General Discussion

He has always said he had no idea what it was when he got it, that he picked it out of a book the tattoo artist had. That sounds 100% believable to me. When I was researching this thing myself, I found a Reddit thread about it (in r/Maine, linked below) where people were talking about it. Some were horrified by it, but a lot of others said they would never have recognized it as a Nazi symbol. (I didn't know what it was myself.) There were also some vets talking about stupid stuff they did when they were in the military. A lot of people said they believed him when he said he didn't know what it was when he got it. Here's a link to that thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/Maine/comments/1odcx9l/graham_platners_new_tattoo/

The Reddit discussion was of course inconclusive, just a bunch of people expressing their opinions, but reading the comments there helped me clarify my own thinking on the matter.

Imo, the Totenkopf is one of those things that if you know what it is, you can't unsee its meaning, but from what I've been able to glean, there are a loads of people who just see a skull with no particular associations other than Halloween or maybe pirates. I was one of those people myself until this thing with Platner hit the fan, so I'm not about to insist that ANYONE with such a tattoo MUST have known what it meant and deliberately chose it for its SS associations.

I admittedly have not looked into any of the other stuff as deeply as I have with the tattoo (although I plan to do so now), and I'm really not interested in getting into any protracted arguments about Platner's fitness for office. I expressed an opinion that I expected would be controversial, and I (rightly) assumed some would disagree. C'est la vie.