Nazis

People are angry. People are annoyed. It’s all because I had the timerity to draw a cartoon, this week, depicting SS officers hanging around a café in an occupied European nation (I was thinking France, but it could be anyplace the Germans occupied during World War II) talking about how much the locals love them, the kids wave at them, the schools are open again and how everything is just hunky dory.

“Bush is an idiot,” one guy wrote me. “He hasn’t sent anyone to concentration camps.” Well, not exactly true. Gitmo IS a concentration camp; if the Administration has its way and begins executing the inmates there, it’ll become a death camp. But it is a concentration camp; there’s no other term that fits, regardless of your politics. So a Nazi comparison is certainly applicable.

But that’s not why I drew the cartoon.

The point I’m trying to make is that occupiers ALWAYS wanna think the locals love them to death. They delude themselves that, because a few whores sleep with them and a few profiteers suck up to them, they’re accepted. Of course, it ain’t so–an occupier is a foreigner is an exploiter is an enemy. Always. If Canada invaded the US and brought us the blessings of universal health care, I’d be the first to spend my nights picking off Canadian occupation police from Manhattan rooftops. If you read memoirs of German soldiers fighting during World War II, you’ll find many accounts of how well they got along with the locals.

Then there are the Internet geeks who would prohibit any comparisons, no matter how apt, between Nazism and post-World War II events. Sorry, but I never signed up for that rule, which is stupid. It just so happens that Nazism was anything but a unique phenomenon in history. It wasn’t an aberration, and the undercurrents of oppression and totalitarianism that characterized Hitler’s regime exist in every modern Western society. There isn’t a huge jump between a guy like Adolf and a guy like GWB, and I’ll be damned if I’m not allowed to say so.