Hitler’s Generals ⁂ starbreaker.org

Obligatory Disclaimer

The following is my opinion alone, not that of my employers or their clients and partners. If any of the sentiments expressed in this post offend you, my complaint hotline can be reached by phone at 1-800-B-DAMNED. Underpaid operators in the Global South are standing by, ready to summarily dismiss you!

Finally Shocked

I'm not used to being shocked by Donald Trump. He's never worked a day in his life. He's never created anything on his own. His idea of the value of money is that having means never having to say you're sorry. Having grown up in New York in the 1980s and 1990s, I knew even as a kid that Trump has always been an amoral and thoroughly venal asshole. The way he talked about the 1989 Central Park jogger case made it clear to me, even as a child of 11, that he was a man who did not think before speaking, wore his prejudices on his sleeve, and had no respect for the rule of law, due process, or any of the other institutions that give America what greatness it ever possessed.

That's why I didn't vote for him in 2016 or 2020, or in this year's election. Instead, I voted by mail the same straight blue ticket I've been voting since 1996.

Make no mistake about my motives: I don't vote blue because I agree with or like the Democratic party. They are not nearly as leftist as Republicans insist they are. They are the USA's true conservative party. They are only as liberal as Corporate America allows them to be. They are only as progressive as activists force them to be.

If "none of the above" was an option that actually counted for every office on every ballot, then that is how I would vote under the current two-party system, because while I dislike the Democratic party, I loathe the Republicans. To me, the Republicans are a coalition of fundies, fascists, and white supremacists. The average Republican's morality is that of a seventeenth-century Puritan fresh off the Mayflower: nothing but the relentless and unreasoning terror that somebody, somewhere, is having a good time without having first gotten permission from the church and state, and is doing so without having further enriched the already wealthy. Their arrested moral development — conventional at best by Lawrence Kohlberg's metric — is evidence of a congenital inability to mind one's own business. This is nowhere more evident than in the prurient obsession entirely too many Republicans have with policing other people's sex lives, particularly those of women and LGBT people. Their pretences toward libertarianism are those of people who are more interested in the privatization of tyranny for their own benefit than in its abolition for the common good.

Despite not being a Christian, I cannot in good conscience vote for such people, especially if they line up behind a demented old man who has already proven himself a traitor to this country's ideals and repeatedly violated his oath to preserve and protect the Constitution of the United States. These people are beneath contempt, and their morally and intellectually bankrupt ideology is founded on the double standard and the notion that might makes right. Their notions of political economy are those of a child who not only insists on playing the banker in every game of Monopoly, but cheats.

a tangent on policing sexuality and gender

I don't consent to having my sexuality or gender policed by anybody, least of all uptight vigilantes who live in fear of an unauthorized erection. If you want a cop in your bedroom, date one. That's your kink, and while it's as valid as any other kink consenting adults might enjoy that doesn't give you the right to impose it on me. If there are cops in my bedroom, and it's not my wife doing a bit of cosplay, they'd better damned well have a valid search warrant signed by a judge. Otherwise, the last thing they might hear before fleeing the house is me firing up "Cop Killer" by Body Count on the stereo and turning the volume up to 11.

Why? Because this is still America, dammit. Our homes are still our castles, and some of us dirty liberal atheists have as big a hard-on for the rest of the Constitution as we do for the First Amendment. (You should see how my cock throbs for the Ninth Amendment; it's all natural and cheaper than Viagra.) In my house, fuck tha police is not a flirtation, and the only flag I'll ever fly is a rainbow Jolly Roger.

a tangential note to evangelical Christians

I'm not a Christian, let alone your kind of Christian, and quite frankly I'd sooner brave the lake of fire head first than endure eternity in your craven and servile company while praising the cacodaemon you mistake for a just and loving God. After all, some of you claim God intervened to save Trump, but where was he when Nazis at Auschwitz were murdering Jews, queers, trade unionists, Roma, and Communists by the trainload? Hell, what in the name of Lilith's heart-shaped ass is your God doing every time some nutjob shoots up an elementary school right here in the US? Was God at Sandy Hook? How about Uvalde? It would be kinder to believe that He somehow didn't notice, because if He was there and He permitted this, well, no "greater good" can justify the mass murder of children.

Don't invoke abortion as justification for the mass murder of children in schools, either. If God truly objected to abortion, there would be no miscarriages. Or is your argument that, like vengeance, abortion is God's exclusive prerogative?

Regardless of such questions, my conscience demands that I say the following: I won't say that by supporting Trump you're supporting the Antichrist. Trump isn't the Antichrist. He is merely an antichrist. I don't expect you to recognize the difference when you can't even accept that your preferred translation of the Bible is precisely that, or that the Bible was assembled by a committee convened by and beholden to the Roman emperor Constantine. Nor do I don't blame you for not being able to recognize false prophets when they appear. I blame your pastors for devoting more time to the Old Testament and the Epistles of Paul than to Christ's teachings as written in the gospels of Matthew, Mark, John, and Luke. The fact that you choose to support Donald Trump, despite his sins and crimes, because you believe he will promote your interests above those of people with whom you would rather not share this great country says everything that needs be said about the moral and intellectual bankruptcy you share with conservatism as an ideology. But he sure as hell isn't your Cyrus the Great; he's just using you, and you're too damned ignorant to see it.

Nevertheless, I will also say that by supporting the notion that your understanding of Christianity should supplant the Constitution of the United States, you prove yourselves bad citizens and bad Christians alike. I will also say that you plainly do not understand American history, since you continue to insist that the United States is a Christian nation even though it was founded in rebellion against established authority and states in early treaties that still carry the force of law that the government United States is in no sense founded upon the Christian religion. I will also insist that the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment gives you more protection than you deserve, and that you plainly don't know or remember that this country was colonized in part by people their neighbors back in Europe regarded as meddlesome and obnoxious heretics, among them Puritans who would recognize themselves and their sins in you.

The Jeffersonian firewall between church and state represented by the Establishment Clause is there as much for your protection as it is for mine. You can't have freedom of religion without freedom from religion; the latter ensures that we can both enjoy the "free exercise of religion", and if you keep tampering with this firewall you are going to get burned. When you do, I will celebrate your suffering as a foretaste of the Hell with which you are ever so fond of threatening others.

To be fair, I know that you see things differently. I have no sympathy, because if Christianity is in fact dying in the United States, you are complicit. I also know you're not all ignorant, self-righteous, inhospitable Sodomites and Pharisees willingly voting for a traitor and false prophet, but you know what? I can't bring myself to give a single little fucking shit about such niceties any longer, because those of you who aren't have failed your brethren by refusing to remonstrate with them yourselves; how far have you fallen if you must be rebuked by a goddamn atheist? Therefore, I will continue to condemn you all, for the Lord will know His own and I'm content to let Him sort you out — assuming He can be bothered to pay attention to His job. Surely the Judge of all the Earth will do right, will He not?

In the meantime, try using the brains God gave you for a fucking change. Study Christ's actual teachings, as recorded in the core Gospels, instead of acting like Pharisees and obsessing over ritual purity as defined in the Old Testament. Try actually giving a shit about the poor, the outcast, and the foreigner instead of acting like the men of Sodom who demanded that Lot hand over his guests or the Pharisees who demanded of Pilate, Give us Barabbas! Get your shit together unless you want to find yourself standing dumbstruck on Judgment Day as Jesus says unto you, I never knew you; go away from me, you evildoers. Sure, I might join you on the road to perdition for my own sins, but I'll walk tall through the gates of Hell knowing that even if I'm not doing God's work, I've done the Devil's — and the Devil still works for God as His angel of persecution.

Nor can I in good conscience vote third party or refuse to vote at all. Such actions help the Republicans more than they harm the Democrats. Voting third party — even though both the Green and Libertarian parties have positions closer to my own on many issues — is tantamount to voting Republican under the current system. Not voting at all is likewise tantamount to voting Republican; that's what these assholes want from citizens who oppose them, especially if their opposition is black.

Thus I hold my nose while voting, and wash my hands afterward while quoting that Scottish play. (Out, damned spot!) Given a choice between neoliberals (the Democratic party) and neo-Nazis (the Republican party), I will choose the neoliberals. I don't like Kamala Harris, but while she isn't without flaws, nobody has caught her on tape saying shit like I need the kind of generals that Hitler had.

Never mind that this sort of talk should be beyond the pale in the US, or that it should have been immediately reported and denounced as un-American. Never mind that this sort of talk betrays Trumps fundamental authoritarianism or proves the speaker unfit for any sort of public office in a country that claims to be either a democracy or a republic. This is one point on which I almost agree with Trump.

I almost wish that Trump had the kind of generals Hitler had, too. Many of them tried (and unfortunately failed) to assassinate Adolf Hitler. However, while I don't agree with most of what the US military has done overseas over the last century, I still think the vast majority of the US military's officer corps are men and women of integrity who honor their oaths to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic.

I'm not suggesting that Trump should be assassinated. It would be better if he were tried for treason, convicted, and condemened to spend the rest of his life in the United States' closest equivalent to the dungeons of the Chateau d'If, never to be seen or heard from again, and his corpse tossed in a dumpster. Nevertheless, if a general serving under Trump were to intrepret their oath to the Constitution in such a way that their conscience demanded they take a shot at Trump, I would not blame them.

Nor do I think Hitler is a good parallel for Trump. He's more of a Caligula. Trump is exactly the sort of person who would pimp out his sisters or appoint his horse to the Supreme Court if he thought he could get away with it.

This makes me wonder about the Secret Service's Presidential Protective Division. They're the closest thing the US has to a Praetorian Guard. Their duty is to the office of the President of the United States, not necessarily the man or woman holding the office. How egregious would a President's behavior or rhetoric have to get before a Secret Service agent assigned to protect the POTUS decides that they must commit treason for the good of the country?

It would be a good plot for a novel, but a fucking disaster if it happened in real life.

If Trump gets another term, I suspect it might happen if he goes far enough. I'd rather not see it happen, however, which is one reason I voted a straight Democratic ticket. Even if a Secret Service agent assassinated Trump for the good of the republic, they might end up doing more harm than good by making a martyr out of a moron — even if the moron is also a neo-Nazi in all but name.

Frankly, I think the ideal October Surprise this election would be for Trump to drop dead of a stroke while grabbing Laura Loomer by the pussy, and for JD Vance to get caught fucking Peter Thiel's couch while discussing the alleged merits of theocracy and autocracy with Curtis Yarvin. I'm not counting on any of that to happen, of course. It would involve the occurrence of the sort of miracle that would force me to reevaluate my atheism for the sake of what little intellectual integrity I possess. Admittedly, this isn't the first time that politics in the US has resembled an episode of the Jerry Springer show, but it hits different when you're there to see it happening live.

Memo to the Secret Service

I won't insult your intelligence by claiming that this entire post is a joke. Nevertheless, I'd like to make a few matters clear:

I have no intention of making an attempt on Trump myself; as I had said before, it would be an exercise in martyring a moron.
I do not condone the attempts that have already happened; nor would I condone future attempts.
I don't expect any of you to take a shot at this asshole, either; it would set a dire precedent that the United States can ill afford.