Disclaimer: This article is based on actual news from the real world – honestly! However, it has been sprinkled with a healthy dose of satire.
The U.S. Coast Guard issued an urgent policy clarification Thursday night banning swastikas and nooses without qualification, roughly six hours after media outlets noticed the service had briefly downgraded Nazi iconography to “potentially divisive,” a phrase more commonly applied to Thanksgiving seating charts.
A lovely swastika-free uniform. (zhukovsky/depositphotos)
The new guidance declares hate symbols “prohibited,” a word officials insisted was “totally different” from the previous version, in the same way that admitting you set the house on fire is totally different from saying you merely pre-heated it aggressively. The change came after The Washington Post discovered the November guidance, at which point the Coast Guard experienced what psychologists call “sudden moral clarity” and what everyone else calls “getting caught.”
The trouble started when reporters discovered the Coast Guard had quietly revised its November guidance to reclassify swastikas from “widely identified with oppression” to “potentially divisive,” a rhetorical downgrade roughly equivalent to calling the Black Death “a challenging respiratory season.” The earlier policy also stopped short of actually banning the symbols, instead empowering commanders to maybe remove them if they felt like it and morale seemed affected, which is roughly how the Weimar Republic both handled and subsequently bungled the issue. Both versions maintained a prohibition on Confederate flags except in educational settings, a carve-out that presumably allows display if someone is learning why displaying them is a terrible idea.
Admiral Kevin Lunday, acting commandant, insisted the rollback claims were “categorically false,” without specifying which category they belonged to instead, possibly “misunderstood semantic exercises” or “unfortunate word choices about genocide.” Lunday stated that hate symbols “have been and remain prohibited,” a timeline that experiences some turbulence in the middle, where they were briefly “potentially divisive” before returning to prohibited status like a plane that dips sharply then levels out. The press release emphasized this was “new policy to combat misinformation,” not a correction, suggesting the original version existed in some parallel dimension where it was fine and only became problematic when observed by outsiders, like Schrödinger’s policy document.
A lovely swastika-free boat. (a2gxe/depsoitphotos)
November’s version eliminated “hate incident” terminology in favor of “harassment in cases with an identified aggrieved individual,” effectively requiring someone to formally register offense before institutional action becomes possible, like a complaint box for atrocities. Commanders were authorized to remove “potentially divisive” symbols only after consulting with lawyers and determining their effect on morale, a process that sounds efficient until you imagine an officer scheduling a legal conference call to debate whether a noose is bringing down team spirit. The policy suggested symbols could be removed if they were “affecting unit morale or discipline,” implying that some swastikas might be motivational depending on the unit, which is a sentence no one should ever have to parse.
Law professor Menachem Rosensaft noted that dismissing swastikas as divisive would be “equivalent to dismissing the Ku Klux Klan’s burning crosses and hoods as merely ‘potentially divisive,'” a comparison the Coast Guard briefly considered before realizing that was, in fact, exactly the problem.
Admiral Lunday ended his statement by reaffirming Coast Guard values, which evidently include recognizing hate symbols but experiencing periodic uncertainty about the appropriate adjectives. The new guidance is expected to hold unless someone uncovers additional memos describing burning crosses as “contextually challenging” or nooses as “subject to interpretation,” at which point another midnight policy sprint will presumably occur.
This story is based on fully factual news, but if we got it wrong, blame these guys, we’re just here to make it funny.
