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"Why the Smears Against Graham Platner Didn’t Work" (jacobin.com)
submitted 4 months ago by to c/slop@hexbear.net
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Jakkkobin

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[–] 40 points 4 months ago* (2 children)

He had a totenkopf for what, 15 years? And he only got it covered up after massive backlash

Glossing over that little 'smear', there is the whole debacle of who he is, such as the time where he talked about how he'd have loved to have been more involved in infantry combat in places like Vietnam or Gulf War 1 (not WWII though, how weird), how he deployed like 3 times(?), once as a PMC, the reddit account where he made racist as fuck comments...

I dunno, maybe the guy who had a Nazi tat for a third of his life, explicitly avoided saying he wanted to fight the Nazis (but really liked killing!), and was/is a racist asshole is maybe a Nazi

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  • [–] 24 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    it is kind of wild how many jewish people he was openly wearing that tattoo around who didn't know it was a nazi tattoo. people from fascist countries like the u.s. and isntrael aren't taught anything. i'm pretty sure that for most amerikkkans, the only nazi symbol they can identify is the swastika.

    don't take this as an excuse for platner, but the reality of doing multiple tours with blackwater is way more damning to me since he actually knowingly did that shit 100% for real than a tattoo that he genuinely could have gotten without knowing its origins.

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  • [–] 17 points 4 months ago* (2 children)

    people from fascist countries like the u.s. and isntrael aren't taught anything

    That is genuinely not an exucse here .The totenkopf he was sporting is in like every fucking nazi thing, you can't watch a ww2 documentary without seeing it, you can't play a ww2 themed game without seeing it, fuck man you can't even look at memes without seeing it (It's on the hat in the "Are we the baddies" meme/sketch) it's up there with the double sig rune and the wolfsangel. Hipster nazis use like the crossed stick grenades

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  • [–] 15 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    I can give you my experience with the totenkopf as a clueless american: no doubt I saw it in war movies, WW2 photos, and such, but the first time my attention was brought to it was the "are we the baddies" sketch. And when I watched that sketch, I truly thought the skull on their hats was hyperbole, to make the sketch funnier. I truly had no idea that nazi hats actually had a skull on them until like 5 years ago. Ridiculous stuff, truly!!

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  • [–] 5 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    i assure you, you are genuinely wrong, most people aren't seeing that, and most people that are aren't looking that closely. the average person just sees a skull and thinks about all the skulls in all the different military stuff and puts it in that box. they do not recognize the totenkopf specifically. excuse, not excuse, i don't care to try and litigate what one man does and doesn't know, but the population writ large doesn't know this.

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  • [–] 9 points 4 months ago* (1 child)

    You (As in you, the person with whom I am conversing) misunderstand. You (The general you, not you specfically) can not know.But the reason you (See prior note) don't know isn't because your middle and high school teachers failed you, if you consumed basically any media about or referencing ww2 you saw this symbol and it was used to denote a nazi. This information was not hidden, it was not secret, the issue here is not a failure of the education system.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    ok that's not the point i'm making, i'm not saying it was secret. i'm saying that the schools choose not to teach people explicitly about even a small survey of nazi symbols beyond the nazi swastika, and the average person does not pay close enough attention to pick up on this distinction themselves, and therefore they do not.

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  • [–] 8 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 child)

    I'm not gonna defend the american education system. But this just is not one of their failures. This wasn't obscured or obscure, this wasn't kept from anyone, this was in fact promulgated and presented to people at numerous points and covered western pop culture and every single piece of visual media that involves nazis.
    Its fine to not know, but the reason people don't know is because they haven't taken an interest. Which honestly is fine to me, but I dont accept the excuse it is caused by a failure in the school system.

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  • [–] 4 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    i'm telling you man, it really wasn't. my wife took a class on THE HOLOCAUST and wasn't taught about different nazi symbols. i just showed her a totenkopf, no clue. other than the swastika, which she's over my shoulder telling me she knows about. please. you cannot insist that people learn this in general.

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  • [–] 6 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 child)

    I am insisting on no such thing. I just told you not knowing is both fine and normal. I am saying the reason people don't know is because they dont care to know. Not because they were not presented with the option to learn this information.

    Your wife may have been failed by her teachers though. Since she did seek out information about the nazis. When your wife took her class on the holocaust, did they not look at nazi uniforms (The SS or SD hats for instance), mention Theodor Eicke, the designer of Dachau and the inspiration for all subsequent concentration camps, executioner of Rohm and commander of the Totenkopf division a division of former concentration camp guards? Could she recognise the triangles of the concentration camps? The double sig rune? The nazi reichsadler/parteiadler?

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

    edit: i'm genuinely not sure i understand what you've been disagreeing with me on? is it that the education system didn't teach people to recognize a totenkopf, or that they shouldn't? because they didn't successfully do so, and i'm saying they should have made a point to.

    ok, since this apparently isn't clear to you somehow, when i say that normal people don't recognize this symbol because fascist societies don't teach people anything, i'm making the implicit claim that i think they should. i'm not saying that they tried not to show people. i'm not saying people were denied the opportunity to see it during the education. i'm saying that if people were taught to recognize it then they would, but recognizing symbols used by any existing white supremacist militant groups isn't a priority in fascist society. i'm not denying that people have seen the totenkopf: i'm saying it's not surprising that they don't pick up on it being a specific nazi design. my wife has obviously seen the totenkopf before. she didn't realize it was a design that was specific to the nazis. because normies don't notice symbols they aren't taught to notice. i have no clue what you're even arguing with me about if you agree with that, which you seem to. i don't know why you took this entire conversation as apparently a condemnation of the education system in terms of practice and not design or something.

    Not because they were not presented with the option to learn this information.

    no man, the point is they didn't learn because normies don't learn anything you don't beat them over the head with, and obviously they should be beat over the head with recognizing hate symbols. which again, you seem to be saying as well, i'm really confused what point you're even fighting.

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  • [–] 11 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    if it was shitty quality i'm not going to look super closely at some dipshit inlaw's body

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  • [–] 10 points 4 months ago

    i mean i think these people are on the record as saying they weren't aware of the totenkopf as a symbol. i'm not sure if the relative quality of an albanian, nazi tattoo parlor is relevant to that.

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