Or at least some kind of weird Nazi sympathiser. Long story short I’ve been reading about WWII, Hitler and the NSDAP as is my wont and left a copy of Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich and Kershaw’s Hitler: 1936-45, Nemesis lying around. The cover for the first is a swastika black on white and the latter has Hitler’s evil mug and the word HITLER in bold block capitals.
So a friend of my gf drops in for a visit and sees aforementioned history books, then later says to her that she’s extremely worried about all my ‘Nazi stuff’. The missus actually has a brain in her nut and says that they are history books about **history **not loving the Nazis (if anything, the more I read about Dolfy and his cadre the more repugnant they become, the difference between driving past a car crash and slowing down to examine the grisly wreckage, if you will), she replies that it’s ‘still weird and worrying’.
I only see her once in a blue moon but I am so pissed off about this. I’m conflicted over whether to hunt her down on facebook or in person and plead my case, maybe link to the Amazon pages I got them off whererin they are described as history and not political recommendations, or just dismissing her as entirely too stupid to even bother my arse with.
Ignore it. Start making a fuss about it , and she’ll start saying, “yeah once I found out he was into Hitler he started denying it like crazy. There’s something there alright.”
But I also would avoid having any more contact with her than needed.
I know exactly how you feel, a friend of a friend got upset because I had ‘The Rape of Nanking’ on my bookshelf, “Why do you want to read about a rape?!?”
I wouldn’t worry about it, I think its one of these ‘to those who understand no explanation is necessary, to those who don’t understand no explanation is possible’ things.
Then there was a colleague who got angry and offended because I had a book about Russia on my desk at work, she thought I was showing off. In a later conversation she was complaining about being so bored* at home as the weather was poor, I suggested why doesn’t she read a book or something, “Oh I don’t read”, she replied in an utterly disgusted tone…
*a very good way to immediately cause my opinion of a person to take a nose-dive anyway
I voted D. Essentially, I mean do C, until and unless you ever have the opportunity, at a dinner party say, to display your erudition with others (never directed at her) about WWII. It’s not worth confronting her. She’s sounds like a twit. I understand how the chance made remark of others can get under your skin, but don’t get all Seinfeldian over it. (Is too a word. Now.)
About 25 years ago I noticed my (now ex) brother in law had some books laying around his house exploring the historical “lies” about the death camps and Hitler and some about the Trilateral Commission etc.
I have a book called Rape of the Fair Country that everyone I met in Cardiff agreed was better than How Green was My Valley (the book that made me want to visit Wales in the first place).
And BTW, a lot of Jews read Nazi history. I don’t, and I know some who find it too painful, but you will find those books on Jewish bookcases.
As long as your girlfriend herself isn’t buying into her friend’s ignorance, I would ignore the situation.
Find evil simply everywhere - and denounce it in 3rd-grade language.
Global Warming is a Chinese Hoax (let me guess - “to steal American’s jobs”)
EPA Regs is what killed the coal mines. Gut EPA and the mines will blossom just like 1950!
As always, don’t bother trying to fix “stupid”. Life is short.
If you don’t have to interact with her, ignore her.
If you do have to interact with her then I vote E: Troll her.
Trolling is generally a shitty thing to do but if someone goes out of their way to interpret what you do in the least generous way possible, you’ll never dig your way out of that because they’ll keep interpreting your attempts to correct the misunderstanding in the least generous way possible.
I just thought to add, IF your girlfriend seems to be questioning your tendency to read about Nazis, read a fascinating book called Faith and Fratricide: the theological roots of anti-semitism by Rosemary Ruether, a well-known Catholic theologian, and leave it around prominently when you do. Also, get the DVD of The Nasty Girl, about a young German girl’s school project “My Town during WWII,” and how what she learned got her death threats, and her family harassed. If you are interested in WWII, you will like it, and if your girlfriend watches it with you, it will definitely convince her you are not a Nazi.
Next time you’re in the room alone with her, pull her aside and explain in urgent whispers that you’re not a Nazi: you’re a time traveler from the twenty-third century hopping back in time in 3-decade increments. Along the way you’re learning as much as you can about the Third Reich so that when you arrive in 1926 you’ll have all the information you can to stop Hitler. But she can’t tell anyone, because that would mess up the time stream!
Then get up, give her a giant silent “Shhhhh!” and tiptoe like Elmer Fudd would out of the room.
Tell her you already tried to stop him once, when all he had done was institute a few work camps, and something went horribly wrong. You need to learn everything you can, to try and figure out what you did wrong the first time, which is why you are traveling in increments. You want to read each generation’s perspective on the situation.
Ignore her, she’s an idiot. However, if she mentions something again to your gf, there’s a simple quote your gf could use that works wonders as a response: “Those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it.”
(I realize that this is probably a misquote, but it’s the phrasing most people recognize.)
I once wrote, in a forum much like the SDMB, about how the Waffen SS troops were elite military units, and that they performed well in certain battles.
I vote to ignore the person who’s being willfully dim.
Humorously enough, I got asked if I was a Nazi (typically in a loudly sarcastic tone) b/c the book I chose to read on my lunch breaks at work was Inside the Third Reich by Albert Speer (the copy I had has Nazi symbols in red and black on front and back even if they didn’t see the title). I’d tell them it was the autobiography of Hitler’s architect, what points he hoped to make regarding the culpability of the German people and himself personally, and that I hoped to learn from the past so it wouldn’t be repeated. Started a couple of good conversations considering the political environment over the summer but I was still asked by my boss and then his boss to keep it hidden when I wasn’t reading it.
When I finished it (a week or so before I quit) I gave it to the other voracious history reader at work; he has an awful temper and cannot be fired due to his connections there.
