In case you missed the memo, I got accepted to graduate school at the best university of all the one universities I've ever attended. Now I would like to add that a couple days after I accepted their acceptance, they offered me a graduate instructor position, which was part of my hope and intention all along but not guaranteed. If I accept this offer I will be teaching introductory English courses to freshman for a salary that covers the graduate degree. And I intend to accept it, but I haven't yet because I have until April 15 and I don't want to look desperate. Maybe this is a test. Maybe if I respond too quickly they'll be like "Sorry, we don't want desperate people on our faculty. Actually, we don't want them as students either. Try your luck at BYU-Idaho next time." That's not a risk I'm willing to take.

Not long ago there was no way in hell I'd seriously consider becoming a teacher of all things. Public speaking meets grossly underpaid babysitting gig? No thanks. But God has basically told me to become a teacher. My father has said more than once that he thinks I would be a good teacher, specifically at relating to the students who don't fit in. Charles Waugh, the professor who urged me to consider graduate school, also specifically mentioned the graduate instructor thing and that he thought I would be a good fit. Okay, so I'm a phenomenal writer, but communicating these things verbally to a roomful of people is a different skill set altogether and I have no clue what any of these people see in me that makes them think I have it. In theory I'll find out.

All I've taught so far in my life are a handful of Sunday school lessons and, more recently, a couple of Come Follow Me discussion groups. And my first attempt at a Sunday school lesson was so abysmal that I hate myself every time I think about it, but I do much better now because I don't do much at all. With the Come Follow Me lessons I basically spend half an hour jotting down questions and discussion prompts, and then use them to make everyone else do most of the talking, which creates an enjoyable experience for all but mostly me. On the rare occasion that nobody responds immediately, I'm not afraid to wait them out. Awkward shmawkward. As Alanis Morrissette once queried,

English classes at USU are also very discussion-based, so much so that many of them are limited to twenty students and very difficult to get into. But nonetheless I'll have to do a lot more preparing and a lot more talking. There's a specific amount of material I'll have to cover and there are actual curricular criteria I'll have to prepare these kids for. And despite my best efforts to be a fun, laid-back teacher that everyone loves, I'll have to grade them honestly and give them Ds and Fs if that's what they've earned, and then they'll hate me and try to get me fired. And at the end of the semester all of them will anonymously fill out evaluations of information including but not limited to all the ways in which I suck. Also, it will probably take me at least a month to memorize all their names and preferred pronouns. I forget so many names sometimes I could swear I have dementia.

I can't say no to this opportunity, yet it terrifies me. I try to comfort myself by thinking of all the times I moved past my fears and it was totally worth it. But then I can't think of any and I remember that actually most of the times I moved past my fears, terrible things happened to me. It's almost as if fear is a normal healthy instinct programmed to protect me or something. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ So I remind myself that I worked at a call center for nearly four months so I can definitely do this. I mean, yeah, I got progressively worse at the call center job as my sleep and will to live decreased every week, and I would let everyone I love starve to death before I'd do it again, but I did it. Yay me. I'm so strong. (You know it's time for a career change when you catch yourself thinking If I jump in front of that truck, I won't have to go to work today.) Don't get me wrong, I have no doubt that this will be better than working at a call center. Clearing an elephant's bowel blockage with my tongue would also be better than working at a call center.

Probably the first couple weeks will be stressful and awful and full of no sleep whatsoever, but then they'll get better and my silly little worries will evaporate and I'll be so good they'll beg me to stay on and I'll get job offers from all over the country. Who can say? One way or another it will be an adventure. With any luck it will be an incredible opportunity to indoctrinate young, plastic minds with my worldview, instill them with a passion for the written word, and become too absorbed in a fulfilling and rewarding career path to ever be bored or fall in love again. It's not going to make me rich, but that's what my books are for. In theory. (Memo to future tenured self: assign your students to read your books so at least somebody will.)

Keen-eyed readers will note that my site looks a little different now. Weebly stopped updating or supporting my previous "theme" so it started to have annoying problems like the menu icon being invisible on the mobile version that most people use. This theme is working out better but will take some fine-tuning to get exactly the way I want it, or as close to exactly the way I want it as I can get without the bother of learning to code.

I am profoundly fatigued from my eternal sleep deprivation, which has robbed me of the stamina to complete the much better post I had planned for this weekend. Nonetheless, yesterday was the first truly happy day I've had since the incident that I keep going on about. The weather here in Logan, Utah was so gorgeous that it felt like a sin to not spend every moment of daylight outside, so I, limited by my unusually tired legs, took several brief walks punctuated by resting on benches and in grass. I also learned two very welcome pieces of information: that I've been accepted for graduate school here at USU, and a family matter that I suppose isn't my place to publicly announce at this time. The graduate school thing comes as no surprise because a. God has been pushing me to do it and b. honestly, if I wasn't good enough to make the cut, they'd only have like five graduate students at most. But having it confirmed gives me one fewer thing to worry about until the reality of what I've gotten myself into sinks in.

With higher brain functions and meaningful accomplishments like my Indiana Jones fan fiction off the table for the time being, I've lapsed into one of my music addiction phases. During these periods I rarely take my headphones off except to charge them, but even more so than listening to the songs I already know and love, I become obsessed with acquiring more and building playlists. The Spotify playlist I'm on now, "Gimme Some Space" - a spacelist if you will, a love letter to astronomy and science fiction and pretentious crap like the yearnings of the human heart - is, for better and worse, easier than some to expand. This list is arranged by topic rather than genre. Obviously it leans a lot toward electronic music that people associate with space but I try to make it as diverse as possible. So at any time I can search out more musical candidates by entering keywords associated with astronomy and/or science fiction, listen to each one time, and if I don't hate it then onto the list it goes. I spent more time than I'd care to admit on this pursuit yesterday.

As of this writing, without consciously setting out to do so, I've ended up so far with ten versions of David Bowie's magnum opus "Space Oddity" - the original version and nine covers (not counting another song that inexplicably has the same title). I also have sixteen versions of Peter Schilling's unauthorized sequel "Major Tom (Coming Home)" - the original German version, two remixes of the German version, a cover of the German version, the official English version, two remixes of the English version, four covers of the English version, four remixes of one of the covers of the English version, and a French cover. I'm way more excited about this than I should be. Probably the only song on the list that outnumbers those ones is the Star Wars theme, which comes under so many different titles ("Star Wars", "Main Theme", "Main Theme from Star Wars", etc.) that I can't be bothered to quantify it scientifically. But I could do worse than to keep replicating three of the best compositions in the universe.

The major downside of these phases is that I go to bed after a day of being obsessed with music, and my brain is like a radio that I can't turn off. One song after another after another. It makes getting to sleep even more difficult than usual and as a result I'm even more fatigued today than yesterday. Of course I know this will happen and try to be responsible and limit myself, but I am weak and subject to all manner of temptations of the flesh. Especially when I'm tired. Which is always. I've loved space stuff for a very long time and I think I've latched onto this playlist because of the spirit of escapism it embodies, which is also something I wrote about in my declaration of intent when I needed some pompous academic language to explain why I should be accepted for graduate school, and it worked. Anyway, here's the playlist in case I've sufficiently piqued your curiosity.

It's a month almost to the day since the nasty incident with my neighbors, and though I've put it behind me as much as possible, and though by objective measures little else has developed, of course I still remember it every day and have had plenty of time to think about it a little more. It's for my own closure more than anything and I'm sorry if it bores everyone else (insert your own quip about all my posts boring you here).

The next day, open enrollment at my apartment complex began for summer and next school year, and I went to sign up. I love my current location, and I had to move thrice last year and I would be damned if I was going to do it again so soon. If my neighbors had a problem with me then they could leave, and I've since heard that they will, though I don't know if it has anything to do with me. I also soon returned to opening my blinds for most of the day as I've always done to maximize natural light and minimize my electricity bill (though most of it is still blocked by trees and recycle bins) but now to also send the message I'm not afraid of you, I mean I am, but I won't let you intimidate me out of living my life. While sitting in my living room on a Sunday morning I've seen them look in my living room window at me before scurrying past like anxious little rodents. Like they're literally scared of me when all I ever did was be nice to them. Such idiocy is so unreal I don't even know how to feel about it.

I've been able to avoid more than occasional glimpses of them, with one notable exception. One Sunday evening I walked into the Spectrum, the basketball stadium on campus where the annual Joseph Smith Memorial Devotional was being held, and there C stood not three meters in front of me, in her campus employee uniform, facing a perpendicular direction. Terror paralyzed me for a moment that seemed like an hour, but I quickly realized that if she turned her head to the left and saw me she would probably call a SWAT team, so I bolted past her, through the crowd, at least halfway around the stadium, not slowing down when I heard some guy behind me say "Hey, there's Nick! Hey, Nick! Nick! He's got headphones on. Nick!" Of course I knew he was talking about/to me because Nick is second only to Christian on the list of things that people think my name is. I found a nice isolated seat close to the action where I could relax a little and process the unwelcome moment.

Now, I was unfairly biased the first time I saw her, as I was trying to close off my heart to the opposite sex entirely, and I thought she looked plain, homely, awkward, and forgettable. I've since come to realize that she is in fact widely regarded by humans as "cute", and I can accept that. But she's no Gal Gadot by any means. She looks like an upside-down exclamation point with glasses, hair, and possibly the worst case of Resting Bitch Face Syndrome I've ever seen. Our first encounter held not the slightest foreshadowing that soon, the slightest hint of a smile on that face would be sufficient to turn my internal organs into jelly. It was what I thought I knew of her mind and personality that transformed her into God's most beautiful creation. This, I thought, is one hell of a woman. This is one of the most mature, intelligent, genuine people I've ever met. This is someone I could have deep, intellectual conversations with for hours. It's not even an issue that she's four and a half years younger than me even though most girls that young don't appeal to me because they look and act like high school students and I'm just not into that.

And then she showed her true colors and I completely lost respect for her, along with faith in my ability to judge character at all, and I was/am embarrassed that I wasted so much emotional energy on someone so unworthy. And then I saw her up close by accident with this new frame of reference and she was still, inexplicably, God's most beautiful creation. So that added another layer of confusion and fear which I was in no position to assuage.

Another little act of bravery was attending home evening even though they're both assigned to my group, and neither of them were ever there so it was fine and for once I was glad I didn't let fear hold me back. After three weeks of going elsewhere on Sundays I decided to return to my ward altogether when it became apparent that few people had heard about the incident and those who did were on my side. Even with C's and T's garbled version of events, it seems, the general feeling from others is that they overreacted to whatever I was or wasn't doing. To their credit, I've obviously told far more people about it than they have, but not so much to their credit, my version isn't dishonest and totally irrational. So I went to church, they sat a bit in front of me with their arms around each other and I realized they make the cutest couple ever.

The final deciding factor was learning that one of their own roommates had stood up for me in a meeting, saying they had jumped the gun, that I wasn't a threat, and that they resented me for treating their dog better than they do. (Guilty as charged. I do have an unfortunate track record of being nice to dogs.) I was surprised to hear about this because, while I knew the complaint had to have come from the two of them, I just kind of assumed all five roommates were on the same page about it. The cop they sent to harass me just kept saying "Your neighbors" this and "Your neighbors" that and made it sound like I wasn't allowed to communicate with any of them at all ever. And I barely know this particular roommate, but on the rare and brief occasions when I talked to her, usually when I knocked on the door looking for someone else, she always seemed to think I was strange and have this What are you doing? kind of look on her face even though I wasn't doing anything. I assumed that when C and T announced I was a stalker she would have just been like I always knew he was sketchy. It warmed my heart very much to hear otherwise.

My friend Jen sent me cookies. She sends me cookies on my birthday but now she doesn't have to for my next three birthdays.

​Another friend suggested, "That one girl (the one who saw visions) sounds like a pathological liar."

I asked, "Literally, do you think?" Because I've used the phrase "pathological liar" perhaps a bit too casually in my day, but now I was really intrigued by the possibility of a legitimate pathology here.

"Yeah," she said. "Every person I know who claimed to see visions or auras turned out to be a compulsive liar. (Not that there aren't people who can see visions, like the prophets in the Book of Mormon.) There is a hierarchy of who can have revelations for who. Like parents can have revelations for their children or the bishop for his ward. I bet she got uncomfortable with you asking questions because she couldn't keep her lies going without exposing herself. But I wasn't there and I can't read minds. That's my guess."

You know, I think she's right. I never suspected anything amiss about T's "gift" because she didn't seem to use it for her own profit or self-aggrandizement, or have any intention of usurping someone else's authority. I just thought, well, this is unusual but cool, whatever. I may seem like a colossal idiot to those who don't believe in anything like that to begin with but we'll just have to agree to disagree. Looking back I can maybe see a few inconsistencies in her claims, and how she moved the goalposts and always had a little too quick and easy answer for everything. If she could really read my aura or see the color of my heart she wouldn't have been so very, very wrong about me in the end, and if she were really as wise as she pretended (though always putting on a show of humility when I pointed it out) she wouldn't have reacted like a fifth grader. And she demonstrably did lie to me at least a couple of times and had no discernible qualms about breaking her promise to me in a heartbeat.

Part of me wants to believe that she has a toxic influence on her best friend C, that everything is her fault and that C really is at heart the kind of person I thought she was. Who knows? I never likely will. But I received more support for this hypothesis from my old friend Marie, a character whom only long-time readers of my blog will remember.

Incidentally, a couple months ago she delighted in pointing out to me that C's lovely name is a sacrilegious swear word in Quebec. If I hadn't been so blind, I would have recognized that as a massive red flag.

I've thought a bit about my story in relation to Joseph Smith's First Vision. In this event, to which The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and all breakoff sects trace their founding, and which celebrates its two hundredth anniversary this year, Joseph Smith reports that at the age of fourteen he went into the woods to pray and was visited in person by Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ. Over the years he wrote a few firsthand accounts, and a few more were written by associates who heard him talking about it. There are two main perspectives on these varying accounts. The critical perspective is that because they aren't identical in every detail, Joseph Smith must have made the story up as he went along. The faithful perspective is that he emphasized different aspects of the event at different times for different audiences. Now obviously I'm biased, but I think the critical perspective is pretty infantile, and that only one of these differences (the number of heavenly beings mentioned in the 1832 account versus the other accounts) even comes close to something that could rationally be considered a discrepancy.

I've thought about it because, though it's only been a few weeks as opposed to Joseph Smith's twelve years, I've told my story to several people and I haven't told it the same way each time. I haven't consciously adjusted the story for my different audiences but of course in each case finite constraint on people's attention spans and I have to select what strike me as important, representative details. I've often just started with a simple statement like "My neighbors thought I was stalking them and called the police" or "I had to go to the hospital for being suicidal" and let the ensuing comments and questions guide my additional exposition. I've even gone back to my original post - which was already too long - and, through the power vested in me by George Walton Lucas Jr., revised a few word choices and added details that I didn't include the first time around. There are still more I could add but I don't want it to become so long and rambling that nobody on the planet cares to read it.

Does that make me dishonest? Of course not. All it means is that it was a really big, emotionally impactful event and that I can't think of or include everything all at once, let alone every time, nor would anybody actually want me to. The First Vision was much bigger and much more emotionally impactful, albeit in an altogether more positive way. That's not even taking into account how memories are reconstructed from scratch every time we access them based on our current perspectives and emotions, or the obvious evolution in how Joseph Smith would have viewed the event's significance as his life continued and more events followed. I only hope that the significance of this event for me will turn out to be more than God giving me the finger. Listen to a very long but well worth it historians' podcast on the historical context of the First Vision.

And speaking of church history, Saints Volume 2 is out now and I'm a few chapters in and I intend to binge-read the rest as fast as possible.

I'm not surprised in the slightest that Trump's impeachment ended with him facing no consequences for his actions. The orange blob has built his entire political career off of facing no consequences for his actions. And regardless of which side you're on, it's really really obvious that the whole trial was a sick farce and that the evidence never mattered, since the voting split exactly along party lines like we suspected it would all along.

Oh, except it didn't quite go exactly along party lines. One of the two hundred fifty Republicans demonstrated an ounce of integrity. Willard "Mitt" Romney sided against his own party, against Trump, and cited his Latter-day Saint faith as the driving force behind this act of conscience. Fully aware of the persecution he would face for standing up to the the Republican cult's wicked god, Romney quoted a song that I, having grown up in the same church as him, heard many times: "Do what is right, let the consequence follow."

This church, due to the historical circumstances surrounding Utah's admission to statehood, leans rather conservative / Republican (notwithstanding those terms are all but mutually exclusive nowadays) in the United States (unlike everywhere else in the world where members' political leanings are indistinguishable from the general population). This wouldn't be so much of a problem if it hadn't led to the existence of a substantial number of morons who are only Republicans because their great-great-grandparents were, yet wrongly believe that they're Republicans because the Republican Party platform is the only one compatible with the gospel, and in practice elevate it to the level of scripture itself. And these morons are very angry at Romney (in addition to the same reason that other Republicans are very angry at Romney) for embarrassing them by bringing their shared religion into his act of treason against their true god.

Well, all I can say to those people is deal with it. If I can tolerate sharing my religion young earth creationists, anti-vaxxers, and Trump apologists, then they can tolerate sharing it with someone who actually lives by its precepts. I can't speak for Romney's experience, but the church I grew up in did not teach me to downplay, rationalize, and/or straight-up defend corrupt, dishonest, lecherous, and/or rabidly xenophobic behavior. It taught me not to judge hearts, but it did not teach me to pretend that a repugnant human being is an example of character and leadership because worse people exist. It did not teach me to abandon my principles at a moment's notice for political expediency. I'm not sure where these other Latter-day Saints picked all that stuff up.

So the Republican cult wants to censure Romney for doing what he (correctly) believed was right. It wants him to face actual consequences for not mindlessly voting along party lines. And the harassment from rank-and-file cultists will probably continue for a good while. But the best part is their god's passive-aggressive pronouncement, "I don’t like people who use their faith as justification for doing what they know is wrong." I mean, this statement is itself so wrong, asinine and completely backwards that it's actually hilarious. In fairness, Trump has never needed justification for doing what he knows is wrong, because his worshipers bend over backwards and fall over themselves time and time again to provide it for him. But one would be hard-pressed to find a more obvious example of the biblical warning, "Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!" Yeah, I went there and I'm not sorry.

Oh, my mistake.

​​Though I have a much smaller platform than Romney and would hardly seek to portray myself as a shining specimen of moral rectitude, I'm somewhat familiar with the price of honesty. It really pisses people off. Speaking the truth as I understand - not to say that I'm always right by any means, but that I follow my own intellect and conscience the best I can instead of pandering to what other people consider acceptable and want to be true - got me hit by my parents and bullied by my peers as a child, and has alienated scores of former friends and counting as an adult. But I've also been informed that others find it refreshing and love my blog and Facebook posts for that reason. So my blog would be a lot more popular if more people weren't fake and shallow. Oh well, that's life.

Of course, this joke of an impeachment trial and the backlash against Romney are symptomatic of the nauseating polarization of American politics which in turn is a direct result of the impossibly stupid two-party system. Why am I even wasting my time writing this? I've talked about it before and it didn't make a difference then and it won't now. I feel like I'm talking to a nation of lobotomized tree sloths. You don't have to choose between Republicans and Democrats. There are other options. There always have been. You saying "They have no chance of winning" is literally the only reason they have no chance of winning, you ******* imbeciles. Cripes.

Sorry about that. I feel better now.

To say that Hitler's Nazis killed eleven million people doesn't even begin to scratch the surface of how evil they were. Murder is bad and all, but in my view, there are many, many things worse than death, and the Nazis did most of them to people. I assume most people have learned at some point in detail about the atrocities of the Holocaust, yet it seems to me that in American popular culture we typically represent Nazis as one-dimensional stock villains who just want to take over the world for vague unspecified evil reasons. This glaring discrepancy is why Steven Spielberg could no longer use Nazis as Indiana Jones villains after making "Schindler's List", and in recent days has also caused me some discomfort as I'm revisiting an Indiana Jones fan fiction based on a rejected screenplay that I started over a decade ago. The truth is awkward. I don't believe all my suffering in the past decade, considerable though it is, would measure up to even a week in a Nazi concentration camp.

And of course, the Nazis' atrocities against the Jews should never ever ever be downplayed, but they do tend to get all the attention, with other persecuted groups who together constituted their other five million victims all but forgotten from our collective memory. This week an excellent op-ed appeared called "Why Nazi Atrocities Against Gay Men Must Never Be Forgotten". (Specifically men, yes, as the author briefly notes that "they viewed lesbianism as a temporary condition so they suffered less", and I in turn note an interesting parallel to what I've read about medieval views of homosexuality, in which female same-sex crimes were given much more leniency because women were stupid and emotional and less responsible for their actions. Yay for misogyny?) Ironically, given how little attention this subject has received, the first time I heard the word "homosexuals" (though I'd already been called "faggot" several times a day for a few years by that point) was in sixth grade when a teacher listed off groups of people that the Nazis persecuted.

Alan Keele likewise noted in his review "Mormons and Nazis", "While visiting in 2007 the Villa Wannsee, outside Berlin, site of the infamous planning meetings for the 'Final Solution to the Jewish Problem' presided over by Adolf Eichmann, I was intrigued – and, frankly, shocked – to learn from a display there that from within Germany proper – not counting places outside its borders like Poland with much larger Jewish populations – the Nazis actually murdered more homosexuals even than Jews.

"I am convinced that the sobering fact of the existence and extent of such homicidal Nazi homophobia, if more widely known and better understood among Mormons today, could have an important tempering effect on current thinking about how disciples of the Prince of Peace should speak about and behave toward members of the LGBT community, especially recalling how homophobia was falsely viewed in the Third Reich as a lofty moral position, the taking of a righteous religious stand against sinful monsters portrayed by Fascist hate-mongers as an imminent danger to society....

"This is by no means an abstract concern. I have witnessed several things, some quite recently, that both shocked and horrified me. In my High Priests’ meeting in early 1994, a retired Seminary and Institute teacher, a man I very much admire, a war hero seriously wounded during the Battle of the Bulge, worked himself into a rage over the fact that President Clinton had invited gays to march in his inaugural parade. Growing more angry by the moment, he opined that gays should not be allowed to take employment or find housing. When someone asked him how he expected them to live, he finally sputtered that all queers should probably be taken out and shot."

In fairness, taking them out and shooting them would be much nicer than what the Nazis actually did to them.

An older but very educational article that also came to my attention outlined "In Germany’s extermination program for black Africans, a template for the Holocaust". Besides showing how the "Final Solution" for Jews and others directly evolved from Germany's genocide against black Africans in what is now Namibia, it explores the intertwining with eugenics and the civil rights movement in the United States. The concept of exterminating "undesirable" types of people really was born in the United States from brilliant minds like Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger, but it was mostly about not letting them reproduce, and Germany watched these developments with interest and decided to improve on them by adding unspeakable torture and mass murder. When the United States saw that, they were all like "Woah, guys, we're as racist as the next country, probably more so in fact, but too much is too much." It forced more than a little bit of soul-searching.

Tangent: The United States' history of forced sterilizations is not ancient history. The article notes that in North Carolina they "continued into the 1970s, long after Hitler fell", but I also remember less than seven years ago when doctors in California were exposed for sterilizing at least 148 women in prison between 2006 and 2010. I was immersed in right-wing Facebook pages and news sources at this time and I remember well that this was pretty much the only thing California ever did that they agreed with. Typical comments from self-proclaimed conservatives ran along the lines of "I don't see the problem here!" and "They should sterilize the men too!" A self-proclaimed conservative myself, it nonetheless made me sick. There are few times when it's okay to compare people to Hitler, but this was one of them.

Hitler said a few nasty things about black people in his book. But the Nazis themselves, unlike their predecessors in Namibia, never got around to an orchestrated campaign against black people because there weren't very many in Germany or nearby. They had a relatively low number of young mixed-race people in the Rhineland (descended from black French troops) whom they sterilized in 1937, and as horrible as that is, it remains one of the least of their atrocities. And when black American athlete Jesse Owens totally humiliated them in the 1936 Olympics, they were nonetheless PR-savvy enough to treat him better than the United States did. Though by no means oblivious to the Nazis' animosity toward him, he famously opined, "Hitler didn’t snub me; it was our president who snubbed me. The president didn’t even send a telegram." If the Nazis had won World War II, though - which was never much of a risk given Hitler's incompetence at military strategy, but if they had somehow, it wouldn't have been long before they swept over Africa and added a few tens of millions more mutilated corpses to their resume.

This actually has some relevance to my aforementioned fan fiction which, as per the screenplay it's based on, has Nazis as the villains and takes place in black Africa in 1937. Back in tenth grade or so I made a point of playing up the racism aspect that the screenplay completely ignores (and adding a bit of American racism as well, because they don't deserve to get off the hook either, though the protagonist himself is canonically established as way ahead of his time on racial equality). But revisiting it now, I still feel uncomfortable because that still doesn't come close to adequately conveying how evil Hitler and his ilk truly were. It's even putting a bit of a damper on my longtime love for the Indiana Jones franchise.

It bears repeating that if there is no God and no afterlife, Hitler and his Nazis won, and their victims lost in a very big, very permanent way.