If we lose freedom here, there is no place to escape to. This is the last stand on Earth. And this idea that government is beholden to the people, that it has no other source of power except to sovereign people, is still the newest and most unique idea in all the long history of man's relation to man. This is the issue of this election. Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves. ~Ronald Reagan
I saw this last night.After I'd just finished my previous post.
Ball caps with Nazi symbols, the Swastika and the symbol of the Waffen SS, for sale at the Sturgis biker rally in South Dakota. AKA the latest COVID-19 Mega-Spreader event.
I mean, Jesus Christ, what the fuck is even wrong with people?
I'm going to say it again. This is not the conservatism, not the Republicanism, that I grew up with. This is the type of shit that America spent a shit-ton of its own blood and treasure and, fundamentally, made itself a world power to fucking stop. Never Again, as they say, is now.
This is exactly the shit that those Ronald Reagan called 'The Boys of Point Du Hoc' swarmed across an iron-gray, stormy English Channel on the 6th of June, 1944 to put an end to, and threw themselves into the meat grinder of breaching the Atlantic Wall to stop. Ever seen the movie Saving Private Ryan? One of my Grandpa's brothers was a US Army infantryman who stormed ashore that day, not knowing if he'd live or die that day and he never, never talked about fighting on that beach, what it was like, or what he saw there.
I heard the story of how he got to meet Edward R. Murrow while he was in the Army a dozen times. It took me 20 years to even learn, and still longer to understand the magnitude of the fact that this happened during the liberation of the Buchenwald concentration camp and I didn't learn the full history of his military service until somebody from that branch of the family researched it after he died and had some copies of what they found printed up and distributed to the rest of us.
And today, you can find the symbols of Nazi Germany on something as American as a goddamned baseball cap, openly for sale at a massive public event in the middle of the goddamn country.
There's something very broken about that.
It almost seems to me, like a certain segment of modern so-called "Conservatives" venerate the Nazis far more than they revere the memory of the Americans who fought against them, even more so than they do the Confederates...and I think they do so with a far more political than cultural or historical sort of interest. You know, I've written down my thoughts about the Confederate Flag elsewhere, but at least it could be said that the people who flew it were Americans, after a fashion, and eventually at least a few of them remembered that fact later on. For those who didn't, the Lost Cause historians cropped up later and airbrushed and whitewashed their crimes and for good or ill, that became a part of our history and affected all type of stuff in terms of culture and symbolism,
I mean, shit, I grew up watching the Dukes of Hazzard too. I've not seen that anybody's ever seriously done anything like that regarding the Nazis, who remain nothing less than a symbol of human evil. Hell, even the modern European fascists generally trace back to and claim the heritage of their domestic collaborators rather than the Nazis themselves. There is no Lost Cause for Heinrich Himmler.
American neo-Confederates revere Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. Even a French fascist these days styles themselves an Anti-Gaullist or a Petainist. The Ukraine's far-right reveres a guy named Stepan Bandera. Until fairly recently in my life, nobody has cried for the goddamned Nazis themselves, or at least dared to do so openly.
For the record, the only people I've ever personally met who had adopted Nazi symbolism were outright criminals who had done so in prison.
I'm 100% serious here.
I once met a guy who had the Waffen SS lightning bolts tattooed on the side of his head. Everybody called him "Crazy." To this day, I don't even know what this dude's name was. He was this skinny white guy that had literally been furloughed from prison so that he could attend the Custodial program at the same school that I was going to for a 14-week vocational evaluation after my accident. He was learning to be a damn janitor. I have no idea what this dude went to prison for, I never asked. I didn't care. I know Crazy got with a few of the white girls that were there, and this was a source of some interpersonal problems. I know Crazy smoked like a goddamn train and was always trying to bum cigarettes from people after he'd spent up the little bit of money that the program gave him. I know during the time I was there he was in and out, gone back to prison after only a month or so because he got in a fight or some stupid bullshit. He was in the same dorm hall as me, at the other end, but I still heard about how he conducted himself.
What a shitty life, eh?
The whole time I knew this dude, I think I personally said only a few words to him, one time, when he tried to bum a cigarette and some snacks off of me. I didn't have any cigarettes because I was trying to quit smoking. I did give him a couple candy bars, though, even that asshole didn't deserve to be hungry. Truth is, like most people, I just wanted him to go away and beating his ass just for existing would've got me kicked out of the program.
The truth is, like most people I regarded him as a joke.He was this dude who presented himself as if he was some kind of moral force...but he openly talked about fighting, prison homosexuality, stealing, toilet wine and various improvised drugs.
But this ideology that in my experience only ever leads to bad ends, personal destruction, ridiculous behavior, the destruction of whole nations and societies and mass murder on an industrial scale...and in America is associated with criminals and cranks...is being marketed to people, sold on the street like it's no big deal. Because racism.
As if it's a goddamn basketball team logo.
If we are to remain a whole country, if we ourselves are to avoid destruction and violent internal conflicts, this shit has to stop.
It has to be stopped. And no one is there to step up and stop it but us. As I've said before, hate and rage cannot be allowed to become the new "Opiates of the Masses" if we are to remain a civilization. This social fentanyl is something that will destroy us if it remains unchecked.
You want a better America? Be a better citizen, and punch a damn Nazi while you're at it.
Blood that has soaked into the sands of a beach is all of one color. America stands unique in the world: the only country not founded on a race but on a way, an ideal. Not in spite of but because of our polyglot background, we have had all the strength of the world. That is the American way. ~Ronald Reagan
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