We've featured some Trump campaign tweets and campaign ads that inadvertently (or not) feature Nazi imagery: eagles, red triangles, soldiers, rune stages, etc. It's happened either through dog whistling or gross incompetence. Either way isn't very encouraging.
Here are four past examples where Trump campaign tweets or ads have featured Nazi imagery: Meaningful Coincidences
So what gives when a recent Trump advertisement promises that if elected America will be a "unified reich"? Gross oversight? Freudian slip? Jesus, these fucknuts are just not very good with the internets. Or just using that for plausible denial. This has happened five times now.
The way I figure, there are at least four explanations for why Trump campaigns and allies have used explicit Nazi symbolism on at least four occasions in the past few years: Trump or someone on his team is signaling his sympathy to neo-fascists; someone in the ad or design agencies his campaign hires is sympathetic to neo-fascism; someone in the agencies his campaign hires is making a statement about Trump's authoritarian tendencies in order to mock him; or it's all just coincidence.
If it is coincidence, then it's careless to the point of incompetence, and maybe the universe is giving us a wink and a nod. I've never seen another candidate get caught employing Nazi symbolism as many times as Trump....and just ask Harvard "symbologist" Robert Langdon. Symbols matter!
Feb., 2021
CPAC is forced to explain why the stage at their meeting is a perfect Odal (or Othala) rune, an unusual and counter-intuitive shape used in the WW2-era by SS units and subsequently by Neo-Nazis.
The Trump campaign is criticized for T-shirts that evoke the NSDAP's leftward-looking Parteiadler eagle clutching a circular symbol of the nation.
The America First Commitee (1940) was a group created to oppose US entry into WW2. Some of its most prominent speakers were known for their antisemitism (chiefly, Charles Lindbergh) and some held pro-fascist views.
In 1943, The America First Party (unrelated) was founded by Gerald L. K. Smith. Smith was an antisemitic and white supremacist firebrand, and after various forays into politics, he turned to fascism, contacting William Dudley Pelley, and attempting to contact Hitler. He eventually joined Pelley's Silver Legion of America, a fascist group modelled on the Nazi Sturmabteilung, the SA, aka the "Brownshirts."
He was later affiliated with the Christian Nationalist Party, which advocated deporting Jews and African-Americans, and attacked Catholics for good measure. The party's official magazine also published articles denying the Holocaust.
This of course doesn't mean Trump believes these things, but using a slogan with such precedents of dubious quality is well, not reassuring.
The Trump campaign uses an inverted red triangle to illustrate an attack on far-left "mobs", especially Antifa. Facebook takes it down. Why? Because the Nazis pinned inverted red triangles on the uniforms of prisoners in concentration camps to identify them as political enemies: social democrats, liberals, socialists, communists, anarchists, people who helped Jews, trade unionists, and Freemasons.
You may know that the pink triangle identified homosexuals and of course a yellow Star of David identified Jews. A chart showing the various prison badges can be found here.
The Trump campaign Tweets an image which includes soldiers dressed in Nazi-era German uniforms (In the red stripe, bottom right; the links have clearer images).
Analysis by Ishaan Tharoor in the August 30 Today’s WorldView newsletter of The Washington Post.
In a recent speech by Biden:
“What we’re seeing now is either the beginning or the death knell of an extreme MAGA philosophy,” Biden said, referring to Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan. “It’s not just Trump, it’s the entire philosophy that underpins the — I’m going to say something — it’s like semi-fascism.”
The GOP goes bonkers. In light of recent posts, it's worth a read. Tharoor notes that scholars disagree as to what fascism is, exactly. It's like we know it when we see it, but given the variety of its expression, it's hard to pin down with a precise definition.
See this one about CPAC using an Odal rune-shaped stage. The Odal rune being a favorite of neo-Nazis. It also mentions a Trump campaign Facebook ad using an inverted red triangle to illustrate an attack on antifa and liberal enemies. Like the yellow Star of David for Jews, the triangle was used to identify political prisoners in Nazi concentration camps.
Back in 2010 I published a post called Tea for Two about the Tea Party and affiliated groups such as the Oath Keepers. I ended with a warning that we should be prepared for some "wild and woolly" times akin to Italy's "Years of Lead". The anni di piombo refers to the 1970's, when political violence between left and right-wing extremists was tearing Italy apart.
At the time, people castigated me for being alarmist and completely off-base. I would present the mob violence of January 6th as validation of my prediction. And today, WaPo has two articles/editorials about civil conflict in the USA. One is about a CIA analyst who applied her criteria for countries susceptible to civil war. She, and other NGO's, claim the US is a lot closer to a civil war than many of us would like to believe. Her job is to track and predict these things, so I'd assume her book How Civil Wars Start is probably an alarming read.
In a second editorial, three retired US generals warn that the military must prepare itself for civil war. They are not just referring to dealing with mob violence like we saw in January, but the possibility that Trump-supporting governors might refuse to obey the President; they cite the commander of the Oklahoma civil guard refusing to obey Biden's order that all soldiers must be vaccinated, arguing his Commander in Chief is not the President but the Governor of Oklahoma.
I don't know if he is correct or not, but these generals are genuinely concerned that some military units could choose to support Trump or a Trumpian figure if Trump is defeated in 2024. They evoke not only the possibility of civil insurrection, but of military units obeying different orders and recognizing opposing authorities. Civil war, in other words.
Maybe their fear is unwarranted, but given the number of vets and even active-duty personnel who participated in January 6th, I think we should heed their advice....
II
I've written quite a few posts about the removal of Confederate memorials, changing flags, and even city seals. In The Politics of Removal I mentioned an agency whose job is to review place names and, when appropriate update them. I think we can all agree "N-word Creek" is no longer a viable official name. At the time I learned that the word "squaw" is not a word we should use, either, as the meaning is not merely "wife" or "woman" as the old Westerns have it. It's actually quite vulgar and offensive. So I found this WaPo article interesting. It talks about changing the names and how a replacement isn't always so straightforward. Sometimes a Native American name is considered, but as the article observes, different tribes don't always agree on which word. And of course White people are often reluctant to countenance any change at all.
This process isn't limited to the US. In France a town called La Mort aux Juifswas changed in 2015, now split between the hamlets of Les Croisilles and La Dogetterie. Similar requests were made in 1992 and 2014. The reason is clear. The French translation can be translated as "The death of the Jews" but also "Death to the the Jews".
Similarly, in Spain a place once named Castrillo Motajudíos ("Jew hill camp") in 1035 was changed to Castrillo Matajudíos ("Jew-killer camp") in 1627. In 2015 the town voted to change it again, to Castrillo Mota de Judíos, something like "The hill camp of the Jews" which sounds better than "Jew hill!"
Yet we'll always have Santiago Matamoros: Saint James the Moor Slayer....
The Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) this year was held Feb. 25-28 in Orlando, Florida. Social Media users quickly noted that the unusual stage design for the event is essentially the "Odal Rune":
Quoth Wikipedia:
"This symbol was adopted in Nazi Germany as the badge of the SS Race and Settlement Main Office, responsible for maintaining the racial purity of the Nazi Schutzstaffel (SS), as well as by the 7th SS Volunteer Mountain Division Prinz Eugen, the 23rd SS Volunteer Panzer Grenadier Division Nederland, and many neo-Nazi groups worldwide...The symbol was later used by American white supremacists.
....DC-area
design firm Design Foundry took responsibility for the staging design,
saying that they "had no idea that the design resembled any symbol, nor
was there any intention to create something that did." Design Foundry
had proposed several stage designs to repeat client ACU, based on the
"best use of space", and ACU decided which one to use. Ian Walters of
ACU said they would no longer use Design Foundry for their events."
Pure coincidence? Intentionally used a wink and a dog-whistle to Trump's more radical supporters? Intentionally used by the designer in order to make a statement about Trump's racist rhetoric?
At the very least, it would seem synchronicity is making a comment about the direction the alt-right has been heading under Trump's "leadership".
It's not the first time. We discussed back in 2015 how a Trump campaign ad included an image of WW2 re-enactors dressed as German soldiers. Then in 2020 a re-election campaign ad used an inverted red triangle to illustrate an attack on Antifa and other "far-left" groups. The ad was removed after it was noted the exact same symbol was used by the Nazis in the 1930s to identify Communists, Social
Democrats, liberals, Freemasons and members of other opposition parties.
At the time, one historian noted "It’s hard to imagine it’s done on purpose [not that hard, apparently], because I’m not sure if the
vast majority of Americans know or understand the sign, but it’s very,
very careless, to say the least."
Or do Trump and co. know exactly what they're doing? One would suppose those who carried Confederate, Kekistan, and other far-right flags among the mob which attacked Congress on January 6 wouldn't disapprove....
Israeli West Bank Barrier - Justin McIntosh. CC License.
A wall is defined as "a structure that defines an area, carries a load, or provides shelter or security". Seems simple enough, but simple definitions are themselves walls that hide complex realities.
Walls can be made from a large variety of materials and serve a large variety of purposes. There are many kinds: Curtain,Mullion, Partition, Party,Infill,Fire,Shear,Knee, Cavity, Pony...and that's just in building lingo. We won't even go into Facebook walls and firewalls. They can be works or art or canvases, even the screen for vast and complex animated films. From Banksy to Blu, the ordinary can be made into something extraordinary, a reclamation of our shared environment. We don't think about them too much, but we should, for they define us as humans as much as opposable thumbs, binocular vision, and the use of tools.
"Tear down this wall!" signaled the end of a nearly 100-year geopolitical duopoly whose ramifications are still defining the world in which we live. The wall in question came crashing down, and the clouds of dust are still settling. Within this murky atmosphere, the blind and our one-eyed kings are clamoring to put walls back up. The rich retreat behind them and some western nations are debating them as a way to keep the migrants out. The collision between globalization and nationalism may well be a story of walls, or a lack thereof.
Matty Stern/U.S. Embassy Tel Aviv. Public Domain.
But enough with the stentorian platitudes. This post came about after seeing a photo of Trump at the Western Wall -- he loves his walls, -- and an EFL class I gave using public art and urbanization as its theme. We discussed the Vietnam Memorial Wall, and I intended to do a short post about the two walls as places to grieve, where people leave mementos of their grief, whether rolled up pieces of paper with prayers written upon them, or mementos of a war whose combatants are now dying off. The memories will soon be gone, but the wall will remain.
Some of the most famous walls -- The Great Wall of China, Hadrian's Wall, The Berlin Wall, The West Bank Barrier, Trump's proposed border wall -- were erected to keep people out...or in. There are score thousands of lesser-known walls all across the world, like their cousins the fence, making manifest the abstract lines on a map that define the boundaries of private and public property, from the homeowner to the state, from anonymous mud-brick dwellings to the only human structure visible from space. They shelter and protect us from the outside world, from threats real and imagined. But I wanted to speak of other kinds of walls.
Some of these walls are metaphors, like Pink Floyd's Wall, the emotional barriers to shut out the world, to compartmentalize experience, the kind of walls that allow a preacher to spread the gospel on Sunday and snort methamphetamine with male prostitutes on Saturday. Or in this case "where traumatic experiences are represented as 'bricks' in the metaphorical
wall [the hero] constructs around himself that divides him from society."
The Walls of Jericho were blown down a trumpet....the Walls of Jerusalem and countless other cities the scene of great mayhem and carnage. Alexander the Great scaled walls like a spider, single-handedly jumping into a walled city to inspire his troops along their unstoppable march to India and back to Macedonia. And when there were no more walls to breach, he died.
"Shaka, when the walls fell"....in an episode of Star Trek, this is a phrase uttered by an alien trying, incidentally, to break down the walls between humans and his race. In that episode, the language barrier is eventually overcome. The aliens speak in allegory and though Capt. Picard and crew understand the words, the meaning is lost without knowing the ur-tales to which the allegory refers. When the walls fall, the language barrier drops. Dialogue is established and when Riker asks Picard if they'd made friend that day, Picard can answer that at the very least, they didn't make an enemy.
Some walls exist only because they are all that's left of an edifice, like The Western Wall, the last remaining remnant of Solomon's temple. Jews go there to mourn the destruction of the Temple and pray for its reconstruction, leaving prayers on rolled up papers pushed into the crevasses. It is the holiest site where Jews are allowed to pray -- the holiest site is actually behind it. Some rabbis teach that the Foundation Stone is located near the El-kas fountain, opposite the exposed section of the wall and where the Holy of Holies once stood. As a practical reality, the wall symbolizes the great obstacle to the restoration of Judaism, for Islam's second-holiest shrine, the Dome of the Rock, sits atop the Temple Mount. Its destruction would unleash Armageddon. As long as the Dome of the Rock stands, the Temple cannot be rebuilt. It is an impassable wall with apocalyptic ramifications. As the location of the Foundation Stone, it recalls that our earthly creation was in effect the separation of Man from God; it is a great wall separating Heaven from Earth.
In addition to the mosque on the Temple Mount, Muslims revere the wall because it is believed that the Prophet's miraculous steed was tethered to it by Muhammad during his night flight to Jerusalem.
Stoning the Devil in Mina - Al Jazeera English. CC License.
During the Hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca incumbent upon all able-bodied Muslims with the means to undertake it, Muslims also perform a ritual called the Stoning of the Devil. Pilgrims throw seven pebbles at three walls (jamarāt), from east to west, in order to reenact a part of Abraham's pilgrimage, where he threw pebbles at three pillars. For safety reasons, in 2004 these pillars were replaced by walls. The walls represents God's temptation of Abraham, Hagar, and Ishmael to renounce the sacrifice of Ishmael. They also represent casting away base desires and are a repudiation of the self before God. This renunciation also serves to bring the pilgrim closer to God; the walls in effect represent not just temptation, but sin itself, and thus represent, much like the Western Wall, the separation of God and Man.
Again, like the Western Wall, walls serve a stand-in for the buildings themselves. Sacred Walls: Learning from Temple Symbols, is a book about the symbols found on the walls of a Mormon temple, symbols which communicate to the faithful.
Both books and buildings have voices.... However,
even though architectural symbolism existed before the written word, the message
of a building is often difficult for most of us to recognize. For Latter-day Saints, temples are the most important and symbolic buildings in
existence. Through temples the unique doctrines of the restored gospel are communicated... This unique and fascinating book is designed to help you see the House of the
Lord with new eyes as you examine the “voices” of temple exteriors along with the
“voices” of the Book of Mormon....
Gate of a Hunting Ground - Jean Jacques Lequeu. Public domain.
This is no different from a Catholic cathedral, which is in many ways a Bible in stone, a visual didactic tool for the illiterate. It is "architecture parlante" -- or speaking architecture. Architecture parlante may be as simple as an inscription or phrase, a quote perhaps, to instruct and to declare the building's purpose. Or it may be that a building's form reflects its purpose: the cooper's atelier is shaped like a barrel, the brothel resembles an erect penis (yes, those were real proposals). The idea of architecture parlante was originally "voiced" at the time of the French Revolution by architects Claude Nicolas Ledoux, Étienne-Louis Boullée, and Jean-Jacques Lequeu. "The same concept, in the somewhat more restrained form of allegorical
sculpture and inscriptions, became one of the hallmarks of Beaux-Arts structures" and was a recurring feature of American civic architecture. The severity of Modernist architecture saw a decline in the use of ornament and inscription, but Post-Modernist architects have revived it.
The Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington is composed of three parts: the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall, the Three Servicemen Memorial, and the Vietnam Women's Memorial. These latter were erected to appease early critics of the original memorial -- which consisted of the Wall alone -- who deemed it shameful because of its unconventional design, black color and lack of ornament. Sad to say, architect Maya Lin's gender and ethnicity were a factor in much of the negative reaction (Ross Perot reportedly called her an "egg roll"). It's since become highly regarded, if not revered. The Memorial Wall is a wall that doesn't enclose or bear anything at all. Like the Western Wall, people leave articles, not prayers necessarily, but personal mementos. As one travels along the wall it gets higher and the names of the dead eventually rise over one's head. It's a mournful black, and a mirror in which one can see oneself reflected. It is spare, elegant and deeply moving. It has the atmosphere of a holy place, like an outdoor temple. Visitors are hushed and while there is no wailing, there are a lot of tears. It's perhaps one of the most powerful memorials in Washington, and has been described as a "wound that is closed and healing". In a sense, it is architecture parlante, and it is a dialogue.
The three soldiers appear to be looking at the wall and there is something archetypal about their number: Three Kings, Freemasonry's Three Ruffians, The Trinity....
The Women's Memorialalso depicts three uniformed women evoking perhaps the Three Mary's, with a wounded soldier.It is a Pietàin all but name.
The wall has proven so popular that at one point three half-sized portable versions traveled across the country and to date have attracted tens of millions of visitors. There are four other traveling versions of differing scale, and four fixed replicas.
The idea that architecture can communicate something, a set of ideals or civic virtues, may be a high-falutin' topic to be bandied about by art historians and architects, but something in it resonates in the popular imagination: "If these walls could talk...." some people say, as if the walls, silent witnesses, retain memories of scenes enacted within them, like video cameras which record but cannot play back. The artists Blu and Banksy have made them speak, however, often quite eloquently. The simple wall, however, unadorned, can often speak volumes. While ostensibly barriers, they can serve to identify where one space meets another and serve as points of communication. Why have more than one space at all? Boundary stones, fences, great walls....are these basically human equivalents of pissing on rocks to mark a territory, like most graffiti? One piss stain upon another? I dunno, It's too late for more of my grade-school philosophizing. I just thought it was neat how that photo of Trump at the Western Wall popped into my monitor about the same time I was discussing the Vietnam Memorial Wall, two walls where people feel compelled to leave stuff. The rest is just riffing. Breaking on through to the other side.
And with that, I'm Audi 5000.
PS
Looks like I hit "Publish" too soon. Reading about the Robert Frost poem "Mending Wall" (of "Good fences make good neighbors" fame), I came across the following analysis of the themes, stating more or less what I was trying to say at some point in the post:
The poem explores the contradictions in life and humanity, including
the contradictions within each person, as man "makes boundaries and he
breaks boundaries". The poem also explores the role of boundaries in human society as
mending the wall serves both to separate and to join the two neighbors,
another contradiction....Then, in "Mending Wall", Frost meditates on the role of language as a kind of wall that both joins and separates people.
A Southern California footwear company has recalled a pair of its boots after a Redditor posted a picture on Imgur of the footprint they leave: a mandorla in glory, with a lucky seven swastikas inside. A surprise to be sure.
The Redditor writes "There was an angle I didn't get to see when ordering my new work boots...."
Conal International Trading Co., the manufacturer, issued an apology and stated the swastikas are completely unintentional, blaming their Chinese manufacturer for the mistake.
One Redditor countered "The soles don't look that much like swastikas, but the prints are
unmistakable and whoever made the soles would
have understood that."
That actually might be true. In many Asian cultures, the swastika still signifies good fortune, which was how it was used in the West for decades until the Third Reich tainted it until now and probably for a long time to come. Until WW2, it was used on everything from Scout badges to Coca-Cola mementos. It has been used for centuries as a religious symbol, even on synagogues.
Neo-Nazi site The Daily Stormer called them a "Perfect footwear for Nazis....wanting to leave a good impression." Hyuk hyuk. Stern, a German magazine, notes that the boot's name Polar Fox -- Polarfuchs -- was an operation in WW2 in which German and Finnish soldiers captured a town in Finland from the Soviet Union.
If the Chinese maker of these boots did this on purpose or by accident, it wouldn't be the first time something like this has slipped through the cracks.
Back in 2014 a German discount shop sold Chinese-made coffee mugs that featured flowers and....a portrait of Hitler. Not to be outdone, Migros, a brand of Swiss coffee creamer, sold little doses of cream with a foil lid featuring the man, based on a cigar band. The creamer company was mortified and issued an apology, but the third-party designer, Karo Shipping, didn't really understand the fuss. Miglos severed their relationship.
In India, the use of Hitler is intentional. Perhaps after a day of shopping for clothes at "Hitler" and Having a meal at "Hitler's Cross", you can have a "Hitler" Ice Cream, then go home for an episode of Hitler Didi or go to the movies and see Hitler Hero in Love. Expat pedophiles need not worry either, because in Bangkok you can go to "Hitler" for a bucket of chicken.
Sometimes, like with Michael Graves'
tea kettle said to look like Hitler, the resemblance is a bit of a stretch, as if people are out
there looking to get offended, or just be silly. But the kettle does, oddly enough, when
seen from a certain angle, resemble Hitler.
Then there those cases somewhere in-between. When Trump was still but a long-shot waggling his tiny orange hands about, were the SS soldiers on one of his (hashtag) Make America Great Again tweets a gaffe, or was he trying to tell us something? (and yes, I actually do think it was an error). I guess we'll see; only 5 short days until the piss hits the fan. Some people say not to worry, Trump's just playing to the crowd. But watch out where them Polar Foxes go, and don't you eat that yellow snow....
Hitler and Nazi-related imagery seem to have popped up unexpectedly on products quite a bit recently. It's as if the universe is telling us to examine what we buy closely. You buy a coffee mug and you end up staring at Hitler every morning.
P.S. Just to clarify what we're on about, here's the stock photo of some re-enactors in WW2 German uniforms that some witless (or very cheeky) graphic designer used in the offending Tweet. And no, I don't think Trump did it on purpose. I implied he's crazy like a fox, not stupid. He could have vetted his propaganda better though We originally posted on this here.
Seeing as I view The Donald with such disdain, I'd like to help spread this gaffe around.
Trump's campaign tweeted the following image the other day and pulled it down after about an hour, blaming the mistake on an intern. Which is probably true, but it's pretty much symbolic of Trump's whole campaign -- full off bloviation and jingoism, but pretty much bereft of any concern with the details. And that's where the devil lies, innit?
Where's Waldo? That be him in the lower-left hand corner, one of the guys wearing an SS uniform. Oops.
Oh Donald, he's got stars in his eyes, a Tribble on his head and Nazis on the White House Lawn; he's probably planning on serving some of that delicious Hitler ice cream at his inauguration.
Which probably won't happen but then again
In the same hour as the apparent Nazi imagery surfaced, USA Today released a poll showing that Trump is now the leading candidate for the Republican party’s presidential nomination. (The Guardian)
