No idea if his tricycle days made the difference, but:
He’s a socialist, who spent his life as an academic working on issues of health and education amongst Australian Indigenous people.
He’s also a militant atheist, despite spending decades as the head bellringer at the Catholic cathedral in Sydney. He’s an interesting dude. 
I’m sure a lot of people born between 1930 and 1941 grasped what happened afterwards and responded accordingly as they grew older. You should ask him if his childhood experiences influenced his later politics and activism.
Tangential anecdote:
Keith Miller was an Australian cricket star, who also flew with the RAAF during the war.
Once during a postwar interview, he was asked how he coped with the pressure of batting for Australia in a Test Match. His reply was:
“Pressure? This is a game. Pressure is flying with a Messerschmitt up your arse.”
He was quite an impressive sort:
It’s kind of hard to figure out what the teacher was trying to do, given as little context is provided in the article. The assignment seems to have the flavor of a lot of modern-era teaching methods, of trying to get kids somehow “involved” in history by giving them a participatory exercise to do that involves thinking about it in depth.
Giving the benefit of the doubt and assuming good intentions on the part of the teacher, I could see this assignment as being intended to get kids really thinking about the Nazis’ beliefs and attitudes by by boiling those beliefs and attitudes down into a mascot representing them. It’s a way to find out if the kids truly understand what they were reading, rather than just parroting the text out of their textbook on an essay question.
The problem with giving such assignments is that, if you’re not careful, it’s very, very easy to couch them in terms that seem to endorse the thing you’re teaching about–even if that wasn’t your intent at all. And that leads to a big uproar.
Then perhaps there’s some hope after all…
I’ll take a well meaning but ham fisted approach over the opposite situation any day.
Late Stage Fascism?
I made no reference to Trump supporters at all. I was only mentioning that the generation for whom WWII and actual Nazi horrors were living memory is in its 90’s at the earliest.
No argument there. I fully agree. I think there was just some miscommunication here. I am more than willing to take the blame here.
True, but if they were American at birth, the war had virtually no impact on their lives in a direct way.
They were very fashionable. They took ideas from the fashionable American eugenics movement and married it with uniforms by Hugo fucking Boss.
It’s a campaign fund raiser. He’s making it himself, and ‘selling’ them for donations. So much fine print in the ad. I believe you can get one with the red MAGA hat as well.
A friend of mine in college had a professor named Doctor Slaymaker.
Another friend in the same college had a Doctor Fightmaster.
“I think the great lesson of the 20th century is that you have to separate the ethics from the aesthetics. […] You don’t have to agree with what the Nazis did, but, yes, be honest about it, they did have the best uniforms.”
–Andrew Eldritch
Would a klansman qualify? Or was something like a dahschund required? Or maybe Leni Riefenstahl?
Your next assignment is to come up with a toy that best represents Stalin’s purges. The school told me we have to balance our studies politically. Have fun kids!
We vilify history’s assholes for a reason. Because they’re assholes. You wanna teach about history and authoritarian regimes in an interactive manner, use The Wave or something similar. Jeebus.
That’s what I was thinking as well, this whole story, lacking further information, sounds like a young teacher mistake. Understanding when to deploy this kind of assignment, and when it would not be appropriate is something you learn by messing up. I suspect the teacher won’t make this mistake again.
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