I’m not really sure where to put this but I figure that the pit is the right choice.
So I was driving to work this morning and managed to get behind a car with a big annoying decal in its rear window. Being a normal part of my morning commute I didn’t pay much attention but eventually it caught my eye. The guy had a giant swastika imprinted on a star of David as the main decal and then once I started paying attention I noticed there was an 88 on each side of the main decal. We talk about Nazi’s enough on this board that I recognized the 88 as a potential hint the dude was a Nazi but the star of David kind of threw me and the swastika wasn’t really obvious. I took a photo because I wanted to confirm with some of my cop friends that what I thought I was seeing was real. Turns out it was.
I don’t know my mind is kind of blown. It’s one thing to say Trump is a Nazi and another to see raciest stuff happening but, fuck, I’ve never seen anyone to want to be known as a Nazi. I saw an article about some dude running for congress in Illinois who is calling himself and Nazi and the governor isn’t willing to say that people shouldn’t vote for him and I turned to my wife and said “Seriously, how is it possible we can’t all agree that people who call themselves Nazis are bad” . Then today I saw that.
Back in college, on one of the first days of the year, I was hanging out with a bunch of friends from my freshman year and a bunch of new friends that we had all met within the last few days. A few of the people from our group walked in the door, having just got back from the grocery store and one of them said ‘we saw a guy at the store with a swastika tattooed on his forehead’. One of the roommates said ‘yeah, that was probably my dad’. That year or the next year (we were and still are all friends), her dad stopped by. Sure enough, a little Charles Manson-esque swastika on his forehead. FTR, I don’t know anything about him, only met him the one time, he might have made a misguided choice 30 years prior, or he might still be goosestepping around in his backyard.
OTOH, a few years ago I saw a guy with a huge swastika on his T-shirt standing out on a front porch on a semi-busy road. Sure, maybe he lost a bet, but I’m more apt to believe he was doing that because he wanted to be seen.
In the parking lot of a local brewery, I saw a car with a license plate that read MKY LVR.
It made me say hmmm. It made my gf say hmmm. I decided to take a picture of the plate.
While I’m taking the picture, the owner of the car walks up to me. A woman in her mid/late 60s. Can you say “awkward”? Well, it turns out she is a Mickey Mouse fan. Much ado about nothing.
What blows my mind is, how can you be an American AND a Nazi ? No, no, I don’t mean that in an American exceptionalist sense - y’all can certainly be just as shit as anyone. What I mean is that over the past 70 years you’ve all collectively beaten your chests about that ONE thing you (well, your old folks, but it’s always “we” anyway isn’t it ? ) did that was unequivocally, unquestionably good. You’ve hung half of your national pride on the “WE BEAT THE NAZIS” item, and brought that horse for parade damn near every year - as TV series, Hollywood movies, documentaries or the Hitler, I mean the History channel. And whenever your country is (or your countrymen are) backed into a moral/ethical corner by someone from another country - be it about Viet Nam or Iraq, about the drug war or propping up dictators in Latin America etc… the usual skeletons - the conversation always seems to inexorably steer towards “yeah well if it hadn’t been for us you’d be speaking German right now so how about you just sit down and shut the fuck up ?!”
So what I mean is, it must be *really *dissonant to bellyfeel both strident American nationalism and Nazi sympathies at the same time.
Well, more dissonant than plain old fascism typically is, anyway.
Sure, I guess this is what I think of as normal racism. I used to work in the oil field and I’ve worked with people who would call Obama the nigger-in-chief. I’m not saying that I’ve never known racists but there seems to be a difference between them and Nazis or the KKK.
There probably isn’t a real difference especially if you’re one of the people they hate but to me there seems to be a difference between I wouldn’t let me daughter date a black guy and we should round up all the niggers and put them in a gas chamber. Nazis seem like more of the second then the first. I know a lot of people in the first category and while I’ve probably met people in the second this is the first time I’ve seen someone proclaiming it for the world to see.
I’m having a slow day - what did you think it was? The **Y **throws me for any Nazi/Hitler connection. Heck, in a brewery parking lot my first though would have been Mickey’s Malt Liquor.
You don’t have to be both. Someone that lives in America isn’t required to be, well, to be anything. Many, if not most, people only live here because they were born here. A self defined Nazi isn’t likely to be dressing up as Uncle Sam for the local parades and store openings.
This is all kind of along the same lines as the other part of your quote. A documentary about the United States can say anything it wants, it doesn’t mean that each individual person is going to agree with it. Also, don’t forget many people’s only recollection to WWII is that their grandparents were in the armed forces at the time. There’s not going to be a whole lot of people that fought the Nazi’s and are one today.
That’s all to say, when you speak of American Nationalists and Nazi Sympathizers, I imagine you describing a Venn Diagram with the Nazi Sympathizer’s circle fully inside of the AN circle. In reality…they maybe touch, but they’re not going to overlap by a while lot.
I didn’t know, but thought MKY was Monkey and I am lousy at figuring out personalized plates. The last one I took a picture of someone eventually explained and it was racially ignorant.
I always assume the worst of my fellow man; less likely to be disappointed that way.
There was, maybe still is, a neo-Nazi group in central MO that I used to always see advertising for members on Craigslist. The ads were in German and everything. One day at a grocery store in Columbia MO, I saw a guy with a white supremacist T-shirt on. I don’t know if he had any affiliation with the group that ran the ads.
Not what I imagine at all; what I understood is, someone who happens to be in that itty bitty AND part of the Venn diagram - even if it were just one - is one too many. It’s the kind of combination that makes one cross-eyed, cross-eared and brain-pained.
I used to feel the same way about the notion of someone living in a place with electricity believing the Earth is flat. Yet, there they are!
I once witnessed a KKK parade in Southern Alabama while traveling from Texas to Florida during Spring Break. I was with a gay man, and he was a bit spooked. We didn’t stop in Alabama. This was in 1979.
) did that was unequivocally, unquestionably good. You’ve hung half of your national pride on the “WE BEAT THE NAZIS” item, and brought that horse for parade damn near every year - as TV series, Hollywood movies, documentaries or the Hitler, I mean the History channel. And whenever your country is (or your countrymen are) backed into a moral/ethical corner by someone from another country - be it about Viet Nam or Iraq, about the drug war or propping up dictators in Latin America etc… the usual skeletons - the conversation always seems to inexorably steer towards “yeah well if it hadn’t been for us you’d be speaking German right now so how about you just sit down and shut the fuck up ?!”