The Hypocrisy of the Democrats Who Defend Graham Platner

Nazism and its anti-Semitism have long been regarded as the worst form of evil, serving as a benchmark for irredeemable wrongdoing. Cultural rules and memes reflect how quickly Nazi comparisons are used to signal ultimate condemnation. Recently, tolerance for Nazi symbolism and modern versions of older conspiracy theories has increased within some American political movements seeking short-term gains. Hatred tied to the mass killing of Jews is sometimes reframed as merely “problematic” and treated as explainable or ignorable. A recent example involves Graham Platner, a Democratic candidate for Senate in Maine, whose long-held Totenkopf tattoo links him to the SS, while he offers an innocent explanation for having it for years.

"For decades, Nazism and the anti-Semitism underlying it have marked zero on the Kelvin scale of villainy-the metric against which all other forms of evil are compared. This is so well understood that we now have cultural phenomena such as Godwin's Law, the theory that online debates inevitably lead to Nazi comparisons, and the "everything I don't like is Hitler" meme. But their existence proves the point: If one wishes to say that something is irredeemably bad, Nazis are the benchmark, the absolute."

"Yet recently this understanding seems to have grown less universal. Nazi symbolism and more modern versions of the ancient conspiracy theories behind this intolerable ideology have found a degree of toleration within American political movements desperate for shortsighted victories. The underlying hatred that, among other things, motivated the killing of more than a third of all the Jews on the planet eight decades ago is viewed no longer as unacceptable, but rather somewhere on a scale of "problematic" issues that can be either explained away or ignored."

"The most recent case is that of Graham Platner, the 41-year-old Democrat who is hoping to unseat Senator Susan Collins in Maine. Platner has a unique personal story, having reinvented himself from high-born prep-school student to blue-collar oyster farmer, and from willing Marine who talked about wanting to go to war to kill people (and who later worked for a military contractor) to a victim of Collins's vote to authorize the Iraq War."

"Although Platner is by no means the first politician to reshape his personal narrative during a campaign, he is likely the first to attempt an innocent explanation for having had, for 18 years, a tattoo of a Totenkopf, the insignia of the Schutzstaffel, or SS-the most dedicated and fanatical component of the Third Reich, whose members were the architects and executioners of the Final Solution. Platner has said that he got the tattoo while "carousing" with oth"

Read at The Atlantic