It’s not the WWII re-enactment that’s so troublesome. It’s not even the fact that it’s German military WWII re-enactment. Nor is it even the fact that it’s SS-unit German military re-enactment.
No, it’s the statements on their website about how the members of this particular SS division (which, remember, participated in Einsatzgruppen murders of Jews and once counted Josef Mengele as a member) were “idealists” fighting for “their loved ones and a basic desire to be free,” how they were “valiant men [who] died defending their respective countries in the name of a better tomorrow,” and how they were “volunteers willing to lay down their lives to ensure a “New and Free Europe”, free of the threat of Communism.”
I actually know a guy who is very much into war reenactments, mostly the Civil War, but others, too. He tells me that nearly 30,000 people participated in the last Gettysburg reenactment. 30,000. I gotta believe a good portion of those are wearing confederate uniforms, but I doubt most of them were admirers of confederate values. That some politician participated on the nazi side of a WWII reenactment does not bother me. However, he shows a lack of judgment if he thought *nobody *would make a big deal out of him wearing a nazi uniform.
QFT. Any politician with a bit of commonsense (GOP or Dem) would realise that this would be taken as support for the Nazis by some people. It shows either stupidity or arrogance if he thought otherwise.
I’ll add that Mr Iott is running in an ultrasafe Democratic district: the incumbent Marcia Kaptur regularly gets about 75% of the vote, so it doesn’t really matter what this idiot does.
Which pretty much proves to me that they are more than wankers. They are a bunch of fucking Nazis, and to hell with them.
I guess all the defenders of these evil fuckwits wouldn’t mind if my reenactment group decided to play at being mid-19th century Klansmen, now would you? After all, it’s just historical interest! :rolleyes:
I know a guy that is into reenactments, and he does it because he admires the confederate values, and wishes the South had won. So I guess we cancel out.
Seems to me that if this guy really was a neo-nazi, this is the perfect cover.
Besides, most of those people dressed up like Nazis are actually liberals trying to make conservatives look bad.
This. I’ve no problem with American Civil War reenactors - but I doubt they’d be cool with a unit that wanted to reenact Andersonville, or the capture of free blacks on a raid in Union territory.
Rightly or wrongly, we tend to view war as a more-or-less honorable thing, within limits. But dressing up as members of a military unit infamous for the atrocities it committed is more than a little messed up.
It’s also my understanding that Nazi party membership was much, much higher in the SS than in the regular German military. A Wehrmacht reenactor can make a credible claim that he’s just taking on the role of a professional soldier who was ordered to fight in a very, very bad war. It’s much harder for an SS reenactor to distance himself from the ideology.
Yup, this too. There’s a point at which historical ignorance begins to look awfully deliberate.
A bit like Conrad Veidt as Major Heinrich Strasser in Casablana – he wasn’t a Jew, but he’d left Nazi Germany with his Jewish wife, to make a career playing Nazis in Hollywood.
