The Original Scout Salute

Actually even though I think this picture was taken in Lithuania, the salute was clearly virtually the same as the salute ("raised hand", at any rate) for making the Pledge of Allegiance in America. This old way of doing things I believe pertained in America up until the 1930s, when it suddenly became politically incorrect - for some reason.

In 1939 Lord Baden-Powell noted in his diary:

Lay up all day. Read Mein Kampf. A wonderful book, with good ideas on education, health, propaganda, organization etc.—and ideals which Hitler does not practice himself.

He also admired Mussolini, and some early Scouting badges had a swastika symbol on them. He maintained that his use of the symbol related to its earlier, original meaning of "good luck" in Sanskrit, for which purpose the symbol had been used for centuries prior to the rise of fascism.

Baden-Powell was a target of the Nazi regime in the Black Book, which listed individuals which were to be arrested during and after an invasion of Great Britain as part of Operation Sealion. Scouting was regarded as a dangerous spy organization by the Nazis.

See also: 'Baden-Powell and boy scouts' [sic]

Gay Fascists

Is it possible for there to be gay fascists, or is this a contradiction in terms?

The essence of fascism is strength through unity, giving rise to force that is arbitrary, ungoverned by human reason and violent. And yet at the same time it is force that is harnessed to particular human goals, and particularly to political ones. Arguably, these political goals are not necessarily themselves "fascist" - and yet in the end any seemingly rational, idealistically formulated goal that fascists themselves may have will ultimately be subverted for the want of reason in the means. What began in violence will end violently and the original goal will be forgotten, because if a society is based on violence then violence will become an end in itself. Human reason will be discarded and man will degenerate until he reaches the level merely of a highly sophisticated animal.

For me the single best film about Nazism ever made was actually an American propaganda cartoon for children, produced during the War by Walt Disney. It's called Education for Death: The Making of a Nazi and it's viewable on YouTube here. There's a rumour floating around that it is now banned, and if that's true then it's shocking: such a ban can only serve the purposes of the neo-Nazi "Far-Right" - partly because it doesn't mention the Holocaust, and so a ban would fuel the paranoia of the Holocaust-deniers, and partly because given that it doesn't mention the Holocaust it's all the more chilling an exploration of pure fascist ideology in all its irrational and irreligious brutality. The second best Nazi film is of course Triumph of the Will - and the very title says it all (i.e. that according to the Nazi doctrine it is the will that is supreme - that is to say the pure, brute appetites of man - rather than his "divine spark", which is his reason).

Given that this is the true nature of fascism, one would have to ask why homosexual appetites should be thought of as more rational - and hence less "susceptible" to fascism - than hetersosexual ones. It would be very difficult even for the most committed of "homosexualists" to demonstrate that they are. And indeed there is plenty of evidence that gay fascists have existed (and do exist) both in fascist movements of the Second World War and in nearly every fascistic political movement that has grown up since.

A few years ago now the "liberal" Johann Hari had a silly but entertaining article, in which he gave plenty of examples of this latter phenomenon. It's just about worth another look. The one problem that he does find himseld faced with is of course the myth of the "Gay Holocaust". Having hitched their cart to the anti-Nazi (and thus the Shoah-business) bandwagon, homosexuals cannot let facts then get in their way. In reality concentration camps were not the same as "death camps" but were in fact often used to house common criminals as well as "political" prisoners; and the Nazis did not "ban" homosexuality, much less did they wage an anti-gay genocide against homosexuals. (Homosexuality was illegal in Germany before the Nazis came to power, and after the Third Reich was overthrown it continued to be illegal up until the 1960s.)

As with those who would try to discredit Christianity by putting up pictures of Hitler going to church and so on, attacking homosexuals for the fascistic tendencies of some homosexuals does betray a certain lack of logic. Yes, some fascists are and always have been "gay", just as some Christians are and have been in the past. More to the point though, there is no logical reason why a homosexual should not be drawn towards fascism - or at least any less than a Christian should be. If one is to understand the problem of fascism, and indeed the nature and extent of that problem, one must look into the nature of fascism itself and do so quite dispassionately. A lot of Christians and homosexuals (and indeed Socialists!) may find the results of such research disturbing. But the first and most important thing to know about fascism is that it has a near universal appeal, and this should not be seen as reflecting badly on any one group or other.

UPDATE: The revelation that Joerg Haider was partying at a gay bar in Klagenfurt shortly before his untimely death in a bizarre Princess Di-style car crash has prompted more fond ramblings from Hari. [H/T: Irving] The figure of '10,000 gay people [who] were slaughtered in the Nazi death-camps' is of course total fiction - unless he's assuming that of the putative six million Jews who died in the gas-chambers only 0.16 per cent were actually gay, which even I'd say seems suspiciously low. Yes, gays were send to concentration camps, but that was because homosexuality in Germany was illegal. A number of them, indeed, may well have died in them. But there was certainly no "Holocaust" against them in the same way that there was (probably - when all is said and done) against the Jews. (On the other hand Hari confuses the Spartans at the Battle of Thermopylae - who were not gay, except possibly in dodgy modern movie versions that have them sporting leather underpants, digitally modified abdominal muscles and not much else - and the legend of the Sacred Band of Thebes. He's clearly no more comfortable with history than homosexuals in general are with reality.)