The Reich Stuff, Part II

Hello. Two months ago, in a Gene Pool post titled “The Reich Stuff,” we observed that signs of Nazism were abundant in the Trump regime. We pointed out Pete Hegseth’s unapologetic, undeniable White supremacist tats:

We pointed out ICE’s thuggish brownshirt casual violence against peaceful protestors, and declared it ominous. It was.

We discussed the government’s chilling downgrade of nooses and swastikas from “hate speech” to “potentially divisive” speech.

We sighed and pointed back to this:

… And to the hypocrisy of invoking Jesus while telling Big Lies, at a lectern, about the meek and the maligned and marginalized.

And so forth.

We didn’t know, yet, about Kristi Noem! There’s a new fuhrer out there today over a placard. And it’s creepy. And we wish to examine it here.

It began when a lefty rocker named Tom Morello (of Rage Against the Machine) made a claim that seemed a little … dubious? Nitpicky? Alarmist?

We checked. We researched. We pondered. We talked to others more knowledgeable than we. We decided: Morello is right.

Note that photo at the top of the column. That’s the head of Trump’s Department of Homeland Security, in New York the day after an ICE goon murdered Renee Good in Minneapolis. Noem spoke at a rally to express her support of ICE agents and her determination to protect them from the public. The placard says “One of Ours / All of Yours.”

The context here is important. Noem’s speech was defiant. She warned people: “If you lay a finger on one of our officers…you will feel the full extent of the law.”

Back to “One of Ours / All of Yours.”

What the heck does that mean? Why is it presented as a DHS logo?

Morello said it was a famous Nazi slogan, but he was not quite right about that. It was never articulated by the Nazis in so many words, German or otherwise. It was merely official policy of The Third Reich.

It’s a threat, still bouncing around the Web, well understood today in far-right circles and among historians of fascism. It’s a reference to the notion of “collective punishment,” involving the policy of mass reprisals for individual acts of resistance in an occupied population: Kill one of ours, and we’ll slaughter all of you. Collective punishment is a war crime under the Fourth Geneva Convention.

The Nazis didn’t say it out loud. They just did it. Most infamously, the policy was put into practice in 1942 after young Czech patriots assassinated a Nazi named Reinhardt Heydrich, one of the principal architects of the Holocaust, a man known as The Butcher of Prague. In response, the Nazis annihilated an entire town in the Czech Republic — Lidice, which had not housed nor given shelter to any of the assassins. Lidice’s men and boys were executed by firing squad, its women and girls sent to concentration camps. The buildings were burned to the ground.

It was a heinous crime against humanity. Here is a video of the hanging of the man who carried out the savagery.

In 1944, in reprisal for D-Day and the unexpected ferocity of French resistance, the Nazis similarly extinguished the French village of Oradour-sur-Glane. The 642 residents were also separated by sex: The men and boys were machine-gunned in the legs, to make their deaths more agonizing. The women and girls were herded into a church that was set afire. Escapees were shot.

One of Ours / All of Yours.

When confronted with this, Kristi Noem said the slogan was simply a misinterpreted expression of the solidarity between the people and law enforcement. That made no sense, but there were no followup questions. Her office later elaborated: “Calling everything you dislike ‘Nazi propaganda’ is tiresome. DHS will continue to use all tools to communicate with the American people and keep them informed on our historic effort to Make America Safe Again.”

This is, we have reasonably concluded, entirely full of shit.

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So. Scott Adams is dead. What are we to make of this?

Shortly after arriving at The Washington Post in 1990, I was asked by top management to participate in a poll of allegedly funny writers and editors. We were sent a package of new comic strips, and management wanted us to help them decide which ones to buy. We were asked to choose three.

I chose only one — a bullet vote, in electoral terms. When asked why, I said that only Dilbert was great, and I didn’t want any of my secondary votes to tip the judgment toward something that lesser humor “experts” might mistakenly prefer. Yeah, I was an arrogant asshole — but the paper did, as I recall, pick up only Dilbert.

It was a terrific, groundbreaking strip through most of its life. Pioneering, funny, and trenchant. Years later, The Style Invitational had a contest for “bad pickup lines,” and I selected as the overall winner, “Hi! I’m the Washington Post editor who moved Dilbert to the Business Section!”

Many years later, Scott Adams revealed himself to be a racist and misogynist turd.

Here’s the Gene Pool Gene Poll:

(Me, I buy it. I pretty comfortably compartmentalize, when it’s all about genius.)

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Okay, that’s it.

Hey, if you don’t buy that book, here’s another way to spend your $50: