Maybe Nothing Changes
Maybe Nothing Changes
By Punkerslut
[Author's Note: Written on Wednesday, September 14, 2005. This
piece is based on true events happening today in Germany.]
For the Batko...
"These Nazis are being hung up, so that the townspeople can
spit on them and beat them... They will be unhooked in one or
two days," he told me. I looked on. There were three white males
chained to a fence. All of them bore the Swastika on their
clothing.
"What... for?" I asked, "That doesn't seem like modern German
due process of law."
"The Nazis killed millions," he told me, "They worked some to
death, tortured others to death, and killed others in the middle
of the street. It is not 1940 any more. We are a long ways from
that time. But whenever we see some proud, Aryan youth, bearing
a symbol of hate and cruelty, we must stop him."
"I still don't understand," I asked, "Do you seriously think
that Nazism poses a threat to modern Germany today?"
"No," he replied, "That's not the point."
"What is the point?" I asked, "Nazis today are probably
outnumbered a thousand to one, at the least. Why are you
torturing these men?"
"Because their political ancestors tortured Jews, Communists,
Homosexuals, and other socially constrained groups."
"They are your ancestors, too," I replied, "During the Reich,
men could openly beat and kill Jews. And today, men are allowed
to openly beat and kill Nazis. The operations of torture and
persecution are set in place by the police. And in both cases,
the media has remained completely silent. What the public knows
will hurt the possibility of change."
"Do you know what the Nazis --"
"The original Third Reich isn't really in consideration here,"
I replied, "The original Jews were led by Moses to slaughter,
enslave, and rape thousands of innocents. I'd ask why you don't
torture and kill Jews openly here in the streets of Germany for
that, but that would only be bitterly ironic. You're only
torturing and killing the Nazi youth of today for having ideas.
Perhaps it doesn't bother you, that by doing this so-called
'justice,' you're only agitating Racists, and causing more hate
crimes against the innocent. The end result of your action is
more Jews, Blacks, and other minorities, killed and tortured. If
the crowd can abuse these men for having ideas, what is to say
that the Communists, or other radical thinkers will not be next?
If a crowd can be moved to stone men to death for believing in
Nazism, will they not be accustomed to the police organizing
public murders? They will come for the Communists, retelling old
war stories of Soviets killing Jews and other innocents in the
USSR. And next, they'll come for the Socialists, the advocates
of Democracy, the journalists, the union organizers, the
Liberals, the Leftists, everyone with an opinion that goes
against the grain of society... and somewhere, I think
everyone's missed the whole fucking point."
"Millions dead!"
"And you're all just adding more bodies to the heap!" I
replied, "Maybe one day, there will be people to torture the
torturers of Nazis, just as the Nazis were the torturers of
people once associated with torturing the entire Middle Eastern
population. At what point do you think this is justice? Sure,
you spit, kick, and punch these men as they are chained to posts
in the public. Perhaps you should take a soldering iron to their
skin, or better yet, to their eyes and tongue. Maybe you could
hear the pains of screaming, see their writhing and their
paining, listen to their quieted moans, as they try to show you
as much as possible that they're not in pain, and they are
unwilling to submit. Can you really openly brutalize a
defenseless man in a collective, and honestly tell me, that
you're doing this out of.... some apparently obscure sense of
justice?"
"I have no answer for you," he replied.
I turned, paced back and forth, and returned. "Again," I said,
"Germany doesn't want the world to know what it's doing. It's
ashamed. The broadcasters will not publish this information.
Nobody will talk about what's happening. There are the same
hushed voices, the same crowd being motivated to the same ends.
Just like the Holocaust, everything is kept quiet, and nobody is
allowed to talk about what is going on in the middle of our
streets in broad daylight." I paused... I asked: "Isn't there
going to be a day when people stop asking 'who should we
torture?' and start asking 'is it right to torture?'"
"That is purely a pipedream," he reminded me. The painful
aftertaste of irony lingered for several days.
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