi salute at US President Donald Trump’s inauguration and made Holocaust jokes to mock the controversy.
However, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu defended Musk by saying he was “a great friend to Israel.”