June 25, 2018
MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey
You Don’t Get It Yet? It’s the Nazi
Thugs who are Ruining Amerika (AKA Trump and His Gestapo)
Friends,
Yesterday in
MY CORNER (“You
Are a Nazi—Or Worse—if you Voted for Donald Trump or Believe in Borders,” June
25, 2018: http://boydcatheyreviewofbooks.blogspot.com/2018/06/june-24-2018-my-corner-by-boydcathey.html) I passed on a
sharp and at times satirical critique by prize-winning novelist C. J. Hopkins (see
“Awaiting the Putin-Nazi Apocalyse,” June 15, 2018: http://www.unz.com/article/awaiting-the-putin-nazi-apocalypse/) of the near
completely unleashed and foaming-at-the-mouth response by the Mainstream Media,
academia, Hollywood, and the political Left concerning the president’s—at times
unwieldy--attempts to get control of our borders and have some form of
immigration reform enacted by Congress.
The strategy
of the unhinged left and their millions of automaton minions has been to fit
their response into the anti-Trump narrative established back in late 2016 and
carried forth with a fanatical vengeance throughout 2017 and into this year:
somehow it’s the Russians—it’s Russian collusion—Trump working with Vladimir Putin—Trump
and his administration acting like Nazis—it’s Trump supporters who have, in
effect, become latter-day Nazis. In
other words, they have created an all-encompassing Putin-Nazi-Trump bugaboo, an
evil force on which they can blame everything they dislike or loathe or see
happening since November 2016.
It’s the
ultimate argument, the reductio ad
Hitlerum, everything reduced to the template that your enemy is the “new
Hitler” whose name is Vladimir Vladimirovitch Putin. It’s all those
“mainstream” Democrat politicos comparing the president’s policies to Nazi
actions; it’s former Fox pundit, Colonel Ralph Peters, calling Tucker Carlson
an apologist for Putin and then comparing him to Hitler on prime time because
Carlson would not buy into the rigors of the standard leftist and
Neoconservative narrative; it’s the continual drum beat by the media,
Hollywood, and various Dems and Republicans
(e.g., Mitt Romney, Senators Jeff Flake, Ben Sasse, etc.) that somehow Trump is a
dictator-wannabe who is willing to violate “human rights”—like a Nazi—and thus
similar to that evil genius in the Kremlin, that wily ex-KGBer: you
know, the guy who persecutes LGBTQ activists and won’t allow same sex marriage
and who forbids same sex proselytization in Russian schools, who goes around
and demolishes those revered (by American
Leftists) edifices to Communism and replaces them with churches, that guy who
says that his country must return to its Christian traditions—you know, that
evil guy. Shudder! He is a real danger to what is called “American
democracy,” you see!
Anyway, our
satirist friend, C. J. Hopkins, offers another savage satirical look—and it
could have been authored (half seriously) by almost any run-to-the-tall-grass
Neoconservative columnist for National
Review or on Fox News, after figuring out that, oops!, he had said or
written a boo-boo in the eyes of the PC establishment and his cocktail party
friends over on the “farther Left.
So,
malefactors who violate the steadily advancing Marxist standards of speech,
action, and thought must be brought into line and forced to beat their breasts
and apologize profusely and often—one way or another. See that ICE agent over
there? Okay, he really is a latter-day Gestapo agent rounding up poor Jews, uh,
I mean poor Honduran children…You understand yet? Go harass him, threaten him,
even employ violence if that what it takes. That’s the authoritarian narrative--it's
no longer the extremist lunatic fringe; rather it’s the lunatic fringe that has
become the overpowering mainstream—and
you deny it at your own professional and very personal—and physical—risk.
----------------------------------------------------
Confession of a Putin-Nazi Denialist
C.J. HOPKINS • JUNE 20, 2018
Last week, I published an
inappropriate and deeply offensive satirical essay, for which I would now like
to repeatedly apologize. The offensive satirical essay in question, Awaiting the Putin-Nazi
Apocalypse, which I regret having written and for which I intend to
repeatedly apologize throughout this essay, concerned what I perceived, at the
time I wrote it, as an overreaction on the part of millions of decent,
patriotic liberals to the first eighteen months of Donald Trump’s presidency
and Vladimir Putin’s ongoing efforts to destroy democracy and take over the entire
world.
In light of recent revelations,
and repeated viewings of heartbreaking close-up color photos of children in
cages, I feel it incumbent on myself to confess what I recognize now as my part
in spreading the scourge of Putin-Trump Nazism that is metastasizing like a
hideous Slavic colon cancer throughout our great nation, and to repeatedly
apologize for having been an apologist for such Hitlerian evil, as well as any
discomfort my Putin-Nazi Denialism might have caused anyone.
In addition to repeatedly
apologizing for any emotional or psychological discomfort or trauma my essay
may have caused, I would like to attempt to explain why I wrote it, not to in
any way excuse myself, but rather, in the hope that other political satirists
might learn from my mistake, and stop and think about the consequences of going
after cheap, easy laughs while hundreds of thousands of innocent people are
being rounded up by the American gestapo and shipped off to concentration camps
to be horribly murdered with poison gas, and experimented on by sadistic
doctors, or just slowly starved and worked to death … which is obviously
nothing to joke about.
Again, I’m not trying to
rationalize the offensive nature of the essay in question (which I wrote on
prescription sleep medication), but I was honestly not aware when I wrote it
that there was such a thing as the American gestapo, or that there were any
actual concentration camps in the United States at the present time. I just
assumed that the stories I was seeing in the press about children being torn
away from their parents, locked in cages, or disappeared, were referring to the
Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement,
both of which were created in 2002, when everyone was still running around
waving flags, backing the invasion of the Greater Middle East, the loss of any
semblance of personal privacy, and the militarization of their local police,
because the ruling classes and the corporate media had told them that Saddam
Hussein was Hitler, or that Osama bin Laden, or someone, was Hitler. I had not
realized that Putin had ordered Trump
to transform the DHS (which during the beneficent Obama administration had been
housing so-called “illegal immigrants” in comfort suites at the Holiday Inn,
and providing the kids with Snow Cones, and so on) into a goose-stepping,
Sieg-heiling Nazi kill-corps that is even now, as I am writing this confession,
carrying out the Final Mexican Solution.
Fortunately, General Michael
Hayden set me straight with his recent tweet, featuring
a picture of Auschwitz itself, and a grim reminder that “other governments have
separated mothers and children.” Hayden, a former director of both the NSA and
CIA, and who has no qualms about torturing Muslims or illegally surveilling
American citizens, surely knows a death camp when he sees one … so I figured
I’d better dig a little deeper into this whole Nazified Amerika thing.
When I did, mostly by
submersing myself in countless reports in the corporate media, and by
spastically flicking through memes on Twitter, I realized what a fool I had
been (which, again, I’m terribly, terribly sorry for). I had thought Trump’s
“zero tolerance” policy was just another gratuitously sadistic twist on the
long-standing practice of tormenting desperate people fleeing societies
systematically destabilized by the US government and the corporations that
basically own it in order to maintain a criminalized labor force to do the shit
jobs Americans don’t want and drive down domestic wages, generally … but it
turns out that isn’t it at all. No, this time, it appears it’s not just another
Republican beating up on minorities to score political points with Americans
too blind or ignorant to understand that “illegal immigrants” are not their
enemies, but rather, the victims of the same corporatocracy that has been
bleeding them dry for the last five decades while pandering to their tribalist
fears and fantasies of racial superiority. No, this time, it’s the actual,
literal Nazis with actual, literal concentration camps, except that this time
they want to exterminate the Mexicans, or Mexican kids in any event, and Hitler
is actually a foreign agent remotely controlled by Vladimir Putin, who is
somehow, at the same time, also Hitler, and is trying to take over the entire world
by allowing his country to be surrounded by NATO, except for his naval ports in
Crimea, which Obama helped the Ukrainian Nazis try to steal away from the
Russian Nazis, but that was way back in 2014,
before Amerika went full-blown Nazi, when there were no Mexican kids in
Walmarts converted into Nazi death camps. Or something more or less like that.
I’ve been getting a little confused, myself, since I started trying to stop to
overthinking things and instead just react to whatever stimulus the corporate
media and the ruling classes wave in front of my face every day.
Look, the point is, I’m
terribly, terribly sorry for writing that offensive satirical essay, which I
realize now was horribly insensitive, and hurtful, and possibly against some
law, or corporate code of Internet conduct. I sincerely hope you will not read
it, and that Google and Facebook caught it and deranked it before it lured any
impressionable young minds into the cesspool of Putin-Nazi Denialism. As for
me, I’ve decided it will be best for everyone if I withdraw from public life
for a while to reflect on how I ended up here and … you know, to spend more
time with my family and meditate on my social sins….
Forgive me. I’m still working
on my Putin-Trump-Nazi Denialism. Just give me a little time alone with the
corporate media, and Twitter, and I will eventually get my mind right, I swear.
C. J. Hopkins is an award-winning American
playwright, novelist and satirist based in Berlin. His plays are published by
Bloomsbury Publishing (UK) and Broadway Play Publishing (USA). His debut
novel, ZONE
23, is published by Snoggsworthy, Swaine & Cormorant. He can
reached at cjhopkins.com orconsentfactory.org.
