A CONSOLATION
In the spring of 1945, the Soviet army descended upon Germany and exacted its vengeance in a vast orgy of rape and murder. There were literally millions of rapes and summary executions as the Soviets visited upon the Germans what the Germans had visited upon so many other countries.

A friend of mine in Moscow told me that "you're the new Nazis." He admitted that we hadn't committed Nazi-scale atrocities yet, but predicted that "tens of millions of dead" was just a matter of time. All right, well, suppose he's right, we are the Nazis, and the world will fight back and crush us and, like the Germans in 1945, we will suffer at their hands what others did to us. What do we have to expect?

I should say that I think I probably could be "broken" by torture. I was once in the hospital and had an allergic reaction to a drug which... well, perhaps the drug should say nameless, but it caused extremely painful muscle spasms, so that my parents commented that it looked like I was possessed by a demon. I remember the sheer horror, not knowing when the pain would strike, or where, or when it would end. I remember screaming, howling for the nurses to come, enraged that they attended to other patients even though there was really nothing they could do. I used to say that if I ever became a spy and were captured, all they would have to do is say, "Talk or you'll get a dose of Reglan, and I'd tell them whatever I knew."

By contrast, when the world avenges itself upon our new Nazi empire, we will be... hmm... hooded, stripped naked, left in the cold for a few hours, given a bunch of empty threats... Honestly, I can take that. It would be annoying, but it wouldn't "break" me. If that's the worst vengeance we'll suffer, I'm not going to lose any sleep over it.