7 August—Six more thankses for the Altice class-action info, although three grateful readers couldn’t find it in optimum.net junk and will therefore presumably try the contact number today. And even though grawlix lost out to Fuck you!, in the interest of journalistic gravitas the audacious Scotties will taunt the Dane with grawlix. For the time being, anyway.

On the subject of gravitas, then, consider Barbie. Not the doll, the real Barbie. As everybody knows, the Barbie Doll, a so-called fashion doll, was the truly brilliant idea of Ruth Handler, president of toy-maker Mattel, and first marketed in 1959. Barbie’s gender wasn’t specified, but it was pretty obvious in the good old days when gender was pretty obvious.

Ken, also a fashion doll, was born two years later. His gender was quite as obvious as Barbie’s—and for the same reason. Well, not exactly the same reason. But I mustn’t digress.

The story goes that both Barbie and Ken were named after the Handler kids, sister Barbara and brother Kenneth. No problem.

But there’s another Barbie to consider, though perhaps not as a namesake. The real Barbie, definitely not a doll. That would be Klaus Barbie, the Nazi SS Hauptsturmführer known as the Butcher of Lyon. There’s no equivalent rank in the English language or any armed forces for Hauptsturmführer, but it literally means head storm leader and was a typically Nazi paramilitary rank with the pay grade of captain. (Josef Mengele, the notorious Auschwitz Todesengel [Angel of Death], also was a Hauptsturmführer in the SS.)

Nikolaus Barbie, born in 1913, shortened his Christian name to Klaus, but didn’t touch his surname. He became known as the Butcher of Lyon for having personally tortured countless prisoners—mostly Jews and members of the French Resistance—as the head of the Gestapo in Lyon, Vichy France. It’s estimated that Barbie was directly responsible for the deaths of some 14,000 people, including those whose roundups and murders he personally participated in.

After the war, believe it or not, the amoral paranoid geniuses in United States intelligence services used Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie (who became Klaus Altmann) as an anti-communist operative and actually aided—probably devised—his escape to Bolivia. There he advised the dictatorial regime on how to repress opposition through torture. One of our guys.

No one knows how many Nazi war criminals facing imprisonment and execution made it to South America (and probably North America), changed their names, and lived out their evil lives without being discovered. And with American and British help.

Of course, only the good Nazi war criminals came to work in the United States and didn’t even have to assume new identities. Of course. Like Wernher von Braun and his gute Freunde from Peenemünde, whose V-2 rockets, having killed thousands of Brits, were pacified into America’s Saturn rockets. And the war criminals became heroes. Of course.

Getting back to Barbie, in Bolivia he was also recruited by the anti-communist West German government. And so on.

Klaus Barbie was a war criminal whom the French really wanted to get their hands on for obvious reasons. In 1971 the Nazi-hunting Klarsfelds found the mass murderer in Peru, where he was doing “security” for that country’s dictator du jour. So he slithered back to Bolivia, whose friendly fascist government refused to extradite him.

Finally, in 1983, Bolivia’s newly elected democratic government delivered the Butcher of Lyon to France to stand trial. It was only then that American intelligence’s disgraceful collusion with Barbie (among other Nazi war criminals) came to light. So Washington, as usual, issued half-assed “deep regrets” to France for aiding his escape:

“As the investigation of Klaus Barbie has shown, officers of the United States government were directly responsible for protecting a person wanted by the government of France on criminal charges and in arranging his escape from the law. As a direct result of that action, Klaus Barbie did not stand trial in France in 1950; he spent 33 years as a free man and a fugitive from justice.” Makes you proud to be an American.

No thanks to Uncle Sam, Barbie was indicted for his war crimes in France in 1984 and tried by a jury in 1987. He was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment—only because France had abolished capital punishment (the good old guillotine) in 1981. (Barbie’s head would have made a great exhibit in Yad Vashem, Israel’s memorial to Holocaust victims.)

Klaus Barbie, the Butcher of Lyon, died of leukemia and spine and prostate cancer in a Lyon prison in 1991. He deserved to suffer. But he didn’t suffer enough . . .