While this piece of satire was written last year, it has a timeless sort of quality, so I think it's appropriate to share:

The Americans came in killing like mad men, I never thought I would say this, but life was better with Adolf Hitler.

June 6th, 1944 — Normandy

Around three hundred French civilians were murdered yesterday and an undetermined number were injured during the first hours of the American invasion of continental Europe. Most of the French victims were due to artillery shots coming from the American fleet that was trying to hit German fortifications on the coast before thousands of soldiers proceeded to land on several of the beaches.

According to sources in the improvised hospital in the town of Saint Mere Eglise, the slaughter was worse than French and Germans anticipated. “We are dropping like flies” said an eye witness who preferred to remain anonymous. “The Americans came in killing like mad men, I never thought I would say this, but life was better with Adolf Hitler.”

According to information coming from the front, the American invasion caused serious environmental damage. The army brigade that landed on the beaches is equipped with tanks, trucks and war machinery that destroyed several kilometers of coastline and thousands of hectares of very ecologically interesting wetlands. It is believed that the lazy crab’s habitat, native to this part of France, has been totally devastated; biologists warned the species might disappear . . .

As it happens, I've been reading a lot about the Holocaust lately, in numbing detail, and is definitely not fun. Babies thrown alive into the crematory ovens. Trains so crammed with Jews that when they arrived at the death camp all were suffocated. Jews herded into gas chambers which didn't work so that they had to wait for three hours while the Nazis got the gas working. Children and the elderly being simply buried alive to save Einsatzgruppen bullets. Country after country, death camp after death camp, killing pit after killing pit, ghetto after ghetto, town after town, and shtetl after shetl. Grim atrocity after grim atrocity. Seriously, it is not easy to read about it, but that's what I've been doing for the past week.

By the way, you don't have to read books like these. Looking at pictures will do almost as well.

Sixty two years ago today, Americans made an enormous sacrifice which eventually led to stopping these atrocities. I wasn't even born, so I'm in no position to deliver moral lectures.

But I've read enough to know the difference between Nazism and incidents like a soldier who let his dog bark too closely at a prisoner. (And who was tried and convicted for his crimes.)

Contemplating the full horror -- the scope and brutality -- of the Nazi Holocaust offers something in short supply lately.

A thing called perspective.