Israeli Law Jewifies Nazis, by Mike Gold – Brainiac On Banjo #258

January 16, 2012 Mike Gold 31 Comments

Ahh, the Lords and Ladies of Irony had to be working overtime on this one. You’d sit back in awe of its very perfection, if it weren’t so goddamned sick and evil.

The Israeli government has proposed a new law making it a crime to use the word “Nazi” or the swastika in any context, save those of scholarly pursuit. If you do so, you can be tossed in the hoosegow for up to six months and/or be fined $25,000.

Let’s forget that the swastika predated the Nazis by millennia and is a symbol still scared to a number of cultures. I’ll even forgo the impact this would have on Mel Brooks’ movies and Hogan’s Heroes reruns. That Hebrew-language reprint of Norman Spinrad’s The Iron Dream? G’bye. Raiders of the Lost Arc would raid no more.

That’s exactly how stupid this law is.

Among their many accomplishments, the Nazis were known for their direct assault on free speech. When we talk about book burning, we are more likely to think of Nazis than we are of fevered Christians pissed off at John Lennon. So, aside from the bitter irony of this ridiculously repressive act, we further limit history.

The typical liberal response to our cultural evils is to ban speech without regard to context. Everybody wants to be on the oppression bandwagon: bum, fairy, fat, handicapped, housewife, illegal alien, janitor, kike, midget, nigger, Oriental, retard, secretary, sex change, spic, ugly, white trash. Anybody can use a politically correct doppelganger for these terms in a negative context, and some are so good at it they can get their message across without revealing their underlying discrimination. As an ugly fat kike bum bordering on white trash, I prefer seeing the bigots coming. If I call you a Nazi for acting like a Nazi, that doesn’t mean I’m accusing you of all the evils committed by the Nazi Party: Dick Cheney is not anti-Jewish.

What all these people in their obnoxious show of contrived pain fail to acknowledge is that there are no evil words, just evil deeds. We use words to describe those deeds. Banning the use of those words does nothing to prevent those evil deeds, but it does limit our ability to discuss them freely. Burning Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and DVDs of Inglorious Basterds does nothing to diminish racism or fascism.

If I can’t call a person a Nazi because, in my opinion, that person acted like a Nazi, then I don’t have free speech. The Nazis transcended history and became a metaphor long ago, and we have the right to employ their name in such a manner.

Except in Israel. Where they’re acting like Nazis.

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Free Speech Huckster Mike Gold performs the weekly two-hour Weird Sounds Inside The Gold Mind ass-kicking rock, blues and blather radio show on The Point, www.getthepointradio.com, every Sunday at 7:00 PM Eastern, replayed three times during the week (check the website above for times) and available On Demand at the same place.