Earlier this month, over 30 employees of West Virginia’s Division of Corrections and Rehabilitation were suspended over a photo clearly showing its latest class of prison guard trainees making stiff-armed Nazi salutes.
The caption above the photo of the group of guards reads “Hail Byrd!”, the name of the class’ training instructor. No word on whether “Byrd” was one of the two trainers summarily fired after the incident.
Meanwhile, an investigation into how 30 men got caught up into the spirit of fascism continues. It’s likely that every one of the 30 trainees who “cosplayed” their fealty to the Third Reich while wearing fresh new prison officer uniforms will lose their job. Law enforcement photographed acting like Hitler Youth is unacceptable on the most primal of levels — as it should be.
In recent years, high school senior yearbook photos have featured students doing Nazi salutes, but not with the same choreographed panache as West Virginia prison guards.
High school students who may have just completed a unit on World War II are still enough in touch with notions of right and wrong to know they’re doing something vaguely antisocial.
When high school kids are caught being fashionably fascist, they’re still young enough to claim that they weren’t really saluting Hitler as much as waving at mom standing just outside the frame of the picture. That’s because there’s little ambiguity about the meaning of Nazi salutes.
Still, there are plenty of Americans of all ages who love Hitler but don’t quite have the courage of their convictions to state it publicly. They leave the stiff-armed Hitler salutes to morons and pranksters.
The preferred expression of allegiance to white power these days is an upside down “OK” symbol, made pressing the thumb and forefinger together to form a circle while the remaining fingers point down. The hand has to be kept below the waist. It’s a move you really have to think about because it requires racist intent to flash an upside-down OK.
Over the weekend, the United States Military Academy announced it had appointed a “preliminary inquiry officer to conduct an internal investigation into the hand gestures” made by Army cadets and Navy midshipmen during a nationally televised pregame show during Saturday’s Army-Navy football game in Philadelphia.
Because President Donald Trump was at the game, the white power hand gestures were more ubiquitous than usual (or folks simply notice them more because of the tenor of the times).
After years of denial, the U.S. Military Academy realizes that it has a problem with white supremacists in the ranks and has vowed to root them out.
The racists already in place can influence recruits who aren’t sophisticated enough to make the connection between America’s fight against Hitler’s Germany in WWII, the racist ideology embodied by Pepe the Frog, and the suburbanized American fascists who befriended and taught them the white power sign in the first place.
Flashing signs of their intolerance is just a game these young cadets and midshipmen are playing — or so they think. Like the seniors in the yearbook photos, or even the older “Hail Byrd!” gang in West Virginia, they don’t see how their gestures supporting the memes of white power can threaten the fabric of our society.
It would never occur to them to ask why Milo Yiannopoulos, the former Breitbart editor and alt-right provocateur, uses the gesture to gin up his ever decreasing crowds of supporters. The American Nazi Richard B. Spencer uses both Hitler salutes and the white power thumb-and-forefinger to signal to his followers what he’s about.
Roger Stone, the recently convicted political adviser and friend of Mr. Trump, was photographed with the far-right group the Proud Boys in 2018 flashing the white power sign. Presidential adviser and suspected white nationalist Stephen Miller, recently exposed for his regular pre-White House contacts with Breitbart.com, was photographed making the same elaborate hand gestures years ago, though he maintains that he was doing no such thing, contrary to all photographic evidence.
Then there are all of the “nobodies” who generate instant notoriety by doing the hand gestures and finger signs in photographs and on TV: the Coast Guard officer who used the sign during an MSNBC show and the four cops in Jasper, Ala., who thought it would be funny to flash the signs and preserve the photographic evidence that got them fired.
On the other extreme is the white supremacist in New Zealand who killed 51 Muslims earlier this year. During his trial, he flashed the upside-down white power sign to reporters and court officers determining his fate.
Despite a few voices on the right accusing the left of being “easily triggered” by cartoons and OK signs, in March, the Anti-Defamation League officially classified the gesture as a “hate sign.” The ADL and other civil rights organizations now track the outbreaks and uses of this gesture across the culture.
None of this is a surprise or even disputable in hardcore hate circles. They’re proud of the fact that a once innocuous gesture that began on 4Chan and other online hate sites as a way to “troll liberals” was quickly appropriated by genuine fascists and Nazis. Once the worst people in America fully embraced it as a racist, anti-Semitic meme, it was only a matter of time before it trickled down to those who merely flirt with “white power” without fully committing to it.
No wonder that the most ahistorical people in our society are able to treat it like a game instead of the serious affront to our national values it represents. They’re too stupid to realize that the upside-down OK gesture they think is so funny is a middle finger to democracy itself.
Tony Norman: tnorman@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1631.
First Published: December 17, 2019, 10:00 a.m.