Indeed… the fact that the willful parsing of a narrow excuse making ends up having the resonances and the form that sounds almost exactly like the holocaust denial, is not a pure coincidence, it is made by willful blindess and retraet to the narrow parsing to avoid the uncomfortable truths.
The american right, it never had to learn the lesson I think that the democratic republican right of the continent learned in the 1930s-1940s as in the France, as in the Spain (for longer period of course)… the extra precise parsing, the narrow excuses, for the exploitation of moment to gain the political push back against the left, blindness to the opening and the infection to a diseased political thought.
I think carrying of flags is a bit fuzzier than explicitly stating “kill all the jews”. That’s one possible meaning, and a very reasonable interpretation, but the person doing so might merely be advocating for, to use an example from earlier, mass deportation instead of genocide.
I think this is the question you are referring to.
Possibly, although as others have pointed out, people wear Che t-shirts and presumably don’t support all of his bad acts, and people use Communist symbology or slogans and yet presumably don’t support all the bad acts of Stalin or Mao. I think marching with white supremacists and carrying swastika flags and repeating Nazi chants is a pretty good indication that they’re not nice people, and not someone who I think holds the key to better race relations in their philosophy. I find the acts abhorrent, without the need to claim that it’s an explicit call for murder or genocide. I hope that’s clear.
Thanks for answering. I think this is terribly and even damagingly wrong (in that it allows you to mostly ignore white supremacists), though – swastikas and nazi imagery are nigh-infintely more intimately wrapped up with genocide and Hitler than Che is with Stalin and Mao.
Holy shit, wtf happened to you conservatives in the last 20 years so that you can defend KGB agents and Nazis in their efforts against America and our ideals of truth, liberty, and justice for all?
If they invoke Nazi paraphernalia and imagery, or for that matter Confederate paraphernalia and imagery, their sympathy for mass murder and / or enslavement is implicit. Nobody asked them to choose those symbols with which to identify.
In any case, even if they don’t support mass murder they do (by their own acknowledgement) support turning America into an exclusive homeland for particular racial groups, which I think would be extremely bad for the world as well, and needs to be condemned in the strongest terms as well. They were shouting at black women in the vicinity that they should go back to Africa.
Since the way you are using “display” is different than the way that others are using the word, it’s fair to say you are being incredibly disingenuous IMO and fair to say that you’re being so in multiple ways.
There are lots of regimes in history that have deported people. The Nazis aren’t memorable for deporting people, they’re remembered for killing millions of them for their ethnicity and religion. If you choose to invoke Nazi symbolism then I think the message is clear, and that even if you don’t intend to kill people you want Jews, Black people etc. to live in constant fear, which is sort of the definition of terrorism.
In any case I think the idea of mass deportation of ethnic minorities from America would be a morally very bad idea as well. America is not an ethnic or religious homeland for a particular group, and it shouldn’t be.
Again, you are not remotely familiar with American culture, so let me fill you in. Che Guevara’s image is a popular one on T-shirts for leftists in the United States. They love the way he stuck it to the “man”(in this case the “man” is the capitalist pigs i guess). He killed thousands as the extermination arm of the Cuban communist movement.
Do you object because his killings were not on the scale of Stalin, Mao, and Hitler? Ok, if so do you believe his modern idolaters are ok because he only killed thousands? Should idolaters of Osama Bin Laden or Timothy McVeigh be welcomed into polite society?
It remains a silly, foolish, and very dumb comparison.
I know the history of Che and also the popularity among the young fashionable ones on the left, which is hardly unique to the USA, indeed very much the contrary no matter your very silly posting.
It remains the idea that Che t-shirt has a bearing here is absurd.
A stalin or a mao t-shirt and you have some point.
Thus says his biographer Jon Lee Anderson, who is not a hard left-winger:
“I have yet to find a single credible source pointing to a case where Che executed “an innocent”. Those persons executed by Guevara or on his orders were condemned for the usual crimes punishable by death at times of war or in its aftermath: desertion, treason or crimes such as rape, torture or murder. I should add that my research spanned five years, and included anti-Castro Cubans among the Cuban-American exile community in Miami and elsewhere.”
The right-wing equivalent of Che Guevara might be the fascist regimes in Greece or Austria, which were not genocidal and (unsuccessfully) opposed the Nazis.
Heavily armed nazis killed and injured American citizens on American soil and, instead of condemning it, they make excuses. Excuses for murderous nazis??
America, you have officially descended into bizzaro world. I don’t know how you can ever come back from this. Nations rise and fall. Maybe this is the end of America as the world has known and loved. I sincerely hope I’m wrong.
You can’t possible be serious in believing that this is a good analogy.
Again this is a good example of why most European countries (even the ones where public opinion is very anti-liberal and ethnic-nationalist) have outlawed Nazi imagery.
