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.
They should all emulate Hitler by climbing into a ditch and setting themselves on fire.
@Pavlov
Thank you very much!
Also, I’m glad you brought this incident to my attention. It further undermines the godawful nonsense neonazis spout about how naturally all white people are secretly nazis.
It’s funny, really. They accuse black people of pretending that all white people are racist and then go, “Well, achshually, all white people are racist, it’s just that THA JOOOOOOOOOOOS don’t let us!”
And that’s obviously not true, as anyone can see – and the event you’ve just cited further indicates.
ETA:
White supremacist logicks:
David posted a picture of Hitler on here.
Therefore, David is achsually Hitler in disguise.
LOGICK!
I wonder how Carl “I can’t read for shit” Benjamin would excuse this rally, given his tendency to flippantly disbelieve that someone is a Neo-Nazi or fascist because they don’t have “tell-tale signs.”
It really is pathetic that he keeps trying to pass himself off as progressive and yet everything he spouts is borderline authoritarianism. I mean, for fuck’s sake, he started a petition demanding universities stop teaching social justice course ’cause he just happened to not like them.
Dude, you’d have a much better chance of success if you just learned to use English grammar, syntax, spelling and punctuation correctly. Your sentences are such a mess, you don’t need Third Reich kitsch lying around to scare people off.
@Bina
“Surely you can’t be talking about the Superior Intelligent White Male who single-handedly crafted civilization with his bare white hands and a naked blonde white woman clutching at his loins while birthing two pure, genetically white children,” Fransceca said, her voice soaked in irony. “I thought that they were supposed to be utterly perfect in every single action they undertake! What is this awful heresy you speak?”
@Franscesca:
O for the confidence of these worse-than-mediocre white dudes, eh? Well met!
@Bina
Thank you!
And, yes, I am totally jealous of their unfettered (and, I might add, untried) confidence in their ability.
Would that I had such overweening arrogance…eh, maybe not. It might get me killed.
Confidence, of course, can be overrated.
Those Mammotheers who have ever seen even a moment of two of a Fail video know what I mean.
My boyfriend is addicted to them. I occasionally see parts of them.
And I am horrified.
Even at their most subtle, Nazis are always laughably obvious with their Sooper secrit codes and whatnot. But even if they somehow managed to actually camouflage themselves, the minute I see a political movement that’s uniformly white I’m already running for the hills.
@Kat:
Yup. Those videos are not the only reason you’ll never hear me say “hold my beer”, but they are one of the many…
OLD AND BUSTED:
Telling people you can trace your bloodline back to William the Conqueror of England.
NEW HOTNESS:
Telling black people on the Internet that white people made the Internet, computers, and science, so they aren’t allowed to disagree with white people online anymore.
This is real shit that actually happens.
Shit has gotten so bad that on a certain pony fanfic site I hang out at, you can get someone telling you “AFRICA CONTRIBUTED NOTHING TO MODERN SOCIETY” in three posts.
We didn’t?
Blinkblink.
Someone tell Christiaan Barnard. Or Jill Farrant. Or Arnold Theiler. Or, if you count people who were born here but left at a young age, John friggin’ Ronald Reuel Tolkien.
@EJ
Apparently.
Being the cradle of human fucking beings isn’t enough for Pony Nazis, even.
No, you have to have top hats.
The fuckface I’m talking about on this fucking pony fanfic site posted a fucking picture of a fucking top-hat wearing white man in a jungle with naked black tribespeople around him and stated that this is why Africans are inferior.
I shit you not.
… Uhm, I somehow doubt that society would be particularly recognisable without, y’know, all the humans.
(Oh, who am I kidding, there’s a 50-50 chance he’s a creationist too.)
@SFHC
Or one of those nitwits who thinks Humans evolved elsewhere and that Recent African Origin Theory was ginned up by THA JOOOOOOOOOS™ so that they could do a White Genocide®.
ETA:
When I pointed that out, the fuckface in question was like “Oh, well, humans merely ended up there by accident, it didn’t mean anything.”
That’s just lazy. I mean, at the very least they could have drawn a picture of a white pony wearing a pith helmet. That at least would have taken some creative effort. Instead, they post a picture of a human on a pony board. They probably didn’t take the picture themselves either. Such superior. So creative. Wow.
As Bina says, why are the champions of the white race always the worst examples of it?
@EJ
Appallingly, I have seen pictures of white ponies enslaving Zebras (the Equestrian equivalent of black people until very recently).
For a very long time, partly because the idiots who made the show had a black woman voice the single Zebra character, the fandom decided that normal ponies were white and zebras were black, when drawing them as humans.
There were exceptions, but they mostly served to prove the rule. Drawing Celestia, the mane 6, and the rest of the normal ponies as black people was ‘shocking’ or ‘subversive’ and there are hardly any examples.
On this site I speak of, there was a black girl who made the mistake of writing a fanfic about a black girl who makes friends with the ponies, and people just fucking downvoted that shit to hell, until she deleted it. I was extremely upset when that happened and I never forgot it.
Returning to my original point…it seems DHX and Hasbro realized they messed up and brought in a black woman to voice a non-Zebra pony in the latest movie.
Ironically, her character is a sea-pony. A seahorse, basically. And this is amusing because white people like to say black people can’t swim.
I swim very well and have recently considered taking up a job as a swimming instructor. I’d like to be posted somewhere there’s rich white people with privileged white children, just to see the looks on their faces when they realize that n-words can’t just swim, but they can teach others to swim.
@EJ
An example of the FiM fandom practice of humanizing ponies.
It also serves an example of how Ponies Are White People.
I usually write about them as being either 3, 4, or 5.
It’s annoying to describe them as picking things up with their hooves and I like being able to say that they stood up or sat down or got into a car.
The FiM fandom is basically what happens when you take all the negative things from the Furry and Anime fandoms and combine them.
That’s my professional analysis on the matter.
I was in both the Furry and Anime fandoms since the late 1990s. I know what I’m talking about, I’ve experienced both of them extensively.
I once tried to see if I had any interesting ancestry, but going back a couple of hundred years just threw up English all the way, so I figured any further back didn’t really matter and stopped looking. Can’t say it’s anything I take pride in, it just is what it is.
@Francesca Torpedo: I love your modern interpretation of Norse legends. One of my middle name’s is Iduna (she who held the apples of youth) and a little sister called Freya(she has a chariot pulled by cats!), so I’ve always had an interest in them as passed down by my mum.
In a place that hot and humid (like a jungle), it’s smart to not wear a lot of clothes. The British inflicted a lot of unnecessary suffering on themselves and the people they colonized by insisting that everyone dress like they were in England, regardless of the climate.
Of course, the British also refused to adopt the custom of resting in the middle of the day in hot climates. “Mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun.” I don’t see infliciting heat stroke and skin cancer upon oneself as a sign of superiority.
Helix_luco said
I’m with you! And I’m a middle-aged, white-as-it-gets American housewife. Seeing a group of old, white politicians on the tee vee really gets my hackles up nowadays because they’re generally up to no good.
Francesca Torpedo said
It takes exactly no imagination to believe this.
But it reminds me of a neat PBS series of six shows about the history of the African continent: http://www.pbs.org/show/africas-great-civilizations/ If you’re able to play these online, I highly recommend them!
It’s about time we got some docs about Africa that are about the humans that live there. Nice as the wildlife is, there have long been civilizations in Africa that are fascinating, too!
@ lindsayirene
A friend of mine worked for the UN. One time they had to emergency evac from somewhere dodgy. They had to abandon everything. On her return (and that’s another story, involving my truck nearly floating out to sea, but I digress) I helped her fill out the compensation forms.
“Who takes three cocktail dresses to a warzone? Who even takes one cocktail dress to a warzone?”
She looked at me with an air of genuine bewilderment.
“I suppose you’d wear the same thing to an evening function as a luncheon one?”
The British Army did adopt the shemagh though (those Arab headscarf things). They’re amazing (I have several), and the only bit of non uniform kit you’re allowed to wear on duty.
@Varalys
Thank you!
Also, there’s a few white people in my family tree – I imagine they owned my African ancestors at one point and had sex with them – and, consequently, an ancestry-tracing website revealed that I am, on my mother’s side, related to Anglo-Norman Nobility. I have my own coat of arms and everything.
12-year-old me who read TONS of Arthurian legends and sword-and-sorcery and medieval fantasy (this was before the recent epiphany I had regarding all the racists in this fandom/genre) would have been so happy to find out about this.
I found out about this very recently after my enjoyment of such things was spoiled, however, so I am not really stoked about it.
Late to the party as usual, but:
@Franscesca Torpedo
Speaking as a white person, I don’t believe I’ve heard (or heard implied) that one before; however, I don’t doubt that it is a meme (in the original sense) near where you live but not me.
Doesn’t change the fact that it makes even less sense than other racist memes I’ve been exposed to.