By GARLAND KENNEDY
Sentinel Staff Writer
A bearded man stood in a hallway amidst a crowd of people cheering as they raised up the captured name plaque of the Speaker of the House.
But while many smiled for the trophy photograph, this man stood without an expression. Since that moment in the U.S. Capitol building on January 6, the words and image on the man’s sweatshirt have caused significant consternation and backlash.
“Camp Auschwitz: Work Brings Freedom” was written on the shirt adjacent to the image of a skull, in a clear reference to the Nazi German death camp that operated in Poland between 1940 and 1945.
The Nazi references and other racist and anti-Semitic themes were apparent in the mob attacking the Capitol, following an address by President Trump that morning calling on his followers to prevent the certification of the election of Joe Biden by the joint session of Congress that was in progress at the time.
In the two months since the election Trump had made baseless claims that the election was stolen from him. But much of the symbolism among the January 6 rioters did not relate to the election, but rather to their white nationalist beliefs.
Six million European Jews died in the Holocaust, but they were far from alone. The Nazis killed millions more, including gay people, people of color, members of various religious and political minorities, and those with disabilities. Some of the earliest victims of the Holocaust were Germans suffering from psychiatric ailments.
The neo-Nazi imagery at the pro-Trump insurrection drew quick condemnation.
“These photos are sickening to those of us who are survivors,” Eva Fahidi told The New York Times on Friday. She was deported with her family in 1944 to Auschwitz, where her parents and sister perished. “The idea that someone would wear such a shirt on their own body is horrifying.”
The Anti-Defamation League website says a December protest in Washington, D.C., a member of the radical right group the Proud Boys wore a shirt that read, “6MWE.” That’s for “6 million wasn’t enough.”
One Auschwitz survivor told The Times that he wasn’t surprised by the odious imagery that has been emerging in the United States.
“I told them yes, it would be possible,” Marian Turski said. “Nationalism and fascism were not exclusively German. Under the right conditions and circumstances, it could also happen here.”
THE ANONYMOUS Q
QAnonymous iconography in the Jan. 6 mob at the capitol was captured in photos and reported by The Washington Post and The New York Times. Gregory Stanton, professor of Genocide Studies at George Mason University, describes QAnon as “a Nazi Cult, Rebranded”.
He summarized QAnon’s conspiratorial beliefs as follows:
“QAnon purveys the fantasy that a secret Satan-worshiping cabal is taking over the world. Its members kidnap white children, keep them in secret prisons run by pedophiles, slaughter, and eat them to gain power from the essence in their blood.”
QAnon rebrands the early 20th century anti-Semitic book, “Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”
“Central to its (“Protocols’”) mythology was the Blood Libel, which claimed that Jews kidnapped and slaughtered Christian children,” he said. The Nazis made Protocols required reading in German schools, and Hitler copied some of the conspiracy theories into his own work, Stanton said.
“The world has seen QAnon before. It was called Nazism. In QAnon, Nazism wants a comeback,” he wrote. A host of Trump supporters displayed QAnon slogans and logos in the Jan. 6 insurgency at the U.S. Capitol building. Anon has made its way to Sitka as well. The group’s motto, “Where we go one, we go all,” abbreviated as “WWG1WGA” was spray painted on the door of an abandoned garage near Sealing Cove Harbor on Japonski Island.
HANGMAN’S KNOT
Another stark symbol of hate nearby the Capitol Jan. 6 was a makeshift gallows dangling a noose.
“That is something that will stay with me,” Texas Rep. Colin Allred, who is Black, told The New York Times. “They set up a noose and scaffolding on the Capitol Hill. This event has to be a wake-up call.”
The noose is widely known in the United States as a symbol of anti-Black lynching and also invokes images from an infamous 1978 work of fiction, “The Turner Diaries,” about a group of white nationalists as they overthrow the U.S. government and establish a white ethnostate. At a climactic moment in the novel members of Congress are hanged.
University of Chicago History professor Kathleen Belew elaborated on the connections of the Jan. 6 events to “Diaries” in a Friday interview with The Los Angeles Times.
“I think that The Turner Diaries really becomes a clear point of reference if you look at the photographs of the action. Activists erected a gallows outside the Capitol and hung up symbolic nooses… That’s a reference to ‘The Day of the Rope,’ the systematic hanging of lawmakers and other people they consider enemies. The ‘Diaries’ also features very prominently an attack on Congress that is significantly not a mass casualty attack… What happens at Congress is instead meant to be a show of force that a group of activists can impact even a highly secured target. So what we see there is a really clear alignment (with) the way it’s imagined in the movement,” Belew stated.
DOWN THE RABBITHOLE
Another neo-Nazi icon appeared at the insurrection, the flag of “Kekistan,” Washington Post reporter Rebecca Tan reported. The banner is a take on the Nazi war flag, with the red backdrop turned green, and the swastika and Iron Cross replaced by right wing internet memes.
SCARS OF WAR
Arnold Schwartzenegger, movie star and former governor of California, condemned the attack in a YouTube video, recalling his childhood in Austria.
“I grew up in the ruins of a country that suffered the loss of its democracy,” he said. “I was born in 1947, two years after the Second World War. Growing up I was surrounded by broken men drinking away their guilt over the participation in the most evil regime in history. Not all of them were rabid anti-Semites or Nazis, many just went alone step by step down the road. They were the people next door.”
Sam Goodfellow, a professor of fascism and terrorism at Westminster College in Missouri, noted that in recent years, anti-Semitic attacks have exceeded Islamophobic attacks in the U.S.
“There have been more anti-Semitic attacks than anti-Muslim attacks over the last few years… It’s like Holocaust denying is a handshake, ‘We’re in the same club,’” Goodfellow told the Sentinel.
“The first victims of fascism are the people who support it,” he said. “They step up and make these mistakes that plague them for the rest of their lives.”
DEUS NON VULT
Some of the Jan. 6 rioters appropriated imagery from the Knights Templar, a medieval military-monastic order. A subject matter expert told the Sentinel he was not surprised.
“My reaction-- sadly right now -- is to not be surprised, because people have been dialed into the fact at least since Charlottesville (the 2017 alt-Right rally in Virginia) that there is this subculture of far right extremists who look back to the Middle Ages as part of their white supremacist ideology,” said Professor Brett Whalen, who teaches Medieval History at the University of North Carolina.
Whalen highlighted the anti-Semitic links to crusade iconography.
“It is important to understand that when the crusades were declared as an act of holy war against enemies abroad… once you set a big group of armed people in motion you can’t exactly control them. They ended up attacking Jewish communities in the Rhineland. Anti-Semitism is very linked with the Crusades… Every time there was a call for a major crusade expedition by the Papacy, there was a threat of anti-Semitic violence,” he said.
In the modern world, the professor noted that crusade imagery shares links to the white supremacist vision of America as a white, Christian nation.
“It’s part of this white supremacist view of Europe as a pure, white, Aryan past… Modern America as a Christian nation is seen as a defender of Christendom. Christendom is under assault by Jews, by Muslims,” Whalen summarized.
The medievalist emphasized that ideas of a homogenous Medieval Europe are false.
He stressed the complex social and cultural nature of the real Middle Ages.
“It’s a Europe of their own imaging… (Europe was) not exclusively white, and yes, there were acts of violence that were religious in nature. There were holy wars. But there were also Muslims, Christians, and Jews living alongside each other,” he said.
The same, he noted, is true of a military crusading order such as the Templars.
“The historical reality is the Templars had a very complicated relationship with other faith traditions, fought with them, sometimes allied with them, learned to make accommodations and live alongside them.”
Whalen stressed the seriousness and importance of imagery in framing a discussion.
“This is not a joke. You can see these things and they seem unimportant. ‘Well some guys have Templar imagery or they’re wearing furs.’ But what we saw in the Capitol, is that it starts with apparently harmless social media images, but it’s serious. It’s deadly serious.”
In response to the insurrection at the Capitol and other events, the Museum of Jewish Heritage will host a free online panel on extremism in the modern world this Thursday at 10 a.m. Alaska time. Interested people can register for the meeting at mjhnyc.org/events. The Zoom event will include panelists from the New York Board of Rabbis, Talia Lavin- an author who has written on the topic, and officials from the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center.
