"Yeah? How many trenches have you stormed, kid?"

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Meme Curator

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"Yeah? How many trenches have you stormed, kid?"
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Meme Curator OP edited

Explanation: The term ‘stormtrooper’ is often associated with the Nazis nowadays. In fact, the association does come from the name of the SA, the Nazi street thugs who helped Hitler’s rise to power.

… but they themselves took the term from the trench assault groups of WW1 Germany, veterans of whom were involved both for and against the Nazis, including in Nazi-opposed groups of the Social Democrats and the Communists. Someone who was part of the “Sturmtruppen” was just a volunteer specialist for close-combat in trench assaults - perhaps a little mad, but not a title which presumed any particular ideology. One imagines that at least a few couldn’t help but see the SA taking brawling with civilians as ‘stormtrooper’ behavior as little more than children playing at war, especially since many of the SA were too young to have participated in WW1.

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I thank The Wire every day for blessing me and my family with the term “off-brand.” Kinda like our Confederates, eh Pug? Off-brand patriots.

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Meme Curator OP

Temu Trench Vets

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those ww1 boys were something else. the first people to see that kind of hell

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edited

See that little stream — we could walk to it in two minutes. It took the British a month to walk to it — a whole empire walking very slowly, dying in front and pushing forward behind. And another empire walked very slowly backward a few inches a day, leaving the dead like a million bloody rugs. No Europeans will ever do that again in this generation.”

“Why, they’ve only just quit over in Turkey,” said Abe. “And in Morocco —”

“That’s different. This western-front business couldn’t be done again, not for a long time. The young men think they could do it but they couldn’t. They could fight the first Marne again but not this. This took religion and years of plenty and tremendous sureties and the exact relation that existed between the classes. The Russians and Italians weren’t any good on this front. You had to have a whole-souled sentimental equipment going back further than you could remember. You had to remberer Christmas, and postcards of the Crown Prince and his fiancée, and little cafés in Valence and beer gardens in Unter den Linden and weddings at the mairie, and going to the Derby, and your grandfather’s whiskers.”

“General Grant invented this kind of battle at Petersburg in sixty- five.”

“No, he didn’t — he just invented mass butchery. This kind of battle was invented by Lewis Carroll and Jules Verne and whoever wrote Undine, and country deacons bowling and marraines in Marseilles and girls seduced in the back lanes of Wurtemburg and Westphalia. Why, this was a love battle — there was a century of middle-class love spent here. This was the last love battle.

–F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night

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