Friday 18 May 2012

Detecting Under the Microscope: "Einsatzgruppen" Out to Get the Tekkie?

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It seems Dealer Dave over in California is not alone in his Stormtrooper fantasies discussed here several times in the past. A while ago Heritage Action was offensively described by one South Coast UK metal detectorist as "heritage brownshirts", now another one went so far on Dick Stout's blog on March 16th as to liken metal detectorists as the victims of the Holocaust and in a subsequent post refers to the Portable Antiquities Scheme's Liaison Officers as:
 gauleiters goose-stepping all over Der Reich indulging in “Ve haf vays ov making you tok’-style arm-twisting, to extract finds details and locations from hobbyists, or ‘unter-menschen,’ as it appears they now are regarded by the boys in jackboots.  
I really do not think any comment is needed.  Though for the record we might point out that the Einsatzgruppen der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD were not under the command of the gauleiters, far from it and what Howland depicts as a uniform badge on Stout's blog is in fact a vehicle ensign. Still, the English and Americans never experienced a full Nazi occupation, so I guess their ignorance and ability to joke about Nazi atrocities and misuse imagery of them in order to play the victim is perhaps understandable, but hardly excusable. Shame on the blog host for publishing such things. 

2 comments:

kyri said...

i fully agree paul.it seems in britain and the us we trivialise the nazi atrocities.god forbid it will ever happen again but in times of economic uncertainty anything could happen.i remember reading that the great war was the "war to end all wars" and 20 years later europe was at it again.
i recently saw a film "the boy in the striped pyjamas" the final scenes bring home to you just how unhuman/barbaric these nazis were.
kyri.

Paul Barford said...

and I think the cultural sensitivity of metal detectorists (both sides of the Atlantic it would seem) is barely above zero.

 
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