I’m honestly shocked at the number of people I went through on my pipeline who claim to have never seen nor heard of a totenkopf
Maybe I’m misperceiving how well known it is, but the totenkopf is the focal point of the Are We The Baddies sketch. Which I feel like everyone who has spent time on social media has come across at least once
It was literally only from that sketch that I learned anything about it all those years ago. Despite being very interested in learning about WWII in school, and watching documentaries and reading several books, it was only once I saw that sketch that I was like “wait, Nazis literally wore skull and crossbones?? Wtf?” It seems we teach a very very simplified version of Nazism. My own mother doesn’t even know what the term “fascism” means, despite literally being born during WWII. Nazis = Swastika. Nazis = Antisemitism. I think that is really the extent of understanding most people, at least in the US, have.
Americans are politically and historically illiterate because that makes it easier to benefit from the suffering of the global south
every fresh generation can be horrified anew because they have no clue what vile acts of terrorism their grandparents committed. this is the natural next step moving on from the initial settler-colonial phase of the project where everyone can be expected to be trained and then bathed in the supremacist logic of the settler-colonial genocide.
Generation Shoot, followed by Generation Cry
If they explained the “anti-commintern” in “Anti-Commintern Pact” stood for “Against the Communist International,” people would realize the formation of the Axis Powers was explicitly a reaction to communism. Then they might question why some of the most evil people in history were against communism. Eventually, they come to the conclusion the US and NATO are also evil for being against communism post-WWII.
A totenkopf is by itself not a nazi symbol. It is the specific skull. And that specific skull is up there with the crossed stick grenades in terms of messaging.
He didn’t get this by accident.I will say, I don’t know how one can be into ww2 history without learning of SS symbols. They love to slap that shit in documentaries because we all have to propagate the weird idea that the SS were somehow cool.
When English speakers say “totenkopf,” they 100% mean the Nazi one, just like they don’t generically mean “empire” when they say “Reich” or “leader” when they say “Fuhrer”.
All part of a larger scheme to make it all feel foreign, like the US didn’t inspire any of it. ‘apartheid’ is another one of those. Just translating it to separation would’ve made it feel too close to home
I agree with you about “apartheid,” but often foreign words are used because there’s some more specific context in which they are being used that happens to be in another language and so just keeping it in that language is more convenient, as we also did with “Soviet” or “Glasnost” (and note that the latter was regarded well by American media, so it wasn’t used for villifying it). So when people say “Reich,” it’s not “empire” with spooky music because it’s German (though you can analyze it on that level if you want), it’s because Hitler built up a cosmology around the term with his mythology about the previous two “Reichs” and the “Thousand Year Reich” that was supposedly being born.
This is also used all the time in philosophy and other literary and artistic traditions for the same time. The most infamous example is probably “Dasein,” which is literally just “being” but Heidegger was using the word to talk about a concept that I don’t faintly understand and most others don’t either, so we may as well just call it “Dasein” to note when we are talking about his concept to make things easier to follow. “Umwelt,” more literally just “environment,” refers to the environment as perceived by the subject in the sense of what the subject finds significant and how. For example, a picture on a wall is probably not going to be regarded almost at all by a dog unless they have some unusual conditioning affecting that, but people will regard pictures with more significance. Likewise, there are many noises that people will completely ignore and forget they heard moments after hearing it, but a dog will care a lot about some of those noises. Speaking of the dog’s “environment” or even its “perceptual environment” is less clear than talking about the dog’s “Umwelt,” at least if you know the word in an academic context.
Edit: I distracted myself, but also we in English also use a more literal translation of totenkopf, “Death’s Head,” to refer to the Nazi symbol and especially to the SS unit most associated with it, but barely ever use it to mean “skull-and-crossbones,” preferring either that term or “Jolly Roger” when used in reference to pirates. I really don’t think this is a case of abusing language.
For Totenkopf I was kind of joking, that is a very specific symbol.
But for the others I have a hard disagree. There is nothing general except collection of the specifics. Every empire is unique, the German one being different from every other one exactly as each specific is unique. And every empire made up glory stories about itself. The use of “Soviet” instead of “council”. Every Council has unique aspects, and the choice of whether to translate the word or not is entirely removed from the distance from other “councils” that fit within the generic term. It’s a political choice with the intention of creating distinction as opposed to familiarity. Dasein was explicitly described by Heidegger as different from the word itself, so this doesn’t fit the others.
As Hegel would’ve said, there is no Universal aside from the collection of the particulars. Removing particulars changes the universal, and that is what is actively done in these processes.
Edit: I wanna be clear that I’m not upset or angry in any way, I like this topic and am glad to engage you in it! And would like to hear your position. If any of this comes off as mean instead of just strongly-opinionated, that’s my English fucking up
Maybe for German speakers totenkopf could mean a skull and bones for pirates or poison, but using the word to English speakers is 100% the Nazi one.
idk dude I was like 15 in 9th grade. I have since, obviously, learned a lot more about the subject.
Like i dont want to dunk on kid you here, but i don’t think I’ve ever seen a documentary or read anything with pictures about the nazis without an ss uniform being presented. Obviously we all have things we just don’t realise until it suddenly clicks. But I just don’t think we can say that not knowing about ss insignia is the default state even of those interested.
I can imagine being a kid and seeing an SS uniform without closeups in a documentary and your brain being like “yeah I got it, buncha military bullshit symbols and a swastika armband” without feeling the need to look closely at the exact military bullshit symbols, because you’d probably subconsciously expect an eagle or a shield or whatever until the first time you see an actual skull. And then that’s the point where you’re like “Haha, what the fuck?”
Obviously we all have obvious things we don’t realise until suddenly we do. See all the “I was today’s years old” posts or similar. I’m just saying it’s not like they keep these symbols hidden, they put ss symbols right in your face in most ww2 stuff I’ve consumed.
When I first saw this sketch I assumed the totenkopf insignia was fictional because it is comic book villain shit.
Exactly! Me too! Like, I knew they were pretending to be nazis, but I assumed the skull was hyperbole, not something nazi hats actually had! Artistic license, to make the sketch funnier, you know?
Like, did they not live through the same several decades where the Nazis were bad?
They recognize jack boots and peaked caps as Nazi shit, but not the literal Death’s Head?
So they’re either utterly, profoundly ignorant or they’re lying
they’re lying
Everyone older than like 35 is lying and full of shit. That shit was everywhere in Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade because Indy was facing off the SS in that movie. Or how about Inglorious Basterds where every clip where the main antagonist who’s an SS officer gets millions of views ? Or how about the overexposure of Nazi military iconography on the History Channel in general? Or how about the “Are We the Baddies” bit where gifs and memes about it show the totenkopf?
Platner was like 5 when Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade was in theaters. And like most kids born in the 80s, he watched that shit over and over again on VHS because that’s what kids fucking did back when smartphones didn’t exist. You don’t need to be a wehraboo to know what a totenkopf is. You just need to watch the highest grossing film of 1989 of a popular movie franchise directed by a popular movie director at least once in the last 30+ years.
They knew. He knew what the totenkopf was and his business partners in his oyster farm also knew what the totenkopf was.
I’m not surprised, while i cant remember where i learned about the death’s head, i do know it wasnt with any of the other nazi history stuff, reruns of cable tv WW2 history shows, some text books, etc that I learned everything else about them from.
I think i first encountered it in context from the Tarantino movie
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Lots of people expressing the [reactionary] “it’s just common sense!” sort of attitude here. It’s fine to be surprised that people don’t know as much as you. It’s fine/good if this is considered disqualifying for a high ranking candidate. “Everyone who doesn’t know all the things that I do is just stupid” is not a healthy attitude.
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It does kind of resemble a jolly roger melting in a hot car
I EXPECT DRUNK MARINES NOT TO RUN FOR CONGRESS WITHOUT LEARNING ANYTHING ELSE FIRST, FUCK
love that we’re expected to believe that the guy who fantasized about volunteering for the motherfucking Indian Wars got a totenkopf tattoo accidentally
The guy (or someone he deployed with) had a Reddit post about using a Mk 19 40mm grenade launcher as an indirect fire system in Iraq because command has banned the use of mortars. Let’s just say that intelligence is not very high on the list here.
oh yeah, that’s the other half of this that you’d think these so-called progressive commentators would care about. even if we buy the idea that mr totenkopf had no clue about his nazi tattoo, we know for a fact that he liked killing the “acceptable” brown targets, he signed up four fucking times, and then joined Blackwater in 2018. all of that is public knowledge from his reddit and personal history. he clearly doesn’t regret those opinions, he just thinks that the current targets are bad. which tracks, because you’d have to be that stupid and violent to think that was the problem with amerikkka’s infinite genocide on the globe, not all the murder of innocents and theft of their land and resources. guy’s offered seemingly no analysis of what’s wrong with doing global genocide, no reparations for his own decades of colonial hyperviolence. he’s done nothing to make up for the shit he’s done, which shows that he really has a problem with the boss, not the job, per se.
The Maine primary is seven months away. Why is he blowing up whatever credibility he has on this guy right now?
he’s not even the only candidate :agony-indescribable:
It’s sort of untrue to say that Graham doesn’t have a party supporting him. He doesn’t have any organic base in Maine that he’s worked to cultivate himself. What he does have though is the Bernie Sanders stay behind network of which Grim is a part of.
Still just shocked about Ryan Grim. He interviewed Hamas. He seemed to understand in a very principled way that western colonial violence is bad. Why the fuck is he going to bat for someone who enthusiastically conducted that violence?
graham after being elected and getting a single raytheon presentation of the importance of automated turrets in gulf of mexico
I’m personally not surprised at all these “anti woke” people not caring about this, he was or still is on the Hill, which is not a left publication by any means-
Thank you Mr. Grim for chiming in on this topic, now that we know where you stand please go fuck off to be a guest on redscarepod you fucking clown
I’ve said this before but it bears repeating, Grim has known this guy personally for over a decade. This isn’t an ideological lapse (not that Grim has ever been a principled Marxist). He likes the guy. That’s it. He’s not going to let it go, but since I don’t live in Maine, I’m going to let it go. Because fuck it. What’s the downside here, an imperialist bootlicker might become a US senator? I’m muting Platner posts from now on, especially since the implication in this discourse seems to be that if he had a better position on imperialism then suddenly supporting Democratic party entryism would be okay? No, it was always fucked. Mamdani is standing shoulder to shoulder with an outspoken Zionist rep today. It’s a good barometer of rising class consciousness but that’s all it is
The Know Your Enemy boys were giving him a lot of grace. I personally think at this stage of Fascists overrunning three-branches. You kinda don’t want to take a risk with the dude who picked a nazi tattoo while on tour.
turns out, they didn’t know their enemy 🥁 they have been disappointing me with their libness a lot
Red Menace + Chapo + Antifada/Trillbillies rotation is still the goated combo, but they don’t post enough.
i like my citations needed/varn+regrettable century and trillbillies as well, although they oscillate between too doomer/too optimistic.
i don’t think i’ve felt more disappointment and disgust than theirs friedman episode. ultimately they are at best, hegelians, and at worst christian libs. it’s still interesting to hear american right history with more leftist viewpoint, cause reading rightwing books is more self-harm than its worth, but like my guys, that’s not how ideology works.
Whatever happened to Tulsi Gabbard anyway.
