Ways to Cope With Nazis

January 17, 2018 9:54 PM

Three different ways of coping with Nazis, some more effective than others. First there's Oskar Speck, who kayaks from Germany to Australia. Then there's how Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto coped with the Germans. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising & Jewish Identity And then there's how Isidore Greenbaum stood up at an American Nazi rally. American Nazis & a Jewish Man from Brooklyn
posted by MovableBookLady (8 comments total)

From the last link, that video of the 20,000-participant American Nazi rally, with its swastikas and enormous portrait of Washington, is chilling. Right out of The Man in the High Castle.

It’s fascinating how the national mood after WWII was able to make such massive US Nazi demonstrations at least outré and impolit for a good long while, sending most of the bigots scurrying for the dark corners of the internet, except for occasional flare-ups and outbursts.

And now we have our current political situation, where being an overtly demonstrative white supremacist and hate-filled bigot seems to be coming back into vogue on a scale that hasn’t been seen for 70 years. It’s truly alarming.
posted by darkstar at 10:12 PM on January 17, 2018 [7 favorites]

I clicked on that last link, expecting a telling of a different story about a Jewish guy at Madison Square Garden in 1939.

But this one's good, too. The Memory Palace link above tells a hell of a story about Joseph "The Mighty Adam" Greenstein, 5'4" strongman and his exploits. It's really worth a listen.
posted by pykrete jungle at 10:58 PM on January 17, 2018 [2 favorites]

Previously: So a Nazi walks into an iron bar: the Meyer Lansky story.
posted by rtha at 10:59 PM on January 17, 2018 [5 favorites]

I just want to remind everyone that it is almost the first anniversary of one of the finest moments of 2017
posted by poffin boffin at 12:09 AM on January 18, 2018 [13 favorites]

The Aldo Raine school of thought is the one I find most persuasive.
Of course we're not in an active war, so beating them up and/or mocking them are certainly reasonable alternatives.
But mostly, fuck nazis.
posted by From Bklyn at 2:53 AM on January 18, 2018

In case you've ever wondered how Henry Rollins, Mike Watt, et al. dealt with Nazis: An oral history of actual punks punching actual Nazis in the face
posted by holborne at 7:41 AM on January 19, 2018 [2 favorites]

"I decided to let the worst Nazi of all get up on stage, and gave him the mike and let him say what he wanted to say. Of course, he wasn't very intelligent and he started sieg-heiling and saying racist nonsense or whatever. Our tour manager grabbed a drum stand and walloped him on the back of the head."

Awesome.
posted by AFABulous at 8:27 AM on January 19, 2018 [1 favorite]

We need to go all Vidal Sassoon on them.
posted by leotrotsky at 8:29 AM on January 19, 2018