Here’s one of the things
That’s only further confused me
The more I’ve thought about it:
The Nazi occupation
Of France.
It became France’s whole identity
To have lost most of the country,
In Groundskeeper Willie’s estimation
To have become
“Cheese-eating surrender monkeys”
Despite all the great history
Behind it
Not,
Incidentally,
Merely considering
A guy named Napoleon,
Who was in one sense
Hitler before Hitler,
Who rallied his country
In a time when it seemed
To have lost everything.
And yet de Gaulle,
The very face of
The famous French resistance,
Upon which dubiously sits
All subsequent resistance,
Isn’t as famous as Churchill,
Who rallied his own country
To confront the Nazi menace,
To successfully defend it
And lead the world against Hitler
For a time.
Napoleon, whatever else he was
Was no Hitler.
No one in history
Is Hitler
Except Hitler,
And it is an insult
To an actual Holocaust
We still mourn
While still believing
Jews have no right
To a country
To living
To running their lives,
To ever, ever suggest otherwise…
And this resistance
Is the signal, last major
Rally to freedom
Of modern times,
Not merely self-determination,
But of a great power of history,
Having lost it
And struggled to reclaim it
And reduced
Only to resistance
But mostly shame.
These are the times
In which we live.
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