Graham Platner's tattoo (and other things)

I'm not wasting massive time on it. And, I'm only providing one link as a direct reference link — Snopes. Then two other backgrounders plus an image.

I broadly agree on two things.

One is that, unless we have a much better photo than an underlit video-grab from more than a decade ago, it's hard to say how closely his tattoo resembled the Totenkopf.

And, that — the Totenkopf — is the second link. Not to justify it, today, but it has a pre-Nazi and even a pre-German past. 

And, not even a past! The Royal Lancers in the UK use their own version of it today. 

As for him not knowing what it meant?

Quite possible. How much does the average 22-year-old or whatever Marine enlisted man who has not gone past high school level know about this imagery, versus of course the swastika. For all you doing callouts, was the Totenkopf covered in your high school world history class? Did you know what it was before you decided this was a good opportunity to dogpile on him? 

And, that would be one thing enough if he got it at a bar near an American base.

Instead, he's in Croatia getting drunk in a bar with fellow Marines. Did ANY of them know what this symbol meant?

Or rather, per pre-WWII Germany and today's Royal Lancers, did it just look cool? 

Likely the latter, though not as cool as the Royal Lancers.

Meanwhile, an ultra-Orthodox retweeting racist Richard Hanania to try to "own the Zionists" or whatever he was doing is on pretty shaky ground doing a callout of Platner, then getting indignant when I called them a Zionist. Lie down with fleas ...

Now, as for the Croatian tattoo shop owner? Given the Ustashe in World War II, complete with a Croatian SS unit (founded before the 1st Galician of modern Russia-Ukraine infamy) followed by the right-wing thuggery of Franjo Tudjman as first leader of post-independence Croatia, I have little doubt they knew at least the general history of the Totenkopf. 

This is not to say that I don't find Graham Platner troubling.

Obviously, I can't read all his deleted Reddit posts. They were written years later. For someone who claims they were leftist by then, a certain amount of them cut against that grain. And, yes, PTSD is serious and real. But, per the Latin bon mot, "in vino veritas," PTSD doesn't necessarily cause an "alt-persona" to arise. 

This also show that he's a political novice. Experienced candidates running for something as high as a US Senate seat do "oppo research" on themselves to find out in advance what opponents might dig up, and to be prepared in advance. 

I didn't think to check his Wiki much in advance. I'm as troubled by the fact that his family was moneyed enough to send him to an elite prep school like Hotchkiss as anything else, even if he got financial aid. Did he get booted, though? That's not the only high school he attended. The other is also private, originally Catholic but now nonreligious.