Hey, look at meeee!
Apparently our old friend Andrea “JudgyBitch” Hardie — oft-banned antifeminist Twitter “activist” and alt-right hanger-on — was once again feeling a bit ignored by the internet, so she bought herself a Nazi t-shirt and made a lovely video.
Despite the video’s deliberately provocative title (“Hello Fourth Reich!”), this is one of the duller “provocative” videos you’re likely to encounter on the YouTubes — at least until Hardie puts on her swastika t-shirt roughly three-quarters of the way in.
Hardie begins the video wearing a different t-shirt entirely — one adorned with the Rising Sun flag of Imperial Japan. Over the course of the first half of the video she offers a rambling, ignorant and often nonsensical take on the issue of populism — or at least the oversimplified and completely ahistorical caricature of populism she’s got bouncing around in her head.
Her main point, insofar as she has one, seems to be that anyone who’s critical of the current outbreak of “populism” is “sneering at the idea that common, ordinary, everyday people are the best people to identify what the problems in their own lives are.”
Well, no. Demagogues like Donald Trump and Marine Le Pen may claim the label of populism, but they are in fact racist right-wing autocrats who really aren’t much interested in democracy at all. “Populism” has, historically, always had a dark nativist streak to it, suffused with anti-Semitism and what historian Richard Hofstadter called the “paranoid style” of politics.
But let’s not linger too long on the history of actual populism, because we haven’t even gotten to the real point of the video, which is that Nazi t-shirt.
Hardie starts the t-shirt portion of the video by pretending to be shocked that the Rising Sun t-shirt she’s wearing isn’t likely to elicit the same outrage as a t-shirt festooned with a swastika — even though the Japanese military forces flying that flag did all sorts of truly horrible shit over the course of many years, from the Rape of Nanking to Pearl Harbor.
But those who wear Rising Sun t-shirts in public aren’t generally going to get accused of supporting any of these terrible things. To most people, Hardie declares, the Rising Sun is nothing more than a “fun meme,” and it turns out that’s just fine with her.
“What i want to know,” she asks, “why is this shirt ok, why is the Rising Sun ok, but” — she dons her Nazi t-shirt — “this shirt is not?”
This is a question that could actually lead to an interesting discussion. Why is the Rising Sun, at least here in North America, seen by most though definitely not all people as a rather innocent cultural symbol — much as the Confederate flag was back in the day when it flew unprotested from every southern state capital and adorned the top of the Dukes of Hazzard’s beloved creek-jumping car? Will perceptions of the Rising Sun change, much as they have for the Confederate flag?
But instead Hardie offers a rambling rant even more incoherent than the rant on populism in the first chunk of her video.
After informing us that the Nazis “were socialists; hey Bernie Sanders, hi” she indignantly asks why it’s considered “not ok” for people to wear Nazi shirts, so much so that YouTube probably “won’t let me monetize this video because of this shirt.”
Maybe because most people rightly connect Nazi symbolism with the Nazis and their hateful history? Maybe because virtually everyone who adorns themselves with Nazi symbols is either an actual Nazi or some other related kind of hateful shit? (Or perhaps the ghost of Sid Vicious.)
But Hardie has another theory, albeit one that makes no fucking sense whatsoever: Apparently people get mad about swastikas because they want to demonize true populists who stand up for the people! By “weaponizing the swastika” these evil liberal lefty anti-populists try to make ordinary people look bad!
I’m not even going to try to transcribe this portion of Hardie’s rant; I’m afraid it might damage my brain. Just watch. The video below should start at the beginning of her, er, explanation, a little more than 15 minutes in. Watch for the next two minutes or so, if you can manage it. Feel free to stop when she starts talking about Pepe the frog. Or if your head literally explodes.
Shortly after her Pepe digression, Hardie informs her viewers that
everyone, at the end of the day, is a stupid violent brute. Everyone. Violence is the only truth.
Huh. That sounds an awful lot like something a Nazi would say.
The only question to her is who controls this violence — evil leftists who actually hate the people, or
the common ordinary people who think, you know what, some of us is dumb assholes and, you know what, those are the first ones we’re gonna shoot. The people have a unique way of taking care of business.
That’s human history. That’s all of human history.
Er, there are are forms of government that don’t involve whatever group is in power just going out and shooting everyone they don’t like.
And all the swastikas in the world aren’t going to change that.
No. They’re going to make that sort of thing more likely. That’s why most people FUCKING HATE NAZIS. That’s why people tend to get mad when idiots put on Nazi shirts and make videos defending other idiots who put on Nazi shirts.
If you need to clear your head a little after watching that video, this might help.
@PI: thanks for the troll-slaying.
@joekster, Birmingham has a higher-than-national-average proportion of Muslim population – others here will have more info than I do, but I think it’s somewhat under 22%. I suppose to these idiots about a fifth looks like a scary-scary majority.
The national figure is about 5%
I just had two teeth on my upper left side ground down for crowns (no root canal, though.) I’m sitting here with two temporary crowns as we speak. I’ve had my permanent bridge on my upper right for about two weeks and I love it so much because I was dealing with one dead, broken tooth AND a crown I lost about a year and a half ago. That entailed two extractions, bone grafts and a temp bridge for two weeks.
I think, at this point, my teeth are 50/50 restorations to real tooth. But, I’m on my way to being able to eat normally again. *blows noisemaker and throws confetti*
Yes, I too have been bad about going to the dentist. But, I’ve had some bad dentists. The thing is, it’s hard to tell your dentist is bad until you find a good one.
@ hambeast
If you ask about anaesthetic and they offer you a swig from their hip flask that’s probably the time to leg it.
@Alan
I’ll keep that in mind. (Especially as someone below drinking age in this nation…)
@ troubelle
If it’s not an emergency though you’ll have to wait until you’re 5.
“If it’s not an emergency though you’ll have to wait until you’re 5.”
And to some Brits, an “emergency” includes a baby that hasn’t gone to sleep on schedule.
@Alan
Laws are quite different here in the States…Plus, I’m genetically susceptible to alcoholism anyway. I’ll stick with grape juice.
Nazis like Mao Tse Tung? “All things grow out of the barrel of a gun”
The Rising Sun symbol had a history that didn’t involve aggression. The Confederate flag was made as an instrument of treason and rebellion to preserve slavery. The Swastika was imported from India and inverted by the Nazis to form a symbol of racial suppremacy and a right to aggression.
What I find more mysterious is the termination of the so-called Nazi salute which in fact was the American salute for most of history, until we came to associate it with Nazis. (The Volkswagen Beetle, for some reason, escaped being so associated).
@Petra
I’m going to continue to request that you play something else. Don’t Starve is always good.
@Troubelle
My own preference lies more in the Space Engineers, Minecraft, From the Depths area, so basically sandbox games where constructing the wierdest of designs is possible. Then again, ymmv. I’d also strongly recommend Cook, Serve, Delicious if you want to play a relatively relaxing game to eat time.
@SSBread
I’ll keep that in mind. Don’t Starve lets you go where you want, but your creations are more limited…though it’s certainly its own experience to wander around in.
Just don’t let Charlie get you.
A little late given the way the thread has evolved (I have a wire on my bottom teeth and the Oral-B Superfloss really helps get beneath it), but I wanted to thank everyone for their thoughts on the Antifa movement. I think Alan summed up my thoughts on it best with violence being a morally neutral element in any struggle (although I would say there’s a dimension of scale to the equation; killing somebody–even somebody awful–when non-lethal force can work just as well is an immoral act in my eyes). What matters is why it’s being deployed.
I’m not sure how many Mammotheers recognize my avatar, but in addition to Kansas being a guilty pleasure of mine, I always found John Brown to be a captivating figure himself. I found a quote from Malcolm X in my Twitter feed from a longer speech he gave which echoes MLK’s “White Moderate” notion in relation to John Brown (from an OAAU Rally in 1964):
There’s some important words in that speech that I think a lot of the “resistance” needs to pay attention to. Even if one has moral qualms about being violent, the civil rights activists of the past at least put their own safety on the line for their cause, and when they weren’t demonstrating, they were organizing for hours on end, doing a lot of very important but tedious work.
@ gussie
I like that extract. I’ve also always had a bit of a soft spot for this sentiment…
That’s a great quote, Gussie Jives, thank you.
I think that X was absolutely right about John Brown. But I think he was wrong about his own time. It was MLK, not Malcolm X, that won the day. And we lost the election in the DNC during the moment of silence for the Dallas police, when the BLM chant started up. Because that came off to a lot of people as BLM taking credit. I tried to persuade folks that that was a Trump plant that started that cry, though it might have been a Putin plant. Whatever it was, it was devastating.
I was disgusted with the lies told against John Brown and Sherman in the recent show “Hell on Wheels.” John Brown wasn’t going around murdering slavery supporters during Bleeding Kansas. He was picking out the ringleaders that were murdering Kansas abolitionists. The Civil War had already started, and he was the only Unionist that knew that.
@ gussie (or possibly dalillama as this is a folk query)
Pardon my ignorance but is that John Brown anything to do with the “John Brown’s Body…” song?
The very one! JB was the hero compared to Jesus in the two different main marching songs of the Union Army.
I absolutely disagree. How it’s deployed is at least as important as why. Maybe more. John Brown didn’t make sport of his killings, didn’t kill people at random. Didn’t have his soldiers rape.
It was actually Mohammed, in the Koran, who first distinguished as two separate absolutes: that the war’s cause must be just, but that the manner of fighting must also follow certain restrictions. (I am not Muslim and do not agree with how Mohammed answered these two separate questions, but he deserves his place in humanitarian history for articulating the questions).
If AntiFa was doing anything other than preventing people from expressing ideas, they would not be a toxic fart in the elevator. But that’s all they do, so that’s all they are.
Get AntiFa out at standing rock, busting up equipment before the oil flows. Get them doing direct shit like Greenpeace, where they actually take on the bastards and equipment that’s destroying the earth. If I had a billion dollars, I’d get Greenpeace attack subs and helicopters. But AntiFa is just violence for the sake of silencing people who they end up giving more attention to.
@ petra
Cheers. I’ve now got rather a rousting version blasting out.
Yeah, that’s unreal. Fascism was not populism; it was elitist to the core. Naziism put on a show of populism, but the first mass murder was NOT by popular demand — the people recoiled in horror from the murder of their children. Forced the Nazis to take that underground.
@Alan — do share! This is my favorite: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6WignKYFI8
I know I’m late to the party, but I’d just like to raise my hand as someone who doesn’t find the Rising Sun to be an innocent cultural symbol. Imperialism isn’t the same as fascism, but they’re relatives.
@ petra
I’m not sure that’s correct. The concept of ‘just war’ is first recorded in the Indian epic ‘Mahabarata'(sp?) and that dates from the pre christian era. And there were various codes of conduct throughout the classical period.
Abu Bakr though was one of the first people (that we know of) to set out a list of rules for the conduct of warfare.
Funnily enough just having a discussion about this on Varalys’ blog; but this is personal and professional interest of mine anyway.
@Petra
Well, I’d assume the rank and file of Antifa have other causes they’re a part of (the ones that aren’t the Black Bloc style agitators who just show up to make trouble). But in this troubling time where these people feel emboldened, they need to have bodies standing in their way to make them feel outnumbered and unwelcome. Before all this Trump/Brexit nonsense, these people were looked at with disdain the prevailing society to the point they kept these abhorrent ideas to themselves; obviously, they feel they can let their freak flags fly, so it’s important to check that in some manner. A decade ago, I might have agreed with this sentiment, but I’ve seen it metastasize to the point of putting an orange Julius in the White House, so I take nothing for granted anymore.
Great discussion though! That’s why I like this place 😀
Petra,
Swastika not just from india. Dont be ignorant. Swasitka sybol in many cultures too, there is a slavic swastica, celtic swastica, middle east. Lots. Just they don’t look like the one hitler stole and manipulate. See these are all good sybols before but no fucking way im wearing one or putting it on my wall. Even slavic swastika is used by facists now in eastern Europe.
It’s interesting the first time you encounter a “surprise swastika” in Asian culture. Mine was while watching the Japanese martial arts movie Sister Street Fighter. Several of the characters in the film practice Shorinji Kempo. They used the swastika as a symbol when the film was made in the ’70s, which I didn’t know when I first saw the film. So it was a bit of a surprise when we’re first shown one of their dojos and there are swastikas all over the place, including on the gis of the students. Of course a Japanese audience wouldn’t have given this a second thought. Of course a Buddhist oriented martial art would use swastikas.
@Tosca:
Ow, that’s even worse than mine, and I thought mine was bad.
I had all four of my second (12-year) molars removed in my mid-teen years because there wasn’t enough space in my jaw for both them and my wisdom teeth, and my wisdom teeth would probably have come up under the roots. Afterwards when the wisdom teeth came in, they all came in sideways because they had leaned over into the open space, and so all four of THEM had to be removed as well. So I only have one of the usual three sets of molars.
Granted, I also used to have enough of an overbite that I could touch my upper gumline with my lower incisors.
Ah, if we’re doing dental horror stories… Haha… >_>;; One of the few things I’m still too shy to go into any great detail about, but the short version is that my teenage orthodontist used my braces as the guinea pig for some new metal alloy he’d been working on. Which turned out to eat right through skin, enamel and bone.
This is why nobody here’ll ever see a photo of (what’s left of) my face. =P
@SFHC
I’m sorry to hear that.
Your charm and wit remain intact.
♥♥♥