All you have to do is take an honest look at political trends in this country over the past decades and you see an amazing, even horrifying, shift from center to the upper righthand quadrant which is the territory of the extreme right and authoritarians. Even most of the recent Democratic candidates for the presidency have been located at the center or center-left of that quadrant, according to Political Compass (where you can take the test and find out where your beliefs put you).
That makes a lot of us pretty nervous. So a photo of a Republican/tea party candidate wearing a Waffen SS uniform is a little unsettling.
Rich Iott is running on the Republican ticket from the 9th district of Ohio. Iott was contacted by Atlantic writer, Joshua Green. Iott spoke freely about his dressing-up and re-enactment hobby.
"I've always been fascinated by the fact that here was a relatively small country that from a strictly military point of view accomplished incredible things. I mean, they took over most of Europe and Russia, and it really took the combined effort of the free world to defeat them. From a purely historical military point of view, that's incredible."
Maybe it's just me, but I'm nervous about "accomplishing incredible things." I've been around long enough to remember what a number of those incredible things were. Just to hammer the nail in, take a look at the group's website advertising their view of history.
Nazi Germany had no problem in recruiting the multitudes of volunteers willing to lay down their lives to ensure a "New and Free Europe", free of the threat of Communism. National Socialism was seen by many in Holland, Denmark, Norway, Finland, and other eastern European and Balkan countries as the protector of personal freedom and their very way of life, despite the true underlying totalitarian (and quite twisted, in most cases) nature of the movement. Regardless, thousands upon thousands of valiant men died defending their respective countries in the name of a better tomorrow. We salute these idealists; no matter how unsavory the Nazi government was, the front-line soldiers of the Waffen-SS (in particular the foreign volunteers) gave their lives for their loved ones and a basic desire to be free.
Historically, of course, this is bullshit of the first order. But it's not funny bullshit, it's very troubling bullshit. It's worse because it represents some of the darker shades of thinking that lie behind what many in our increasingly authoritarian nation like to believe. It's scariest of all when you look at which media are carrying the loudest megaphones in America.
