What a short cut to style. How children must tremble at the sight of you.
Maori gangs used to wear Nazi regalia, but that stopped a while back. Maybe they realised how many Maori men had died fighting against what those symbols stood for.
It takes a while, with some people, for the penny to drop.
These days fascist gear seems to be casual, to judge from the photographs of current devotees. Tailoring is expensive, especially when you’re not running the country as yet and can’t get it subsidised. T-shirts seem to be the go, and black jeans.
In group portraits, young fascists look less like licensed psychopaths than saddos dressed up for a party but permanently lacking an invitation.
Why are fascists so young? Because they’d need to be. In the first place, anybody whose father fought in the war against fascism grew up around first-hand memories of what happened and knew refugees who fled here, along with their stories. And second, you have to be young to know so much.
It’s taken me years to forget most of what I knew when I was the age of Nic Miller, for example, who’s just 22.
Mr Miller is a Lower Hutt aluminium machinist. He hates Jews. I doubt that he knows any personally, but that never stopped anyone. He recently published, on the Internet, the names, photographs, addresses and phone numbers of some local Jews who’d written letters to a newspaper about Israel, and I don’t think he intended that people would be sending them flowers.
Among those on the list was Professor Peter Munz, 85, a formidable intellectual with an international reputation. Professor Munz is Jewish, but points out that he is not a Zionist – a believer in the primary importance of having a state of Israel.
The courage it would take to identify and vilify a diminutive 85-year-old intellectual on the basis of their parentage is underwhelming, but nonetheless true to the Nazi spirit. Mr Miller calls himself a “national socialist”, by the way, which means the same thing.
“I’m anti-Semitic,” he says. “I do not like the Jews, not one bit. They should have been exterminated.”
I can’t help comparing his bleak and narrow life and outlook with Clare Galambos-Winter, the 82-year-old Jewish violinist who just endowed Victoria University with two annual violin scholarships, having already donated valuable violins.
Mrs Galambos-Winter is Hungarian. She emigrated here in l948, and played the violin professionally for 50 years, 33 of them in the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra. She is a survivor of Auschwitz, the notorious Nazi death camp. Most of her family was murdered in concentration camps.
“New Zealand gave me a reason for living,” she said the other day, explaining that the scholarships were a way of showing her appreciation to her adopted country. “I had a terrible youth surviving Auschwitz and all that.
“For 30 years I couldn’t talk about my experience at all because if you lose your parents and you lose everybody, it is such a shattering experience.”
I hope nothing terrible happens to Miller before he finishes growing up.
Life in easygoing New Zealand is an ordeal, to be sure.
However, with courage and tenacity he may overcome it, and contribute something of value to the world.
