Hitler IS fodder for comedy, and here's why...

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Maybe it's just me, but I find using Hitler for humor extremely distasteful. The man was the epitome of evil in the last century and the murderer of most of our people.

Yehudi Hilchati: Hitler and comedy

Some might think as a ger tzedek (I know they shouldn't but people are people, yadda yadda) I should not merit a say on this subject but I must disagree.

From before I entered school, from as early as three, my grandfather spoke of his World War II experience. I heard about the blood, guts, and whole bodies floating in the water at Normandy, days after the invasion. He arrived two days on and they were still cleaning up the mess. The waves were still foaming red he said.

He spoke of the sight of bodies run over by tanks as they advanced, the effect on internal organs as they exploded under the pressure.

But... most of all... he spoke as he motioned at my uncle's house three acres distant, of the bodies at the camps. Impossibly thin, gaunt, skeletal. They stunk of rot. The whole camp stunk of burning human flesh. It stunk of sewage and human body odor. He pointed at my uncle's house and said that they were stacked farther than that, as far as he could see, like cordwood.

He'd trail off then with a distant look on his face as if he no longer wanted to live, for just a moment. That look of horror that says you have just become disconnected, please call back later.

I also grew up with Jewish comedians like Mel Brooks making fun of Nazis. At first I didn't understand, but then it made sense. The minute you fear these creeps, is the minute you grant them the first bit of false legitimacy on which every other piece of their evil is hung. Not knocked from the table, they will nail it down, here, there, everywhere. Soon they are entrenched, established, and we fight with them.

For there to be an argument, there have to be at least two sides. Nazis don't have  a side. None. Zip. Zero. EVER.

They were given that first piece of legitimacy during the beer hall putsch maybe. Maybe before that. Instead of being patted on the head and herded into mental facilities with comfortable pajamas and heavy medication, they were taken seriously. People actually argued with them as if they had any point to make, any side to argue. Their side was so monumentally insanely indefensible it amounted to not being a side. More like the kind of Internet Performance Art done by trolls, and with the same idea that argument was just amusement and distraction and never the real point of any of it. In the case of Nazis though as with all such political loons, it was about getting some of the power over their fellow man that being in government offers. And from there... Same as all other political movements and people. More power.

Unlike Nazis however, most political people today aren't jonesing to put people in camps and systematically wipe them out. Which is what separates them. Their ultimate idea of what to do with all that power eliminated any rational sane claim that they had a side. That they had any rational sane claim. To anything.

The Nazis must remain for all time locked beyond the veil of legitimacy and relegated to cartoon characters. The cranks who spew their bullshit to the streets, who wear white hoods, who publish how-to guides on domestic terror, and so forth... they must NEVER be seen as anything more than the unfortunate mildew on society's edge that they are.  Not for fear of them, because they are not anything to fear, but for fear of what WE cause to happen by putting our prodigious powers of the mob of society behind a broken steering wheel of intellectual worthlessness like them.