Something very disturbing about the post above caused a reaction in me I am not proud of: I waved it aside. All the chatter about trolls in the last week - what is a troll, who here might be one, how to defeat them by ignoring them, etc. - made me think the best thing to do was nothing. This morning I believe that I was wrong.

Oddly, I'm not talking about the content of Lee's post itself. We've all read, and perhaps even heard spoken aloud, words like those. I was even, in my "benefit of the doubt" way, wiling to grant the possibility of parody or sarcasm - a common usage here. Then I recalled the overall pattern apparent in all of Lee's posts, things like eugenics, his allusion earlier this week to the National Front, his "joke" about the yellow jackass... In this one, what finally caused me to act was the reference to the Frei Corps. It sounded familiar, but I couldn't place it precisely, so I Googled the term. Among the first things I found was a history of the 45th Infantry Division, the Thunderbirds - who, along with the 42nd ("Rainbow"), liberated Dachau.

The 45th Infantry Division was formed in 1923, and on August 11, 1924, it adopted an ancient symbol used by Native Americans, called the swastika. A militia group in Germany, called the Frei Corps, had already adopted the swastika and was using the symbol on arm bands that they wore in 1919 when they fought the Communists in the streets of Bavaria. Many of the early leaders of the Nazi party came from the ranks of the Frei Corps, and the party also adopted the swastika as its symbol in the early 1920ies. By 1938, Nazi Germany had become very unpopular and the 45th Thunderbird Division wisely decided to replace its emblem in April 1939 with the Thunderbird, another Native American symbol.
[emphasis added]

Switching to the German spelling, Freikorps, I found this capsule bit of history:

After the First World War former senior officers in the German Army began raising private armies called Freikorps. These were used to defend the German borders against the possibility of invasion from the Red Army. Later they were used against attempts at revolution in Germany.



General Franz Epp led 30,000 soldiers to crush the Bavarian Socialist Republic in March, 1919. It is estimated that Epp's men killed over 600 communists and socialists over the next few weeks.

Herman Ehrhardt, a former naval commander and Wolfgang Kapp, a right-wing journalist, led a group of soldiers to take control of Berlin in March 1920. The Kapp Putsch was defeated by a general strike of trade unionists and Kapp was forced to flee to Sweden.

The Freikorps were dissolved in 1921 and later many of them joined Sturm Abteilung (Storm Section), the private army of Adolf Hitler.



[Readers of German (SDAI, Raoul - others?) may find this instructional as well]

More references may be found here, including a British Freikorps, a.k.a. "The Legion of St. George".

This leaves little doubt in my mind as to the true nature of Lee's character. The question we must address now is: What, if any thing, do we do about it?