Yikes man, I had to google that. Found this on NY Times, it is too long to post the entire article, so I cut off a bit at end. Crazy brainwashed people suck.
View attachment 4671370
In the sepia-toned photo, two white soldiers patrol on foot over brush and rocky ground. Lean and bearded, they carry what appear to be Belgian rifles, and they wear an unusual uniform — cloth jungle hats, short shorts and tennis shoes — associated with a military unit that was disbanded nearly 40 years ago.
That unit was called the Selous Scouts, a special-forces regiment from the Rhodesian Army, which fought black insurgent armies in the Bush War of the 1960s and ’70s to maintain white-minority rule over territory that is now Zimbabwe.
Not long after Rhodesia ceased to exist, it became morally untenable to mourn its disappearance. As the rest of the world woke up to the injustices of Western colonialism and its system of white-minority governments, the Selous Scouts and their cause became taboo.
View attachment 4671371
But late last year, the image of two Scouts began to circulate on Instagram, part of a social-media resurgence of Rhodesia as a source of inspiration.
Photos of soldiers marching through grassland and rivers, special-forces units jumping out of helicopters and civilians posing in front of their homes with rifles collected hundreds, sometimes thousands, of likes on posts seeming to offer tribute to a hardened and forgotten cadre of Cold War-era bush fighters. The online movement also caught the attention of opportunistic apparel marketers who started selling Rhodesian-themed T-shirts, posters and patches, among other collectibles.
Nostalgia for Rhodesia has since grown into a subtle and profitable form of racist messaging, with its own line of terminology, hashtags and merchandise, peddled to military-history fans and firearms enthusiasts by a stew of far-right provocateurs.
In conversations and email exchanges with The New York Times, some prominent social-media figures and companies selling Rhodesia-themed merchandise denied trafficking in white-power messages, or said they had done so unwittingly. A few said their affinity for Rhodesia derived from the government’s supposed anticommunist stance.
But outside observers of this Rhodesia revival cite a far more disturbing inspiration for it: Dylann Roof, the American white supremacist who
killed nine black parishioners in a Charleston, S.C. church in June 2015. Roof, who was sentenced to death last year, had penned an online manifesto, which appeared on a website called The Last Rhodesian, with photographs of himself wearing a jacket with a patch of the green-and-white Rhodesian flag.
View attachment 4671372
View attachment 4671373
View attachment 4671374
The photograph is well known. It was taken in September 1977 by an Associated Press photographer, J. Ross Baughman, who was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for capturing the brutality of the Rhodesian Army.
That Instagram caption provides far less context than the version submitted for the Pulitzer, which
read: “Lt. Graham Baillie raps a small wooden bat against his leg after using it to beat Moffat Ncube, a local teacher, political leader and now a bound, unconscious prisoner slumped against the wall of schoolhouse, 20 September 1977.”
It added: “Ncube reportedly later died after three days of brutal, nonstop torture.”
As of April 6, the photo with the more anodyne caption had nearly 1,850 likes.
Some pro-Rhodesia voices on social media are not so subtle.
Last December Joseph Smith, a 22-year-old resident of Rexburg, Idaho, who told The Times he had not heard of Rhodesia until 18 months ago, posted a YouTube video that he said offered “a quick rundown” of Rhodesian history. The video has received more than 180,000 views.
Comments on it included calls for Rhodesia to return, claims that the West betrayed Rhodesia and outright hostility to the idea of black-majority rule. With more than 1,700 comments in just the last three months, the discussion quickly devolved into a stream of racial and ethnic slurs against African-Americans and Jews, calling for them to be shoved into gas chambers and ovens.
In an email to The Times, Smith wrote that he felt persecuted and that he has found Rhodesian themes compelling. “I’m sure you’re aware these days being a conservative heterosexual white male is rather unpopular in the eyes of many,” and that “this is the demographic that caused Rhodesia to thrive as well as it did for as long as it did.”
He insisted, however, that his attraction to Rhodesian nostalgia was not racist. “I do not think that it’s a race issue though,” he wrote. “Partly I just feel like white people like having a team to root for these days.”
An examination of retailers and social-media accounts showed a varied understanding and mixed approaches to addressing the meanings in the pro-Rhodesia messaging.
The Selous Armory, a Massachusetts apparel company run by Sean Lucht, a Boston firefighter and Marine veteran, sold a red-and-white “Make Zimbabwe Rhodesia Again” patch online until recently. The site also sold T-shirts with sayings like “Rhodesians Never Die” and “Apply Violence” with the Rhodesian Foreign Legion logo, in addition to “Be a Man Among Men” posters. When The Times reached out to Lucht for comment about the business in March, all the merchandise was stripped from the website and an announcement was published on its home page saying, “The Selous Armory was always a place for military history/humor and never a place for hate.” The announcement added that the Selous Armory had ceased all operations. Lucht did not respond to numerous requests for comment.
The Instagram account of retired Delta Force master sergeant Larry Vickers also displays an affinity for Rhodesia.
