One of the most insidious, and perhaps ultimately one of the most dangerous, manifestations of neo-Nazi resurgence may well be its steady subversive infiltration of contemporary popular and consumer culture.
Rabidly bigoted -- anti-Semitic, anti-Roma, generally xenophobic -- modern day neo-Nazi parties and movements such as Jobbik in Hungary and Golden Dawn in Greece are relatively easy to identify and fight through political, judicial and legislative means. They are the violent heirs of the Nazi Brown Shirts, the S.A., who terrorized non-fascist Germans throughout much of the 1920's and early 1930's as part of Hitler's rise to eventual absolute power.
Then there are the more nuanced modern-day fascists such as Marine Le Pen's Front National in France who combine reactionary views with a calculated strategic effort to make themselves appear more palatable to the political mainstream, often with frightening success. Still, these ultra-right wing extremist movements and parties are relatively easy to identify and expose for what they are -- at the end of the day they leave little to the imagination. Bigotry, after all, remains bigotry regardless of any intellectual or dialectic attempts to legitimize the preying on fears and often deep-seated prejudices. But below the radar screen, there are nefarious attempts to legitimize Nazism and all that Nazism stood for in the popular psyche under the guise of cutting edge fashion, perverse home decoration, and even crass, prurient sexual exploitation. Among some of the more egregious recent examples are:
•The peddling of silver "Swastika Rings" on Sears' online Marketplace that "are going to make you look beautiful at your next dinner date." Faced with consumer outrage, Sears quickly yanked this example of what had been described as "gothic jewelry" and removed the offending vendor from its site.
•The sale on the Walmart, Sears' and Amazon websites of a "home decoration" poster featuring the "Arbeit Macht Frei" ("Work makes you free") gate of the Dachau concentration camp. All three retailers pulled this item after their attention was called to it. "We were horrified to see that this item was on our site," declared Walmart. "We sincerely apologize, and worked quickly to remove it."
•The Spanish retail clothing chain Zara was forced to apologize for marketing a striped concentration-camp-like tee shirt complete with a six-pointed yellow star. For what it's worth, Zara had previously sold handbags embossed with swastikas. Lovely.
The latest, and possibly the most nausea-inducing example of this particular fad is an ever so sexy beauty pageant out of the former Soviet Union. Before it was apparently suspended by the Russian social media site Vkontakte, a page on that website solicited women who consider themselves Nazis to submit photosof themselves and statements on precisely why they admire Hitler.
To be eligible, according to the contest's rules, a contestant had to be, among other things, "a woman Nazi" and "a woman who hates Jews."
Among the entries are sultry Ekaterina Matveeva from St. Petersburg, Russia, who proclaims that "Adolf Hitler's position is genius and true, that races are different not only in appearance, but also in intelligence," and Katya Shkredova from Mogilev, Belarus, who "adores Adolf" and loves his willingness to "experiment on people."
The winner of this revolting pageant was to be crowned Miss Ostland -- the name given by the Nazis to the German occupation regime for the territory covering Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and part of what is today western Belarus -- and receive a piece of jewelry featuring one of the Nordic runes that were popular with Heinrich Himmler and his SS. Second prize: a pendant with the German Iron Cross.
Granted, there is no indication that this particular beauty contest ever had a mass or even large-scale following. Nevertheless, it is a timely and potent reminder that neo-Nazism in its vilest form is enjoying a significant revival among at least some segments of society, and the Vkontakte page in question purportedly did have more than 7,000 Russian and Ukrainian followers.
In Kentucky, a white supremacist write-in candidate named Robert Edward Ransdell who is running for the US Senate is posting signs proclaiming "With Jews We Lose" that leave little to the imagination. Ransdell also took advantage of an invitation to participate in the University of Kentucky's Constitution Week to spew his anti-Semitic bile to college and high school students.
And in Sydney, Australia, a neo-Nazi group is sending out flyers declaring that "It's time for all White Australians to stop being blinded by political correctness and Jewish lies about equality, multiculturalism and the need for so called diversity. Diversity really means white genocide."
To be sure, much of the virulent present-day anti-Semitism emanates from Radical Islamic and leftist pro-Palestinian sources. But these are increasingly finding disturbing common ground with the extreme right.
Cries of "Gas the Jews" are suddenly being heard once more in demonstrations in Germany and elsewhere. "The fear is that now things are blatantly being said openly, and no one is batting an eyelid," Jessica Frommer, who works for a nonprofit organization in Brussels, told the New York Times. "Modern Europe is based on stopping what happened in the Second World War. And now 70 years later, people standing near the European Parliament are shouting, 'Death to Jews!' "
As Ambassador Ronald S. Lauder, the president of the World Jewish Congress, has emphasized, the prevailing atmosphere in which anti-Semitism has become acceptable empowers other equally odious manifestations of bigotry. "When hundreds of thousands of Christians -- men, women and children -- are killed, this isn't war," he declared at a recent gathering of Evangelical Christians in Jerusalem. "This is genocide. And we Jews know what happens when the world is silent to genocide."
"Anti-Semitism has always been, historically, the inability to make space for differences among people, which is the essential foundation of a free society," Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, emeritus chief rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the British Commonwealth, wrote in the Wall Street Journal. "That is why the politics of hate now assaults Christians, Bahai, Yazidis and many others, including Muslims on the wrong side of the Sunni/Shia divide, as well as Jews. To fight it, we must stand together, people of all faiths and of none. The future of freedom is at stake, and it will be the defining battle of the 21st century."
As we approach the 70th anniversary of the end of the Holocaust and the liberation of the Nazi death and concentration camps by Allied troops, we must bear in mind that while the Third Reich was defeated at the end of World War II, the ideology that made possible the genocide of European Jewry is very much alive throughout much of the supposedly civilized world. We ignore or dismiss its presence in our midst at our peril.
Menachem Z. Rosensaft is General Counsel of the World Jewish Congress and teaches about the law of genocide and war crimes trials at the laws school of Columbia and Cornell Universities. He is the editor of God, Faith & Identity from the Ashes: Reflections of Children and Grandchildren of Holocaust Survivors (Jewish Lights Publishing), available December 2014