So roughly 150 neo-Nazis, alongside some alt-rightists who are basically Nazis but kind of like to pretend that they aren’t, went a-marching in Pikeville, Kentucky this past weekend, dressed to the 88s in an assortment of Nazi-esque uniforms, carrying flags festooned with swastikas and an assortment of other Nazi-ish symbols, chanting chants containing the word “heil” and occasionally breaking out in Nazi — sorry, “Roman” — salutes. A few even brought assault rifles along with them, in case they needed to invade Poland or something.
Now some Nazis are wondering if the Nazi marchers were maybe a bit too obviously Nazi-ish during their Nazi march.
On the neo-Nazi internet tabloid The Daily Stormer, Eric Striker declares the rally “a sleeper hit,” predicting that it will lead to even bigger rallies in the future as “millions of hidden Alt-Right and Nationalsocialists in America” overcome their fears and embrace an explicitly racist agenda.
But Striker is worried that his Nazi buddies were perhaps a bit too blatant about the whole Nazi thing.
I actually support unironic use of the Roman salute, but only in its historic context as a gesture of honor to fellow comrades and leaders. When the goal is to lure Antifa to take off their “peaceful” masks, triggering them by Roman saluting them is also appropriate.
But at this demonstration, where nationalists outnumbered the increasingly irrelevant left, the two NSM affiliated individuals who were doing Roman salutes at a local media outlet zooming in on them committed an extreme propaganda error. It’s not so much the Roman salute itself, but that the image projected was that the rally was about shock value rather than real issues impacting local whites.
So maybe cool it with all the salutes, fellas? They’ll be time for those later!
Striker also has issues with some of the marchers’ fashion choices.
The citizens of Pikeville agree with 99% of what the Nationalists there believe, but superficial blunders like this, and the poor attire choice of wearing Schutzstaffel [SS] collars, distract from the frame we’re trying to build, and cause people to tune-out.
Also, maybe try to hide all your Nazi tchotchkes when the lugenpresse is nearby? In one Youtube clip, Striker notes,
there’s Third Reich memorabilia laying around, which should’ve at least been put away when the press was arriving. Again, optics aren’t everything, but this kind of stuff just triggers inculcated defenses of common folk who otherwise agree with us from joining. After winning them over, you can teach them the truth about the Third Reich, but getting them to listen first is the most important part. …
[F]ew will disagree that if the [National Socialist Movement] toned some of the outward eccentricities, they would have far greater appeal along with way fewer agent provocateurs/federal informants/misfits harassing them.
I guess if they didn’t leave so many swastika souvenirs lying around no one would have ever figured out that a group called the National Socialist Movement was really a bunch of Nazis.
Here are some of the Pikeville marchers in all-out Nazi mode:
And here are some of the same people in STEALTH MODE:
Clearly, without all the “seig heils” no one could have possibly figured out they were Nazis.
In the end, Striker urges his fellow Nazis to emulate European fascist groups like Greece’s Golden Dawn and the Nordic Resistance Movement.
There is no reason their methods can’t be applied to America, with a few adaptations. Being a National Socialist isn’t about flying a Swastika or having an edgy tattoo, it’s about what you project from the inside: Honor, strength, courage, pride, love, loyalty and most importantly: confidence in the final victory.
Daily Stormer publisher Andrew Anglin follows up Striker’s post with a few of his own thoughts on Nazi “optics.” Anglin, who’s been known to throw “Roman salutes” around in public himself, isn’t worried that Nazi outfits and the like are too “edgy” to appeal to Americans, but that they really aren’t hip or sexy enough to get the cool millennial kids on board.
“The Golden Dawn and Nordfront,” Anglin writes, have created an
aesthetic which is both serious and sexy, and that is the model we need to be following. Nazi uniforms, swastika flags and people in bad physical shape are a part of an aesthetic which has been tried for a very long time in this country, with very little in terms of results.
Nazi uniforms not sexy? Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS must be rolling over in her imaginary grave.
David Futrelle,
Apparently both Striker and Anglin think that by putting lipstick on their pig that they will be able to fool everybody. Thankfully that’s not happening.
I mean, isn’t this exactly what the Nazis did though? Make their uniforms sexy (hence, Hugo Boss designed)? It’s almost like it’s not that Nazism doesn’t look sexy, it’s that its repugnant and genocidal ideas aren’t sexy.
But these gentlemen are clearly living manifestations of sex gods, so clearly that can’t be the case. /s
Seriously though how are we living in a time where we need to assert “Nazis are bad.” I’m used to having to defend myself around the dinner table from accusations of communism for supporting minimum wage, but even my racist conservative redneck forefathers knew Nazis were bad.
Those are some pretty sloppy salutes, just sayin’.
Nazi punching remix thread? Nazi punching remix thread.
I guess they want to make sure that we do Nazi them coming.
I’ll let myself out.
I wish the tuba guy had been there this time.
That it suffered an ignominious defeat?
As one (anti Nazi) German general put it at the time “The Nazis talk about a thousand year Reich but can’t think ahead five minutes.”
“The whole Nazi philosophy, the racism and all that, is hateful to me, but of course I drew them anyway—they had the sexiest uniforms!”
–Tom of Finland
Tuba guy is a legend. I laugh every time I watch that.
Let them come out, and as the great Linton Qwesi Johnson sung in Fite Dem Back – smash their brains in, cos they ain’t got nothing in them.
It never gets old. When he kicks into “Ride of the Valkyries,” all I can manage is a wheeze.
These people don’t deserve to call themselves Kentuckians.
Tuba man is amazing. As are the “Loldiers of Odin”, who dressed up in clown suits and marched with the Soldiers of Odin in Scandinavia to mock them.
I feel that that should be the go-to strategy when these reptiles crawl out. Getting into throwdowns with them a) get speople hurt, b) turns many people off and makes us look bad, lying down with pigs and all that, and c) isn’t an option if you’re a pacifist.
Imagine if every rally of white supremacist and Nazis was swamped with dozens of clowns and tuba men. I know I would try to organize that if they came to my town.
@Iseult The Idle
Right? This is just embarrassing.
@Kivutar, I like that reasoning. I was wondering yesterday, as I was reading about the white supremacists’/”Proud Babies” milita dopes, how to combat them since I disagree with violence and I know most of us peaceful protesters do?
Mocking them as the clowns they are makes a lot of sense to me. More tuba people!
@Flora: sexy and utterly unusable. Hitler had the designs done by runway designers, not people who regularly make military stuff. Instead of proper sturdy suspenders (apparently Adolf was anti-suspender) they had their weird as heck harness to hold up their gear…that failed and would often trip them up. Their coats were terrible since instead of proper quilted winter coats they were given coats made from thin fabric lined with fur. Fur which got fleas, smelled when wet and was impossible to clean. As someone on tumblr once noted “Hitler gave his army dry clean only coats to go fight Russia in.”
Nazi clothes: fashionable but in no way functional.
@Kivutar
Speaking as an Asatruar who is actually familiar with the Eddas, the Loldiers of Odin are much more in keeping with the spirit of the old gods.
Making fun of the enemy is very much within Odin’s wheelhouse.
I don’t know how White supremacists who are obsessed with the Norse gods reconcile themselves with all the interracial god-on-giant sex and transgender instances in the corpus of the Norse religion, but I digress.
The fact that fighting nazis hand to hand makes us look bad on the view of the public makes me so angry I can barely think. Not at you, mind you, just these dense bastards who are dumb enough to think these things.
Didn’t know there were so many fascist-loving scum in our society.
I always thought it was ridiculous how the Germans and Italians supported the fascists, but now I understand entirely how it happened, after observing all these fence sitters wharrrgarbling about how the ‘tolerant left’ is punching these poor widdle Nazis.
@Alan Robertshaw
“That it suffered an ignominious defeat?”
Exactly!!!
I suppose those idiots are ignorant or uncaring of the irony of having this discussion on the anniversary of the freaking *fall of Berlin*.
…and not just an ignominious defeat but a *complete and total* one.
I’d have half a mind to show up to protest one of their marches with the battle colors of the 150th Rifle Division, 8th Guards Army (you know, the “Victory Banner”)….but nowadays people in general are so ignorant of that part of history I wonder if anyone on either side would get it….
Who was the quote from?
Great fodder for befuddling ignorant neo-Nazis are reminders of all the German senior officers who defected as POWs and became anti-fascist, e.g. Paulus and the Nationalkomitee Freies Deutschland.
(No apologism for later abuses of the DDR government — but it’s good to recognize that the Wehrmacht had plenty of generals NOT willing to fight courageously to the end. THAT is a part of the history of the Third Reich that should be rubbed in these guys’ faces every damn day.)
As a person who studies Democratic Socialism in the context of the United States (hence, my username). That the words “socialism” and “comrade” have been tainted by these violet, racist children make me actively angry. (let’s be honest, most things these days make me angry).
I’m not surprised this is in Kentucky (and dude in article who was like “Why doesn’t anyone talk about the GOOD things about Kentucky?! Well you let stuff like this happen, so maybe clean up house a little bit and come chat. I don’t see you standing against the TRUFAX Nazis that are standing in your downtown).
@ pavlov’s house
Paul-Otto Schmidt; whom a quick Google shows was not a general (apologies) but worked in the German foreign office.
(He did the interpreting at the Hitler – Chamberlain meetings)
@Francesca Torpedo, have you seen this?
Full story: https://www.someecards.com/news/so-that-happened/homophobic-pagans-get-schooled-by-the-irish-pagan-federation-ireland/
@Alan Robertshaw
Thanks, I’ll look him up and read more….sounds interesting.
Another great source I bet would be Vincez Muller, a long-serving officer with service in WWI and then in the Weimar Reichsheer and later Wehrmacht, commanded 56th Infantry Division (I think) on the Eastern Front…defected to the Soviets as a POW but actually also became a really committed Communist. His book hasn’t been translated though, and I don’t have the German knowledge necessary. But always wondered about the details of *his* story.
@ pavlov’s house
There’s a BBC documentary you may enjoy. It’s called something like Spying on Germany. It’s about a posh POW Camp (well, house really) that MI19 set up in a stately home. They put all the captured German generals there. Basically every part of it was bugged. They also got an agent to pose as an aristocratic British Nazi sympathiser and draw them into conversations.
Two factions arose. One pro Nazi and another Anti-Nazi. The transcripts of their rows in the stairwell make interesting reading. But you’d especially love their reaction to the news of the Stalingrad defeat (the British let them listen to the radio and read all the newspapers to gauge their reactions).
Can we appreciate the kid in the Kentucky shirt here though?
http://i0.wp.com/www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/nazop3.jpg
A+ juxtaposition.
Striker on European fascism:
Don’t forget ancestral ties to the land /snark