The algorithm brought this video to my attention. It's a critical review of a Vice News hitjob on how a Vice News reporter tries to label a bunch of WWII Re-enactors as Nazis. Link to the Vice News 'expose' is in the video link. It's apparently this Youtubers first video review so it's a little rough but I found it illuminating and furthermore... led me to do some googling since I remembered similar treatments of loathsome Civil War reenactors.
Civil War reenactment was of course famously skewered as being a bunch of racists in a Key & Peele sketch but there's always been media and pop culture pushing against Civil War reenactments which has only increased in recent years, often combined with other negative pejoratives associated with peoples viewpoints of reenactor stereotypes. As well as the obvious comparison of reenactors to "crypto-KKK" Lost Causers and Neo-Confederates.
Not into the hobby myself, but I have seen some of the 'Living History' events they put on and found them insanely cool, though the older I get the less cool I found them.
Still it does seem like as far as hobbies go, with the amount of maligning and hate reenactors in general have been getting and will be getting in the future, perhaps this is a hobby that just isn't politically correct enough to survive, at least in most forms.
- From the Washington Post
The decline of the Civil War re-enactor - From the New York Times
With that said, while there is a lot of Doomery regarding the hobby, not everyone is convinced it is dying (even if the Washington Post and New York Times seem to be respectfully fapping to the thought of such an politically incorrect hobby being extinguished).
Have any of you been involved with the reenactment community and regardless what are your thoughts on the whole hobby in general?
