Below Andy, beneath the balcony of the Reich chancellery, was the screaming masses, their hands raised high as if hailing Andy as a messiah. Andy took one hand out of the folds of his coat and raised it. Heil! the crowd cried, ecstatic. Andy smiled, put the same hand onto his breast, and took out the other. Ho! the crowd cried, with tears in their eyes. Andy raised the other hand. Heil! Then, the other: Ho! Both hands: Let’s go!
This is the origin of The Ramones’ Blitzkrieg Bop.
Again, this is all historically accurate.
It is 1942. The senior officials of the Nazi Party gathered together in a Berlin suburb called Wannsee.
Andy had a difficult task ahead of him. He had to convince human beings, who could not be called his fellows, to undertake a systematic project that would cause widespread suffering and pain, all of it needless, and all of it philosophically invalidating not only the purpose and meaning of their own lives but the very existence of mankind which should be a miracle and not a meaninglessness, as the being of the lion and the wolf.
Andy anticipated all of their arguments: Why? What reason? What men? What money? Why now? With the war going as it is? And how? These were all reasonable questions, questions a machine wouldn’t blush to ask; and yet, for history to proceed correctly, Andy needed to undertake this ordeal. He sighed. Right now Gary was implementing the New Deal. Some fates are unfair.
Andy spoke his intentions to Heydrich, Himmler, Eichmann, Stuckart, Bühler, and others. When he had finished, one could hear a pin drop. Surely their consciences were stirring within them now; it was natural, nay, human to be considerate of one’s legacy and one’s impact on their fellow human beings.
Wilhelm Stuckart, undersecretary in the Ministry of the Interior, broke the silence. What a grand idea! But should we kill them or sterilize them? They would make for good free labor.
We can do both, Friederich Wilhelm Kritzinger answered, we’ll build camps to both force them into labor and to execute them. But how shall we gather them?
We can get the aid of the Judenrat to identify and sort them, Martin Luther replied.
Think of the cash flow, from appropriating their property! Himmler cried.
But wait, Heydrich asked, will we even have enough bullets to accomplish the task?
Bullets? What are we, barbarians? We’ll use gas! They’ll go to their final sleep like lambs! Klopfer retorted.
Gas is very expensive, isn’t it? Lange inquired.
Yes, but we live in a civilized society! Meyer growled.
Oh, save some gas for us! The group erupted into laughter.
Eichmann, chuckling, took notes.
What about those who are but a quarter, or a half? Bühler asked.
Who cares? They’ll be dead, was the reply.
Andy was surprised by how smoothly things were proceeding. They discussed the issue as if they were salesmen selling vacuums. Humans see themselves as objects first, then humans, he had observed a long time ago.
The Nazis had a very well-organized lunch, they played a well-organized game of cornhole, they then had a well-organized exit, and a well-organized toast in the nearby tavern. For it is far more important to be organized than human.
At midnight, the agents round them up. Those who fight, are whipped, or are beaten with the butt of rifles; it becomes abundantly clear that it is better to be among those who do not fight. Orders are bellowed: get into the train cars. They file into the swinging doors; they cannot stand or lay down for lack of space, so their only choice is to stand and stare into the impenetrable black hole of their destiny. Some, are taken to the camps; some go nowhere at all; they stand and stand forever, their conductors given always new orders, until they die. For even confusion is order, so long as the government says so.
To the glint of bayonets and the howling of dogs they are then taken into pens; it is clear the pens are too small, for too great a mass of people; nevertheless, they go into the pens, where legs are shoved beneath legs, heads looped under heads, children are pushed below adults and every link on the fence has some flesh pushed between its gaps. One can see why they are eager to follow the jacketed men when they are directed to other facilities in the camp.
They are placed in a chamber. They are given personal instructions: merely stand, and close your eyes. Now, your masters will rarely ever tell you to close your eyes; they want your eyes open, so you can work in the fields, or understand which of your possessions they want; they only ever ask you to close your eyes when they do not want you to know something, and no secrets could be kept here; and so, the comprehending many in the chamber had tears trickle down their closed eyelids, for they knew what it was they were not supposed to know; the nozzles of the chamber hiss; the pressure of the chamber intensified; the nozzles silenced, the gas was leaked away; the floor is covered in bodies.
The agents then arrive with knives. They throw themselves on the bodies, and cut, cut, cut; they cut off clothing, they cut out jewelry, they cut out the gold in their teeth, and the skin for their lamps; and then, their knives raised overhead, they carve and carve and carve, stripping muscle and fat from the bones; and the bones, they throw away, useless to them, and the meat they put into refrigerators.
The steaks, hocks and sausages are then transported to the humans of the world, who greedily dine on them all the same, regardless of the bloodshed and misery behind every ounce.
This is how the cows of Thrinacia paid for their abattoirs.
After the massacre of the females, the cows envisioned a glorious male future; however, the future is only ever the future. They were able to regain in technological advances; they persuaded their large females, who could be bred smaller, but never truly smaller than the males, to be gentle, sweet, pacific and modest and useless; but they were, after all, cows, and they still participated in cow-arguments and cow-debates.
Who would have thought the same race capable of slaughtering and subjecting their only other gender, were also capable of subjecting themselves?
The cows began factions; the factions argued some strains of cow were impure; let’s see, how about, if you are brown with spots you are impure; how about a mole behind the ear; if you are a black cow, you are impurest of them all; et cetera; the factions began stockpiling weapons; they began executing their less aesthetically pleasing counterparts; they sent their soldiers to massacre the others; and then, one day, a brilliant white flare was thrown into the sky on a cloudy day, brighter than the sun; this very sun fell and slammed into Thrinacia, kicking up a crown of smoke; and then there was only silence.
One cow was left. He felt, by the weakness of his body, his time was short. He moved about the wreckage of cow-ciety, his snout against all his friends’ lifeless bodies (moo...moo...moo...), then sat him down (moo. moo. moo.) and ... did nothing, for he concluded there was nothing worth leaving to the earth of cow-ciety, no songs, no stories, no histories, it was okay if the wind swept it all away, away and away, to be dispersed into the atoms of the sea, to be forgotten in the sea as to be forgotten by time. The cow then died.
So, that was the Cow Holocaust, and that was the Holocaust, and what was the point of them? Nothing, they were all just games to occupy people’s time, they were all just games of rules and logistics and tactics, and these were very expensive games the Nazis played, but weren’t they very good at playing the game? Luckily for the Nazis, Andy and Gary paid much of the trucks, trains, gas and soldiers for the slaughter with the gold of El Dorado. It is up to you to believe whether the El Doradons were happy to part with their gold for the betterment of humankind.
© 2025 Jay Lee