WHEN THE NAZIS INVADED CHARLOTTESVILLE

We’ve seen a lot of breathless headlines this week about the KKK and the Nazis invading Charlottesville. Charlottesville, Virginia is down in the valley below Thomas Jefferson’s famous mountaintop aerie, Monticello. It is also the town where the great Jefferson personally designed the original campus of the University of Virginia. The KKK and the Nazis did their well planned and well publicized attack because they claimed a need to prevent the taking down of the statue of the famous Civil War general, Robert E. Lee. The fact that their attack was so well publicized led to a physical confrontation with a counter-force formed to turn back the unwanted invasion. President Trump’s even handed response to the melee has created a political fire storm which is ongoing.

Let us think about two groups involved in what has become a major political event: Everyone knows about the KKK. The Ku Klux Klan was one of those organizations created to keep down blacks in the South after they were freed as a result of the Civil War. The KKK was a kind of combination white men’s social club and terror group. They dressed in colorful costumes (they only went all white in 1915). Local people probably knew who they were but the costumes were designed partly to keep their Klan identities secret. The KKK was revived again around 1915, again partly to terrorize blacks (although this second iteration spread across the North and the West), but they were a kind of equal opportunity hate group. They were opposed to Catholics, Jews, and basically anyone foreign. We are now experiencing the third KKK wave. This time the KKK is made up of scattered groups around the South who want to make clear their displeasure with the Civil Rights laws. As with militia groups in the North during the sixties and the seventies, the Klan allows local young men, bored with their job in the gas station, to go out and scare people.

That brings us to the Nazis, or the Neo-Nazis, as they are sometimes called. One might reasonably ask, why call themselves Nazi at all? The name Nazi comes from Adolf Hitler’s political party before and during World War II. They were officially the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (the National Socialist German Workers Party). Nazi was taken out of Nationalsozialistiche. Most of the Germans who fought in the “Nazi Army” during World War II were not Nazis at all. They were not Party members. They were simply members of the German Army. But the word was easy to say (certainly easier to say than the full name of the party). It has ended up being becoming attached to all kinds of groups with no real connection to that original German political party.

Most of the men who invaded Charlottesville were in their twenties. The Nazi Party ended with the end of World War II in 1945, probably fifty years before many of these youthful invaders were born. So, why call themselves, Nazi? They could have called themselves anything. It is true that, like them, the original Nazi Party leadership was color conscious. They wanted to believe that they were part of a Nordic or Aryan master race that was destined to conquer all inferior peoples (it turned out the master race mostly meant German). That master race was to be as white and blond as possible. The Nazis certainly were brutally anti-Semitic. The Nazi Party was in the beginning, able to attract a lot of young unemployed Germans who enjoyed dressing up in uniforms and pushing people around. They are something of an analog to the attackers in Charlottesville.

So, what about the “Nazis” in Charlottesville? It appears that many were not actually from Charlottesville. They came from all over the country. The twenty year old young man who killed Heather Heyer, and who succeeded in injuring many others, was from Ohio. What we will discover is that most of these young men have little education. They certainly were not star students at the University of Virginia. Most will have been unemployed or underemployed. They weren’t really going anywhere. They chose to be involved with the Nazi movement (or the KKK), not because of their love of Robert E. Lee or for the pre-Civil War South. They did it because it gave them a chance to become a member of something that would make them really feared. They may not have been very successful in school or have been great athletes (They never would have been part of the University of Alabama’s Crimson Tide.). But they now at least have something. When they walk into local bars, girls will smile at them. People will know they were at Charlottesville. They will always have had a part in the action. They were seen in photographs all across the country. Some, as those photos have appeared, have already lost their jobs. But they will always have something to talk about. And, for a few brief shining moments they were really important. They were in the thick of the battle.

It might have been helpful if the people who reported on Charlottesville had not published those breathless headlines about these young “Nazis” as though they were part of some great uprising; a great movement that threatened the nation’s welfare. These attackers are really aimless young men who might reasonably have felt themselves losers in the great scheme of things. They were attracted to the KKK and to the Nazis because those names were ones that more typical people feared. If they had faced the kind of future awaiting their more successful high school friends, they would not be dressing up in weird outfits and carrying shields and clubs. The KKK and the Nazi Party are really things of the past. Both were created in a time that is really over. Germany is a powerful, stable democracy. The South is now really suburban. Rather than an attack of fearsome barbarians we are really seeing lost souls.

H.J. Rishel

8/22/2017