How could someone have planted such an item there? And why?

July 3, 2017 11:54 PM

They looked closer, and an inscription on the surface came into focus. What they saw astonished them. It was a memorial. In honor of Nazi spies. On U.S. government property.
posted by Chrysostom (58 comments total)

“It’s not the argument that historic preservationists make.”
I don't understand why they didn't throw the damn thing into the nearest dumpster. It's just a big graffiti made of stone by nazi wannabes in the 80s. It does not have any historical significance, except for nazi wannabes.
posted by elgilito at 2:17 AM on July 4, 2017 [33 favorites]

The stone, tagged OXCO-475, now spends its days beneath a protective blanket on a shelf at a storage facility in suburban Maryland.

Brody: Where is the Ark?
Maj. Eaton: I thought we'd settled that. The Ark is somewhere very safe.
Jones: From whom?
Brody: The Ark is a source of unspeakable power and it has to be researched!
Maj. Eaton: And it will be, I assure you, Doctor Brody, Doctor Jones. We have top men working on it right now.
Jones: Who?!
Maj. Eaton: Top... men.
posted by chavenet at 4:35 AM on July 4, 2017 [13 favorites]

The "mystery" here is slightly oversold, as I remember hearing about this back around 2000-2001, when an acquaintance had a shop in the old NSWPP office on Wilson Blvd. in Arlington (I was a librarian at the Historical Society of Washington at the time). I think this was more a case of "hiding in plain sight", as with so much other historical detritus at Blue Plains.
posted by ryanshepard at 5:09 AM on July 4, 2017 [2 favorites]

It does not have any historical significance, except for nazi wannabes.

Removing the stone was obviously the right thing to do. The placement was unauthorized, it had no artistic merit, it was placed there by an organization that the clear majority of people consider detestable, and the people it honored were covert agents of a monstrous regime, working against the country whose land it was placed on.

Destroying it due to a lack of historical significance, though? I think that's a poor argument. Claiming a lack of historical significance is problematic in general, not just in this specific case. Who gets to decide what has it and what doesn't, and based on what criteria?

In the case of physical artifacts, the passage of time alone imbues significance on things that their contemporaries would have considered unimportant, unrepresentative, unworthy, unacceptable, or any number of other similar adjectives. Had the stone been discovered shortly after its placement, destroying it would have been a simple decision. But the passing of just a couple of decades already made it more complicated.

The stone is an interesting curio that has an interesting enough backstory to be reported in The Washington Post. The story could have ended in its destruction and nobody would have cared all that much, but since it didn't, the mere fact that it was reported on has given it more historical significance than it used to have. Preserving it is not unreasonable, especially since preservation does not imply reverence or appreciation.
posted by jklaiho at 5:13 AM on July 4, 2017 [12 favorites]

Any way to read it now that it's got a paywall?
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 5:28 AM on July 4, 2017

Try opening it in a private browsing window.
posted by zachlipton at 5:34 AM on July 4, 2017 [1 favorite]

Any way to read it now that it's got a paywall?

Right click and incognito will often get you around the WaPo paywall.
posted by ryanshepard at 5:39 AM on July 4, 2017 [1 favorite]

Claiming a lack of historical significance is problematic in general, not just in this specific case. Who gets to decide what has it and what doesn't, and based on what criteria?

Yeah, I'm done with glorifying people who wanted to perpetrate physical violence against the people of the United States in a time of war. Unless someone cares to argue that it does have significance, I'm okay with not letting concern trolls win.
posted by Etrigan at 6:08 AM on July 4, 2017 [20 favorites]

The story of the 8 spies is actually kind of interesting, as their leader phoned in to the FBI to turn themselves in, but J. Edgar Hoover decided instead to publicize it as an FBI bust, leading to the execution of the 8 men as well the rounding & hassling up of German-Americans. So basically it's fascists all the way down.
posted by chavenet at 6:39 AM on July 4, 2017 [24 favorites]

Only 6 of the 8 were executed. The article says that two were imprisoned and deported after the war.
posted by Think_Long at 6:42 AM on July 4, 2017 [3 favorites]

I work with local historical societies. I serve on the board of one in particular that has a substantial historical archive and collection. You should see the battles we have when there are disagreements about "historical significance" when accessioning or deaccessioning items.

We have Nazi officer uniforms from WW2, donated to the society from local residents. We also have recordings of AIDS activists stories about the AIDS crisis in our area in the 1980s.

There are people on the accession committee that want the Nazi uniforms destroyed, because that's not a part of history we should remember.
There are other people on the committee that want the "AIDS" recording destroyed, for the same reason. And there are others that hold the idea of an artifact as sacred, i.e. you never, ever get rid of anything. Which of course means we have a lot of just plain junk laying around.

Like it or not, "historical significance" isn't political. It's not tied to the beliefs of the people that manage the collection, it's tied to the relevance of the artifact to the historical context it represents.

And it's 2017, folks. As I say over and over at these meetings, you can now record the existence of an artifact digitally, and then get rid of the original or donate to someone that deems it more significant. Again, without bias.

That piece of stone has a story and a context. It's ugly, but so is history, sometimes. You don't have to "glorify" history to acknowledge it.
posted by disclaimer at 7:14 AM on July 4, 2017 [36 favorites]

Destroying it due to a lack of historical significance, though?

No, destroying it as appropriate commemoration of historical events. The best way to honour a memorial for WWII Nazis is the way our grandparents honoured Nazis in 1939-1945; high explosives until what they built is destroyed, then building something good on the rubble.
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 7:30 AM on July 4, 2017 [17 favorites]

I think the best way to honor a memorial for WW2 Nazis is to put it in context with the horrors the Nazis inflicted. Blowing it up kind of misses the point, in my opinion.

If you really think it should be blown up, record its existence, put it in context with other Nazi artifacts, and THEN turn it into pothole filler.
posted by disclaimer at 7:37 AM on July 4, 2017 [2 favorites]

And it's 2017, folks. As I say over and over at these meetings, you can now record the existence of an artifact digitally, and then get rid of the original or donate to someone that deems it more significant. Again, without bias.

Don't you think that the idea that to "record the existence of an artifact digitally" means that the article is no longer needed is a "bias"?
posted by thelonius at 7:56 AM on July 4, 2017 [7 favorites]

I suspect I have been to the location where this is being kept but I must admit I didn't go looking beneath any protective storage blankets.

Jklaiho and Disclaimer have gotten to it before me, but as a historic preservationist, it's true that's not an argument preservationists would make. It may once have been, but preservation nowadays is about more than just preserving the pretty history. Preserving it doesn't glorify it (or it shouldn't). Sometimes telling the ugly stories require artifacts that make those stories tangible.
posted by Preserver at 8:44 AM on July 4, 2017 [8 favorites]

The story of those Nazis spies is an interesting bit of history. I thought for a moment that my favorite Powell / Pressburger film, 49th Parallel (released as Invaders in the US) [it is a fun bit of WWII propaganda with an excellent cast] was based on their story but that film's production and release predates this action. I wonder if there was a connection.
posted by Ashwagandha at 9:00 AM on July 4, 2017 [1 favorite]

The best part of the monument is how it's an opportunity to discuss the shittiness and incompetence of German intelligence. My favorite is the dude (in Scotland?) who was caught because his suitcase accidentally opened, literally spilling out Nivea hand cream and German sausages. As somebody on SomethingAwful quipped, it was truly the würst case scenario...
posted by Sticherbeast at 9:23 AM on July 4, 2017 [13 favorites]

As I say over and over at these meetings, you can now record the existence of an artifact digitally, and then get rid of the original or donate to someone that deems it more significant.

Don't mind me, I'll be horrifiedly screaming in a corner.
posted by corb at 9:34 AM on July 4, 2017 [19 favorites]

It shouldn't be kept as a reminder about Nazis, it should be kept as a reminder about Washington State's racist history.
posted by rhizome at 9:38 AM on July 4, 2017 [6 favorites]

I don't believe that recording an artifact digitally diminishes the artifact. And recording something digitally doesn't necessarily mean you destroy the original. It's all about context.

The society I'm talking about has a core mission to "preserve and convey the history of Oakland County in the context of American history". For a very long time the society's board has been extremely protectionist about this mission. To the point where one board member took an arrowhead collection, boxed it up, and taped it shut because he didn't want any to get stolen by the board member that was working with it (who happens to be a local archaeologist and a former president of the society). He also didn't want local university students to work on recording them, because (in his words) "then they'll know we have them". And the board agreed.

The issue here is that by taking photographs of the arrowheads (or this monument), even if you lose the original, you still have a representation of it, albeit not as good as the original (until we get holodecks, anyway). And you're preserving it by removing the original from play - take photos and then lock the original away if you want - but at least it can still be studied and referenced without actually having to be physically present.

And speaking of arrowhead collections: yeah they're cool, and they ARE relevant to our county's history because they demonstrate that aboriginals were here, but not to the core mission - arrowheads are about Native American and aboriginal history, not American history. In my view, these arrowheads need to go back to their tribes/nations, not kept in a basement in Michigan. If we have good pictures and the provenance of them, why not give them back to the descendants of the people that made them? We can digitally record what they were, that they were here, and they were carefully studied - and we don't need the originals to do that.
posted by disclaimer at 9:43 AM on July 4, 2017 [3 favorites]

Washington State's racist history

Other Washington, rhizome. This is DC.
posted by tavella at 9:46 AM on July 4, 2017 [5 favorites]

preservation nowadays is about more than just preserving the pretty history.

This artifact isn't history, it's a thing that some anonymous shitheels put together to commemorate a pack of idiots who were on the wrong side of history. It adds nothing to the history of WWII and only barely adds an iota of curiosity to the history of American racist cowards. Take some pictures, keep a hunk of it in case a materials scientist can ever sniff out who made it, and grind the rest into powder.
posted by Etrigan at 9:47 AM on July 4, 2017 [9 favorites]

Other Washington, rhizome. This is DC

Gah, I mixed up on, "Southwest Washington," even as I was going to complain about the WaPo leaving the expansion of "NSWPP" until 2/3 through the story.
posted by rhizome at 9:51 AM on July 4, 2017

If we have good pictures and the provenance of them, why not give them back to the descendants of the people that made them?

My horror was more about the "digitally record then destroy" rather than "digitally record then pass on to other conscientious stewards." The issue of essentially repatriation of artifacts is a much more messy one but can have good people on all sides: but I think there's rarely a good reason to actually destroy history.
posted by corb at 9:52 AM on July 4, 2017 [4 favorites]

put it in context with other Nazi artifacts

It bears repeating that this is not a WWII artifact. It was built long after the war by Illinois neo-Nazis.
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 9:53 AM on July 4, 2017 [8 favorites]

As I say over and over at these meetings, you can now record the existence of an artifact digitally, and then get rid of the original

And, when that digital record is no longer readable (either because it's in an obsolete format or due to bit rot), you've completely lost the artifact. "Digitize then destroy" is not a proper form of preservation.
posted by Thorzdad at 10:17 AM on July 4, 2017 [5 favorites]

I hear you Corb - it's the absolute last, worst case scenario to destroy historical items. But there are times when it's the right answer.

I have in my possession about 200 photos taken by my great-grandmother and grandmother that cover a period from the 1940s through the 1970s. Most are poor quality, have been severely damaged (most by being put in self-adhesive photo albums and/or by the chemical process used to develop them), and have absolutely no context - they have no names or dates on them. I'm pretty sure they're photos taken while they played bridge or went on vacations. I have shown them around to relatives and to older people who might know the subjects, but no one can identify these folks. They're just...orphaned.

Since they were taken BY my relatives and aren't pictures OF my relatives, I had no idea what to do with them. The originals were sitting in a box and rotting, you could literally see degradation happening over time. I scanned them all, recorded them in a database with where they came from, an approximate time period, locations if I knew them, and donated the whole lot - digital and physical - to the historical society. And we all immediately voted to throw the originals away and keep the digital copies.
They won't rot any more than they already have, look as good or better than the originals, they take up very little space on a hard drive, and they can be referenced and passed on to people who identify the subjects in the photos.
So, context.
posted by disclaimer at 10:19 AM on July 4, 2017 [2 favorites]

Can I clarify something here for people? Because I guess I didn't say it clearly.

I'm not saying "destroy the original" as a matter of course. That is the absolute last, absolute last, thing I'm attempting badly to say. Give it away, sell it, loan it to other museums, whatever. It is not necessary to have the actual, physical item as part of a collection, especially when that item does not have any relation to the collection of which it is a part.

There are very good reasons a museum or historical society has people responsible for accessioning or deaccessioning items from its collection. It's not a simple process and the disposition of anything that's deaccessioned is very carefully determined, discussed, and debated. We have rugs in our collection that have been in front of the accessions committee for several years because we can't figure out what to do with them after they're out of the collection.
posted by disclaimer at 10:28 AM on July 4, 2017 [4 favorites]

Etrigan: This artifact isn't history, it's a thing that some anonymous shitheels put together.

This.

It's not a WWII artifact by any stretch of the imagination; it's a very heavy précis of an act better recorded elsewhere. It has zero informational value and no historical significance of its own. At most, it's evidence of Wierd Stuff That People Do, or a footnote of a footnote to a treatment of Fascism in America.

Take a Polaroid or a pencil rubbing, then use it as a cornerstone for a new public washroom.
posted by Artful Codger at 10:45 AM on July 4, 2017 [4 favorites]

It is, first and foremost, a really cumbersome piece of graffiti. That doesn't preclude it from being a historical artifact, but I remain unconvinced that it is.
posted by ckape at 10:49 AM on July 4, 2017 [3 favorites]

Okay, last comment for a while, I'm threadsitting and it's not helpful and its a derail, BUT

One of my roles at that society is to teach them how to digitally preserve artifacts. The process I am teaching them involves not only digitally capturing them, but dealing with long-term storage of digital files, how to migrate from one medium to another as formats go out of use (floppies to hard drives, etc), what the shelf life of a digital item is and when to move digital media from one device to another, and how to develop indexes of the items in formats that can survive over time (our databases are important: most are backed up as text files, for example, because a text file is not a proprietary format where a database file is).

This is all being done according to the Library of Congress archiving standards, and those are the standards we're implementing and enforcing.
We're doing all this for three reasons. First, to protect the originals, not destroy them. Second, to preserve artifacts that are in threat. And third, so that the collection can be promulgated and copied as a way of preserving it.

It may have seemed that I was making a dismissive comment about destroying originals: I wasn't. Destroying originals is the last, worst case step in working with historical artifacts.
posted by disclaimer at 10:49 AM on July 4, 2017 [6 favorites]

By the 1970s, though, the group had begun to split apart and had lost much of its relevance, leading Rosenstock to believe the Nazi memorial dates back to that time.

The party didn’t entirely cease to exist until 1983, the law center said, so the stone may had been carved more recently...

That typeface screams 1950s-1960s to me.

My take is that this is a historical artifact. It belongs somewhere like the Holocaust Museum, as testimony that Nazis are not a thing of the quaint dead past, they are still among us, thinking Nazi thoughts, honoring Nazi dead.
posted by Slithy_Tove at 11:32 AM on July 4, 2017 [27 favorites]

It may have seemed that I was making a dismissive comment about destroying originals: I wasn't.

perhaps you should have included in your original comment some kind of, um, what's the word....
disclaimer?
posted by thedamnbees at 12:07 PM on July 4, 2017 [3 favorites]

It's an artifact without context, because its creation was secret; and even if we knew who had made it the answer wouldn't be very interesting. It's heavy and bulky so preserving it is a pain, and we don't want it on display because we don't want our actions to lend it undeserved significance. A photo of the inscription tells us everything there is to be known about it.

Just crush the damn thing: it's cost enough wasted time and energy already. Use the money saved to preserve ephemera of genuine historical significance.
posted by Joe in Australia at 12:16 PM on July 4, 2017 [8 favorites]

Other Washington, rhizome. This is DC.

Which also has its own insane and racist history. The presence of the American Nazi Party / NSWPP right across the river being a not insignificant mid-century part of it. Richard Spencer and his organization have their East Coast offices less than 10 miles from the old NSWPP HQ at the moment.
posted by ryanshepard at 1:54 PM on July 4, 2017

Below that were six names, and below those was another cryptic line: “Donated by the N.S.W.P.P.”

Cryptic? These people have never seen The Blues Brothers?

I hate Washington Nazis.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 2:28 PM on July 4, 2017 [6 favorites]

corb: I think there's rarely a good reason to actually destroy history.

This. Would we be better off if we had bulldozed Auschwitz and built apartment flats there, pretending it never had existed? Would we be better off if Gettysburg were an unrelated-theme amusement park? (partial answer: See what happened to the very practical but aesthetically challenging tower that was once there.) Would we be better off if Hiroshima had simply been rebuilt in place without that embarrassing park with the statue of the little girl who died and all the garlands of origami cranes? Would we be better off if the Vietnam Memorial retaining wall depression was just filled in and the whole thing went back to being a featureless hill? Would we be better off if all the artifacts of ancient Rome and Greece, all of them built on a slave economy system far more extensive than anything the colonial powers ever conceived, were crushed and buried and their few extant documents burned in shame?

The past is what it is. We cannot change it. And in many cases remembering it is painful. But we must remember it, because if we do not remember it we will fuck up again in the same way. We need these monuments, even when they are stupid and evil, precisely because they are stupid and evil. We need to know that so many people felt so strongly about these things that they erected a plaque or a monument or a statue to something we now see is repugnant. Because if we melt those statues and crush those monuments and burn those documents, in another generation or two the very idea that such things had such power will seem a little silly, and those who are inclined to repeat the same mistake will have no disincentive.

I am not terribly upset about the removal of the monuments here in New Orleans ... yet. They haven't yet been destroyed. They should be made accessible. Right now they are literally in a salvage yard, which is not appropriate in any way. They should be put back on display, perhaps less prominently and definitely surrounded by modern context, to put them in place. But hiding or destroying them is not okay. Destruction is only ever the right thing if it is the only way to avoid being destroyed yourself. And it's a hard sell to convince me that a static monument made by long-dead assholes whose organization is in ruins is an existential threat to anyone living.
posted by Bringer Tom at 2:36 PM on July 4, 2017 [5 favorites]

Would we be better off if we had bulldozed Auschwitz and built apartment flats there, pretending it never had existed?

You are willfully disregarding what I and several other people have pointed out already in this thread -- This is not Auschwitz. This is a shitty fanfic about Auschwitz that the author uploaded to an unused subreddit using a burner account.

Just like your precious New Orleans monuments to traitors and slavers, the purpose of this "monument" was to celebrate an evil ideology long after it had been consigned to history's dustbin. We owe it to this "monument" to give it the same treatment.
posted by Etrigan at 2:46 PM on July 4, 2017 [14 favorites]

Just like your precious New Orleans monuments to traitors and slavers, the purpose of this "monument" was to celebrate an evil ideology long after it had been consigned to history's dustbin.

I think the point was that if you remove Confederate monuments and destroy them, you get to erase the choice to erect them in the first place, rather than own up to that choice and that history, not that they were "precious". Which is a fair point--it does feel like ten years from now, someone will be saying "look, racism isn't a problem, we scrapped those monuments".
posted by hoyland at 2:52 PM on July 4, 2017 [3 favorites]

OK, is this, then, an historical relic worth preservation? A commemorative plaque for an event that never happened. But some guy put it up on his golf course, so it's worth preserving forever, right? The Piltdown Man is an interesting aside to history, but not history itself, so why hold onto it?
posted by SPrintF at 2:55 PM on July 4, 2017 [2 favorites]

I spent a very interesting afternoon a couple of years back touring the Aiken-Rhett house in Charleston. It's your pretty standard antebellum house of a wealthy white family but Historic Charleston made the unusual choice not to "restore" the house so you see original wallpaper, furnishings, etc. even though they are a bit deteriorated. The most powerful part, though, is the quarters of the enslaved people who worked there, which have similarly been preserved but not restored. If we followed the principle of some here, we should burn down the entire house and quarters because evil things happened here and we shouldn't perpetuate that. And that goes double for all those Southern plantation museums that ignore their history of enslaved people altogether.

No, that's not the answer. The answer is not to erase. It's to do what Historic Charleston is doing - educate. Compare the way the white people lived with the way they treated their enslaved servants.

And for those who are arguing that this isn't "history" - who says it isn't? Seems to me that NPS is doing what it does best here...hanging on to it until it can be properly evaluated.
posted by Preserver at 3:21 PM on July 4, 2017 [3 favorites]

The Piltdown Man is an interesting aside to history, but not history itself, so why hold onto it?
posted by SPrintF at 5:55 PM on July 4 [1 favorite +] [!]

Off the top of my head, because it has gained significance as an artifact of the history of early twentieth century archaeological investigation and paleontology.
posted by Preserver at 3:26 PM on July 4, 2017 [2 favorites]

Actually, if that Trumpensculture was there for 20 years without being challenged and it wasn't a completely private venture on private land, then I think a case could be made for preserving it. Of course it's as nouveau as Trump's riche so not quite in the same vein as statues that have stood for 100 years, or a monument that has been in place for at least two generations on public land. The thing is the very things that are disturbing about the Nazi monument are what make it worth preserving. People have been doing rituals there? Really? I don't think anyone has done anything like that with the NOLA monuments for a looooong time, and that's a thing worth knowing.

The story of the Nazi spies is also interesting in other ways which make it worth remembering. Some of the spies actually turned themselves in, and were betrayed by J. Edgar Hoover, a man who turned out to be a much larger menace to the US than a handful of Nazi spies. Their extraconstitutional (or at least we would have thought it so at the time) execution set the stage for Guantanamo. You know, maybe we should remember that these guys existed. Turns out their history informs a lot of shit that happened much more recently.

There is no such thing as a monument that is "precious." Monuments are monuments. People all make them for the same reasons. You either respect those reasons, in which case you can expect the monuments you build to be treated with some respect by the people who will come after but disagree with you, or you don't, in which case your fuck you to your ancestors can be expected to be answered with a similar fuck you to you by your descendants, and that way lies madness and ignorance. We need to preserve memory between generations even when we don't like it, in some cases exactly because we don't like it.

I am not upset that General Lee is no longer atop his 60-foot tall pedestal. But I am very upset that his statue is in what amounts to a junkyard at the moment. Not because of any reverence for him or for the other three monuments, but because that statue was there for over a hundred years and pretending that that wasn't the case is doublespeak of the highest order. Perhaps not more evil than the Confederacy itself, but Orwell might well have argued with you on that.
posted by Bringer Tom at 3:29 PM on July 4, 2017 [3 favorites]

If we followed the principle of some here, we should burn down the entire house and quarters because evil things happened here and we shouldn't perpetuate that.

Please name the people who are saying that. I won't hold my breath, because I would die, because no one is saying that here. What I and some other people are saying is that if some shitheel snuck into that house this year and put up a plaque commemorating some poor overseer who was killed in an uprising in 1863, then that "monument" doesn't deserve anyone's time and effort beyond taking a picture of it, noting it in the Local Historical Ledger in the Christ What An Asshole section, and breaking it up for ballast.
posted by Etrigan at 3:40 PM on July 4, 2017 [4 favorites]

You yourself said: "Yeah, I'm done with glorifying people who wanted to perpetrate physical violence against the people of the United States in a time of war. " It isn't much of a leap from that to tearing down plantation houses because they "glorify" the people who perpetrated slavery against an entire race. Same principle.

As for the time argument. It didn't happen "this year." The actual event happened over seventy years ago, and the artifact dates back to at least the 1970s, perhaps earlier...pretty close to the 50 year mark that is a basic criteria for historic significance. Even if it dates to the early 80s, that's still not very recent...much as it pains me to label that decade as such given that I remember all of it.
posted by Preserver at 3:53 PM on July 4, 2017 [3 favorites]

You yourself said: "Yeah, I'm done with glorifying people who wanted to perpetrate physical violence against the people of the United States in a time of war. " It isn't much of a leap from that to tearing down plantation houses because they "glorify" the people who perpetrated slavery against an entire race.

I usually hate people who try to get the last word in discussions like this, but I can't stop myself this time:

Claiming that you know what I would think about an issue that I have specifically pointed out is different from the one we are discussing is so breathtakingly disingenuous an argument that I do not believe you are willing to discuss it honestly, and I refuse to engage you any further.
posted by Etrigan at 4:25 PM on July 4, 2017 [4 favorites]

Monuments are public signs of acknowledgement. This wasn't one of those: it was an obscure slab, secretly deposited in an obscure location without public ceremony. The things that would lend it significance are absent. Preserving it costs resources and the very act of preservation tends to make insignificant things seem important. We don't need this. It doesn't tell a story about anyone, not even its surreptitious creators. Preserving it, though would say something about us: that we're damn stupid and let trolls waste our time.
posted by Joe in Australia at 4:47 PM on July 4, 2017 [6 favorites]

Joe in AU, I think you are the person for which Kim Stanley Robinson wrote Icehenge.
posted by Bringer Tom at 5:29 PM on July 4, 2017

What does it cost to have a piece of stone sitting on a shelf? What kind of resources are going into preserving it? It's a million years old. It'll be fine.
posted by disclaimer at 6:05 PM on July 4, 2017 [1 favorite]

There are actual archivists and curators and whatnot here, but curating anything means finding room for it, writing up a catalog entry, putting it into storage, bringing it out of storage when someone wants to see it, and doing this all over again when the archive is moved or internally rearranged. Plus, in this case the object is a 200 lb slab of rock so you need at least two people plus moving equipment to do any of this, and you can't even put the damn thing on a normal shelf.

Your point about its preservation is well taken, though, so in the spirit of compromise I suggest dropping it in the ocean rather than using it for road-metal. It's not like anyone but a troll is ever going to demand to see the actual Nazi-glorifying plaque; everyone else can be satisfied with a picture, a transcript, and rough geographic coordinates.
posted by Joe in Australia at 6:52 PM on July 4, 2017

If it's where I think it is, it ain't taking up much room or effort there.
posted by Preserver at 7:08 PM on July 4, 2017

Hey guys remember the other war where somewhere in the ballpark of 20-70 million people died? It was mentioned here previously, the second time in reference to a chicken dish...

A World War II-size conflict multitudes bloodier than the concurrent American civil war wrought by Christian fundamentalism. It's a fair bet you barely think about it, because it's mostly been forgotten.

Keep the memorials and put them in their proper context. We must not forget.
posted by saysthis at 7:09 PM on July 4, 2017 [4 favorites]

The proper context for this "memorial" however, is a dumpster.
posted by Windopaene at 11:08 PM on July 4, 2017

Much as I hate to say it, I think it actually matters that Nazis existed in enough strength to lug a 200 lb memorial into the backwoods and have weird ceremonies around it only fifty years ago. It's a terrible history but one I personally would not have known before reading this article.
posted by corb at 11:11 PM on July 4, 2017 [3 favorites]

Matters meaning a reminder we need to keep constant vigilance. I wish we'd remembered the Nazis are always lurking just one short year ago.
posted by corb at 11:12 PM on July 4, 2017

I have a BA in History from a moderately prestigious university (for all that matters): fingerprint it; take every bit of DNA off it that you can; take high-res pictures of it from every angle. Put all of that in the FBI's databases. You get a hit on any one of them from some protofascist who acted up at a rally... well, vandalizing a federal park can land you some serious time.

Then grind it to dust. Find a way to use the dust at the bottom of a sewage treatment plant. Bottom of a holding tank, for instance.

It is not history. It's a prop. It is a monument to supporters of a proven falsehood of an ideology who were themselves incompetent nincompoops. It is no more significant than the gravestones used as Halloween decorations. It has no history, it is not of history, and, in this case, it is not needed to remind us of history. It's destiny is to be pulverized matter under the festering feces of the whole of the Washington, DC metro area. Any money spent in "preserving" it in the meantime must, to achieve any semblance of justice, be donated seven times over to the nearest Holocaust Museum or Museum of Tolerance.
posted by aureliobuendia at 12:03 AM on July 5, 2017 [4 favorites]

that statue was there for over a hundred years and pretending that that wasn't the case is doublespeak of the highest order.

Uh, maybe you want to re-read Nineteen Eighty-Four to review the process by which Winston Smith and his co-workers at Minitrue went about revising history. I'm pretty sure that leaving the very-heavily-covered news of the removal and the subsequent protests intact wasn't part of that.
posted by Halloween Jack at 7:01 AM on July 5, 2017 [1 favorite]

Pedantry: Doublespeak was not a term actually used in Nineteen Eighty-four. Orwell used "doublethink."
posted by Chrysostom at 7:28 AM on July 5, 2017 [1 favorite]