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I don't believe for one wild minute that the five Auckland Grammar boys who found themselves in the middle of a media blitzkrieg this week are fledgling members of the National Front. Nor do I believe they support a neo-Nazi fascist ideology. They probably couldn't even spell fascist - or, for that matter, ideology.
But what they are guilty of is gross insensitivity and stupidity and for that, they deserved their public shaming.
The arrogance displayed by the boys on their visit to the Auckland War Memorial museum was shown in images of them kissing a swastika and paying homage to the Nazi flag, and they compounded their stupidity by posting the images on Facebook.
In posting pictures, you're inviting comment and by God, comment came thick and fast. I was 14 - the same age as these boys - when I first saw Leni Riefenstahl's documentary Triumph of the Will and it had a profound effect on me. We'd been studying inter-war Germany and as I watched this brilliantly produced piece of Nazi propaganda, I wondered whether I would have been strong enough to resist the lure of Hitler's siren song had I been a disaffected young German woman.
It drove home to me that ordinary people can be seduced into allowing evil to happen and that's why we must never be complacent when it comes to Hitler worship. The boys may well have been just idiot boys behaving badly but the appalled response from so many members of our community means that, thankfully, we don't have the requisite intellectual laziness and moral passivity that allowed a fringe German politician to rise up through the cracks and attempt to take over the world.
* www.kerrewoodham.com
- HERALD ON SUNDAY
