It doesn’t have the same alliteration, but I could go with that.
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Mixed metaphors. The Gestapo was a German thing, Gulags were a Soviet thing.
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Since the cartoon was generated by ChatGPT, I asked it how to respond. Here’s its riposte:
You’re absolutely right that the Gestapo and the Gulag come from different historical regimes — Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, respectively. But the cartoon intentionally juxtaposes them to make a broader point: authoritarianism doesn’t wear just one uniform.
The metaphor isn’t about historical precision; it’s about the shared logic of repression — the militarized detainment of vulnerable populations, the normalization of surveillance, the use of fear as a tool of policy. When an ICE agent looks indistinguishable from a secret policeman, and when barbed-wire camps emerge in remote swamps, the specific era or ideology matters less than the structure of power being depicted.
In other words, it’s not about confusing the Gestapo and the Gulag. It’s about connecting them — to show that when we build systems like these in America, we’re tapping into a global and deeply troubling tradition, not inventing something new.
Metaphors, after all, aren’t supposed to be tidy. They’re supposed to provoke.
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I’d mark the answer down for special pleading. It’s also not an ICE agent–there is a figleaf in the label ICESTAPO.
If the point is that authoritarianism does not just wear one unifom, it would be more appropriate and provocative to simply label the goon ICE.
ETA: I don’t like mixed metaphors in the written word, and I don’t like them in visual work, either.
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I predict that Laura Loomer will be Chief Justice of the United States very soon. John Roberts is not a loyal enough lapdog and will step down with Jerry Powell to make way for younger real conservatives.
That’s appropriate as a rhetorical question.
As a straightforward question, one has to reply with another question: How many Americans know fully WTF is going on?
I look at people’s faces in the local super mkt; they smile at my silver hair. I’ll hear some grumbling about the food prices but wonder how many know that Colbert was just fired, that US citizens are being shipped to gulags, that both the SCOTUS and our Congress have both surrendered their authority, that we’ve already crossed the threshold into autocracy.
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Well it appears Powell has a spine made of titanium. Now, if the fat fuck could stroke out that would be nice but it wouldn’t solve a single one of our problems.
Throughout history, the common people have had great capacity to adopt ignorance as their defense against reality and to smile as they swirled the toilet. Especially when they believed the target of government hatred was their next door neighbor and not themselves. We humans are quite well evolved to do that. The price of toilet paper puts us in high dudgeon. The imprisonment, torture, and slaughter of thousands of people different in appearance to us: not so much.
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ICEBOX? I’m working on a good one, but I kind of like this because it is so awful, and when I was young, we had an icebox and were glad to get ride of it.
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The only problem I see with it is the cognitive dissonance. Iceboxes are intended to keep things cold (or at least cool) and do a pretty decent job of it as long as the ice supply holds out.
Your Gulag in the 'Glades is everything except cool.
I think you need to save ICEbox for when they open one up in Alaska.
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I’ve tried to get this across to others: They don’t have to be wearing jack boots or hammer and sickle. The abductions of people to some remote prisons are all in the same tradition and all for the same purpose: to intimidate the population so as to dampen any impulses to resist or rebel. I’ve known people who survived concentration camps by mostly just luck and others who witnessed unspeakable acts like tossing live, screaming children into the Danube.
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