Nazis never win, and Confederates always quit
In the movie “Gone With the Wind,” everything is all hunky-slavey until the Confederates quit, and the next thing you know, you can’t whip the skin off Mammy for being late with your morning cornpone.
In the movie “Schindler’s List,” the Nazis get to queen around in overcoats and shiny boots until, whoopsie, the allies come a-knockin’ on the bunker door. Next thing you know, you can get a good bagel in Berlin again.
Yeah. It stinks being a jack-booted, slave-whippin’ superior Aryan because you always lose, or you quit.
Over there in Germany, where everyone ought to know this, the government just crushed a right-wing coup that could have been written by Mel Brooks.
The German right wingers rallied behind racism, stupidity and some creaky old aristocrat, who is, I believe, Count Rupprecht of Kreplach. Kreplach is a formerly royal kingdom that borders the Sea of Gefilte.
Anyway, united behind this sleepy, formerly invisible autocrat-to-be, the Nazis did what Nazis do best. They lost. If these neo-Nazis had flown the Confederate flag, their devotion to losing philosophies would have been complete.
They may win eventually, for a little while, and there will be torchlit parades and death camp smokestacks and all the rest of it, but they’ll lose long term, because the long-term human impulse is toward freedom.
We like freedom, we humans, because freedom means you can marry who you want, and be Jewish, and if you’re Black, you don’t have to learn how to make a mint julep and answer, “Yassuh” to every question you’re asked.
Every working-class white man in America has a friend or two who longs for the days of the old Confederacy or who knows just a little too much about Nazi Germany.
And it may be petty to say, but most of those guys don’t do that well with the ladies. There’s a reason why the “Incel” movement is so closely linked to right-wing causes. It’s because a lot of these guys have never been close enough to a woman to know she’s not a man. I believe the Incel movement should be called “The Incel and Likely to Stay that Way” movement.
I married an extremely pretty woman I don’t deserve at all, and I don’t know how I did it, but I didn’t do it by suggesting we spend our date nights sitting around a campfire with a bunch of other ding-dongs talking about the different calibers of Nazi weaponry during World War II. I can tell you one thing, if I’d have gotten my wife to do that, she’d have been the only smart, pretty girl around that campfire.
Eventually, the German nutcases may win, as may America’s own jolly band of Capitol-stormers, and there will torture and death camp smokestacks, and Jim Crow will return, and there will be red war.
Those will be high, fine days, and they’ll last until the book-readers who had a date to the prom decide that they have, by God, had enough of your enslaving and killing, and, like Hitler, you will crawl off to die, underground, like a poisoned rat. Or, like that falsely honorable slave master Robert E. Lee, you will throw your hands in the air and holler, “I quits!”
It happens that way every time. You lose, or you quit, and the smart, pretty girls won’t stop laughing at you.