Posted on 02/10/2012 4:37:35 AM PST by KantianBurke
SAN DIEGO – The Marine Corps on Thursday once again did damage control after a photograph surfaced of a sniper team in Afghanistan posing in front of a flag with a logo resembling that of the notorious Nazi SS -- a special unit that murdered millions of Jews, gypsies and others. The Corps said in a statement that using the symbol was not acceptable, but the Marines in the photograph taken in September 2010 will not be disciplined because investigators determined it was a naive mistake. The Marines believed the SS symbol was meant to represent sniper scouts and never intended to be associated with a racist organization, said Maj. Gabrielle Chapin, a spokeswoman at Camp Pendleton, where the Marines were based.
Rabbi Marvin Hier, founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, headquartered in Los Angeles, said he does not buy the explanation that posing with the flag was an innocent mistake and insisted the American public has a right to know what happened.
"If you look at any book on the Nazi period, this is the dreaded symbol of the SS, and to have a Marine Corps unit adopt it and put it beside the American flag when 200,000 Americans died to free the world of that dreaded symbol is just beyond the pale," he said.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
Those who took a solemn oath to “Protect & Defend the Constitution” are still present in the Military.
How many Marine Scout Snipers do you know personally? I have one in my family. He served in Iraq and Afghanistan.
When they use SS it means Scout Sniper. Period. End of story.
I go to a Sunday School picnic every year. The sign they put out on the road at the beginning of the driveway says “SS Picnic”. The S’s are like lightning bolts. This picnic has been attended by countless WWII veterans who fought in the ETO. They fought and killed Nazi’s. NOT ONE of these veterans has ever said a word. No one driving by the sign has ever complained.
Since I don’t cut slack to anyone on the “frontline” of his keyboard, I resent and reject your cheap shot that “anyone here(Free Republic)who tries to pretend it’s anything other than the notorious runic symbols is full of crap.”
The only person “full of crap” is the person who would write such a stupid comment.
Frehley was known to don Nazi garb while in the presence of his two Jewish bandmates, Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley.
There are plenty of posts here by others calling these Marines ‘stupid’ and/or outright stating that they MUST have known what the ‘SS’ on that flag meant before they were photographed with it.
In fact, my “entirely feasible” comment was a RESPONSE to someone who had stated that there was no way they could NOT have known what the ‘SS’ letters meant when they used them. You would know that, though, if you had bothered to follow the thread instead of mindlessly fixating on a couple of very innocuous words from my post.
In short, I have never besmirched the honor of those who serve our country — not on this thread, or any other, in my entire history here at Free Republic.
The facts that for whatever reason, you have chosen me as a target for your unwarranted attacks this morning, and that you have chosen to intentionally misconstrue what I have written, does not change that. Now, please leave me alone and go use your poor reading comprehension skills to make a horse's ass of yourself to someone else.
Actually, it IS a fairly poor repro of a Nazi SS division standard. You see these for sale all the time at small gun shows. I never knew who would buy them. Now I do.
Navytimes has another photo of a Marine with the SS on his rifle but it is a Gannet publication so I can’t link to it.
And it is not the use of the letters SS that is problematic in the picture - it is the nazi-runic form of the SS.
As I said, I cut the guys in the field miles of slack...not so with those here who try to spin and whitewash what was a dumb move -- dumb in the inescapable fact that it gives the anti-military left a convenient and hard to argue talking point.
Really? I thought people were responsible. Symbols are powerful, but they aren't that powerful.
I agree that the use of the SS runes by our Marines is unacceptable, but the calls for these young men to be court-martialed and ruined are insane. Take the flag away and give them some extra duty.
Sorry, but I have a good education and read a lot of history - and I would not have recognized it. My WW2 reading is primarily aviation. Yes, I’ve seen the SS insignia before, but I probably wouldn’t think about it unless someone brought it up first.
Of course, I owned a horse for 3 years before I noticed she had a white spot on her forehead, so I’m not real observant about a lot of things.
Your point seems well taken to me.
Probably some smart NCO should’ve (and, probably did) realize how the “SS” symbol could be interpreted negatively by the general public; and, thus reflect poorly upon the Marine Corps. Corrective action should’ve taken place at the NCO level ...and from what I’ve heard reported probably did. That should’ve been it ...end of story.
I would suspect individuals w/an anti-Marine Corps “agenda” are involved in the recent mass promulgation of controversial images of Marines in order to create a negative impression of the Marine Corps w/the general public.
Regards,
-Geoff
I'm as opposed to politically correct garbage as anyone else.
But that **IS** the SS symbol.
Apparently, based on the photo, at least 10 snipers and a photographer didn't know that. I suppose it's possible they knew and didn't care, but the internal investigation showed that wasn't true. Honest mistakes happen and need to be handled as honest mistakes.
Yeah, we can blame our education system, as hot tabasco and lots of others did. And they're right.
But even watching Hogans Heroes reruns would have taught that, as Andy58-in-nh said, “Anyone with a modest grade school education or even a passing interest in military history ought to know exactly what that symbol means.”
I can tolerate (barely) our public schools not teaching history, but these are members of the Armed Forces. This wasn't just one junior enlisted guy, but ten snipers plus a photographer. Are they not being taught the history of past American military conflicts?
I think the real problem is that we've got soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines who don't know their own country's history. Teaching people to be technically proficient snipers is flat-out dangerous if they don't have the knowledge of American history and values to know why we're telling them to shoot people... and perhaps more importantly, why it's okay to shoot our enemies and not okay to shoot in some circumstances no matter what the commander says.
The Nazis caused their soldiers to follow orders out of fear. It's also possible to cause soldiers to follow orders out of ignorance. Do we want that?
Maybe some young Marine captain or grizzled gunny needs to sit these guys down with a stack of DVDs of old World War II newsreels to show them more about Nazis and why we fought them.
Of course, some explanation of the role of the Nazis using the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem to recruit Islamic soldiers for the SS in the Balkans might be helpful, and showing the Grand Mufti's later connections to the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and to Arafat might help show these Marines just how bad the links are between Nazi hatred of Jews and modern Islamofascism... but I suppose that's too much to ask our modern military to teach its uniformed personnel.
Never mind that we taught as much if not more to World War II servicemen about Nazi ideology and why we need to fight it. That's why the old newsreels can be so helpful — we used to teach stuff to average Americans that now doesn't get touched outside upper-level college classes.
67 posted on Friday, February 10, 2012 8:24:11 AM by wtc911: “Anybody here though who tries to pretend it's anything other than the notorious SS runic symbols is full of crap.”
I thought the same until I saw the graphic at post 52. Apparently this symbol has been in use for years.
It looks like the Marines are handling this entirely appropriately. Notice that the SS symbol is **ALREADY** considered inappropriate, via this list:
http://www.yuma.usmc.mil/services/eo/documents/tattoos.ppt
These comments to Army Times by Allen Falk, national commander of the Jewish War Veterans of the United States of America, seem entirely appropriate: “We believe that these young men likely did not understand the significance of this symbol, and we call on the Marine Corps to increase education on American history,” he said. “This issue goes beyond one of racism or anti-Semitism. Our fellow Americans fought and died to stop the Nazis, and it is shameful for any member of the military to display the symbols of Nazi Germany.”
The military absolutely needs a zero-tolerance policy towards cameras, especially in forward areas, and toward social networks in all cases.
Policy or no, if I were an NCO I'd smash any camera that I found in my squad while deployed in a combat area, and I'd chew the hell out of any guy from another unit that I caught with a camera. This crap has to stop.
The cluelessness of many on this thread is making me sick. That you would side with the PC police on this. The Marines’ flag was clearly for their Scout Sniper unit and not meant as one of those ink-blot tests.
To buy into this fabricated story and turn on Marines is appalling. There is never a word from the media about the Che t-shirts so many “youth” wear or the 100 million that Communists murdered, largely Christians, in 20th century alone. It is the Communists who continue to rape and pillage to this day. It is the Communists who control the media, the entertainment industry, the gubt skools, everything in D.C.
To buy into this fabricated story and turn on Marines is appalling. There is never a word from the media about the Che t-shirts so many “youth” wear or the 100 million that Communists murdered, largely Christians, in 20th century alone. It is the Communists who continue to rape and pillage to this day. It is the Communists who control the media, the entertainment industry, the gubt skools, everything in D.C.
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Agreed. My neighbor a nice kid, showed up with a Mao cap from one of dad’s travels recently. I chewed him out thoroughly for wearing symbols of government mass killings in my home. He didnt know and didnt think. And we are quiet in our acquiesence of such things.
This. They simply thought it looked cool and probably didn't fully weigh the ramifications. Fact is, the Nazis took great pains in creating "cool" looking insignias and uniforms, designed to appeal to the young men they would enlist to fight.
I'm reminded of something I did when I was younger. A buddy and myself built a Volkswagen Baja Bug to do some off-road racing. We painted it desert tan and carefully stenciled a baltic cross like this one on the two doors:
We weren't Nazis. We just thought it looked cool (and it did!)
The 'SS' symbol stands for Scout Snipers.
As long as they are made to understand the nature of the twin lightning bolt symbol in relation to American history and the Marine Corps' own brave contributions to keeping America free from tyranny, I think they will be properly chastened.
I sometimes forget that I am now of an older generation for whom Nazism and its symbols were of far more recent vintage when I was a young man. Those of us who were born in the '40s and '50s knew those symbols implicitly as well as what they represented. When I was a kid and we played war games (with actual toy guns, Heaven forbid!), we often pretended to fight the Germans and Japanese, as our fathers had.
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