I don’t really know what to say about this, except that I think this article must have fallen through a hole from another dimension because there’s not a single thing about it that makes sense to me. Is this something that’s done in schools these days?
[QUOTE=The Olympian]
OLYMPIA, Wash. – Zombie dress-up day had been scheduled Wednesday at Reeves Middle School in Olympia, but it was canceled because students were caught calling each other Nazis, drawing swastikas and making the “Heil Hitler” salute.
It’s middle school, so it is a sort of alternate dimension. In this case, a little worse than usual, but I can see how it got going.
There was a reason I wouldn’t sub those grades most of the time. The roughest high school was less dangerous than a middle school, when a bad situation could boil up out of, seemingly, nowhere.
My daughter MilliCal and her friends are heavily into the manga and anime Hetalia, in which the nations of the world (and especially Europe) from the first half of the 20th century are personified. They attended a Hetalia get-together in Boston in which the rules clearly stated that anyone making Seig Heil gestures was going to be ejected. Apparently the draw to Nazi gestures and symbols is pretty irresistable.
The thing is, I can understand why it would show up when one of your main characters is an interwar Germany. I don’t understand why this would come up with Zombies.
The point here is that for kids these days, Nazis have no more inherent reality to them than zombies - their source for both is movies and video games; in both, they are basically monsters that the heroes have to fight. Hence having a “zombie day” but forbidding “Nazi gestures” makes, for them, little sense. Making such gestures does not indicate support for Nazi ideology, any more than lurching about moaning for braiiiinsss means you actually want to be the undead.
This is increasingly so. My generation knew of Nazis with more “reality” as it were because our parents grew up in actual fear of them - my wife’s mother lived through Nazi occupation.
I think it’s a combination of that and people who are too young to understand that WWII isn’t ancient history, it happened within the lifetimes of people who are still around, and still feel the impact really strongly. And they’re too sheltered to know that the swastika is still a banner under which people are brutally attacked; it’s a symbol that’s still used to tell people they’re not welcome and make them fear for their lives.
Without that context, a lot of portrayals of Hitler and the Nazis in pop culture just seem to be of some interesting figure from history who people make jokes about and like to tell the story of. The strong and recognizable imagery is appealing to people who just think of it as dressing up in costume, and don’t see it as real.
It isn’t quite ancient history yet … but it reasonably soon will be. WW1 is basically ancient history now, and it ended only 21 years before WW2 began.
For young kids these days, WW2 is part of the past, but a part kept alive as it were by video games and movies, as Nazis have never lost appeal as villians. It is no wonder they are not as horrified as people in my generation were by depictions of Nazi symbols.
…but this doesn’t because Nazis aren’t inherently linked to zombies. And the gestures weren’t forbidden ahead of time. It sounds like it didn’t occur to the school administrators that the kids might see a connection between the two things based on the video games (it wouldn’t have occurred to me either).
By the way, I’m a little disappointed that this didn’t happen in Illinois.
What I’m saying is that “zombies” and “Nazis” are, as far as kids are concerned, just reasonably interesting bad guys - not that they are inherently linked.
It is sort of like saying to kids “you can dress up like Frankenstein for Halloween, but not like Dracula, because Dracula really was evil, and stood for real evil, so dressing up like Dracula would upset people. Talking with a “dracula accent” and wearing of false fangs is thus prohibited”. Of course all that does is make Dracula way cooler than Frankenstien.
Now, of course Nazis really existed (unlike Werewolves) and really were evil, but kids don’t have the sort of visceral knowledge of that these days that comes from either living through the war oneself or having parents who lived through the War. It is imposing our (middle-aged to old people’s) sensitivities onto kids.
Naw, the real connection is already given. One of the games has Nazi zombies in it. And games are kids’ biggest exposure to zombies these days. To them, a Nazi zombie was nothing worse than a Werepire–cooler because it has two evil things in one.
Yeah, I don’t think your average 12yo is going to realize that Nazis don’t fall into the same category as zombies. This year is the 70th anniversary of Pearl Harbor–middle school kids’ grandparents are Baby Boomers, born post-war. It’s approximately the cultural equivalent of what I thought about WWI–ancient history.
That doesn’t make it OK for them to pretend to be Nazis, but it does mean they’ll need it explained quite a lot. How are they supposed to know that video games featuring Nazi zombies are acceptable, but pretending to be one is not?
