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Horst Wessel

It’s rather nice having our own exotic sounding place. 

Nearby Soudan, with unusual underground mine next door, is excellent as a veil suggesting a place to hide deep, dark secrets. Almost makes it worthwhile to create something worth hiding, an unknown tunnel to Cambodia or Canada. 

Maybe little known Soudan could replace Wuhan as bat virus-opolis with a wondering possum to replace the suspect pangolin. 

See how easy to build? 

A writer might claim near anything and get away with it because a great many in the audience know less than a negative about the underground or are even much aware the iron range was-is primarily open pit mining. 

I might, were I trying to do so, enhance credibility by advancing my familial connection with the underground mining of coal. 

Mentioning familiarity with the Goodman Continuous Miner could convince some. 

More credentials and authority needed? 

How about if I assert further standing and authority via familiarity with The Engineering and Mining Journal. 

When’s the last time you picked up a copy, eh? 

Never? 

Well, well then. Puts me ahead in the obscure info lead, doesn’t it?

Each of us, I’m fairly sure, likes to think we know a thing or two and have things, so to speak, right. Sure we do. 

Of course. But on the other hand it’s not a bad notion to occasionally (or frequently) remind ourselves it’s possible we have some inaccurate info or wonky conclusions in the bundle o’ truth we lug around. 

I nudge myself to remember the tale of dear Horst Wessel. 

Wessel who? 

Horst. 

An interesting story worth considering as instructive. Four generations past, Horst (along with a song bearing his name) became an icon, inspiration and model in the world of German socialism. (There were lots of earlier iconic models from Russian socialism a generation earlier, but they fell in and out of favor too rapidly to keep track and had names more difficult to remember. Poor them learning the hard way that cogs in a machine are replaceable.) 

But what about Horst? 

This fine young man with musical inclinations was killed by communists, thereby becoming a martyr (death is mandatory in the true martyr line) for the socialist cause.

On the other hand (except by amputation, we can hardly avoid having one) it could be said in a low voice that Horst was a young socialist thug who made the mistake of bodily engaging with communist thugs who carried the day, at least physically if not politically in Germany. 

Horst had been an eager and committed member of the SA branch that emphasized drinking and screwing. It was not by pure accident some saw Horst as a bully thug, something that had to be left out of the iconic inspirational account. 

It’s easy as anything to mock early Soviet heroes coming and going in waves of firing squads. And it’s similarly easy these lofty days to wave aside Horst as a not-to-be-missed and unwanted nasty Nazi. 

In general we like to think ourselves above the manipulations of propaganda. But are we?

Before going further I have to say it’s well beyond me to illuminate Horst or any of the many Soviet heroes before him. Were these good people, naïve, misled, thugs, idealists or what have you? 

Dead as doornails, Horst can’t tell us a thing, but it is safe to assume his characteristics were mixed. The hand that can pet a kitty can also casually pull a pistol trigger to splatter brains on a wall. 

Will the real Horst or Beria reveal himself? 

They won’t because they can’t so therefore we’ll never know. Thank goodness because who’d want to? And plain truth, I couldn’t explain (not that you’d care or need to know it) my own character. 

Knowing the character, motives and intricacies of others is beyond my reach.

The obviousness of this doesn’t stop us though, does it? 

To mask the fact we use our dead heroes and heroines as causes for new laws. Beria and Joe would be most happy, as both saw the great utility of using law to winnow out the unwanted. 

Even for the most noble diversity cause, sorting reduces diversity. No way around that, a conundrum similar to one faced by anti-authoritarians needing greater authority to accomplish their aim. 

Another puzzle for us is being correct in our knowing while also knowing we don’t know near enough. We’re justified believing National Socialist (NAZI) bad and poor or underprivileged good. But it is individual people with their own slants on things who make up those groups, then what? 

No NAZI could do good and no poor person was capable of bad?

Leaving ethnically secure Chicago and becoming an imported Ranger I found myself a bit to the outside, an observer. The big city had its points: opportunity and corruption. The Range had its merits: nature and communities. I was and am damn glad to become a Northern Minnesotan. North Shore, Ports and Range are good places to live. Doesn’t mean it can’t be nasty in dead winter or everyone is a sweetheart. Hell, I’m here so there’s that to contend with. But, truth said, you can’t fix me any more than I’m able to correct my faults. Maybe I’ll never get any better than turning what would have been a long running feud into a two-day tiff. Maybe, though, some of what a fisherman learns from hours on the water applies. In addition to basic skills, fishing introduces us to fish-think. The easy-eager fish takes the bait, doesn’t it? Where’s it get them? If you’ve fished you know. Using north country fish-think you might hold off snapping up the bait. Give it a sniff. Test it. Don’t take it and run, not unless you’ll be happy with a Horst Wessel hero. One of our famous laws recognizes a hero tragically murdered because of his sexuality, or maybe due to selling drugs, or possibly from being known to pimp his boyfriends. 

I don’t fault the law, but it would be better based without the hero.