True story.
I'm a Tarantino movie fan. I find fault with plenty in his movies, but I enjoy most of them. Would be happy to discuss my reviews of his movies another time. Regardless, my current favorite is Inglorious Basterds. One reason is that it calls back to a time when we knew Nazis were the bad guys.
My son is a WWII buff, stemming originally from his love of battleships because WWII was the apex of the battleship. However, his love of WWII sucked him into tanks as well, particularly German and Russian tanks. At 13 year old, I would bet he could outdo all but the best read historians among this group on the details of Operation Barbarossa. I bet CWS and CD could give him a run for his money, but I'd take odds against anyone else, including me.
So, a couple of years ago we started playing World of Tanks on the X Box. It appeals to our interest in tanks. And it's fun. It's a guilty pleasure--judge me if you must.
Anyway, the highest, best use of that game is in multi-player, where you play in two teams of 15 players. Your team is linked, and you can talk to the other members of your team. Generally, as with the anonymity of the internet, the "group chat" is a toxic mix of men screaming expletives at their teammates, blaming them for all manner of ills in the game. So we turn off the group chat feature. But you can also join a "platoon" that gets assigned to teams together. In that platoon, you can use the chat function to limit who you are talking to, so you're not involved in the toxicity of the anonymous group chat.
Over time you run into people that seem like minded enough that you join platoons with them. So the other night, I'm playing with a group of folks. One was from Pennsylvania, one Texas, and one somewhere I didn't catch. Texas guy says, so my grandfather as an SS officer in WWII, and served in Hitler's protection team. He starts to brag about it. Pennsylvania guy says, "How are we supposed to feel about the SS, now?" and these three guys laugh about it, but not the, "of course that's horrible" kind of laugh.
Now, there's some ambiguity here. Maybe Pennsylvania was trying to figure out how to address Texas's family's military history. I get that military service to one's country is an honorable pursuit, and it doesn't mean support for that country's terrible causes. Heck, I served in a war effort (to be clear, not combat service) that I fundamentally disagreed with. I get that; it wasn't my choice--I signed up to do what We the People told me to do, and I did it. I understand that. And I understand the pride in a family's historical military service. But the conversation I was listening too sure didn't sound like it was acknowledging and working around that ambiguity.
How did we get to a place where serving in the SS wasn't automatically a negative?
