THE UNITED STATES AGAIN--You gotta love reactionaries on the Left and the right. The blogosphere is going ballistic over a Wal-mart selling t-shirts with a "Nazi-skull emblem" on them. Ferchrissakes, pay attention to Iraq, watch the lame duck Congress so they don't pass any more totalitarian laws.
Just do something useful.
The image is the SS Totenkopf (death's head) symbol, often worn by American bikers. It's pretty obvious this is an overreaction and that the shirts are a mistake by a lazy graphic designer.
But what if they sold the real thing? What if they sold actual Nazi paraphernalia from 1933-1945? I wouldn't be bothered by it at all. Really? Nope. People should have physical artifacts to prove that Nazism and the Holocaust really happened. These are objects with no power other than what we project onto them.
If you think a swastika or an Iron Cross holds some strange power over you, you might consider an analyst. Wal-mart is removing the shirts, so it appears that democracy's safe for another week. But we all know that it was Nazi paraphernalia that started WWII: an entire generation of Germans were hypnotized and obeyed all those medals, posters and uniforms, not Hitler. "But why would you even want that stuff?" I think I just said why.
[Ed., 12.28.2008--Yes, it was medals and Nazi paraphernalia that caused WWII. Not the devastation and reaction to WWI, not Versailles and the absurd reparations leveled on Germany, and not a Great Depression and a compliant conservative aristocratic establishment that allowed Hitler into Bismarck's cabinet--we can prevent another Third Reich by stamping-out any memory or reference to it. Fuck you.]
just stopping in to say hi..browsing through your blog for the first time and really enjoy your point of view. Keep it up:)
ReplyDeleteNo kiddin'? I'll admit to being a bit blustery and a firebrand! ;0)Feel-free to comment anytime, I encourage a dialog. The site is also to provide some easy-links to pertinenet (and impertinent) information.
ReplyDeletePS: Thank you very-much.
ReplyDeleteMaybe you ought to actually read what I wrote about Wal-Mart selling the Nazi image instead of just labeling me as a reactionary. Wal-Mart censors music and books. They refuse to sell adults like me music containing what they deem to be adult language, yet will gladly sell adults like me a DVD movie containing the same adult language. They then have no problem selling Nazi paraphernalia to kids. Though they issued a statement stating that they removed the shirts, there are still stores with the shirts. All they had to do was issue a statement that they were removing the shirts and too many people like you happily accepted what they had to say as fact.
ReplyDeleteAnd what difference does it make if supposedly bikers wear this same image? Does that somehow purify it? I don't see how.
Dear Rick,
ReplyDeleteI'm fully-aware of the fact that they censor items, and it is anti-democratic. Most-all corporations are anti-democratic, so why not illustrate these things? It strikes me our priorities are not the same. However, having worked in record store, I can tell you that this censorship gave us a niche-market for what they wouldn't carry.
The internet makes Wal-Mart irrelevant in the area of censorship, in my opinion. People should just stop-shopping there, I agree. You're investing too-much in an image. Most people who bought the shirts probably thought they were related to ZAKK WYLDE, I believe he used the image on CD-art. That's why it says 'Since 1978.'
It depends why a person wears an image like that. The punks in England wore swastikas on shirts and wife-beaters, and the interpretation was wrong at the time. They weren't sympathetic to the National Front, it was just a 'fuck you' to English society in-general. Context. It seems a non-story to me, you should preserve these artifacts so people never forget. I stand by this assertion, and thank you for your comments. They are thought-provoking.
PS Rick: I'm indifferent to whether they sell a t-shirt with a death's head on it. It never mattered to me if they said they did or not.
ReplyDelete