One time I was doing subtle agitating and educating at a place I was working at. I mentioned Paulo Freire and a person sparked up with recognition at the name, saying that they were doing an assignment at university based on Freire.

I asked about it. They said were doing a photovoice project where they were going to take some photos of homeless people and attach quotes from the subjects to the photos to “give them a voice.”

I’m sure I wasn’t completely able to mask my disgust at hearing that. That’s not Freirean, that’s not critical pedagogy, that’s not even photovoice (not gonna go into the weeds on that here), that’s just taking some shots on your disadvantage tourism expedition and concealing a deeply paternalistic and explotative approach to some of the most marginalised people in society for your own benefit. I don’t want to dilute or whitewash the horrors of colonialism by saying this but this is a subtle expression of the same underlying psychology of colonialism; it’s human zoo bullshit, just transposed onto a palatable, bite-sized, socially sanctioned form using the medium of photography.

This is what passes as teaching Freire at that particular university. It’s utterly shameless, and to charge people for it too?

https://files.catbox.moe/az1b2z.mp4

Guitarist Ed O’Brien, meanwhile, had his say on the issue, claiming: “We should have played Ramallah in the West Bank as well.”

Inshallah he will be

Keep in mind that this crowd has increasingly jumped onto the rhetoric that originated from some segments of the radical left over the past couple of years when they started using “tankie” as a bogeyman term and they very often accuse tankies of supporting anyone who flies the red flag. I know that there are also a lot of SocDem/DemSocs and adjacent people who are defending Platner right now too and they make the same accusations.

One day it’s “You guys will support anyone who claims they are communist, disgusting!!” and the next day it’s “No but we need to support the guy who calls himself a communist, despite significant evidence that he has fascist sympathies, so therefore any criticism of him is purity politicking.”

I’m loath to invoke this hackneyed term but it’s a legit case Schrödinger’s Socialist: we get attacked for supporting anyone and everyone who uses a label like socialist and yet the minute we say that a person who claims to be socialist doesn’t pass the sniff test then suddenly we’re gatekeeping the left etc. etc.

Hello friend, I hope you’re doing well

“Purity testing is destroying our movement.”

“Stop gatekeeping the left!!”

“Do you want the republicans to win? This is how Trump won.”

“Yes, he might have had a Nazi tattoo for over a decade and he might have killed an untold number of brown people while serving imperialism as a machine gunner and he might have been stationed as a guard for Abu Ghraib prison during the rampant war crimes and human rights abuses that took place there but he has a chance to unseat Susan Collins, who voted for some bad things.”

I don’t want to be taken out of context here and it’s deep enough in the comment thread that this will get buried but the whole “Croatian tattoo artist” claim from a guy with a sketchy past who claims to have reformed yet has provided no evidence of reform except for words said online gives me really strong Beau of the Fifth Column vibes from back when he went on that podcast to claim that his human trafficking conviction, where he smuggled eastern European women into America to exploit their labour for the hotel industry for a few years before they went back home, was actually a humanitarian mission to rescue Jews from the oppressive government of Turkmenistan (or Tajikistan? I forget exactly but it was a central Asian -stan country that Americans have zero clue about.) It’s just super convenient and it has that whole “I have a girlfriend but you wouldn’t know her because she goes to a different high school in another state” vibe to it.

The people coming out in defence of Platner are doing all the same things that people did when faced with criticisms of Beau as well.

[CW: Human trafficking and sex slavery discussion from here on]

(Sidebar: you can’t convince me that young Eastern European women smuggled into the US to work in the hotel industry while being paid a pittance so small it was illegal even under the dismal minimum wage laws in the US while being charged like hell for accommodation don’t end up in the sex trade. You absolutely cannot. Whether Beau was aware of it, whether he facilitated it directly, that’s a matter for speculation but the hotel industry itself is sketchy and that’s without the elements of human trafficking, exploitative pay and living conditions, and Beau holding passports for ransom. That’s no smoking gun for Beau trafficking women into the sex trade and I’ve never seen any evidence to support this but saying it didn’t happen is about as plausible as the people saying they were on Epstein island but only for a scientific conference.)

Yeah, the Finnish government who was vehemently anticommunist and quite cosy with Nazi Germany has continued using the swastikas to this very day.

“I’m not a Nazi sympathiser, I just love the quiet collaborators of Nazi Germany and their particular use of the swastika” isn’t the defense that some people think it is.

Yes, there’s limited historical evidence of them using the reverse:

Prior to the Nazis seizing power there was fairly widespread use of the swastika, including in Germany, and its use was less codified so you can probably find pre-Nazi German swastikas being flown that are of the opposite orientation and it would take a real history buff (obviously not a Graham Platner-tier history buff) to be able to tell if that’s a Weimar Republic era warship flying the reverse swastika or if the image was taken a few short years later under Nazi Germany. (Also anyone who can tell the difference immediately who isn’t some dusty old academic in the history department of a university deserves a side eye.)

So yeah. It’s complicated but it seems like it was used, albeit rarely.

If it’s really C-tier then that’s only possible if the swastika occupies the A-tier and the SS runes are the only entry for B-tier; we really aren’t plumbing the depths of obscure, esoteric, possibly-fascist symbols here.

Imagine caring so little that you’re oblivious to the third most widely recognizable Nazi symbol for your entire life and yet mysteriously you are brimming with opinions about Nazi symbols and all of a sudden it’s of overwhelming importance that you start discussing this.

1. I’ll take the lead from people who actually know what they’re talking about and not the people who have been sleepwalking through a century-long discussion on one of the most studied and well-documented aspects of human history.

2. This smacks of terminally-online curated concern. People will swear up and down that they’re concerned with x or y issue but they are completely incapable of showing any depth of understanding whatsoever of the subject itself. It’s the same old playbook - the Nayirah testimony, the CPC reannexing Tibet, the “Holodomor”… these people don’t actually care about what they have convinced themselves they care about. It’s some real Deleuzian shit.

Unless it was his last tattoo then there’s a good chance that whoever tattooed him since he got that one done saw his chest and the totenkopf on it.

There are two types of tattoo artists:
The ones who know all of the fascist and gang symbols that refuse to tattoo them and the ones who are comfortable with tattooing those symbols. If a typical tattooist saw that tattoo they’d likely refuse to tattoo him or they’d offer to cover it up.

This is speculative, sure, but it’s less speculative than the arguments that amongst a handful of blurry, poorly lit pixels you can clearly tell that there are no cracks in Platner’s totenkopf tattoo, that Platner has never seen a Nazi with a totenkopf in his entire life, and that nobody had ever pointed out that he had a Nazi tattoo on him.

The selective suspension of disbelief that is on display is really breaking my brain.

Which way, western r*dditor?

My burning hatred of fascism and my abject dismay at the Nazi apologia in the discourse from broad sections of the progressive and “radical” left are enough to fuel me posting.

I hope you’re doing well too.

Mainstream fascist apologia in online discourse is enough for me to drag me out of my hiatus.

Nazi:

Not Nazi:

Know the difference! (/s)

If there were no cracks in the skull on Platner’s tattoo then let’s see a nice clear close-up of it.

Here’s an image of the tattoo that I’ve enhanced. Notice how you can’t see the fine line details of the teeth or where the crossbones are distinguished from the skull itself? But we’re supposed to believe that there’s enough clarity and resolution in the image that we can tell for certain that there’s no crack in the skull? These people are deeply unserious.

I know you mean well but this is a myth and there are countless examples of the Nazis using 90 degree swastikas:

Even medals:

And Hitler’s own personal standard:

Not to mention in one of the most iconic videos depicting the Nazi swastika:

I’m not trying to drag you here. Fascists use this argument tactically for plausible deniability and it’s widely accepted as common knowledge in the west but it’s straight up untrue.

For the people claiming they’ve never seen the totenkopf before or that they’d never recognize it if they saw it, just remember that they don’t have that symbol tattooed on their chest which they see on a daily basis, they probably aren’t “military history buffs” the way Platner is described, and they probably don’t identify as a lifelong antifascist.

Here are a couple of very famous depictions of Nazis with totenkopfs throughout decades of media, a few of literally hundreds of examples:

Raiders of the Lost Ark

Schindler’s List, which won like half a dozen Oscars

The hugely viral Mitchell & Webb comedy skit that is still a meme after all these years

The Oscar-winning Inglorious Basterds

If you’re everything Platner claims to be and you want to hide behind the claim that you’ve never seen the totenkopf associated with Nazis then that’s an insult to everyone’s intelligence. And if the lesser of two evils is an imperialist henchman who has a Nazi tattoo etched into his skin then what is there to say?

If it was a century ago, the people who are defending Platner would be trying to convince us that Ernst Rohm is the good guy, actually.

https://files.catbox.moe/9bqwcr.mp4

I’m still hanging in there. New treatment soon so fingers crossed. It will be a few months until I’m on the other side of it. Will update when there’s something to update on.

Sorry if I’ve missed any messages or pings.