Registered here back in February but never posted. I've enjoyed Olivia for a long time now. I was there watching tonight's show and I agree with a lot that Nordling said earlier.
Satire is straight-up lost on a lot of folks. It's gotten worse from one generation to the next. I'm in my 40's; I grew up in a time where we weren't conditioned to become offended and infuriated by almost everything we see. That's not how it is anymore today. Almost anything and everything is an outrage to someone now.
I remember watching and enjoying Mel Brooks movies when I was much younger. Still do. He is a humorist who understands that it's okay - even vital - to laugh at awful things. Mocking something terrible is how we often cope with it. Brooks defused Nazi mines back in WWII, so I daresay he had a good grasp on the damage they did. In '68 he wrote and directed a film featuring a musical farce about the Nazis and Hitler. Nazis sang and danced, and at the end huge Nazi banners were unfurled. Absurd, ridiculous, and funny. In the mid-80's he produced and performed a song and video performing as Hitler. Again - funny stuff. Especially if you saw it when it first came out.
Olivia has also mocked Third World dictators, terrorists and Soviets before. At no time does she espouse their beliefs, glorify them or promote their ideology. She dances around and acts "weird" as someone said earlier; she's quite impish and fun to watch that way. Irreverence does not equate to sharing a set of beliefs.
Tonight Olivia mocked Nazis, just as Mel Brooks did back in the day. Where Brooks did it with song and dance, Olivia did it the way she always does: dancing around and being "weird." At one point she even grabbed a strap-on and paraded about like... well a Nazi with a strap-on. Absurd, ridiculous, and funny - at least to me. It also reminded me, instantly, of the way Brooks spoofed Nazis early in his career.
She never spoke a word about Nazism, never glorified it. Just made fun of it, as other comedians have done for decades. As comedians, actors, recording artists and even Disney cartoons were doing during WWII. And then the outrage started to pour in, with some of the nastiest stuff I've seen hurled about on MFC. One model on MFC even tweeted that she hoped Olivia died; fortunately other models called her out on that. To that model's credit she walked that back a couple of hours afterward. Later, after the MFC Admins stopped Olivia's cam and asked her to drop the Nazi stuff, so she switched - into a Soviet outfit. Now if you know you're history, the Soviets under Stalin were every bit as bad as Hitler and the Nazis. Yet no one on MFC was outraged by that. Only that she'd worn a Nazi costume, which automatically meant she was a terrible racist and a genocidal fascist, right?
It's almost like a lot of models just haven't ever liked her period and saw a chance to pounce. Their MFC followers then joined in.
I've never really "defended" an MFC model before, but I did tonight. The hate being directed at Olivia is ill-placed and sad. She's not a Nazi, she's not a racist. She's a Muppet that likes to dance around and make fun of things. I'm glad for having her sense of humor around because it's rapidly vanishing. Today when something offends people they grab their pitchforks and make it a great cause for justice that must be stamped out immediately. That's something that actually gives the things we dislike and fear more power over us. It also lessens our ability to come to grips with terrible things, which means we aren't learning to cope and adapt so much as hide.
Anyway, just my two cents. Commence with hating me.
EDIT: To clarify, when I said "she never spoke a word about Nazism" I wasn't talking about the speech she read in German, which I saw live. That reminded me of Chaplin making fun of Hitler in 'The Great Dictactor.'