#like there's literally a joke about canadians treating the geneva conventions as the geneva suggestions

[thedawningofthehour]

Unfortunately for Leo, the government knows who he is. I'm still on the fence about how long they've known, but they haven't exactly kept a low profile in the past two years.

(this is off-topic, but I really do love the subtle storytelling of the turtles slowly dropping their secrecy act as time goes on and more people get mutated, because New Yorkers just don't give a shit)

Gale also didn't built nukes, that is slander from Leo's side. Draxum doesn't think weapons of mass destruction should exist (his logic is that you're also screwing yourself since weapons of that caliber can't be controlled and then you inherit the ashes, not to mention it doesn't distinguish between enemies and civilians) and if he has to threaten mutually-assured destruction to not lose, he's already lost. Now, Gale has made lasers that can preemptively detonate a nuclear warhead, so the effect is somewhat similar to if Draxum was sitting on a nuke like a hen incubating a very radioactive egg-the US launches a nuke at Gale, a nuke will blow up somewhere other than NYC. Gale plans to do so over a national forest in Pennsylvania to minimize casualties, if it's ever necessary, but the EPF doesn't know that. Now that I'm thinking about it, they 100% don't know for certain that Draxum doesn't have WMDs, and I mean-the US has literally gone to war over imaginary WMDs before, there's precedent for this to the tune of $8 trillion and 4.7 million people dead, they would absolutely treat Gale like the weapon of mass destruction he is.

#Sure Gale is more valuable than Leo to them so he might get treated better#but#I am pretty sure that Gale is getting all types of medical shit done to him#…#on the other hand#if Leo IS put in a concentration camp or something he is very fucked#Like Auschwitz had over 800 people who tried to escape; some of them insanely clever#but of those only around 140 made it#did u know they wouldn’t separate children from their mothers in auschwitz#that would have been too much forceful work so they just told the mothers they would need baths#and send them with their kids together in the gaß chambers#my sisters class also had to visit the crematory and her friend got in trouble for puking#ok I mean Doth is very dark sometimes but I don‘t think you will go Joseph Mengle with it right?#Like the guy who experimented on Tiger Claw as a kid but that wasn’t graphically shown; just told from TC as a memory#oh I remember Mengle had an obsession with experimenting on twins#given that Leo and Gale couldn’t be further from twinship rn I doubt that’s relevant#Idk how you will write Bishop but the 2003 version is very pragmatic#but yeah no Gale is in for a horrific time#with Leo it depends I think#I wanted to ramble more but I looked up articles about Mengle and now I feel sick#I‘m going to watch cat videos now#love u fai#where ever you take the boys I‘m excited to read your writing

From my understanding, Mengele was only interested in identical twins. (or at least twins that looked identical-I don't think they knew the difference between monozygotic and dizygotic twins in the 30s and 40s, they just knew sometimes they looked alike and sometimes they didn't) He liked to experiment on them because one would serve as the perfect 'control' while he did horrible experiments on the other, and then he'd kill them both to do the autopsies and compare. Though I feel like I remember one instance where he took a male-female pair of twins and tried to graft the brother's genitals onto his sister, but that might have been the Japanese who did that. (the shit the Japanese did during WWII and the Cambodian genocide, reading about those subjects marked two of the very rare times I've ever read something and gone "okay, I mentally cannot handle any more of this today.")

But yeah, even if Leo and Donnie were the same species from the same clutch and could therefore be considered twins with only a bit of stretching the definition, they'd still be fraternal twins so that wouldn't apply. It is interesting that you mentioned it though.

Yeah I'm probably not going to put in an equivalent to Mengele, I haven't wanted to spoil much about Bishop but one thing I think is really important in this story is that all the warmongers have understandable motives. Because that's overwhelmingly how it is in real life. I feel like the constant dehumanization of Nazis and harping on only the most evil, horrible aspects of the genocide has been more counterproductive than anything else, because we end up distancing ourselves from the reality of it all and the choices that went into it. You can't relate to a man like Mengele. He's too horrifically evil, his sadism and complete lack of humanity is just incomprehensible to most people. The things he did, it's hard to wrap your head around the level of suffering and cruelty, it almost doesn't feel real at times. It's too hard to conceptualize.

We focus on the monsters like Mengele because-well, let's be real, partly morbid fascination, but also because he is an easy figure to hate. He was an intrinsically evil person, there's no debating that. His own son wouldn't accept his remains and refused to bring them back to Germany. It's easy to denounce him, because there's nothing about him that would hit close to home.

The vast majority of Nazis were not Mengele. They did not wake up one day and suddenly go "I hate Jews because they're smelly and I'm going to kill them now." Yes, there was an antisemitism problem in Germany already, but not like that. There were plenty of people who weren't antisemitic before Hitler rose to power. Hell, there were Jewish Nazis. They were some of the first people loaded up on trains, incidentally. (tokens get spent, after all) Nobody flipped a switch and turned these people into frothing antisemitic monsters overnight, it was a long process of exploiting people's fears, scapegoating 'others' and manufacturing hatred, eventually conditioning people to accept and even aid in increasing levels of violence against them.

And for total clarify, fuck these guys. I'm not trying to sympathize with fucking Nazis here. They did terrible shit, they deserved what they got in return, and they deserve to have their names dragged through the mud. They were horrible, depraved murderers. But most of them weren't born that way. They were radicalized. And that matters because the same methods that were used to radicalize them can be used to radicalize again.

To me, Mengele is not representative of the horrors of Nazism. Nazism didn't make him evil. He was already like that. He was an intrinsically evil man on the Nazi side, just as there were 100% intrinsically evil men on the Allied side. The difference was that Nazism gave Mengele the platform to carry out his evil and supplied him with victims. That's what makes movements like Nazism evil, not because evil people exist within them but because it allows evil people to flourish, encourages neutral people to do evil, and keeps good people from stopping them. Nobody reads about Mengele and learns how not to be Mengele. They need to read about the father of three who became a Nazi because he feared for the future of his children and Nazism told him there was an easy solution to all his problems. They need to read about that because that's going to be the thing that clicks and makes them go "I need to have a fucking talk with my dad about his attitude towards immigrants."

There are definitely people like Mengele in the EPF. I don't foresee myself writing about them. There is nothing to learn from them.