There was one chilling aspect of the Grassroots Candidate debate in Paducah Tilghman High School, Paducah, Kentucky on February 13, 2010. It was coming face to face with a political armband at a political rally.
In forty years of attending political events in Washington DC or in Kentucky, I have never seen anything like the armband at the Grassroots rally. The design was simple, red letters on a cloth background. It simply said “Sergeant at Arms.” The man wearing it also had the only media press badge that said “Media Security.”
Having read books like 1984 and The Rise of the Third Reich in my youth, I am forever aware of the trappings of authority. Here, at a political event was a modern statement of “an unknown authority overseeing this event that both spoke to media control and people control.”
In a historical context, symbols like banners, armbands and political parties have been used in relationship to move the party members in a single philosophical direction that often use fear of others as its foundation with reality.
The thoughts that rushed through my mind question just how far we in the political world were willing to go to ensure control of media and crowd at candidate or political rallies. Would this become a new method for ensuring that only the party faithful could attend to listen to the official party line?
The greatest use of armbands was the National Socialist German Workers Party. They too were about control and fear tactics. They later became known by their shorter name – Nazis.
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