Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2021/01/18/know-your-insurrectionist-flags-and-symbols.html
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A post was merged into an existing topic: An Infestation of Nazis, Fascists and Insurrectionists Part Deux
This is also a useful guide:
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Around here, I see the 3%er stickers on quite a lot of cars. Several years ago (long before Trump) I googled it to figure out what it was. What I found scared the crap out of me. I now take a good long look at the drivers of those cars, trying to see what kind of people would join a group like that. It’s not just big dumb trucks at the gun range, either. It’s soccer moms in minivans, little cars at the mall with kids, ordinary SUVs, all kinds of things. No other stickers or warning signs, often. Always white people at the wheel, of course, but not people I could pick out of a crowd as being dangerous looking (though I guess if you’re PoC, all white people are dangerous-looking, and I apologize on behalf of us for that).
You never know the hate that is in peoples’ heads until they speak or act.
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Michael Harriot came up with my favorite so far; Coup Klutz Klan. I am also partial to Sweatysburg, though that seems to have originated a few years ago.
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Anyone who doesn’t see why the “Thin Blue Line” flag is so disturbing should take a long hard look at the kind of people who sell it.
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You can get the (false) opinion that Thor’s Hammer and the Valknut (three triangles symbol) is only used by White Supremacists from the vid. Just as there’ll be Christian BB-ers who are pissed off at the Nazis in the vid mis-using the cross, Pagans are having to go around saying “I’m not a White Supremacist, that guy is an arsehole”.
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It doesn’t matter anymore. Their symbols were stolen – as forever tainted with association with the neo-Nazis, just as the swastika was appropriated by Hitler’s Nazis.
Is it fair? No, absolutely not – thus I used the word “stolen”. But did it happen? Yes.
This is not a message they can control, nor can they expect people to sit still and learn about the theft – most people seriously won’t care. If someone displays those symbols now, they’ll only be associated with the hate on display at these insurrectionist rallies.
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Wow! I had no idea there were so many of them.
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JFC. They’ve appropriated many non-white images. And the numbers! There are so many more number combinations than I ever knew. I think that just about every number combination will be eventually on that list.
A-holes.
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This is the reason I don’t have runes tattooed on me, except I made that decision in the late 90s when the “aryan nation” started using it, same with ben Sherman shirts and my bald head, fucking nazis ruin everything. At least we are getting 4th wave ska with a strong two-tone massage, so there’s that i guess
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This is one of the most depressing things I have seen in a long time.
Also, as a part scandanavian, goddamn those assholes for appropriating my culture! I guess now I know what cultural appropriation feels like, I am substantially less dismissive of that whole idea now.
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They use the cross a lot, do you feel the same way about that as a symbol? Is everyone with a bald head and doc Martians a hammer skin? Are you, or anyone you know going around and attacking people who wear these symbols? They only get to keep it if we let them
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I recently saw an ad for one of those “fast fashion” companies that specializes in deceptive product photography, and their “tactical” section has more than a few referencess to knights templar and crusader stuff. Disturbing what a machine learning algorithm decides is worthy of promotion
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as a Warcraft player, i suspected that the KEK thing had its origins there, and it is super annoying to find out i was right. it also makes sense, though – the worst trollers in WoW were almost always teenage Horde players who’d say “Kek” to you after ganking you and corpse-camping you for lulz, so of course those are the type of people who would also hang out in places like 4chan and 8chan and eventually migrate to Parlay or whatever the chan of the week is. ugh.
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As much as I loved Persona 5, it’s use of “kek” in a scene was very cringey.
(In the context of the original JP text, they were using Japanese net slang there too - but surely they could have just used “LOL” instead and not lost anything in the meaning.)
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The alt-right appropriated some real Asian net slang.
ㅋㅋㅋ (kekeke) is the Korean equivalent of the English “haha”. Since this is often used in StarCraft matches, Blizzard, Starcraft ’s developers, decided to reference it in World of Warcraft : when a player of the Horde faction types “lol” using the /say messaging command, members of the opposing faction see it as “kek”
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/kek
Japanese[edit]
Romanization[edit]
kekeke
Korean[edit]
Interjection[edit]
kekeke
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Except that the modern neo-Nazi movement was largely born in Scandinavia. America has perfected it, but the backwoods of Sweden very much kept it alive since the war. The associations with those symbols are not (entirely) cultural appropriation. White supremacy was exported along with the symbols. It’s also a lot of nonsense fake history about Vikings and Celts and such as well, but Scandinavia is far from blameless in all this.
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As long as they don’t appropriate 草
This.
Knew a guy who was really into viking metalworking to the point of reproducing pieces etc… He’s a big white guy with a beard/mustache etc… Had to point out to him that the Thor’s hammer necklace that he regularly wore (because you know, a hammer for metalworking/blacksmithing, and his love of viking stuff) could be easily misinterpreted by people. He was completely unaware of the connection to white supremacy.
