We should never forget what insurrectionists did at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. With President Trumps encouragement, overwhelmingly white men and womenstormed the building, hunted for elected officials, flew the Confederate flag, erected a gallows and killed a member of the Capitol Police.

We should also not forget what we saw, asthey sported such disturbing and bizarre iconography from KKK tattoos, Holocaust denial tee shirts and QAnon costumes to Pepe the Frog flags to crusader crosses- that The New York Times published a decoder. More pernicious due to its very ordinariness, however, was their display of every type, styleand color of tactical or paramilitary apparel and gear.In other words, the rioters dressed like many of us do when practicing yoga.

We need to stop wearing the costumes of the far rightnow. Millions of Americans of all political stripes and economic strata unthinkingly don the same uniforms in everyday life that far right extremists have worn in violent, anti-democratic actions at state capitals over the past four years and on Jan. 6, 2021 in Washington, D.C. What should rightly be called militia-chic is everywherefrom camo baseball caps,womensunderwear, and infantrompers.

For some, like Claire Gibson, who lost several friends in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, wearing a used camo jacket is an act of remembrance or respect. Nevertheless, she contended in 2019, the vast majority of Americans consider camo merely a style, even a new neutral.After the events of Jan. 6, it is something far worseand anything but neutral.

Militia chic is but one representation of the militarization of everything that we have experiencedsince the late 1970s.Post-Vietnam commitments to support the troops has morphed into the bipartisan embrace of all things actually and figuratively military not to mention a reluctance to examine in detail the military budget itself. How else to explain that we attend fitness boot camps at local gyms? That we dont question themilitary flyoversat professional, amateur, high school and Little League sporting events? That Rudy Giulianisexpression trial by combattaken literally by the mobwas introduced into popular lexicon through a hit HBO series?

If the past four years have shown us anything, it has shown us that militia chic has long been anything but a representation of respect, a mere style or simple metaphor. It is a politics, more and more closely associated with anti-Black racism, anti-Semitism, anti-immigration, misogyny and other anti-democratic ideas. Historian Kathleen Belew carefully documents the ways in which Vietnam veterans, bitter at the countrys loss to an Asian people, brought the war home by reigniting the KKK and other white nationalist groups in the 1970s and 1980s.Todays groups say much the same: As one member of the alt-right put it, white men have one biological duty:to wage war.

Even if you think your camo boxers represent respect for the military, consider this: members of far right organizations are joining the armed forces at an alarmingly fast clip and finding quarter there. Up to one half of non-white soldiers have witnessedacts of racismandwhite nationalism. But why should this be a surprise when ten current bases are named forConfederate leaders?And conflation between white nationalism in the military and the Confederate flag hardly remains within the borders of the slave-holding South. AConfederate flagflew for years above a Veterans Administration Medical Center in Hot Springs, South Dakota, less than one hundred miles from the site of the final massacre of the Native people of the plains near Wounded Knee.

While some domestic terrorists, like Timothy McVeigh and Ashli Babbitt, are themselvesmilitary veterans,the vast majority of active duty and retired military personnel are not extremists, not insurrectionists, not terrorists. Instead, they are real-life heroes like Rep. Jason Crow (D-Co), whorefusedto leave the floor of the House until his fellow members were safe, with his only tactical gear a suit and tie.

In fact, most domestic terrorists are wannabe soldiers likeDylann Roof, who killed 12 worshippers at the Mother Emmanuel Church in Charleston, S.C.in 2015, and other white men who may not even qualify for military service, but pretend to have the strength and courage embodied by the soldiers they have seen in video games, the internet and on television.Wrapped in an American flag or a Trump flagthey call themselves patriots when they are in fact traitors.

Maybe you think your camo clothes look great. If so, you might want to consider whose outfits match yours. Im throwing mine out.

Catherine McNicol Stock is the Barbara Zaccheo Kohn 72 Professor of History at Connecticut College.She is the author ofRural Radicals: Righteous Rage in the American Grain, Second Edition (2017) and Nuclear Country: The Origins of the Rural New Right(2020)

Originally posted here:

Opinion Still think your camo is cool? - The CT Mirror