A group of nearly two dozen people waving swastika flags and chanting antisemitic rhetoric marched on the Wisconsin state Capitol grounds Saturday afternoon, performing a salute originally used by Nazis at political rallies, often called the "Hitler salute."
I think they are starting to write this way, because there's huge numbers of Americans who do not even know what the Holocaust is and that it happened let alone the basic facts about it. It's shocking when you read the recent polls which demonstrate the levels of ignorance we are dealing with around this.
Edit:
I'm surprised that people don't know about the ignorance of the Holocaust. Here is some reading for our collective edification.
It might seem unbelievable to see how ignorant people are of the Holocaust, but what you and I find common sense and basic facts of history which we all know are unfortunately not generally known to be basic facts of history and we do not all know these facts. Less and less of us know these facts.
It's alarming and it's good that publishers are writing to state basic facts for an ignorant readership. Because of this we shouldn't see this style of informative writing as a fault but rather as a boon to ignorant readership.
because there’s huge numbers of Americans who do not even know what the Holocaust
I'm afraid that's not it... it's liberal media doing their normal "enlightened centrist" thing and pretending that the US isn't a fundamentally white supremacist state. They want to pretend that neonazis are some kind of "aberration" in the (supposedly) "democratic" US - when in reality the people filling up the top echelons of the political and economic institutions have always held beliefs that are perfectly compatible with fascism.
It's not the Hitler salute anyway, it's a ceaserian salute or Bellamy salute. Amusingly it was a common way to take the pledge of allegiance in the United States and many other countries. It only lost is popularity after Germany and later Italy used it in fascist/authoritarian/nationalistic movements.
…and the swastika is just a Hindu good luck symbol.
I’m sorry, but sometimes someone horrible takes a neutral or good thing and does something so profoundly evil with it that it forever changes that thing, tainting it by what has been done. Doesn’t matter what the salute was originally. Now it means only one thing.
Fun fact about Wisconsin: the Republicans were furious that a Democrat was going to be elected after Scott Walker's fascist stint, so they rushed through several legislative changes to limit the powers of the incoming governor as a final middle finger to democracy.
Yes, because taking exclusive executive power away from the head of a government and giving it to the legislature to vote on instead is famously anti-democracy.
I think there’s a fundamental difference there. The pirates did a lot of bad shit, but they’re cool because rebels and criminals are cool. Tyrannical governments aren’t. Al Capone is cool, but Jefferson Davis isn’t.
Capitol buildings have demonstrations near daily that mostly get zero coverage. He waited to see if it would be a small, no-show situation. Otherwise there is a risk of unintentional spotlighting and advertising the event.
As someone who grew up in Madison and saw the various protests with tens and hundreds of thousands of people at the capital, I find it hilarious how they couldn't even muster 24 people to show up. That's almost as bad as the daily peace protest, which as a daily demonstration that's been going on for years really doesn't attract too many people