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Wow PO1 Tony Holland since it is the Atlantic I am not surprised at the over-the-top imagery in the article "Last Saturday, self-proclaimed white nationalists carried torches through Charlottesville, Virginia, to invoke the racist legacy of Nazi Germany. Fire is more than a dramatic flare. In a charged context, it signals violence and destruction. The Nazi regime began by carrying torches at parades and rallies and, by 1938, burning buildings and Torah scrolls. It eventually burnt the bodies of millions of human beings. The very word Holocaust derives from the Greek, meaning sacrifice by fire.
Marching with torches in the American South has an additional, more specific resonance—nights of fire bombs and lynchings. In the 1920s and ‘30s, members of the Ku Klux Klan marched in torchlight parades, harnessing the theater of terror. White hoods and flame were their stagecraft. For the Nazis, it was the swastika, the jackboot, and fire. On January 30, 1933, torchlight parades announced the onset of the Nazi regime as Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany."
The accompanying image shows people - mostly men with a few woman walking along with torches. As somebody very familiar with WWII history, the image did not resemble the Nazi torchlight processions with goose-stepping brown-shirts SA or black-uniformed SS.
The comparison to KKK was also off since the KKK tends to wear hoods in public while this group was not attempting to hide themselves. I am fairly certain that white supremacists were intermingled in this group; however, what has been lost in the narrative is that many were showing up to support keeping the statue of Robert E. Lee where it was - not to trample anybody's rights.
FYI COL Mikel J. Burroughs LTC Stephen C. Maj William W. "Bill" Price Capt Christopher Mueller Capt Seid Waddell CW5 (Join to see) SMSgt Minister Gerald A. Thomas SGM David W. Carr LOM, DMSM MP SGT SFC Joe S. Davis Jr., MSM, DSL SSgt (Join to see) SP5 Mark Kuzinski SGT John " Mac " McConnell SGT Robert George SP5 Robert Ruck SCPO Morris RamseyCPL Eric Escasio SPC (Join to see) SrA Christopher Wright SPC Margaret Higgins

What I find baffling is that the divide has become so deep in this country that people are willing to start finding moral equivalency in groups that they are politically opposed with to Nazi's and the KKK. Not just rhetorically, but when there are actual neo-nazis and real KKK groups on offer. We've started to step back 50+ years to the bad old days.