You are correct, my ravages of war comment was typed with tongue in cheek. It seems to me that countries east of Germany/Austria sometimes get lumped together with the Balkans. You are much more familiar with the history of the area than I am, though. I can make jokes, but fall short of saying anything intelligent.
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Oh, my bad!
Yeah… true of many other places as well. To be fair, the Balkans have a pretty complicated history, too…
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Good! It was a fucking disturbing period in history and being disturbed by disturbing things is the first step to stopping future disturbing events.
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“While I do not know whether it was an intentionally hateful message or was created out of ignorance, be assured the students will be disciplined for their actions,” Superintendent Dennis Peterson wrote in an e-mail Friday denouncing the post.
These kids are in high school. If they’re not aware of what they’re doing, I’m frankly surprised they made it this far.
I’m sick and tired of this “plausible deniability” bullshit game people are playing these days.
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Perhaps you’re thinking of the Bosnian War between the Bosnians/Serbs/Croats?
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That’s what I asked…
I suppose they are all the same to some people? /s
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Absolutely, and I’d be shocked if WWII and the Nazis hadn’t been part of their education so far. What’s obviously missing is a discussion of how it is linked to modern day white supremacy.
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WTF were they thinking? I really don’t know - it could have been anything from innocent stupidity to serious nastiness.
Yeah, I remember kids in my schools doodling swastikas because they were like a pictographic swear-word. Not meaning anything, but just kind of “naughty.” And how early British punk adopted Nazi elements purely because of the war the previous generation had been fighting, so it became the ultimate rebellion, rather than an actual statement of ideology. (And extremely embarrassing for the punks once they grew up a bit.)
These days, I’m not sure what it means to the kids. I suspect it means something else, now, for a lot of them…
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“Boys will be boys” has turned into “boys will be fascists.” If they aren’t educated about how their actions are wrong and what the consequences are, they might end up as the President or worse.
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A good start would be a discussion of the trial that Deborah Lipstadt was involved with on Holocaust denial:
Or her book that led to the trial, which makes the connections plain.
Also, it would be helpful if we had more accurate depictions of Nazis in the media. It’s fun to have Indian Jones punch a cartoonish villain and all (or have them living on the dark side of the moon or in the earth or be zombies or whatever), but even serious American films about the Holocaust treat nazis like laughably evil monsters instead of what they were - actual people who participated in horrible atrocities (especially Schindler’s List, to my mind). European films do a far better job at doing that (Black Book, Das Untergang, etc).
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This movie is also a good portrayal of what the Nazis were actually like. Based on on the minutes of the conference that planned the Final Solution, it looks and sounds like a corporate board meeting once you take away the uniforms and put aside the subject matter of genocide.
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I have not seen this, actually, but heard good things about it.
Don’t get me wrong, I like my cartoonish nazis that get punched as much as the person, but when it comes to serious depictions of the second world war and the holocaust, I prefer that we get a more accurate historical view through mass media, since that’s often the primary way that most people learn about it.
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I have several similar stories from when I was a similar age–I was a precocious child ahead of the school curriculum in my reading, and had a personal morbid fascination for everything I could learn on my own about WWII–except I never got the awkward conversation with the teacher (or any other observing adult, for that matter). I look back on that period with a full-body cringe for everyone involved, because someone should have seen a fifth-grader checking out Mein Kampf from the library (for example) and had a compassionate educational sit-down with me. Thank goodness the internet didn’t really exist back then.
In hindsight, the key thing was missing in my education (and age-standard level of emotional maturity) at that point was the understanding that these terrible things weren’t in the abstract extremely distant past like most of the history I had been taught, but still directly affected some of my own classmates and friends. I wasn’t able to truly grasp that on my own until several years later.
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History in a nutshell:
Previously - The 49 teens who have some Nazi stunt had it backfire on them and got shamed on the internet.
Other teen: “When I do it, everybody is going to think it’s a funny joke.”
Result - 50 Nazi stunts have been shamed by the internet.
I think the only fake nazi I ever met was a gay guy who thought the outfits/design aesthetic was sort of hot.
I’ve encountered quite a few real nazis of the neo variant.
Anyway I guess I’m on the side of Mel Brooks regarding the hilarity of nazis in general and I do find the idea of a nazi salute plague amusing at least, I get visions of air traffic controllers and traffic cops messing up their work at crucial moments leading to chaos and death by sieg heil-itis.
It’s a good, chilling movie. And shows the truth of C.S. Lewis’ comment:
The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid “dens of crime” that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices.
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Well, he made fun of them, but he never thought making fun of them was enough.
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Reminds of me of my preteen years when my friend and I enjoyed calling his Dad a dildo pretending we didn’t know what that meant.
