I've heard of radicals joining in helping to re-enact the Spanish civil war battles and I'm looking for links to groups that do this as well as media reports. I've even heard of fascists and Nazis joining up with the other side for this as well as WWII re-enactments and I'm checking this out as well. Does this re-enacting happen in the US and in Spain? I'm a writer and this sounds like a good setting for a story.
IF there were ACTUAL fascists as the Nats... well, it wouldn't be a reenactment for me.
I've been looking into WWII re-enactment for a long time now and the vast majority of groups that re-enact WWII don't allow openly fascist sentiments among members. Most of them just want to have fun with no politics involved and don't want racial supremacists making problems. Otherwise the butts of those blank/airsoft/paintball rifles might be put to unintended use. The WWII Airsoft Association, for example, forbids Fascist or supremacist sentiments on its forums or in its games and in fact recruits "colorblind"- which means you will see a black Nazi now and then, which is hilarious in an ironic way. Imagine how hard a neo-Nazi would rage over a black person in Wehrmacht uniform. I've never heard of any Spanish Civil War re-enactment groups, but I'm going to look into it right now. That would be very exciting and I would definitely be interested in getting involved. The only foreseeable problem is that there would be far less interest than for other re-enactment groups. American Civil War re-enactors are the most common, followed by WWII re-enactors, Medieval combat re-enactors and finally LARPers, if we can even count them. Most other groups are fairly small and isolated.
Imagine how hard a neo-Nazi would rage over a black person in Wehrmacht uniform.. I assume they'd rage harder than the real Nazis who didn't believe their own lies and had black African soldiers in the SS. xD
Mind blown. WTF is this?!
A handful of Africans served in national SS units of the German army in WWII. It's one of those ironies of history, like the fact that Moroccan soldiers were part of Franco's fascist vanguard. Some Neo-Nazi "pan-nationalists" like to point to the black SS men as proof that they aren't racist - very ironic considering the SS units were generally used to slaughter vast numbers of "inferior" people. One must however keep in mind that because of the genocidal crimes of British and French imperialism, some Africans and Indians who fought on the Axis side saw the fascist powers as the lesser evil. That said, the number of African people on the Allied side in WWII was vastly higher than that on the Axis side, even if most of them were colonial troops fighting for their own imperialist oppressors. And of course there were plenty of Africans (and Moroccans) who volunteered to fight against fascism in the Spanish Civil War, as well as a few African-Americans who fought in the Soviet Red Army in WWII.
If this doesn't exist already, we need to start it. It would probably be a lot easier to do than other wars, considering that the militias often just wore work clothes, and that the main weapons were Mosin-Nagants, which are super-cheap these days.
