The liking of the Villian or evil empire.. and what that means.

[valkyrie013]

Was on another website, and had a post about something that I think would make a good topic here..

So, this guy was saying that building plastic model airplanes ( was a plastic model site) that depict an evil organization, ( Example was, Bf-109's from WW2 Nazi Germany, but also Nazi tanks, etc.) that the builder was a "Closeted Sympathizer" that they agree with or, like what said evil empire did.
An example of this was, some modelers just build 1 thing.. over and over.. Example was some guy that built 30 Me-262's, all the different variations, and he displays them. He said, this shows sympathy for the nazism, and that he was a closeted Racist, bigot, homophobe..

Other examples of this would be, dressing up as Darth Vader, or Building a Tie Fighter, building a Klingon bird of prey, dressing up as a Romulan, etc..

So his point was that, if you built nazi stuff, under this new PC thing we live in, that you have nazi/white nationalist sympathies, and should watch what you build.

So just wanting your opinions on the subject, ( I will provide mine latter today, to not cloud any judgement) on If you build, or dress up, or have replica stuff, etc from a real or fictional "Evil Empire" is that considered Bad now?

 

[Relayer1]

Utter garbage. I made all sorts of model kits when I was young. Most of my friends did likewise. None of us grew up to be Nazi's. I had a great German Tiger tank though.

Got a toy Tie fighter or two in my son's old toy box somewhere. Mind you, I am concerned that he might have fallen to the dark side...

 

[DonIago]

Academically admiring the tools of an evil regime != Admiring the goals of an evil regime.

Doubly-so if the regime is fictitious.

That said, I might draw a line between building models and collecting memorabilia or such. And that line would be even thicker between, say, collecting Nazi memorabilia and buying Star Wars toys. Darth Vader didn't actually kill anyone, much less anyone belonging to specific minority demographics.

 

[Gary Mitchell]

I always thought that I had a little Klingon in me.

 

[PSGarak]

I think there is a HUGE difference between fictitious villainy and real-world history. Model building is just that. Maybe they like the aesthetics, or the variety, or the challenge. Liking airplanes, tanks, weapons, ships, etc. is worlds away from supporting genocide or xenophobia.

Memorabilia collecting falls into a grey area, but to be honest, I'd need more cues from someone than, "Has a couple of pieces of war memorabilia," to decide someone was a Nazi sympathizer. I have a few friends who are crazy into serial killers and collect stuff related to them. They're into the macabre and counter culture, not serial killers in the making or proponents of murder. People need to chill.

 

[auntiehill]

I always thought that I had a little Klingon in me.

[*place dirty joke of your choice here*]

Hey, not all the Klingons were villains! Worf was a good guy.

To the argument, there is a big difference between being interesting in history and making models of various tanks and, say, joyfully collecting Nazi memorabilia, fetishizing violence and cruelty, and worshiping despots and murderers.

My husband is a big scifi fan, so his friends gave him a Darth Vader mug. That doesn't mean hubby is generally supportive of genocide and fascism. He loves scifi and Darth Vader is a famous character in a scifi film. However, if I walk into your home and you have Nazi flags framed on your walls and books about Idi Amin and Pol Pot on your coffee table, I'm running the fuck out because you're a total psycho.

 

[valkyrie013]

I've seen many "collections" of some people at model contests, many with Bf-109's or Me 262's, or Fw-190s etc. have like 15-20 on display.. Never in my mind did I think.. This guy must be a closet nazi ( Band name!) and should stear clear.. Nope.. Only thing I thought was 1. see if there any good, 2. Think, this guy/girl needs to branch out.. do a gundam or tank or something.. Owell.. Never have I thought, looking at the model tables.. Damn.. so many raycists..
Same for Sci fi Evil Empires, Take Gundam, the bad guys are the Zeons.. If I build a model kit of one of the vehicles.. do I support Gassing 5 million people inside a space colony? Ah.. nope.. It just a cool model, and sometimes, the bad guy kits are look better than the hero's stuff..

Now if I go to said Me 262's guys house and see copies of Mien Kompf and some other things around.. then yeah.. won't stick around to long.. But even that said.. he/she just may be a history teacher... it really depends..

So to me, as a blanket steriotype.. Ah Nope.. Do White nationalist model builders build german stuff?? Quite possible, but its such a low percentage that its kind of laughable to even think of grouping regular people in..

 

[JirinPanthosa]

Of course not, that’s silly. Collecting Nazi or Confederate memorabilia makes you a history nerd, not a racist.

The exception of course is if the person shows emotional investment in the racist side’s cause and mission and not just their tech.

 

[Spot's Meow]

I agree that making models of Nazi planes or structures doesn't automatically prove affinity for the Nazi party itself.

However, I do feel that the other "examples" you cited (Darth Vader, Klingons, etc.) are not really equivalent examples. There's a big difference between fictional bad guys and the actual killing of millions of people. I would not put collecting of Darth Vader memorabilia and collecting of Nazi memorabilia in the same boat at all.

I would not think twice if someone had Darth Vader figures around their house. However, if someone had Nazi memorabilia/models around their house, it would make me wary. I would not automatically assume they were sympathetic to Nazi causes, and would prefer to hear them out about why they collect, but I would certainly feel uneasy and start to question how well I really know them. And I say this as a professional historian myself.

I also think it's much less questionable if they're collecting Nazi memorabilia/making Nazi plane models along with other types of things they collect or make. Such as, they also make models of other kinds of planes from that era, and Nazi planes just happen to be more prevalent in the collection. But if they seem interested ONLY in the Nazi stuff, that is a bit concerning. Again, I wouldn't jump to automatic conclusions, but it would strike me as odd.

 

[Doom Shepherd]

If you looked at the bookshelves in my library you would see a lot of Nazi swastikas and Confederate flag motifs on the books.

They're not there because I have an iota of sympathy for them, (two groups which I find excremental and believe should be utterly destroyed whenever encountered), but because I am an alternate history fan, and those are the two most commonly written-about periods of history.

 

[Kor]

There's also the phenomenon of some veterans keeping memorabilia of the opposing side as war trophies.

Kor

 

[JirinPanthosa]

A good litmus test is, when you talk to them about history, is it clear they are bad guys?

One book that examines a similar question well is “Nazi Literature of the Americas”, a biography of fictional Nazi authors. Where the way he talks about them examines the author’s interest in Nazis.

Do not read if you intend to ever read the book:

Spoiler

In the last chapter the author writes himself into the biography, it’s about an author who is actively a murderer, and his friend is asking him to give away his location so he can murder him. And he decides to give up the location, because he decides his intellectual love for his work doesn’t override that he’s a monster.

 

[StarCruiser]

History is history - period. Remembering it - by any method - is a responsible thing to do. Trying to bury it, forget it - is foolishness and that old warning still applies: "Those who forget history, are condemned to repeat it."...

I've built models since I was around 3 years old (snap together stuff at first) and I have built models of German Bf/Me 109's and Japanese Zeros - along with the Spitfire and P-51 Mustang (Corsairs, Hellcats...) that fought against them. I know quite well that Hitler was a racist "whole ass" and Tojo was as well (so was Stalin but, that's another matter).

I can separate the equipment and weapons used by the villains of history from their actions. Anyone with a functional brain should be able to do so.

 

[StarCruiser]

Of course - here's the other aspect:

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[Delta Vega]

I used to root for Team Rocket in Pokémon.

Great bunch of lads

 

[Spot's Meow]

History is history - period. Remembering it - by any method - is a responsible thing to do. Trying to bury it, forget it - is foolishness and that old warning still applies: "Those who forget history, are condemned to repeat it."...

This is definitely true, but I don't know that everyday folks building models is necessary to remember our history. That history is documented in a multitude of ways, academic and not. One less Nazi plane model on the market (or even all of them taken off the market) would not take that away. It's similar to the arguments I've seen about the Confederate flag, that not displaying it would somehow equate to erasing that history. It's just not true at all, that history is still there for all to study and understand, and not displaying a flag would not remove any of that - it just removes that one instance of a flag.

Having said all that, as I mentioned previously, I don't necessarily have an issue with models of Nazi planes being sold or enjoyed by those who build models. The context matters a great deal before jumping to any conclusions.

 

[StarCruiser]

How is a model of an actual aircraft (which happens to have been a very good plane for the day) inappropriate? Just because it might have a swastika on the tail?

All methods of preserving history are equally appropriate. The Confederate Flag - and I presume you mean the "Battle Flag" and not the "Stainless Steel Banner" or any of the other actual national flags of the CSA - is just a symbol.

While I do understand how it's been twisted (even further) by the racists, it's still just a piece of cloth... I was born and raised in Texas (part of the CSA during the Civil War) and that flag means nothing to me. The ol' Stars and Stripes - yep - I happen to be fond of that one.

That whole "Sticks and stones..." thing is coming to mind again. We need to start growing thicker skin - and stop being so ridiculously sensitive and/or PC about everything. There is no actual benefit to that approach - there never was.

Trying to hide from reality does not help anyone...

 

[Locutus of Bored]

I can't seem to find the thread, but I'm pretty sure we had a big debate in Misc. during the 2010 election about House contender Rich Iott from Ohio being a pretty hardcore 5th Waffen SS Panzer Division Wiking re-enactor up until a few years before he ran for office. I mean, he was decked out in full uniform and regalia and gear, they met in a beer hall filled with Nazi flags and memorabilia, the whole nine yards. He called it something he wanted to do that was fun for him and his son. You know, quality time, dressed as Nazi foreign volunteers who slaughtered Ukrainian and Hungarian Jews on the Eastern Front, among others.

So Iott said it was his interest in history that made him pursue dressing up as a Nazi and that he in no way endorsed their ideology. But then when you start examining the group's whitewashed, minimized, and manipulated version of history where these were noble volunteers fighting against the scourge of Bolshevism, and then completely glossing over the atrocities they committed (going so far as to disconnect the group from the "real" Nazis in Germany), it sure came across as admiration for the SS rather than simply playing the baddies in a reenactment for historical, educational or filming purposes.

What's Wrong With Nazi Reenacting
Joshua Green - Oct 13, 2010

Their main defense--it's also Iott's defense--is that donning Nazi uniforms and pretending to fight is somehow "educational" and reflects only an interest in history. The problem with this defense is that it's categorically false, because these re-enactments downplay or simply ignore the most historically significant fact about the Nazis: the Holocaust. I spent a good deal of time on the Wiking website, the outfit that Iott was part of, and didn't once see the words "Holocaust" or "Jew." Yes, there was a pro forma disclaimer that Nazis did some bad things. But the thrust of the "history" presented therein was devoted to glorifying the exploits and implicitly excusing the atrocities of the Waffen SS soldiers. Worse, a number of re-enactors have chastised me for quoting actual academic historians because, as one of them put it, "historians of the winning side always write history the way they see it," and only they--the grown men earnestly playing soldier in the forest--are the true authorities on Nazism. It's this perversion of history that's so troubling.

Since the story broke, two legitimate academic historians who have far more experience with reenactors and Nazi history than I do wrote in to express similar concerns. One was Rob Citino of the University of North Texas, quoted in my original piece, who laid out his thoughts in this fascinating column about how certain people develop "an adolescent crush" on Nazi history, which he witnesses through his own fondness for board games (it turns out many of them are devoted to Nazi history). The other correspondent was Andrea Orzoff, who teaches Central and East European history at New Mexico State University, and draws an important distinction between those who deny the Holocaust and others who simply aren't interested in it. She's kindly given me permission to publish her email, and I'll let this be the last word:

I think most of us understand the Holocaust denial movement as comprised mainly of its worst, noisiest, most extreme fringe -- the folks who yell about a "Holo-hoax" and claim that Germany, and the West, were victims of a worldwide Jewish conspiracy to set up the Jews as martyrs. They're revolting, that little gang, but they're few and far between, and they're so desperate for media attention that they're relatively easy to keep tabs on.

But in fact there are far more people out there like Rich Iott. They don't specifically deny the Holocaust; they'd just rather not think about it too much. They're more interested in the Nazi perpetrators, whom they see as cool -- powerful, purposeful, casually and overwhelmingly violent, glamorous, almost sexy.

If they think at all about Nazi policy, or about the ideology to which the people who originally wore those uniforms pledged loyalty, they tend to focus either on military strategy or domestic policy. In this portrait, the Nazis reestablished unity, order, and an appealingly traditionalist set of family and gender roles (at least nominally). They managed an astonishing set of early victories against significant odds and stood down the Communist threat: again, nominally, but the facts aren't what matter here. The fact that neither domestic policy nor military strategy can be divorced from Nazi genocidal intentions -- that it was all for the protection of the Volksgemeinschaft, the idealized Nazi racial community, and all threats to that community needed to be eliminated -- gets waved away, or just misunderstood.

I'm not calling Iott a Holocaust denier, not in the classic sense of that word. But I think it's fair to think of him as a Holocaust minimizer, at the gentler end of the denial continuum but still undeniably present on that spectrum. People like Iott, seemingly just a geek running around in uniform on the weekends, share certain qualities with hardcore Holocaust deniers. Specifically, both deniers and minimizers are interested in rehabilitating Nazism, and ignoring or lying about the millions of Jewish and non-Jewish innocents the Nazis killed.

It's an ugly business, no matter how Iott tries to defend it. Much more
than just a weekend game.

Andrea Orzoff - Associate Professor - Department of History - New Mexico State University

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2010/10/whats-wrong-with-nazi-reenacting/64489/

And in Iott's own words and those of the group's website, you see they do everything they can to minimize the atrocities and it comes across as admiration:

Iott, a member of the Ohio Military Reserve, added, "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."

Iott says the group chose the Wiking division in part because it fought on the Eastern Front, mainly against the Russian Army, and not U.S. or British soldiers. The group's website includes a lengthy history of the Wiking unit, a recruitment video, and footage of goose-stepping German soldiers marching in the Warsaw victory parade after Poland fell in 1939. The website makes scant mention of the atrocities committed by the Waffen SS, and includes only a glancing reference to the "twisted" nature of Nazism. Instead, it emphasizes how the Wiking unit fought Bolshevist Communism:

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.

Historians of Nazi Germany vehemently dispute this characterization. "These guys don't know their history," said Charles W. Sydnor, Jr., a retired history professor and author of "Soldiers of Destruction: The SS Death's Head Division, 1933-45," which chronicles an SS division.

"They have a sanitized, romanticized view of what occurred." Sydnor added that re-enactments like the Wiking group's are illegal in Germany and Austria. "If you were to put on an SS uniform in Germany today, you'd be arrested."

Christopher Browning, a professor of history at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, said, "It is so unhistorical and so apologetic that you don't know to what degree they've simply caught up innocent war memorabilia enthusiasts who love putting on uniforms."

Iott says he does not recall exactly when he joined the Wiking group (his name appears on a unit roster as far back as 2003), but did so with his son "as a father-son bonding thing." He says his name and pictures were removed from the Wiking website not out of concern that they would harm his political career, but because he quit the group three years ago, after his son lost interest.

The actual Wiking unit has a history as grisly as that of other Nazi divisions. In her book "The Death Marches of Hungarian Jews Through Austria in the Spring of 1945," Eleonore Lappin, the noted Austrian historian, writes that soldiers from the Wiking division were involved in the killing of Hungarian Jews in March and April 1945, before surrendering to American forces in Austria.

"What you often hear is that the [Wiking] division was never formally accused of anything, but that's kind of a dodge," says Prof. Rob Citino, of the Military History Center at the University of North Texas, who examined the Wiking website. "The entire German war effort in the East was a racial crusade to rid the world of 'subhumans,' Slavs were going to be enslaved in numbers of tens of millions. And of course the multimillion Jewish population of Eastern Europe was going to be exterminated altogether. That's what all these folks were doing in the East. It sends a shiver up my spine to think that people want to dress up and play SS on the weekend."

https://www.theatlantic.com/politic...-gop-house-candidate-dressed-as-a-nazi/64319/

You see the same with a lot of Confederate reenactors. It was just a noble "lost cause" for state's rights (to own slaves, as enshrined in the declarations of the causes for secession of the various Confederate states). Statues and high school names and state flags honoring the Confederacy are just "heritage not hate." The Confederate battle flag is just a symbol and a piece of cloth (yes, a symbol that represents slavery to those whose ancestors were oppressed beneath it). Meanwhile, if someone tried to burn an American flag in protest today somehow I doubt they would consider it just a meaningless piece of cloth. If a player refused to stand for the National Anthem and took a knee to protest rampant police brutality and shootings of minorities would it still be just a cloth? Or does it carry weight and meaning as a symbol, good and bad?

Yes, you can be a reenactor for purely historical purposes and that is a helpful educational tool, if you get the history correctly (the bad stuff too) and you're not absorbed in the part. And that goes for Union Calvary on the Plains too. It's not like we don't have our own share of atrocities to account for.

But if I come in your house and it's decked out in Nazi or Confederate memorabilia and you start telling me how noble Robert E. Lee was, I'm hightailing it out of there.

Fictional baddies I don't care about so much. The 501st Legion dresses up like Stormtroopers and Vader and do charity functions and visit sick children in hospitals. We had a guy who used to freak out about that here, but I think as long as no real people were hurt, we can overlook Alderaan and the Younglings.

There are people who identify a little too much with Gul Dukat or the Sith or Magneto or Thanos and start posting shit like "Gul Dukat was right" or "Magneto was right" and will go into extensive detail about why they feel that way that indicates they'd probably believe some horrible shit IRL too, and they get the side eye.

As far as model kits go, that seems harmless to me and just indicates an interest in aviation or tanks.

 

[DonIago]

Well...Thanos may have had a point, in a way, but AFAIK The Snap didn't discriminate either.

 

[nightwind1]

Was on another website, and had a post about something that I think would make a good topic here..

So, this guy was saying that building plastic model airplanes ( was a plastic model site) that depict an evil organization, ( Example was, Bf-109's from WW2 Nazi Germany, but also Nazi tanks, etc.) that the builder was a "Closeted Sympathizer" that they agree with or, like what said evil empire did.
An example of this was, some modelers just build 1 thing.. over and over.. Example was some guy that built 30 Me-262's, all the different variations, and he displays them. He said, this shows sympathy for the nazism, and that he was a closeted Racist, bigot, homophobe..

Other examples of this would be, dressing up as Darth Vader, or Building a Tie Fighter, building a Klingon bird of prey, dressing up as a Romulan, etc..

So his point was that, if you built nazi stuff, under this new PC thing we live in, that you have nazi/white nationalist sympathies, and should watch what you build.

So just wanting your opinions on the subject, ( I will provide mine latter today, to not cloud any judgement) on If you build, or dress up, or have replica stuff, etc from a real or fictional "Evil Empire" is that considered Bad now?

Among the many models I build as a teen, I built an ME-262 and a Panzer tank. I didn't grow up to be a Nazi.