I'm going to keep this brief because it is simple. Sometimes when people attempt to make simple things complex they are being manipulative. I
I’m going to keep this brief because it is simple. Sometimes when people attempt to make simple things complex they are being manipulative.
If Graham Platner had even ONE KKK uniform or affiliated symbol in his closet, he would never get my vote or support. Anyone who supported him would lose my support and hear whatever voice I have available.
You can’t hang out with people comfortable with symbols representing the following:
- murder
- domination of vulnerable persons
- forced sterilization
- rape
- torture
admiration for violent or supremacist ideologies,
misogynistic beliefs,
repeated dehumanization of women or minorities,
coercive behavior,
threats or intimidation,
and documented acts of abuse.
……..and then pop out like, “Doesn’t that sound good, y’all? Now make me your leader. Come on, let’s go.”
Many of us have long held that some people do not make connections back to when they were calling sex-based boundaries, protections, and rights that are meant to insure equity and survival, “Jim Crow.”
The Nazis got their inspiration from white supremacy, slavery, and Jim Crow shenanigans right here in America.
Historians have documented that Nazi legal thinkers studied U.S. racial law, including Jim Crow, segregation, anti-miscegenation laws, racist immigration law, and citizenship exclusion. James Q. Whitman’s Hitler’s American Model argues that American race law had a “real, sustained, significant” influence on Nazi thinking around the Nuremberg Laws.
The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum also states plainly that Nazi leaders learned from racist thought and practices in the Jim Crow South.
When someone waves Nazi symbolism around, they are not just invoking Europe. They are invoking a transatlantic history of racial hierarchy, forced control, legal dehumanization, and bodily domination. That means Jim Crow and slavery are not “separate” from the moral meaning of that symbol. They are part of the same family tree.
The ideology of National Socialist German Workers’ Party was built on several core ideas:
Some people are inherently superior.
Other people exist to be dominated, exploited, or eliminated.
Violence is justified to maintain hierarchy.
Empathy for targeted groups is weakness.
These core ideas say nothing about “service” to a diverse constituency.
And yes, rape and sexual abuse happened under Nazi rule. I invite those who think that such a symbol is “no big deal” to please listen to and read some of the stories from the women in the Holocaust. It is often under-discussed because many victims were murdered, many survivors were shamed into silence, and sexual violence was historically treated as a side issue rather than central evidence of domination.
(Note: I know that we are deeply divided on global conflicts these days. And doing the work of women is understanding that we must listen to one another as women because we are not the ones waging the wars nor financing the weapons, but we are the ones losing so very much. If men wanted to fight one another, they could go to designated areas and duke it out to their heart’s content. But there would be no fun in that, because torturing innocent women and children is what they tell us that “war” is.)
I hereby call bs on the new shock and awe act. In a time when no one must go to the library anymore to get information (but PLEASE do. Support your local library.) I am not going to keep buying and signing up for….”I didn’t know.” We knew what Nazi symbols meant in grade school, and we didn’t have search engines. This is getting tired and tedious.
A Nazi tattoo is not proof of sexual assault. But Nazi allegiance is absolutely relevant to questions about bodily autonomy, consent, misogyny, racial domination, and violence. If you are a leader, I expect you to be a leader and not the cheerleading kind of leader that will cheer on harm.
People want to separate it because separation makes the symbol look like “politics” or “free speech.” But for the people Nazis targeted, it was never abstract. It was bodies. Women’s bodies. Children’s bodies. Jewish bodies. Roma bodies. Disabled bodies. Black bodies. Human beings reduced to categories that could be controlled, violated, experimented on, sterilized, or killed.
Symbols of hate are not just “tattoos.”
No. It is a public loyalty marker to a history of domination.
And if you want to lead people there should have been more questions.
Nazi ideology did not invent racial domination, sexual domination, or bodily control. It studied, borrowed from, and intensified systems that already existed, including American Jim Crow and the long afterlife of slavery. In supporting the democratic candidate from the state of Maine, some leaders told us under no uncertain terms that they do not care about a large cross-section of American lives. Well, how long has this been going on?
Let’s Make It Plain: Jim Crow and Sex-Based Boundaries Are Not the Same Thing – WE Survive Abuse
Jim Crow Was About Stripping Boundaries-Not Setting Them – WE Survive Abuse
Jim Crow and the Erasure of Black Womanhood – WE Survive Abuse
Sex-Based Boundaries Are NOT Jim Crow – WE Survive Abuse
Valaida Snow: The Black American Jazz Star Caught in Nazi-Occupied Europe – WE Survive Abuse