Who’ll Step the Goose Step Today?
This won’t help his campaign:
Iott, whose district lies in Northwest Ohio, was involved with a group that calls itself Wiking, whose members are devoted to re-enacting the exploits of an actual Nazi division, the 5th SS Panzer Division Wiking, which fought mainly on the Eastern Front during World War II. Iott’s participation in the Wiking group is not mentioned on his campaign’s website, and his name and photographs were removed from the Wiking website.When contacted by The Atlantic, Iott confirmed his involvement with the group over a number of years, but said his interest in Nazi Germany was historical and he does not subscribe to the tenets of Nazism. “No, absolutely not,” he said. “In fact, there’s a disclaimer on the [Wiking] website. And you’ll find that on almost any reenactment website. It’s purely historical interest in World War II.”
Personally, I don’t really have a problem with people playing dress up and doing war re-enactments. I think the way they seem to have romanticized it is ahistorical and creepy, but in a country where people openly celebrate the Confederacy, it is kind of hard to get worked up about some jackass play-acting as a Nazi.
On the other hand, it would be absolute political malpractice for Democrats to not exploit this for everything it is worth. On top of that, as JenJen and others from the region will point out, if there was to be a resurgent Nazism to emerge in the United States, SE and South Central Ohio is a pretty good guess as to where it would happen. Marge Schott wasn’t the only one living there.
Doesn’t that mean that Tea party endorses Obama as Obama is the hitler? Its so confusing… May be Obama is really a Tea Party President.
October 9th, 2010 at 8:11 pm
Yea, and the idiot is using the Marge Schott defense of, well, maybe they did some bad stuff, but look at the efficiency in which they did it.
I am going to start a Stuck’s no noes for candidates for public office.
1. Never brings masturbation onto your platform, unless you also admit to noodling in witchcraft, where the laws of osmotic attention will shift in another direction.
2. Never, ever, get photographed wearing an SS Officer uniform, unless it’s Halloween and you are too fucking drunk to know it.
October 9th, 2010 at 8:13 pm
You mean south-western Ohio, not south-eastern, right?
SE Ohio is just an extension of Steeler Nation, but with more Quakers.
October 9th, 2010 at 8:19 pm
So just to recap the score, wanting universal healthcare makes you Hitler, but dressing up as a Nazi makes you a good father and avid historian.
October 9th, 2010 at 8:19 pm
Cincinnati is full of post WW2 old money types, which gives it a certain type of conservatism. When I was living near there back in the late 70’s, me and some buddies would get drunk and head out to crash the Polka parlors on riverboats mostly on the KY side of the Ohio River. Very creepy, everyone dressed up in 40’s gear with bouncers that looked like descendents of Himmler. They did not appreciate our happy asses intruding on their world, to say the least.
October 9th, 2010 at 8:20 pm
I just spent a month in Germany including a long visit to Ober Salzburg and the comprehensive Nazi museum there. Just walking down into the underground bunkers gave us all the absolute chills, knowing who else had been in those tunnels. If these re-enacters really are students of history, there is just no way to put on a Nazi uniform and play pretend war and not know what they are representing. Sick.
October 9th, 2010 at 8:20 pm
Lived in the South for a bit & attended a couple of community 4th of July celebrations that included Civil War re-enactors engaging in skirmishes. it always pissed me off that people would cheer when the gray ‘prevailed’ but never when the blue did. Sometimes a cigar is more than a cigar.
October 9th, 2010 at 8:25 pm
Cole survives! Good to know.
However I am tired of these effete elite bicostal inside the beltway West Vriginians (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B.....ton_region) looking down their noses at the Heartlands of the American Fatherland, er, Homeland, like SC Ohio.
Edit: And notice that the effete elitist Cole brags about fancy mustard and lettuces on the front page of his liberal blog.
Editedit: I assume of course that all of WV is damned by the loss of those three eastern counties, Hampshire and Jefferson(?) and whatever the other one is. But the rest of the state is supping with the Devil, with a long spoon is all, is what I saying here. Also, too.
October 9th, 2010 at 8:26 pm
Here’s a great idea for an ad. A dark background and a voiceover saying “The Tea Party claims that they’re not just another group of Republicans, and they’re right. They’re worse, they’re Nazis” and then show a picture of Iott in his SS officer’s uniform.
And if he tries that “we’re just re-enacting the exploits of the 5th SS Panzer Division” defense just point out these exploits.
This guy is a sick fucking bastard.
October 9th, 2010 at 8:26 pm
@Alwhite:
“We cannot change the hearts and minds of those people of the South, but we can make war so terrible … [and] make them so sick of war that generations would pass away before they would again appeal to it”
William Tecumseh Sherman
Whilst on his hike to the Savannah beach.
October 9th, 2010 at 8:28 pm
Personally, I don’t really have a problem with people playing dress up and doing war re-enactments. I think the way they seem to have romanticized it is ahistorical and creepy, but in a country where people openly celebrate the Confederacy, it is kind of hard to get worked up about some jackass play-acting as a Nazi.
John, Although I understand your point, I still disagree with you. The Wikings slaughtered Jews under the premise that they were promoting personal freedom. It’s not a matter of the Democrats using this information, it’s a matter of standing up to the whackos that want to take over the country.
Iott needs to dress up in his costume and fly to Germany and walk around parading his nice outfit.
October 9th, 2010 at 8:29 pm
Ha! Just so happened I was reading the Cincinnati Enquirer’s write-up on this this very moment, and I’m shaking my head at the nutters just falling over themselves to acquit this guy in the comments section.
So, we’ve actually reached a point in our national discourse where you can’t even make fun of some fuckknob who likes to dress up like a Nazi on the weekends without becoming a sworn enemy of the right. I mean… they’re sticking up for pretend Nazis now.
Not sure that makes Ohio or Cincinnati any different than anywhere else in the country, though. Newspaper comment sections are universally loathsome, and depressing.
ETA: Oh, and as far as the OP is concerned, this character is from Toledo, the northwest part of the state, not even the hotbed of junior-neo-fascism that I’m usually referring to down here by the Ohio River. While watching Maher last night I almost fell over when they said he was a Toledo guy.
October 9th, 2010 at 8:35 pm
Holy Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS! I guess you could argue that this is like playing a video game where you play the part of the Germans, or the Taliban. But what the fuck, the Democrats should run with this for all it’s worth.
Tea baggin for Amerikkka.
October 9th, 2010 at 8:35 pm
@General Stuck: Headed there in the morning!
October 9th, 2010 at 8:36 pm
Posted on the previous thread in response to a specific comment:
(Cross posted from LGM)
As Benen pointed out, the real stupidity is that this is the guy the GOBP picked for one of their top-tier target races (against Marcy Kaptur).
Knowing what we do about how McCain’s people “vetted” Palin, maybe we shouldn’t be surprised. This seems to be a recurring GOBP pattern this year.
October 9th, 2010 at 8:37 pm
Election-related but a bit OT: What do West Virginians think of the “Hicky” ad, and the new Manchin ad?
October 9th, 2010 at 8:39 pm
Okay, can’t agree with ya there buddy. As an African American, obviously, I ain’t much of a fan of Confederacy reinactments. Let’s forget for a moment why I believe the Civil War was fought (slavery…duh).
Let’s instead think about what “character” I would be designated to play during the re-enactment. Hmmh, African American female…? Yeah, I’m not liking what I’m imagining.
Oh well John “you do you”. I ain’t mad at cha, I’ll just gonna let ya use the “cool white dude” card I gave ya from last Thursday.
:D
October 9th, 2010 at 8:43 pm
@stuckinred:
Say Hi! to Uncle Billy, if you see him roaming around.
October 9th, 2010 at 8:43 pm
Wow. Being photographed in actual Nazi gear has to be the stupidest thing yet done by a candidate this season (though the Art Robinson-Maddow interview the other day comes close). WTF was this guy thinking?
On the other hand, just got linked to a truly despicable post by Bryan Fischer of the AFA. Not trying to re-ignite the firefighter wars but check this out: Firefighters did the Christian thing in letting house burn to the ground.
October 9th, 2010 at 8:45 pm
Gen. Stuck:
Sherman is good for a whole passel of really good quotes on War and the South in general. After he ordered the evacuation of the population of Atlanta, the grand civic leaders protested on humanitarian grounds. Part of his response:
And then he burned the place down. See also “Sherman’s neckties,” a way of both decorating the landscape and destroying transportation infrastructure.
(edit: bold didn’t show up.) Note well the bolded bit: anyone else notice the parallel to the epistemic closure on the right today? (so here it is: “You have heretofore read public sentiment in your newspapers, that live by falsehood and excitement; and the quicker you seek for truth in other quarters, the better.”)
October 9th, 2010 at 8:45 pm
I can see the ad now:
“It’s true. I am a Pretend Dress-Up Nazi. But you know what else I am? I’m you.”
October 9th, 2010 at 8:47 pm
Sorry, but this is in no way the same as civil war enactors – many people are descended from soldiers from the civil war – it is our history.
Also, the vast majority of CSA soldiers were enlisted/NCO’s and did not own slaves and were fighting for their States feeling they were defending their homes (I give no pass for most CSA officers and especially not for the ass licking Lee the worst traitor we have ever had – that pig should have been executed for his war crimes (the crater battle that as commanding officer, he was responsible and fully knew of the murder of so many black Union soldiers in cold blood.)
NAZI’s killed vast numbers of American soldiers and there are many WWII soldiers still living as well as many victims of the SS. This is not play acting, this is hero worship in the worst way – this teabagger isn’t playing NAZI he is dreaming of being one!
October 9th, 2010 at 8:50 pm
Oh, wait a second … that’s O’Donnell’s campaign slogan isn’t it?
OK, how about: “SS We Can” ... or … “I Like Reich” ... or … “The few. The Proud. The Morons.”
October 9th, 2010 at 8:51 pm
@stickler:
And they thought he was crazy before the war, saying it would be a long and very bloody affair. I always liked his quote about his friendship with Grant, that he keeps me sane, and I keep him sober.
October 9th, 2010 at 8:52 pm
Oh. And anyone who dresses up as a freaking SS “soldier” in his spare time is either:
a) a damned fool who should have no role to play in our public life and really shouldn’t have the right to drive or find unpaid female companionship
or
b) a Nazi in all but membership-card-possession. And I’ll bet not a few even have those in their back pockets already.
The SS, including the Waffen-SS, had some damned snappy uniforms (designed by Hugo Boss!), but that is really about the extent of their positive attributes. Everything else is actively awful.
October 9th, 2010 at 8:52 pm
Years ago I knew a bunch of guys who were deeply into Civil War reenacting. They’d often be willing to don either blue or gray, depending on the ‘needs’ of the event. A great book on the subject is called “Confederates in the Attic”. I always thought they’d have more fun if every fifth reenactor was allowed to use live ammo.
Today there are reenactor groups for just about every period: Ancient Rome, both World Wars, and even Vietnam. A friend who was once approached about joining a WW2 German unit had parents who fled Poland in 1939. He said “There’s no way I’m going to wear a fucking Swastika!”
October 9th, 2010 at 8:53 pm
In the (limited) defense of those who re-enact the Confederacy, they have counterparts who re-enact the Union to fake battle against. I can’t say I’m aware of too many folks who re-enact many, if any of the Allied forces for these erstwhile faux Nazis to tilt against. So yeah, I’m gonna go with creepy adulation of inhuman monsters.
October 9th, 2010 at 8:56 pm
I don’t see what’s so weird about this. Me & my friends get together on weekends and dress up as famous serial killers and re-enact some of the most famous grisly murders. We’re really good on the historical detail and simulations of the blood and organ loss.
What?
October 9th, 2010 at 8:56 pm
Look, I don’t do any of the Nazi dressing up, but I do have a lot of money each year in the Fascist Fantasy League.
October 9th, 2010 at 8:59 pm
@Mike in NC: Have em react this from the Nam.
October 9th, 2010 at 9:00 pm
@Cermet:
I agree.
And I don’t understand why people have so much trouble acknowledging the unique evil of Naziism, and just laying off the fucking comparisons.
October 9th, 2010 at 9:05 pm
The lesson I’ve learned about this is that I need to keep pictures of my reenactment of the Lidice massacre off the Internet.
(theoretically speaking, of course, not that I would ever endorse such a thing, cuz Lidice was bad)
October 9th, 2010 at 9:09 pm
@John,
You see it as equal?
Maybe being Jewish makes me biased but I don’t see it that way. Civil War re-enactments are the North vs South. The issue may have been slavery but it wasn’t a fight to slaughter a whole ethnicity.
Nazis killed not only Jews but Gypsies, gays, the disabled, other religious groups. It wasn’t the spoils of war, it was extermination.
Please tell me if I’m seeing it wrong but I don’t equate them at all.
October 9th, 2010 at 9:09 pm
@General Stuck: Apropos of nothing, and all things considered, Stuck, what did you think of our Reds last night? :-(
October 9th, 2010 at 9:10 pm
@eemom: Sadly, NAzis were in no way unique. Enslaving people in Africa, chaining them below decks without minimal access to water and working the survivors to death doesn’t really put the traitors from the US south up on the Germans.
October 9th, 2010 at 9:10 pm
@Karen:
I agree with you too, and I’m not Jewish.
October 9th, 2010 at 9:12 pm
Perhaps he’s in the chorus of Springtime for Hitler.
Do you suppose they take turns invading each other? What other costumes are involved? French farm boy? Milkmaid? Wetsuits?
October 9th, 2010 at 9:13 pm
@El Cid: Rookie. Call me when you’re ready to join our Donner Party and Uruguayan Rugby team re-enactments.
October 9th, 2010 at 9:13 pm
@JPL: I wish he’d go play dress up auf Deustchland, where such attire would get him arrested. I read our local (Cinti Enquirer) story, but knew the comment section would be bad for my blood pressure, so I skipped those.
Though Jenjen may recall my personal favorite ever Enquirer reader comment. It was when Krikorian alleged an Oil of Olay conspiracy to get air time and extra votes for Surya Yalamanchili in the primary because there was an Oil of Olay ad on Olbermann the night he ran a story about Krikorian saying “nobody can get elected in SW OH with a name like Yalamanchili.” Who had been a P&G brand guy. One of the commenters said:
I laughed for days when I thought about that, for no real good reason.
October 9th, 2010 at 9:13 pm
Just another case of reality imitating The Onion.
October 9th, 2010 at 9:14 pm
@Martin: Not coming up. My group is scheduled for two sequential weekends, the first doing the Rwandan Interahamwe machete chopping up people hiding in a church, and then the following weekend we’re doing our Khmer Rouge re-enactment driving the educated out into the rice paddies and then creating a pyramid of skulls out of marzipan.
October 9th, 2010 at 9:17 pm
@Karen: The only reason it wasn’t a greater slaughter of blacks in the south is because they were given a purpose. The mindset and willingness to kill what they viewed as ‘sub-human’ are the same.
October 9th, 2010 at 9:17 pm
Hey, is Bohner stumping for this ReichDouche? Because that’s a tie-in I’d love to see made.
“Ve vill round up das Orangemann.”
October 9th, 2010 at 9:17 pm
Next time they could decide to do something in a lighter vein:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vMqSmiC_xHg
October 9th, 2010 at 9:18 pm
@El Cid: Heh. Aren’t we the PC hippies?
I was just reminded of one of my favorite Sam Bee segments.
October 9th, 2010 at 9:19 pm
You know who else liked to dress up in a Nazi uniform?
October 9th, 2010 at 9:19 pm
I have to agree with John here—it’s pretty fucking sick to be dressing up as traitors to the US and pretend to fight battles against the federal government already, so I’m not surprised to find that some idiots have taken it a couple of steps further so they can envision themselves as foreign enemies of the US.
And can we please not play the Victim Olympics where people try to claim that 10 years of outright genocide was worse than 200 years of race-based slavery? Thank you.
October 9th, 2010 at 9:23 pm
@JenJen:
I think the Reds are a very young and very talented team that froze some in the spotlight. against the best team in the NL , and well seasoned in post season play. I still love em, no matter.
October 9th, 2010 at 9:25 pm
Wiking Division, made up of foreign volunteers.
My study of history has convinced me that Evil always attracts people eager to help, while Good has few friends.
Wonderful creatures, those humans.
October 9th, 2010 at 9:27 pm
@somethingblue:
Sign of the Wingularity – trying to unGodwin a thread.
October 9th, 2010 at 9:30 pm
I don’t know, telling thousands of people at a time to strip down for a shower, when you intend to gas them, kind of has the top shelf in the evil department for me. But the fascist ideal of sub human is the same, like Martin said.
October 9th, 2010 at 9:31 pm
@somethingblue:
Prince William?
Jesse James?
October 9th, 2010 at 9:31 pm
@Bella Q: Gotta love a good P&G joke in this town. ;-)
@General Stuck: I love the Reds to death, always have, always will. We still have Sunday, and I still have faith. A little.
October 9th, 2010 at 9:36 pm
I live for these kinds of comments. You see, I’m a black Jew… sorta. My dad is black and my mom is a white jew, which would make me Jewish except for the fact that I’m adopted. My mom is “a reformed Jew” as she calls it. Neither of my parents are religious. However, having been forced to eat gefilte fish at my grandma’s Seder dinners, I’m Jewish enough damnit!
All of that is to say: this is as offensive as reenacting the Confederacy, IMO. I just don’t buy the whole “we just like reenacting the Civil War” nonsense from southern republicans who come from states that were fighting to keep their slaves.
And I don’t buy the “but we’re just reenacting the WWII.” How many liberals do you see running around reenacting wars, a central premise of which was the denigration of an entire race/group of people?
I have had a couple few (hundred) beers, so pardon me if this doesn’t make any sense.
STEVE HOLT!
October 9th, 2010 at 9:37 pm
John: you follow @KagroX, right?
I thought his question carried more weight than the satire I assume inspired it: Are there a lot of Viet Cong reenactors?
Civil War and Revolutionary War reenactments make sense as they took place here. People can visit the actual battlefields and experience some token of what happened there and the life as it was when it did. (But even some of those events can get questionable: http://www.balloon-juice.com/2.....-its-1859/ )
Presented in appropriate venues and context, such as at historical societies, and offering examples of uniforms or other military items on display rather than worn or carried, a discussion of Nazis or any military events should be acceptable.
But WWII did not happen here, and you don’t work at the Renaissance Faire. Do not dress up and play Nazi.
October 9th, 2010 at 9:39 pm
@General Stuck: I think there is a level of evil that one can reach where measuring and comparing no longer matter. It is like the old story about the primitive tribe who counted in this fashion, “1, 2, 3, 4, 5, many.”
October 9th, 2010 at 9:41 pm
@Wile E. Quixote:
I studied the Einsastzgruppen, using the reports they sent back to headquarters plus first-hand witness reports.
Nasty business. Two things they [mostly] did not do: They did not rape and they tried to not bury anyone alive. Everything else you may have heard is probably true.
Intercourse with untermenchen was most verboten, of course.
Making sure that folks were dead before they were buried was an effort to make sure that the dead stayed dead for one thing. More efficient that way. It also was the result of an effort by high command to make the campaign as “clean” as possible, so that the soldiers would carry out their orders. A totally revolted soldier is not a trustworthy soldier.
The high command had problems with this and that is why they switched to gas chambers. The insides of the chambers were out of view and the process was less traumatic for the soldiers.
October 9th, 2010 at 9:43 pm
@Linda Featheringill:
Not to mention that trying to “solve the Jewish problem” with bullets was slow and expensive compared to the clean, modern efficiency of gassing them.
Plus that way you could sell their clothing, hair, and the gold from their teeth and make some money from their corpses instead of burying all of that valuable merchandise in the ground.
October 9th, 2010 at 9:45 pm
@somethingblue: Chip Hitler?
October 9th, 2010 at 9:52 pm
Mother dear, did you hear
How they’re teaching me to do the goose step?
October 9th, 2010 at 9:55 pm
Linda Featheringill and Mnemosyne make excellent points. The Einsatzgruppen were a brutal and inefficient method for mass murder, and their work posed serious problems (“externalities?”) for occupied USSR territory—groundwater pollution from mass graves, say.
But the grand daddy of awful might be this speech by Himmler to SS officers at Posen in 1943:
http://www.holocaust-history.org/himmler-poznan/
It includes this incredible sentiment:
To have seen the bodies piled up, and to have remained “decent” ... Good God in heaven.
October 9th, 2010 at 9:57 pm
@Omnes Omnibus:
Maybe, but purposeful intense effort to exterminate an entire people is the high bar to meet for such an equilibrium, imho.
October 9th, 2010 at 9:59 pm
@General Stuck: I can’t argue with that. I just think that parsing degrees of evil once one has hit a certain point doesn’t get us anywhere. Unless, of course, we are Dante and we need to rank folks in order to fit them in the right circle of hell. If we are going to do it though, genocide of millions is way up there.
October 9th, 2010 at 10:12 pm
WTF? Do Civil War re-enactors get this into it?
It also doesn’t seem like anybody is playing the part of the Soviets, which makes me think these guys just like dressing up as Nazis.
@Mike in NC:
That’s how I always thought they did it. It’s a little hard when you’re in the role of Reinhard Pferdmann.
October 9th, 2010 at 10:23 pm
As bad as slavery was in the south… AND IT WAS REALLY EFFIN AWFUL (As was Jim Crow and the white terrorists that enforced it) I have to say that I can at least sort of understand the “myth of the lost cause” and the southern heritage that still romanticizes it. BUT any nut that wears gestapo gear should be dragged through the streets and feathered because what the Nazis did to the world starting with the basques in Spain and continuing to the Ukrainian Jews was about as calculated and evil as humanity can get and we are still recovering from it. This fellow barely deserves citizenship, let alone a public office. What a scumbag and I will blame Ohio forever if they elect this miscreant.
Dear Americans:
HAVE YOU LOST YOUR FRIGGIN MINDS??? Vote sane, vote Democrat and things will get better.
October 9th, 2010 at 10:26 pm
@Omnes Omnibus:
agreed
October 9th, 2010 at 10:40 pm
A much-overlooked part of this story is how the GOP apparently scrubbed the Nazi dress-up candidate from their “Contenders: Young Guns” page.
He’s 58.
October 9th, 2010 at 10:47 pm
The scary question I have (which perhaps Kay can answer) is…
Does this fncking d0uchebag r3tard have any chance at all of being elected?
Truly?
I mean, its just one total whacko after another over there in the GOBP.
Time was all these folks, if they could get on the ballot at all, ran as Larouchies.
Now, they’re running under the banner of one of our two major parties, and they may actually take over one house of congress.
And I thought it was scary when Nixon and Reagan won.
Gawd.
October 9th, 2010 at 10:50 pm
I guess Imma just missin’ out on the funny here. But correct me if I’m wrong – this guy has a greater-than-zero chance at being one of the congressman of the United States, no?
October 9th, 2010 at 10:56 pm
Anyone is entitled to this kind of historical re-creation and I simply do Nazi anything wrong with it. (rim shot)
October 9th, 2010 at 11:05 pm
@kdaug:
Mentioned it before, but the Repubs are running a guy named Pantano in my district against a hack good ‘ole boy Blue Dog. Pantano shot some unarmed Iraqi prisoners in the back with a full mag of ammo. That makes him a “war hero” in the local media. Apparently there were no child rapists or serial killers available to put in the race.
October 9th, 2010 at 11:08 pm
@mclaren:
Meh – too cute by half… though I guess we always knew that much of Repuke party is made up of fat effing fascists.So now that we have proof, what next?
October 9th, 2010 at 11:10 pm
@Mike in NC: Oh, yeah, think I heard about that. That’s the guy who hung the “No better friend, no worse enemy” sign over their corpses, right?
October 9th, 2010 at 11:11 pm
Yeah, just to reiterate: Iott’s in the Toledo area, NORTHwest Ohio. Granted, we’re only an hour south of Adrian MI where that militia group was picked up a few months ago.
He got a jumpstart on Kaptur for lawn signs, so I’ve seen
“RICH IOTT” all over the place; I am constantly tempted to write “ID” in between his names.
October 9th, 2010 at 11:20 pm
Somebody should ask Eric Cantor whether he will endorse this guy? Is he going to go do events for the guy? Is he donating money to his election campaign? Inquiring minds want to know.
October 9th, 2010 at 11:23 pm
So how exactly does one reenact a tank division?
October 10th, 2010 at 12:03 am
@Mo MacArbie:
Well, if you can re-enact the Battle of Pearl Harbor in a cow patch ...
October 10th, 2010 at 12:13 am
@Mo MacArbie:
So how exactly does one reenact a tank division?
Well, you put on the uniform, get in formation, put your lips together and say Vrrrrrooooom. It has to be real loud though.
October 10th, 2010 at 1:06 am
@JPL:
I guss this may not be the right thread to mention I’m a Revolutionary War re-enactor??
In any event, I have little problem with portraying a standard Wehrmact unit soldier for re-enactments, but many of these guys seem to gravitate to Waffen SS…and I do find it creepy and more than a little fetishistic.
What disturbs me the most and raises red flags is that these guys seem to be trying to sanitize the history of the unit they portray instead of being frank and upfront about the accurate history. That looks more like apologists than dedicated living history enthusiasts.
October 10th, 2010 at 1:09 am
@Mo MacArbie:
A number of re-enactment outfits for WW II have acquired surplus tanks. A friend of mine in Indiana who does both Civil War and WW II was telling me how he saw a nasty accident with an old Russian T-34 that resulted in some serious burn injuries at one event.
October 10th, 2010 at 1:13 am
@lamh32:
Underground Railroad conductor would be a cool character and one that would be educational for the public. Living history isn’t just battle engagements, and there are limitless oportunities to portray people from the past in a manner that illuminates them and what they did, and brings them to life for people now.
My school (Guilford College) is a famous stop on the railroad, btw.
October 10th, 2010 at 1:22 am
More Limey humour, very on topic.
October 10th, 2010 at 1:31 am
@lamh32: I, too, am no fan of the Civil War reenactments, though there weren’t many Asian American women around during that time period in our history.
I found this story particularly repugnant, especially as noted elsewhere, this asshat would have been arrested in Germany had he worn his get-up. This is not play-acting or whatever. This is idealizing an amoral and vicious group of people who deserve only scorn and antipathy.
@Martin: I agree with you. Besides, the Confederates enslaved an entire race and decimated it from within by raping the women and selling off the children (for starters). I am not comparing one situation with the other, but they were both heinous.
October 10th, 2010 at 1:37 am
@celticdragonchick:
Really!? You can buy a surplus tank?
And can I ask, what goes on in re-enactments? Do you pick a battle? Are the same people always the British or Americans? I ask because I thought these guys were weird in making up their own German names (such as Reinhold Horse-Man or whatever it was).
October 10th, 2010 at 1:40 am
Well fuck me, you can buy tanks on Amazon!
(Make sure to read the customer reviews)
October 10th, 2010 at 2:15 am
@General Stuck: “Cincinnati is full of post WW2 old money types, which gives it a certain type of conservatism. When I was living near there back in the late 70’s, me and some buddies would get drunk and head out to crash the Polka parlors on riverboats mostly on the KY side of the Ohio River. Very creepy, everyone dressed up in 40’s gear with bouncers that looked like descendents of Himmler. They did not appreciate our happy asses intruding on their world, to say the least.”
Way back when there was a canal through the middle of Cinci, which they called the Rhine. Thus the neighborhood still known as ‘Over The Rhine’.
October 10th, 2010 at 3:26 am
@Mark S.: That’s no tank, that looks like a home-made attempt to build one of Jabba the Hutt’s speeder boat things from Return of the Jedi.
If you want tanks you have to go to EBay.
Here’s a post-WW2 British Ferret armored car.
Lots of big military trucks. No real tanks available at the moment, just a couple of faked-up ones, though one has real treads from an old US tank.
October 10th, 2010 at 3:34 am
Study history. I can absolutely see that, there’s quite a bit to learn, if one tries. But reenact war? War is brutal, war is inhuman(not that we’ve let that stop us), war is not just death, it is also maiming and life altering for a very large percentage of the participants and spectators. War should be studied to see how not to have to do it, not to see how glorious it never, ever is. I do not understand how one learns this from reenacting battles without the bleeding. So what does one learn from reenacting?
How much fun wars are?
Wars are grave inhuman atrocities that sometimes have to be fought to keep them from being bigger and worse than they end up. Nothing more.
October 10th, 2010 at 4:20 am
if there was to be a resurgent Nazism to emerge in the United States, SE and South Central Ohio is a pretty good guess as to where it would happen. Marge Schott wasn’t the only one living there.
Just wanted to point out that Mr. Iott is running in the 9th District in Ohio, which is Toledo, which is NW Ohio, not SE or South Central. Toledo itself has been a Democratic stronghold for a long time; they’ve had one GOP Congressperson there for one term in the 1980’s, but before and after it’s been Democrats. It also has a large multicultural population, including Muslims, and just south of Toledo (in another district) is the Islamic Center of NW Ohio, one of the largest mosques in the country.
That said, having grown up there, you don’t have to get too far out of town before you run into the sentiment that dressing up like Hitler is just part of Oktoberfest at the beer hall.
October 10th, 2010 at 6:15 am
@Mustang Bobby: A friend owns a tank and is part of a group that reenacts the Battle of the Bulge—the next one will be January 2011 in Pennsylvania. He has a saying—friends don’t let friends reenact the SS.
October 10th, 2010 at 8:56 am
@Ruckus:
Well said, and you are absolutely right. That should be all there is to say.
October 10th, 2010 at 11:26 am
My favorite bit from the whole article is Iott’s explanation of his nom-de-Nazi:
“Richard” in German, is, of course, “Richard”.
What a dumb-ass.
“Literally horse man” is, of course, comedy gold.
Stuff like this is just so deeply and profoundly fucked up that I can’t even get upset about it. The dude is in some other moral universe that I don’t even want to try to understand.
It’d be like getting all outraged about Mafiosi bumping somebody off. Duh – it’s what they do. Mafiosi kill their business rivals, and punk-ass authoritarian fascist wanna-be’s dress up like Nazis, collect Nazi memorabilia, and look for the positive spin in Mein Kampf.
The most disturbing thing of all of this, to me, is that I don’t know if it would hurt Iott or help him if the Democrats put this crap front and center.
October 10th, 2010 at 12:02 pm
Members of the division’s bakery column, led by Obersturmführer Braunnagel and Untersturmführer Kochalty, assisted Einsatzgruppe A in rounding up Ukrainian Jews.
Seriously, the bakery column? Makes you wonder what horrors the division’s baristas were up to…..
October 10th, 2010 at 12:33 pm
Maybe being Jewish makes me biased but I don’t see it that way. Civil War re-enactments are the North vs South. The issue may have been slavery but it wasn’t a fight to slaughter a whole ethnicity.
No, it was just a fight to for the right to continue to kidnap, enslave, rape, torture and exploit a whole ethnicity. Which may not be as bad as slaughtering them all, but still…c’mon. As bad things go, it’s pretty far out there.
October 10th, 2010 at 12:38 pm
The most fucked data point is that, as celticdragonchick pointed out, they weren’t play acting at the poor Fritzes drafted into the Wehrmacht but chose the Waffen SS, an all-volunteer unit. Hardly coincidental.
October 10th, 2010 at 12:40 pm
I do have some sympathy for this since my friends and I re-enact the Army unit that was guarding the Abu Ghraib prisoners in 2003. I play Lyndie England. (we are having some problem finding fellow re-enactors to play the prisoners, though, so if people have some time on their hands on weekends and don’t mind being piled in naked pyramids and photographed….) Our interest is purely historical and we don’t subscribe to the tenets of the Republican Party. In fact, there’s a disclaimer on our website. It’s purely historical interest in the Iraq War…...
October 10th, 2010 at 1:01 pm
“Really!? You can buy a surplus tank?”
A used tank costs about the same as a new family car, depending on scarcity.
Anybody in the SF Bay Area should check out the Military Vehicle Technology Foundation in Portola Valley. They have about 100 tanks and two SCUD missiles.
October 10th, 2010 at 3:57 pm
@Cermet:
I get what you’re saying and I’d agree the Nazi’s haven’t had as good a publicists as Confederates but in fairness Confederates killed more Americans in uniform than did the Nazi’s.
October 11th, 2010 at 2:24 pm