With the news of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas corruption through accepting lavish trips and gifts from right wing billionaire Harlan Crow, who of course happens to be an avid collector of Nazi artifacts, i'd like to see 2+2's opinions on the idea if it's fair to infer someone's values from the things they enjoy keeping..

i'm significantly less interested in the obvious run of the mill corruption of Clarence Thomas and more interested in the online arguments about whether keeping loads of Nazi stuff makes it fair to call someone a nazi sympathizer or not.

if someone goes through the trouble to privately purchase, obtain, and keep Nazi artifacts is it fair to "infer" values from that collection? why? or why not?

if someone goes through the trouble to privately purchase, obtain, and keep Confederacy artifacts is it fair to "infer" values from that collection?

does historical relevance really make complete difference in the situations between keeping a swastika flag in your apartment and keeping an autographed copy of mein keimpf on your desk?

There isn't a simple answer to this question, and it's obviously a question of degree. When I was a teenager, I remembering finding a Nazi armband in a box of WWII stuff at my grandfather's house. I asked him about it. He obviously wasn't a Nazi, and he told me that he took it off the uniform of a Nazi soldier as a reminder of why he had served.

Collecting a ton of Nazi stuff and displaying it of course would seem much more questionable.

I collect books about birds, bird identification books, books about where to find birds in specific regions, etc. It's because I like all that stuff.

It seems reasonable to conclude that someone who collects stuff about Nazis likes Nazis.

It depends on the person and the reasonings. It's a lock that Harlan sympathizes with Nazis. But we are also entering a new world where collectables are looked at and valued differently than before. Artifacts, flags, weapons, signed memorabilia and so forth along those lines are just going to be harder to find and become more valuable. I've been collecting comics for 30 years and comics with swastikas have gone up 3-10x in a few years. Same with certain books now. Even original splash mountain merchandise has shot up. It's a new form of value. I don't have any Nazi stuff but I enjoy collecting old stuff and I would have been perfectly fine morally stocking up on all kinds of that **** ten years ago.

This is always a tricky topic. I am not a collector at all, though I have dealt with avid collectors and they are an interesting personality type. I also have seen people buying and selling tricky merchandise (confederate stuff and such) and when I have asked them about it (especially when demographically they are not the ones who typically would sell such wares) why they do it - often times I am told something along the lines of it is what people want to pay money for, so I sell it. Hard for me to really argue with that as they may as well monetize the derps instead of someone who shares their values as I see it.

i think selling the stuff, while still suspect, is a bit less than displaying the stuff in your house.

i have a framed civil war discharge order of my great whatever grandfather from the Union Army hanging on my wall, so im not sure i can necessarily judge someone for having a similar item from their family that just happened to live in the south.. but everything else confederacy seems suspect.

not trying to debate nazi vs. confederacy in anyway, just bringing it more towards the US history.

I don't think anyone is going to disagree with you that collecting Nazi memorabilia most likely makes someone a Nazi sympathizer. I assume that's what you're looking for but I don't suspect you'll find it.

certainly loads of political commentators online are quite upset about what they believe is the Harlin Crow "slander". both the right and the center left appear to be upset that people are calling him a nazi sympathizer just based on his room full of nazi stuff.

but for this place i guess im more interested in the confederacy angle. is collecting confederacy memorabilia worthy of scorn in 2023?

Has anyone here even heard of the guy until now? Hard to imagine getting upset over the perceived slander of someone no one has heard of. Although apparently he's a big anti-Trump guy so I guess that explains the "center-left" getting upset.

i certainly hadn't.. i think he was just another one of those dark money billionaires floating tons of money around, and now all those people he floated money to need to earn it by coming out in his defense.

Fortunately for you, collecting Bird books does not necessarily make you a birdbrain.

You could probably make a fortune selling fake Nazi stuff to Nazis online. Would that be immoral?

Who is coming to his defense and what are they defending?

I'd say you judge someone by their actions and what they say, not by what artifacts they might collect. Has this guy said anything that would indicate he believes or sympathizes with Nazi ideology? If not I would give him the benefit of the doubt until proven otherwise.

There's enough Nazi accusations flung around already without any actual basis in facts.

If someone has a roomful of satanic pedophillic art then they're going to be judged accordingly. Not sure why Nazi stuff would be treated any differently.

My dad has a collection of golf related stuff. It's because he likes golf.

My mom collects waffle-makers, oddly enough. Maybe I'll get that someday.

There is always going to be chance that someone has inherited some collection or gotten some collection of stuff through some sort of random happenstance, but most of the time it's going to be because they like it.

He might just like it for it's artistic merit. You don't know. People collect all sorts of weird stuff, doesn't mean they are raving pedophiles or Nazis. They might be, but I would need more proof than that before accusing them.

I'm confident enough to say that Harlan would be quite the outlier if he were to relish the artistic merit of Hitler's paintings but despised nazis.

But there are collectors who tend to be completely disconnected or oblivious to the politcal element associated with certain things from another time - but we usually are going back to the renaissance or medieval. I think it's in part due to the personality trait of why certain collectors collect for themselves. Harlan doesn't seem to exhibit those traits based on the other information I have on him.

He's a massive doner most likely so the establishment would prefer him to not be known and if he becomes known, definitely cannot frame him as a Nazi sympathizer.
I'm sure he's just collecting the stuff so that nobody forgets the Nazi atrocities.

If someone collects Nazi or Confederate stuff, I don't immediately think they want to reinstate slavery or exterminate all non aryans but I would definitely look at them in a different light

If they collected historical artifacts generally or WW2 memorabilia generally and the Nazi stuff wasn't an outsized portion of that collection I wouldn't suspect them of being a Nazi sympathizer but outside of those conditions I would be suspicious. I also wouldn't feel comfortable calling Harlan a Nazi sympathizer without knowing more about him and his collecting habits.

In a related matter, I wonder how many black friends Harlan has collected ?

Just the one?

How many that he has spent millions on?

People are asking these questions.

I am sure the nazi **** is innocent, kinda how Christians collect satanic stuff, you see it all the time amiright?

Does someone wearing a Che shirt or espousing far leftist ideas support the most murderous ideology of the last 140 years?

This is a ridiculously bad analogy.

What if he only drives Porsche and BMW and Mercedes, drinks kolsch and Becks beer, wears puma and Adidas, only shoots HK firearms, and his favorite soccer club is Borussia Dortmund? Is he a nazi too?

Don't wear the uniform if you're not on the team.