It absolutely is a Nazi salute, and it should be obvious to anyone.

>>I don't see that growing up next to Auschwitz makes you an expert in this area.

Something about being taught about this stuff endlessly at school and seeing it brought up all the time in your immediate neighbourhood makes you recognize when it happens - I guess that's just how it works.

As someone who literally grew up next to Auschwitz - the attempts to excuse Elon's Nazi salute as anything but exactly that are just sickening. Those who don't study history are bound to repeat it, indeed. "My heart goes out to you" - a man literally doing a sieg heil. Bloody hell.

><>If the US wasn't around, Russia would likely be rolling around most of Eastern Europe today. From 2022 to 2025

No one is saying otherwise. Still, I don't see how you can describe Europe as failing. Unless, like I complained in my original comment - you see the world as some kind of race where only one country is "winning" and everyone else is losing(failing).

>> America and Europe went dollar for dollar in support of Ukraine. And many of the Euro dollars went to purchasing weapons and defense from the US.

In terms of military spending, yes. In terms of refugees support and civil expenditure, Europe was obviously ahead. And again, this isn't a race to see who can spend more.

>> Even more harrowing when your population doesn't understand the need for defense.

As a Pole, I don't see this sentiment at all - Poland really understands the need to defend itself, with our spending being allocated accordingly - and importantly, new funds are coming with the specific provisions to prevent them being spent on American technology.

>> of NATO (read: America)

Obviously, America has the largest fighting force on the planet. But are we just going to pretend that UK, France and Germany don't have capable armies which would be capable of defending our eastern flank if needed, including with nuclear deterrent? I know Americans are being fed the stories of NATO being entirely US and no one else, but obviously even cursory inspection shows that this isn't true?

I honestly don't even understand what you mean by that. Europe has accepted an extraordinary number of refugees from Ukraine giving them immediate and full rights to live and work within its territory, keeps donating billions of dollars worth of goods to keep Ukraine going, provides training to Ukrainian military personal and ramped up its military production specifically to bolster Ukraine.

How has Europe failed here? Did you expect Poland to start shooting missiles towards Moscow, or something else?

>>Europe won't be able to catch that. If we cut the chip supply right as things take off, China might not either.

My immediate thought is - why is it a race. Like holy shit imagine if we could actually work together instead of having this mentality of "if we work hard the other countries won't catch that". As someone who grew up in the golden age of globalization and rise of the information superhighway, the way countries are just siloing themselves and treating everything as a zero sum game is both sad and scary - that's exactly how you lead the world on a path to another world war - telling yourself that you don't need anyone else and in fact you need to beat them to the punch and everyone else is your opponent. If an alien race was looking at us right now they'd be shaking their heads.