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
Did the Mammoth eat my previous comment? It’s not showing up.
I so LOL’d at the shield labeled “nog är nog”, meaning “enough is enough” in Swedish. Again someone is bravely defending Sweden against the brown hordes.
This is what I think of whenever I hear about their ‘let’s not let people know we’re really Nazis!’ SOOPER SEKRIT PLANZ!!
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4955865,00.html
Nationalism, antisemitism, fascism – all cannot be separated. Buy one get two free! -_-
Nationalist movements have become increasingly legitimized and visible. Their message has been resonating with an alarmingly larger number of people – including people with the means to take them from rag-tag rallies and secret “1488” codes to the mainstream of politics and culture. They are a stew of homegrown -isms and bigotry stoked by anger, frustration, and years of manipulation that can no longer be safely ignored or brushed off as some aberrant fringe element.
Yet…still with the Nazi Fucking Germany. Hitler. The SS. Sieg Heil. Richard Spencer may make cogent arguments about US-centric nativism or ethno-nationalism, but then he negates it all by parading around in the uniform of a (correctly) vilified German political party that lost a war 72 years ago spouting “Jew” this and “Jew” that. As if their beliefs ARE “German Reich, Part II” and not a wholly American (or Swedish or English or where ever) thing to be a part of.
Even the advice above goes from dangerously good “draw them in by discussing actual local issues that will get them on board with a local white nationalist movement” to the thankfully alienating “and then show them your collection of Wermacht medals!”.
It’s foolish and self-defeating, I just don’t get it. But I sure won’t try and talk them out of it.
Because I hate their beliefs, I love that they can never leave good ol’ Adolph out of it. Mention him all the time, Stormers! White nationalism is beyond repugnant, and the more #Make America Germany Again turns people away from it, the better.
So, I’m of the mind we should encourage the Nazi cos-play. Keep on “Roman” saluting your way out of the hearts and minds of would-be followers ya jackbooted jackasses.
@Kereea
Ba ha ha the idea of flea-ridden, smelly, dirty, useless coats designed to look good, not only failing at accomplishing anything of value, but actively being counter-productive, is a brilliant metaphor for the alt-right Nazi-rebrand attempt.
I’m pretty sure the “common folk” aren’t thinking “I’m secretly in total agreement with their vile hateful racist swill, but oh my stars, those outdated swastikas are embarrassing. They’d never go with my Lululemon tops.” Bigots gonna bigot, and they don’t care how they look or what other people think. In fact, that’s a feature, not a bug.
“Honor, strength, courage, pride, love, loyalty”. This may come as a shock, but it’s possible to have all those things WITHOUT being a racist shitbag.
In fact, being a racist shitbag pretty much precludes having any of those qualities.
Good luck resolving the tug of war between your archaic, fusty values, and your desire to brand yourself futuristically.
“We want to drag everyone back to the 1400s, but in a sexy way.”
@AsAboveSoBelow
Why did I follow that link? Because then I followed the link, and there are alt-right paganists? Who keep really terrible websites.
I. just. Don’t want to live on this planet anymore.
@Alan Robertshaw
Thanks for that also….it sounds familiar actually.
At the institution where I teach the officer-candidates all take an upper-division military history class their senior year in which they have to write a research paper on a battle or campaign, usually from World War II. One of the learning objectives is balancing evidence from multiple primary sources….so we usually try to make certain they have access to some Axis (usually German) primary sources.
The British and Americans interviewed lots of German officers when they held them as POWs in ca. 45-47 or so….and then many German officers published memoirs in the 50s-60s.
You can easily imagine, I’m sure, how different the published memoirs are from the immediately-postwar interviews….and I’m sure both are strikingly different from the wartime evidence covertly recorded in the events in the documentary you mention.
Those differences are actually good for us, because forcing our students to deal with them helps us achieve a learning objective.
The point here though is that the reality of Wehrmacht officers’ beliefs would shatter the idealized image that these modern Nazi-worshippers have.
“fight to the bitter end”, eh?
@Dan Hoan: Some “Odinists” are way into white separatism, if not white supremacy. There’s an unfortunate amount of crossover between certain Norse pagan groups that I find really discouraging. I thought the Irish pagans’ response was priceless.
Anne, I don’t know why the spam filter grabbed your other comment, but I just freed it!
@AsAboveSoBelow
It was really great! I am happy that they were so open with their response to that kind of racism.
I admit my knowledge of pagan beliefs and followers is limited to probably what I have come across when looking into Lilith Fair (so incredibly limited). I had NO idea that they were such virulent racists. That woman’s website is one of the most Anti-Semitic things I come across.
Fashionably late–and when it comes to my own state!
I overheard some students doing math tutoring talk about Pikeville. There were a few comments including, roughly, “my parents told me not to go to Pikeville–don’t worry about the Nazis, I’ll whoop you one” (from a white student) and “if they went to my [relatively progressive] town, they’d have issues.”
Nevertheless, fuck these guys. They don’t deserve the Bluegrass State.
Also!
@AsAboveSoBelow and David
That ain’t a tuba. That’s a sousaphone, which replaces a tuba in marching band. It has worse sound quality, but it’s far more convenient than a contra(bass horn).
I know, because I’ve played one.
Anne, that kid is wonderful.
addenda to last post:
Regardless, the video is fucking priceless.
Little bit of fat-shaming there in Anglin’s remark about optics.
Just to round off the nasty Nazi shit storm.
Things to like: Kid disappointed in Nazi bullshit.
Woman in sousaphone video overheard observing the Nazis with ‘This is what stupid looks like’.
Wow, the us nazi flag is pitifully shit. As always, reactionaries can’t design
@Axecalibur
Reactionaries fucking suck at everything and that’s why they are reactionaries. It’s easier to say that the browns and the gays are why you can’t get your shit together than to admit to your own personal failure as a human being.
That’s my take on it, anyway.
@AsAboveSoBelow
I did, actually, but thanks for posting it again!
Full disclosure: I am a black queer transwoman who is an Asatruar.
For a while I had issues with other Asatruar who bitterly insisted that one must be troo kult white person to be an Asatruar.
And I’m like, fuck that. Absolutely nowhere does it say such a thing.
I find that the Reconstructionist Asatruar are the worst at this. They lay heavy emphasis on ‘muh ancestral blood’, which is rank idiocy.
Francesca, you tell them that if Thor doesn’t want you as a follower, he can make it painfully, electrifyingly clear himself.
@Karalora
Don’t tell anyone yet, but I’m about to write a treatment of the Eddas in which Odin is an effeminate black boy in visage.
I was inspired by a Icelandic Asatruar woman who quite reasonably put it to us that Odin isn’t a large santy-claus looking man with a beard – he would be a young boy, because they eat apples that make them young.
It’s going to be fantastic. Watch for it when it drops on Amazon’s self-publishing thing.
I was also inspired by Kousuke Fujishima’s “AA! MEGAMI-SAMA!” in which Urd, Nordic Goddess of the Past, is a buxom black woman.
You can hear the Reconstructionist Troo Kult White Nordic Asatruar people’s heads exploding from here!
Seriously, I giggle every time I imagine a white supremacist going to Valhalla and finding themselves confronted by a cute, femmy black boy with long white hair, one eye, and a spear.
@Franscesca Torpedo
“You can hear the Reconstructionist Troo Kult White Nordic Asatruar people’s heads exploding from here!”
Yep. I like it when reality crashes right into the front of their twisted ideological ahistorical and unfounded fantasies.
(hence my own contemplation of 2017 alt-right Nazi-wannabees crying in confusion when Big Brave Manly German soldiers say circa 1944-46 “oh, yeah, ok. Actually Communism is a thing after all. OK. Got it.”, e.g. Vincenz Muller, et. al.)
admittedly not really analogous to the case you point out, but nevertheless also of great potential for upsetting Fascists.
@Pavlov
I like it!
Also, I’ve put a great deal of thought into making my retelling of the Eddas relevant to the modern day, just as the old Eddas were relevant to the past.
I envisioned the Frost Giants as being blonde white people who behave like Nazis and give extensive speeches about how they simply must make war on the Gods to expand their living space while raising their arms in a stiff armed salute.
That would indicate very clearly to the white supremacist Nazi Asatruar that they are not the heroes of this story; they are the enemy.
Among the new enemies for the Gods and Goddesses to fight: a small giantess called Plutonia, who vaporizes anything she touches and makes people sick; a reference to nuclear weapons.
She is small yet extremely dangerous.
In the canonical Eddas, there is a substory where an evil Giantess introduces the idea of gold and money to Asgard.
Chaos ensues until Odin wises up and has her killed.
I was going to expand on this and make it a huge indictment of modern day consumer capitalism: Gullveig, the aforementioned giantess, looks like a modern day businesswoman (I intend to fuse the past and the present solidly in this story: picture the Nordic gods using computers and lazing about on the Internet. Freya is probably a huge cat picture and YouTube video fan).
She introduces the Stock Market, finance, and banking to the Gods and Goddesses, who promptly lose their heads and want to buy stuff and make corporations and everything becomes totally awful until Odin has his insight and throws her and her system of capitalism down.
@Francesca Torpedo
Wow, that is really creative and ingenious. Go for it. I think that is a really innovative adaptation.
Present-day Nazi-wannabe and alt-right appropriation of Nordic heritage fails on so many levels; as I’ve been reading these comment threads it occurred to me that it would also be wise to point out the historical contributions of twentieth-century Scandinavian peoples to the struggle *against* Fascism in World War II. Sure, it’s undeniable that thousands of Norwegians, Danes and Swedes *did* join the SS and fight on the Nazi side but, I mean come on, Norway was an Allied country, its legitimate democratically-elected government fought the Germans in 1940 and after the defeat in June of that year (and only after a hard fight) continued to marshal the country’s remaining assets on the side of the Allies against the Axis. More Norwegians fought the Axis than fought for them. Even Denmark (though the government did not resist the original invasion) developed quite a resistance movement; some of the Danish armed forces’ resistance groups might evoke to the lay-person’s ear more reference to Nordic tradition than any pro-Nazi stuff, e.g. “Princes”, “Ringen”….all anti-Fascist.
Norwegians fought on many fronts, and the Royal Norwegian Navy had ships supporting the Normandy landings on D-Day.
My personal favorite Nordic hero of the fight against the Nazis is actually from the 1940 campaign, and is good ol’ Col. Birger Eriksen http://www.visitdrobak.no/en/visit-us/the-statue-of-colonel-birger-eriksen
(I love to say rhetorically ha-ha, Fascists, the diligent old patriotic and professional Norwegian soldier sank your big cruiser with 50-years-out-of-date weaponry).
Anyway….enjoy the creative process, sounds like it will be a great adaptation/retelling.