A reader recently sent me a chilling article from the Atlantic magazine. In Ohio, Steve Iott, a Republican congressional candidate  of the "Tea Party" wing of the party has as a hobby activities that would have gotten him thrown into jail during WWII and ostracized for many years afterwards, 

 He has with likeminded associates dressed up as a member of the Hitlerite Waffen SS in order to re-enact battles of WWII.  Iott is a fan of the military achievements of the Waffen SS, but claimed in a subsequent New York Times story that this did not mean that he was a supporter of Nazism.

The NYT story omitted most of what was really important and let Iott and his friends off the hook.  The Atlantic story did not. 

Because it really gets much worse than just the Waffen SS, the tens of thousands of fascist volunteers whom the Nazis recruited to fight  what was their own holy war for a racist imperialist New Order in Europe. The group  of reenactors has its own website, in honor of the Wiking division of the Waffen SS.  Iott (I am tempted to call him Idiot) claims that he and his friends chose Wiking because they fought on the Eastern Front, where of course over 27 million Soviet people, 6 million Polish people, half of them Jewish Poles, the other half mostly of Roman Catholic background perished, along with millions of others.

It then gets much worse.  The group's website in honor of the Wiking division goes on to say "Nazi Germany had no problem in recruiting the multitudes of volunteers  willing to lay down their lives to ensure  a 'new and free Europe', free of the threat of Communism....we salute these idealists: no matter how unsavory the Nazi government was the frontline soldiers of the Waffen--SS (particularly the foreign volunteers) gave their lives for their loved ones and a basic desire to be free."

With the exception of the faint criticisms of the Nazis, this is  recycled Hitlerism minus the rabid anti-Semitism.  The Attantic article has comments from distinguished historians, Charles Sydnor and others who challenge  the complete ahiwtorical absurdities of these views. 

 The best though, and one that should be written on Iott's uniform is from Professor Rob Citino of the Military History Center at the University of North Texas:  The entire German war effort in the East was a racial crusade to rid the world of 'subhumans' Slavs were going to be enslaved in numbers of tens of millions.  And of course the multimillion Jewish population of Eastern Europe was to be exterminated altogether.  That's what these folks were doing in the East.  It sends a shiver up my spine to that that peole want to dress up and play SS on the weekend."

I would add a few points to anyone who  even passively takes Iott seriously on any level.  Freedom in occupied Europe meant freedom from Hitlerite domination.  Those who joined the Waffen SS were largely involved in fascist and ultraright groups before the Nazi occupation gave them a license to kill.  And kill they did.  The Waffen SS, as against the regular German army was along with the Regular SS an organization of murders.   Denying their major role in many atrocities is like denying the Holocaust itself  and those atrocities were not only committed in the East, as if that would be any justificaqtion for them.

 In late 1944 at the Battle of the Bulge for example Waffen SS forces murdered American prisoners of war in the same way that they murdered Soviet prisoners, partisans and innocent bystanders in the East When Ronald Reagan went to a  german military cemetary  at Bitburg which included Waffen SS troops along with regular German army draftees in 1985, this led to a U.S. and international wave of protests which led Reagan to "balance" his trip with a visit to a concentration camp.

I would not call Ronald Reagan a Nazi and I doubt he would dress up in this way except to play a role in the movies, where the characters in Nazi uniforms would be villains.

 Given the statements on the website, I am not so sure about Iott or those who have usurped the name of the Tea Party the way Hitler usurped the term socialist.  If there are Polish Americans in Iott's district, they should know that the Wiking website has video footage of the Nazi "victory parade" in Warsaw in 1939.  The merciless bombing of defenseless Warsaw, the atrocities committed widely by the SS forces against Polish people they regarded as subhuman, are not included in a website dedicated to the exploits of these "idealists."

 But what Iott and his ilk represent in this election is a third wave of Reaganism, which in political terms is less a rising of the angry but the overflowing a cesspool which has been untreated  and allowed to grow over the last three decades  while people were told that from this cesspool would come prosperity and power..

Hopefully, voters on election day will send Iott the message that weekend Nazis, couch potato fascists, have no place in the U.S. Congress.  Hopefully, those on the left who are falling for the media pessimism that a Republican victory is coming will realize the danger that Iott and his friends represent and turn back these sinister reactionary forces.  At best, they would if victorious represent a new 1994 and Gingrich Congress.  At worst, something like the German elections of the early 1930s, when the Nazi party emerged with the largest bloc of seats in the German Reichstag, which frankly a "Tea Party" Republican majority, might resemble.

There is still time to stop them and mobilize to make real the change that voters elected President Obama to carry forward in 2008 and which is the antithesis of everything that the Republican party represents today.