When P.R. runs amok

Dear Austria and Germany:

We get it. You feel guilty about the Holocaust. You want everyone to know you feel guilty. Fine. But if you are going to put people in prison because of their opinions--however ridiculous and ungrounded in fact those opinions may be--you are behaving like...well, like Nazis.

What if we did this in the United States? Not only would all of our asinine Holocaust deniers go to prison, but so would the slavery deniers, and the people who deny or minimize the reality that our nation's leaders helped slaughter hundreds of thousands of native Americans. Why, we might have to imprison all those talk show hosts who deny that we provided all that political support and weaponry to Saddam Hussein, and some day, imprison them for their support of our alliance with Saudi Arabia.

The Holocaust has become an easy metaphor for "Oh dear, wasn't that simply awful--so glad we don't do things like that anymore" when, in reality, someone in the world is always doing things like that. And when people speak of the Holocaust, they speak of the 6 million Jews who went to their deaths, not the entire 11 million people who were killed in the camps. Somehow, I cannot imagine Germany or Austria imprisoning someone for denying that a few million homosexuals were killed during World War II.