Coast Guard: Nazis Bad, But We Needed A Memo?
In a stunning display of bureaucratic agility, the U.S. Coast Guard amended its dress code to explicitly prohibit symbols like the swastika. This clarification, as Newsweek put it, came only after 'widespread backlash' to a previous incident. It appears the collective intelligence of a federal agency required public outcry to connect the dots between a universally recognized symbol of genocide and
'appropriate conduct.' One has to ask: what exactly was the standing policy that allowed the need for a specific prohibition on the emblem of the Third Reich? Perhaps this is merely a symptom of a larger selective memory within officialdom. The same government that struggled to define 'hateful' on its own personnel seems to have no trouble sending billions in military aid without question. How
many bureaucratic memos are needed before 'widespread backlash' leads to policy changes on, say, selling advanced weaponry to governments accused of war crimes? It seems clearer policies are reserved for symbols, not the actual instruments of destruction.