So, another Hugo award has passed – a singularly apt choice of phrasing in the light of the unfortunate visuals afforded by the now notorious asterisk and the more-than-a-little-phallic rocket award (sooner or later some lout will make a gif of the rocket going into the middle of the asterisk and… well… Let’s not go there. There isn’t enough brain bleach).

Before I say anything else, congratulations to the winners. Congratulations also to those who were denied an honorable win by the slate-voted No-Award crybabies, and to everyone else who was nominated. Regardless of whether they were nominated by wrongfans or TruFen, every single item on the ballot was there because there were people who thought it was one of the best pieces in its class that year.

It’s a shame this year’s hosts showed all the restraint of a Nazi rally along with the morals of a Soviet show trial and the taste and discernment of a cat in heat. And I’m not talking about the votes.

We’ll start with that asterisk.

I’m sure nobody else noticed the startling resemblance to a certain anatomical outlet, and of course, the Hugo rocket’s suggestive shape has been noticed by many people. Put those together and you get a pretty damn accurate depiction of what the pre-award “show” did to their precious awards, not to mention the unfortunates deemed to be tainted by classical communist and Nazi guilt-by-association.

The entire response from the We Are TruFen clique is… well… imagine a group of Mean Girls from your high school or middle school years. The nastiest, bitchiest ones, only with a fraction of the candlepower, and picture them as ardent devotees of whatever flavor of dictatorial socialism it is. You get the picture.

The thing is, is it Nazi, or is it Communist? There are elements of both. Take this quote from Hitler:

“It is thus necessary that the individual should finally come to realize that his own ego is of no importance in comparison with the existence of the nation, that the position of the individual is conditioned solely by the interests of the nation as a whole.”

and replace “nation” with “Fandom”.

They certainly took note of Goebbels on propaganda techniques:

“The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly – it must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over.”

And I’m sure this observation of Hitler’s would not be at all strange to them:

“We are socialists, we are enemies of today’s capitalistic economic system for the exploitation of the economically weak, with its unfair salaries, with its unseemly evaluation of a human being according to wealth and property instead of responsibility and performance, and we are determined to destroy this system under all conditions.”

(And they say the Nazis were right wing (sarcasm off))

I was going to mine the Intertubes for Nazi quotes that the Puppy-Kickers could have said if they’d been about Puppies or white men rather than Jews, but alas, even in translation Hitler and Goebbels are so much more articulate the comparison would be utterly unfair to the Puppy-Kickers (and remember, these are writers and editors – but the Nazis beat them on all fronts when it comes to articulating points of view. I suppose I should be relieved: pointing and shrieking tends to be rather less than effective as a means of converting the undecided).

Oh, and for those who are wondering? The reason I didn’t use quotes from Mao, Lenin, or Stalin was that an awful lot of Puppy-Kickers would be flattered to be compared to such luminaries of the world’s most lethal ideology.

So, let’s call them for what they are. Nasty, petty, bullying socialists who would fit in just as well with the Nazis as they would with their equally murderous Communist cousins. They even have a racial agenda, and while they’d deny it, they’re so US-centric it’s hilarious (as well as sad).

And what’s even sadder is this pathetic collection of power-hungry little Hitlers have destroyed what was once a genuinely respected award. Whether it can be resurrected by the Campaign to End Puppy-Related Sadness or not, I consider the cause to be worthy.