More Info on Paskowitz

Submitted by Alex (United States), Apr 3, 2009 at 13:27

It may surprise some who know me and have read my posts that I am knowledgeable about surfing, but here is a factoid about Mr. Paskowitz that Dr. Pipes might have missed:

He was a conscientious objector during World War Two--not Vietnam, not even Korea, but the Second World War, despite his being Jewish. He is rumored to have said in justification that if Hitler were a surfer, the hostilities of the mid-20th century would not have happened.

This is just to let you know that who you are dealing with here is a flake, one who gave up his admission to Stanford medical school (after graduating summa cum laude as a pre-med there) to become a surfer.

I actually would even venture that the southern California, 1950's counterculture out of which the popularity of both Paskowitz and surfing arose would be somewhat hospitable to Nazism, not because of sympathy with it, but because of this subculture's total break with conventional society and seeming incapacity or unwillingness to make judgments. Fopr example, on the North Shore of Oahu in the early 1960's (I believe), one of the early big-wave surfers' fathers brought back Nazi uniforms that he had captured as an American soldier in Europe. The video of famous big-wave riders like Greg Noll wearing them as a "gag" can be seen in the documentary, "Riding Giants."

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