@oralloy,
oralloy wrote:
snood wrote:If you were with a bunch of people who started chanting "Blood and Soil! The Jews will not replace us!", would you immediately leave, or just ignore it and just keep marching or hanging around?
I probably wouldn't have even recognized "blood and soil" as being related to neo-nazis.
"Jews will not replace us" sounds creepy though. I'd have recognized that as bad.
It would depend on the size of the park and whether there were other people who shared my views who were sticking around. If there were a lot of people with various views in various corners of the park, I'd probably try to find the people that I agreed with and stick with them.
If I was alone in representing my views, I might ask the anti-neo-nazi group if they'd welcome someone who supported the statues but opposed neo-nazis. I guess the left is pretty intolerant and unwelcoming though, so that'd probably fail.
Snood may have seen other video but in the one Blickers provided, the tiki torch bearers are clearly chanting
"You will not replace us" and not
"Jews will not replace us."
Guardian Video
The
"you" they used could very possibly have been Jews, (as well as any number of other NWO villains) and while I suppose a glib explanation for the use of "Blood and Soil" could be offered to deny any anti-Semitic sentiments, and depict it as simply nationalist, I would never take it seriously. Anyone who used
"Blood and Soil" in protest chants had to know of its connection to German Nazis. It's not as if it has been innocently co-opted by any group or groups who have disseminated it so far and wide, and out of any context with Nazis, that it has effectively broken free of the noxious connection. I don't know any Americans who had a clue of its origins prior to Charlottesville, but I am 100% certain the tiki-boys did. Deliberately chanting slogans closely associated with German Nazis is, in my mind at least, ipso facto anti-Semitism.
You are of course correct that it's ridiculous to assume that this one video covered everyone in attendance; throughout the weekend or even that night. I doubt even the Guardian would have made such a claim. So Blicker's insistence that unless one can somehow identify a "
good person" in that video, it is proof that Trump was referring to neo-Nazis and the KKK when he made his comment about there being "
good people" there on
both sides is laughably absurd, but illustrates the nature of the debate offered.
To snood's point, a
good person in attendance would probably have also been unaware of the origins of "Blood and soil." Out of its German context, it's not a particularly sinister sounding slogan. Very Teutonic, but absent the Nazi connection it could simply be a dramatic nationalist watchword. I can imagine it having been used during the Revolutionary War, much the way
"Dont tread on me" was used on the Gadsen flag.
Similarly, "You won't replace us!" (unlike "Jews won't replace us!") would not necessarily trigger white supremacist alarm bells. It's clear from the video (even before violence breaks out) that the tiki-boys were angry and intense (albeit even a bit comical) and that might have scared off
good people who didn't like the electricity in the air, but a lot of people like to watch train wrecks and rubberneck on the road when passing the scene of an auto accident. It doesn't make them
bad people.
Finally, for all any of us know,
good people in attendance that night did leave the scene when the tiki-boys began their march and even more after violence broke out.
Again, I have no real knowledge that there actually were
good people there and I don't know how Trump's assertion could have been anything more than an assumption and a refusal to blanketly accept the narrative being spun by certain quarters of the left that
everyone attending the demonstration was a hate-mongering, white supremacist, and
everyone participating in the counter-demonstration was a fine upstanding patriot, including the ones in masks with pepper spray and cudgels. (The latter Antifa thugs, of course, were merely there to protect peaceful counter-demonstrators from the violence of the white supremacists).
As I've written previously I believe it's safe to say any
good people among the counter-demonstrators far out numbered any among the demonstrators, but that doesn't mean there were
no good people among those protesting the removal of the Lee statue, and
no bad people among the group who were there to protest the protesters.
I don't know any of the demonstrators either personally or by reputation, but I do know
good people who would
peacefully protest the removal of a statue honoring a Confederate general. I think on this issue they are wrong and that their romanticizing the antebellum South and the heroes of the
rebellion, clouds their judgment and steers them away from a realization of the degree of insensitivity their position represents, but they are still
good people.
Every good person I know has flaws. (I know it's hard to believe, but I too have flaws!
)
Foolishness and insensitivity are flaws but in the case of the Statute Wars, I personally don't consider them the sort of sins my boyhood Catholic friends referred to as
Mortal. Apparently, someone was teaching them that there are sins so bad that once you commit one, that's it; game over man! According to their understanding of the dogma a
Mortal Sin put a black mark on your soul that could not be erased no matter how much you pleaded for forgiveness or how many good works you performed. (I think maybe someone didn't want them playing with themselves under the bed covers). In any case, it often seems that this is the view of some folks on the left when it comes to Confederate statues, flags, and "Dixie."
