There was a column in the Cornell Daily Sun today titled “Totalitarianism Lives” by Angelika Byorth, a student at the University of Nebraska. Sometimes, when the Sun doesn’t have enough original material to publish, they resort to this “College Exchange” which I always assumed featured a column from some other college newspaper. However, although numerous google searches confirmed the existence of this “Angelika Byorth,” there was no evidence of the aforementioned column being published in Nebraska. If anyone can find it, I would be eternally grateful.

Why? Why, you might ask, is this certain column of such importance? Really, I am in awe. It is an amazing work of a mixture of complete incompetency and absolute ignorance. The whole article is actually quite poorly written - surprise! a liberal who isn’t the brightest bulb in the box! But it is definitely worth reading. Although, I would recommend not eating beforehand, I almost regurgitated my lunch.

Background (since I am not typing out this whole stupid mess for you): apparently this “student” is at least 50 years old. Jewish. Lived in Germany post-Holocaust, something something something. Tells a sad story about repression and oppression that I honestly thought would have a legitimate message until this point:

For decades I’ve tried to suppress painful memories of growing up in post-Holocaust Germany. I didn’t want to talk about 1957, when my family gave up house and home then fled with only five suitcases of personal belongings from the totalitarian regime in the former East Germany. I didn’t want to speak or write about the poverty, the food rationing, the hunger and the government intrusion into our lives.

But I must come forward about that part of my personal history, because I have been an eyewitness to what can happen when a once free society allows itself to slip into the nightmare of totalitarianism. I have seen it for real and, long before the year 1984 arrived, what George Orwell described in his book.

Unfortunately, I am seeing it happening right here in the U.S. today. You know the details: widespread wiretapping, checking on library records, taking away the rights of people who are suspected of terrorism, monitoring online communications, being treated like a criminal when traveling by airplane, torturing political prisoners, fighting war upon war, often with imperialistic motives, and the list goes on.

I ask that you pay attention to political matters and get involved. Adolph Hitler was elected by only 37 percent of the German people because the rest didn’t care to vote, preferring apathy. According to U.S. Census Bureau and Federal Election Commission statistics, President George W. Bush was elected in 2000 by only 27 percent of eligible American voters.

The numbers don’t lie. Bush was less popular than Hitler.

<Insert barfing here.>

Seriously, this is unbelievable. I think the main reason it stuck out to me was because lately the Sun has been running a couple very interesting columns about how the world’s treatment of Ahmadinejad’s actions is eerily similar to the way they handled (read: mishandled) Hitler leading up to World War II. The title of this Byorth’s piece of trash, “Totalitarianism Lives,” was misleading in that context. Especially from a Jewish perspective.

Give me a break! Is she even aware of her own implications? These people have no limits. At a time when the Jewish population ought to be far more concerned about insane Islamo-fascist dictators in the Middle-East, this idiot is comparing Bush to Hitler. Nay, she is actually implying that Bush is worse than Hitler.

Brilliant. Apparently, along with totalitarianism, stupidity thrives.