Is Comparing COVID Restrictions to Nazism Ever OK?By Dan Gelernter
January 4, 2022
The Jerusalem Post published a column last week by Kenneth Bandler bemoaning the “normalization of Holocaust parallels in the COVID era.” The author is upset at people who invoke Nazi Germany when talking about vaccine mandates and what they portend. Bandler takes issue with Washington State Representative Jim Walsh, who actually wore a yellow star and said, “In this context, we are all Jews.”
Oh, the heinousness!
Bandler wants Walsh to know that comparing political actions or leaders to Nazis is strictly verboten: “It is imperative that responsible political, media, business and civil society leaders agree that utilizing Holocaust terms is off limits.”
I hate this sort of thing. My childhood Jewish day-school education was obsessed with the Holocaust. But not from any useful or meaningful perspective: A decent lesson to teach us young Jewish Americans would have been, “This is the sort of thing that happens to a people who lose the means to defend themselves.”
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Let’s approach this logically. And for the moment, let’s forget that Bendler didn’t write this article when people were comparing George W. Bush or Donald Trump to Hitler, which was when this really became “normalized.” Setting that to one side: At what point does the behavior of a government become Nazi-like?
If Nazi Germany had stopped at the yellow star, had not started a war, had been content simply with dividing Jews from the rest of society—if there had been no death camps—what would we think of those stars now?
It’s conceivable they would still be in use.
It’s tremendously easy to condemn Nazism when you have the luxury of looking backwards to its defeat three-quarters of a century ago. But most people who were stuck in the middle of it found it was easier to follow Nazi orders and wait for better times. This applies both to the Jews who were willing to put on the stars and their neighbors who didn’t stand up for them.
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People wearing a yellow star to protest vaccine mandates may bother some people. They don’t bother me even one tiny little bit. People accuse them of trivializing the Holocaust. That’s a shallow and backwards interpretation: If anything, these protesters are overestimating the dangers of our current situation. They’ve chosen the Holocaust precisely because they see it as the deepest human catastrophe they can think of. If you ask me, they take the Holocaust very seriously indeed.
The real complaint from people like Bendler has nothing to do with the Holocaust: His objection is that he thinks the current situation isn’t too serious. That’s where the accusation of “trivialization” comes from—from people who see the current encroachments on freedom as trivial.
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Obviously we’re not living in Germany in 1944. No one is suggesting we are. But some parts of the world (like China) already look like Germany under Hitler. And a lot of the world looks like Germany before Hitler. That is cause for concern, and ample justification for historical comparisons.
Unless you’re absolutely certain it couldn’t happen here.
Mind you, if there is one thing I learned from from my Hebrew day school education, it was that the Jews in Nazi Germany tended to think, “It couldn’t happen here.” And they continued to think that, even while it was happening.
Source:
https://amgreatness.com/2022/01/04/is-comparing-covid-restrictions-to-nazism-ever-ok/
