QandO

June 30, 2004

Digital Brownshirts
Posted by Dale Franks

This whole Alliance of Digital Brownshirts thing bothers me. Yes, I get the point of the thing, vis a vis Al Gore's remarks. Yes, I understand the sarcastic nature of the whole deal.

But it bothers me.

I despise totalitarianism in all its forms, but there's something peculiarly bothersome about Nazism. So, I am repelled by the DB logo, which uses a portrait of the head brownshirt himself, SA leader Ernst Roehm. Granted, Roehm, who was murdered on Hitler's orders in 1934 during "The Night of the Long Knives", was killed long before the Nazis began their more egregious crimes, was never able to become more than a sadistic street thug before Hitler bumped him off, so it's not as if the logo used a known war criminal.

But something strikes me as extraordinarily unseemly about the appropriation of Nazi imagery for any putatively humorous purpose. And there are certainly some who will look with suspicion at those who do so with such apparent glee. "Why," some will wonder, "are these people so proud to associate themselves with Nazi imagery?" And, irrespective of the various bloggers' reasons for doing so, a number of people will, in the course of asking themselves that question, come up with an unpleasant answer.

The only good Nazi is a dead Nazi. Period. So, not to rain on anybody's parade, but I'm simply repelled by the use of Nazi imagery for any purpose but depictions of the utterly inhuman and brutal nature of the Hitler regime and its ideology.

It strikes me that using Nazi imagery this way runs the danger of detracting from the real evil that it represented. Ernst Roehm wasn't a jolly, thick-necked, beer-swiller. I mean, he was, but he was also something much darker, and his party left a stain of barbarism and oppression that should remain sharp and clear in our minds for generations.

Let the DU types make the "Bushitler" commercials, and photoshop Don Rumsfeld as a German Field Marshal. Let them make the Nazi comparisons, and trust the basic common sense of the American people see it for what it is.

But I don't feel comfortable at all joining them down in the mud by cheapening the evil of Nazism for satirical effect.

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