I ran across this while browsing the news. http://news.yahoo.com/us-defense-chief-seeks-probe-marine-photo-211906333.html Uhm, we are not Germany in WWII and our Marines are not SS troops. So not the same thing. Following the logic of the complainers and the secdef (or lack thereof), there is something that bothers me. A Marine 1 star's flag looks like the communist chinese flag, white star on red background - It obviously isn't identical, but it's close enough and I find that insulting. Perhaps, in order to make everything as politically correct as possible, we could change the Marine 1 star flag to a pink flag with a puppy and a unicorn in front of a rainbow. Additionally, the perched eagle collar device worn by O-6's is very similar to the perched eagle Nazi insignia, I recommend a new collar device consisting of a fawn bending slightly to lick the face of a small bunny in a field of clover. - Or just the androgynous symbol.
I went to OCS with a salty snake-eating prior recon and scout-sniper SSgt. He and I had been friends prior to showing up to OCS, and we wound up in the same platoon - then on day 1 they called him out of the squad bay. Turns out the SS tattoo he had on the inside of his arm was no bueno with somebody. He was in line to see the Col to potentially get the boot, and some Sgt Major walked up to him and asked if he had money to get a new tattoo. He then drove him to the nearest tattoo parlor and the guy wound up getting a dragon-snake thing to cover it up. Only guy I know to get a tattoo while at OCS haha.
I love stories like that. That's the Corps I know and love. Good on that Sgt Maj. The SS has been in use with scout snipers for decades. What a bunch uh' BS.
Playing devil's advocate... perception is reality. Just like the comic above notes, just because the true nature of a symbol is relatively innocuous, doesn't alleviate your responsibility to ensuring your behavior doesn't offend others. The civil war on a grand scale was about state's rights, but if you drive around with a rebel flag on your truck, you're an asshole. Why? Because it's a symbol directly attached to the atrocities committed against the blacks in this country. Is that REALLY what the rebel flag stood for? No. But it's the perception and the general consensus that people think those who fly rebel flags are assholes that makes it your responsibility to not be an asshole. Sure, the scout/snipers may have used that symbol for decades.... but they were wrong when they started using it, and they're wrong now. It looks PRETTY fucking close to the SS symbol. Am I offended by it? No. I'm just a regular self-hating jew. But had I not known the backstory, I'd have assumed it was another bunch of racist POS Marines, just like I've heard/seen as an epidemic in the infantry Army. So basically, this was a long, convoluted explanation of the same thing the above comic demonstrated.... Awesome.
Plenty of Nazi flags ended up in pictures in WWII as war trophies...were the gents from the 101st and 82nd Airborne all skinheads who hated Jews? My guess is that since they jumped into Europe, probably not, but that's just my uneducated assumption. Maybe the good Rabbi could find some of those guys and ask them about their thoughts on the matter?
So pictures of war artifacts with the people who took them.... I don't get your point. That's not at all what I was talking about. Clearly those WWII gents had no allegiance to those symbols. I'm talking about people who DO have allegiance to a symbol that is interpreted as offensive and socially unacceptable, even when in fact it is not.
Who gives a flying you know what? These are soldiers in a combat environment. Who gives a crap if some looney toon used it 50+ years ago. he also stole a few other symbols that were considered good luck before he showed up. The Soviet Flag has a sickle and hammer. Maybe we should ban the Amish from using those tools since it obviously invokes communism Maybe these liberal hippie fucks who dont like it can get off their asses and do something useful to defend our country instead of trying to find something wrong with every CO, Pilot, Marine, etc who is actually sacrificing to make a difference.
I'm not asking to publicly keelhaul these guys. I'm just saying, if someone wants to paint a giant SS on the side of your unit's buildings, if that doesn't make you pause and go "OOOOh.... uh.... yeah, guys. Let's not do that", I think that's a bit naive. I see the SS, and that's the first thing that comes to mind. No harm, no foul. No one is confused to their intent, but it's still not a very good symbol to stand behind. I say let's just go ahead and do away with that SPECIFIC symbol and move along. Nothing more to see. It's obvious our minds our made up, and no one is going to change, so I have nothing more to say.
My first thought when I saw this story was, "this is what happens when you let the coaches teach high school history". It doesn't surprise me in the least that these guys were ignorant of what the SS lightning bolts stood for. It's easy to say, how could anyone not know? Almost no one in this country gets a decent liberal arts education unless they seek it out, and I don't imagine these guys are History Channel-watching types.
I have to be honest; when I hear SS, this is what comes to mind: Then again, my mind defaults to cars. I had a sergeant instructor at OCS that had one of these particular nazi-like "SS symbols" tattooed on his forearm because he was a scout sniper. Didn't seem like a big deal to the Corps, but when I saw it I did briefly wonder if he was some kind of Nazi. It's an inappropriate adoption of a symbol. Much like the recent fashion statement of Che Guevara t-shirts and Mao gear. Most people wearing it have no idea. Saw an interesting news report on that very subject last week before all of this nonsense erupted.
I completely agree (except for the Chevy reference, I'm a Ford guy). If you talk to the majority of people wearing those stupid shirts, they wouldn't know how many people they killed and tortured or the brutality they showed. They only care about the "revolution" and "sticking it to the man" just because they can't smoke weed or get hassled for being lazy. Ignorance, gotta love it.
Wait a minute.....I'm a huge Ford guy, too. But it's not like any car guy has never heard of the Monte Carlo SS. Btw...Hendrick can suck it. /redneck out
Touche. The Chevy SS is pretty well known. Unfortunately, my Ford guy (Mark Martin) isn't really racing anymore and is now a Chevy guy. Lame.
As long as we're giving credit to the bowties, we might as well go all the way: Mark Martin can suck it, too after stealing Rusty's thunder on his Last Call season. Anyway.....back on topic..... The Commandant is pissed, and believe me, Big Brother is now watching for insensitive emblems. If you have any such vulgarities on your buildings or in your shops (I'm looking at you, Ordnance).....stand the fuck by.
Of course he's pissed: all he needed was one guy to have both enough education to recognize the symbol, and enough awareness of our current environment to say "I wonder if having that around is a good idea?" and he wouldn't have had to have any of his own time wasted fixing it.
Ok, I'm a car guy overall and like even Chevys (sometimes, I'm still Ford though). And I'll pretend I never heard that MM comment.... Back to the topic at hand, the best quotes from the Terminal Lance post: "On that note, however, there’s some things you should just avoid: and anything inspired by Nazis is probably a good place to start." "In any case, I’m sure Public Affairs has been having a blast lately."
True, but if this symbol has been around for as long as people say and is so engrained in the culture, it's going to take a little more than just one guy saying that (unless he's really, really high up). That being said, one person could have prevented the pic from occuring, but if this symbol is going to be used like this then it's only a matter of time before something was going to come out.
I've never seen any Marines using it myself, but assuming it is relatively prevalent, then I'm really left wondering how nobody in any of the CoC's where it was used raised a question about it. Even if somebody wasn't personally bothered by it for whatever reason, you'd think somebody would have been able to recognize that this could cause a problem in our current environment.
Or...maybe a bunch of Marines whose job requires them to shoot human beings in the head with a high powered rifle thought the fact that people were offended by a symbol didn't give a fuck.
What military are you in? Yeah, we'd all love to not ever have to worry about political correctness or the perceptions of the public we defend. But that never existed in my 20 years of commissioned service so nobody serving right now has a right to be surprised by it. Those poor bastards are going to get their nuts hammered flat, and it wouldn't have happened if their CoCs had shut that stuff down.
I'm relatively certain those Marines aren't evoking the Nazi party line - it is a cool symbol. However, at the end of the day, we have the answer to many of those liberal, hippie, pussies who are glad to start a shit storm denigrating the great men in that picture. The whole world will latch onto that picture and use it as an example of why the US sucks. In short, it just provides fodder to drive people away from US influence. Right or wrong, that's the way it is. The suck of it is, the Taliban can get away with anything in the eyes of people who hate the US or are at least indifferent to our stated politices. Kinda like how your wife can change her mind a million times and it's still your fault for not keeping up.
The scout sniper "SS" has been around for awhile. While I know the snipers aren't Nazis, and yes, it's a cool looking symbol, I'm shocked that no one in authority all these years hasn't said,"ummm...yeah...gunny, why don't we take that down...it's probably not a great idea." However, this does show a lack of knowledge about the Nazi SS. I think some Marines think of them as the elite stormtroopers of the German blitzkrieg, and think of them as a warrior elite. Well, there is that, but they were also the troops manning the concentration camps. Not exactly an association one should embrace. These guys, or rather their leaders, are going to get their balls smashed eight ways from Sunday. As with many things, they're getting a "wrong place, wrong time" screwjob. The current platoon, company, and probably battalion commanders are going to get hammered. Their predecessors aren't. There are a LOT of now high ranking Marines who've commanded snipers. No one did anything about it before it hit the press. It's not as if this is a brand new symbol. Some of those guys are going to be asking for the heads of their successors, who are merely continuing a legacy that was established years ago.
My point is that this is not a new symbol. Scout Sniper bubs have been getting the SS lightning bolts tattooed on themselves since the 60s, probably earlier. They are not Nazis. Not one of those guys ever put a Jew in a gas chamber. None of them swore allegiance to the 3rd Reich. I'm sure somewhere along the way, there was a Jewish Scout Sniper Marine. Maybe more than one. My squadron has a skull on our patch, a symbol of the occult and not much different from the deaths head. If someone is offended by it, should we replace it with some unicorns blowing rainbowy loads out of their unicorn boners? Maybe that would be a better fit, since we are a P-3 squadron, but that's beside the point. Maybe it'd be more palatable to the public if they shot furry kittens out of their rifles and killed their enemies with kindness, but that's not real effective. I'm inclined to give someone who goes into the 3rd world shit holes our political leadership sends them to the benefit of the doubt. I would hope that their leadership does the same. We forget too easily that the purpose of the military is not to look good to the public; it's to go to bad places and break shit when our civilian masters tell us. I guess I'm just a naive JO, but seeing people ahead of me get bent out of shape at a bunch of young dudes who've been trained to shoot bad guys in the face for not finishing their sensitivity GMT gets me a little pissed off at the whole fucked up system we find ourselves in. We are told it is not ok to be offended by homosexuality, but it is ok to be offended by a bunch of Scout Snipers. hmm.
