This stuff breaks my head. Maybe I should've spent more time looking at the Abu Ghraib photos -- were the folks there all smiling so much? Then again, the ones in the scrapbook aren't posing next to the crematorium doors, either...
One of the biggest problems today is how we have monsterized the Nazis.
Some people actually get angry and/or violent when I point out that Hitler was not Satan. He was a man. He was a leader. He did horrible things, but he was just a man. He was not a demon, he should not be spoken of in the same tones as the concept of the Antichrist. His picture should not fill us with spooky revulsion, should not inspire fear - just contempt.
Likewise, the Nazis were not demons. They were not the mutant zombie monster killers that pop culture teaches us. They were men and women who did a job - some of them did absolutely terrible things, things that should have made them seek suicide in penance, but many just followed relatively innocuous orders.
We should not fear the swastika.
Before anyone accuses me of being a Nazi sympathizer, ha ha. No. An entire nation made a wrong choice, and supported the concept of traveling in a direction that I find abhorrent.
But when we demonize Hitler and his followers, we make the mistake of turning them into nightmarish boogeymen. This is dangerous as hell. The whole damned thing should have been a lesson for the world, but too many societies (the USA included) learned the wrong lesson.
Because now we can have a president who invades a sovereign nation with absolutely NO justification, kills hundreds of thousands of civilians, strips us of our constitutional rights, acts like a fucking despot, and the idiot public just look once at a picture of Hitler and say "Well, at least he's not as bad as that guy!"
George W. Bush stood in front of one of his most watched press conferences and said, without irony, "You're either for us or against us."
And because he was not wearing a swastika when he said it, I was one of the few whose blood ran cold at those words.
We don't want to think of them as people, we think it's too hard to imagine someone who could patiently teach his dog to shake a paw and then go shoot some emaciated and overworked men. We can't accept that they're human, because that means we're also capable of these acts.
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(no subject)
Date: 2009-01-25 08:27 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-01-25 08:49 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-01-25 08:56 pm (UTC)"I'm going to play with my kitten a while, and then go back to gassing people."
Date: 2009-01-25 09:16 pm (UTC)Re: "I'm going to play with my kitten a while, and then go back to gassing people."
Date: 2009-01-25 10:05 pm (UTC)One of the biggest problems today is how we have monsterized the Nazis.
Some people actually get angry and/or violent when I point out that Hitler was not Satan. He was a man. He was a leader. He did horrible things, but he was just a man. He was not a demon, he should not be spoken of in the same tones as the concept of the Antichrist. His picture should not fill us with spooky revulsion, should not inspire fear - just contempt.
Likewise, the Nazis were not demons. They were not the mutant zombie monster killers that pop culture teaches us. They were men and women who did a job - some of them did absolutely terrible things, things that should have made them seek suicide in penance, but many just followed relatively innocuous orders.
We should not fear the swastika.
Before anyone accuses me of being a Nazi sympathizer, ha ha. No. An entire nation made a wrong choice, and supported the concept of traveling in a direction that I find abhorrent.
But when we demonize Hitler and his followers, we make the mistake of turning them into nightmarish boogeymen. This is dangerous as hell. The whole damned thing should have been a lesson for the world, but too many societies (the USA included) learned the wrong lesson.
Because now we can have a president who invades a sovereign nation with absolutely NO justification, kills hundreds of thousands of civilians, strips us of our constitutional rights, acts like a fucking despot, and the idiot public just look once at a picture of Hitler and say "Well, at least he's not as bad as that guy!"
George W. Bush stood in front of one of his most watched press conferences and said, without irony, "You're either for us or against us."
And because he was not wearing a swastika when he said it, I was one of the few whose blood ran cold at those words.
People are fucking stupid.
Re: "I'm going to play with my kitten a while, and then go back to gassing people."
Date: 2009-01-25 11:53 pm (UTC)See also child abuse, my darling husband couldn't possibly be a childrapist they are bad people with signs on their backs, so my child must be lying.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-01-25 10:47 pm (UTC)