There are many good reasons to criticize the rhetoric and conduct of Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene. Her recent comments comparing mask and vaccine mandates to anti-Jewish laws in Nazi Germany are not one of them. Indeed, it is to the shame of our political and commentary class that it has been left to such a bizarre figure to speak aloud this eminently sensible point.
Greene’s comments were attacked across the board, including by prominent conservative commentators and politicians. Progressives were her most fervent critics, of course; much can be said, and has been said, about the hypocrisy of those who sputteringly fulminate against Greene after having spent the last half-decade saying that President Trump is Hitler, and after having turned a blind eye to the anti-Semitism of figures like Representative Ilhan Omar.
Many of Greene’s detractors, such as Wolf Blitzer and Dana Bash, explicitly invoked their Jewish heritage in order to condemn her. Insofar as Jewish background is sufficient to bolster the credibility of one’s arguments on this matter, allow me to invoke my own to say that I agree with Greene fully.
We must not forget that we share a basic human nature with the people of Nazi Germany. Most of Hitler’s supporters were not psychopaths, but ordinary men and women, separated from you and I mainly by chance and circumstance, who truly believed themselves to be on the right side of history. Psychological research conducted after the Holocaust, such as that of Stanley Milgram, has demonstrated the capacity of ordinary people to commit acts of great evil.
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Greene’s detractors argue that it is ridiculous to compare something like a mask mandate to the murder of millions of Jews – and yet Hitler did not start with the murder of millions of Jews. He worked his way up to it slowly, over the course of many years, gradually extending his control one step at a time. The road to Nazi Germany is paved with small steps, each of which may seem inconsequential on their own, but, when taken as a whole, signify a terrifying descent into darkness.
Fortunately, we are still very far away from death camps in America. But when the public is divided into groups of “essential” and “nonessential,” or “vaccinated” and “unvaccinated,” with civil rights afforded disparately between those groups, then we have taken many steps in the wrong direction. The nakedly authoritarian language of many politicians, including President Biden, is revelatory of this.
We have been told that Holocaust comparisons are out-of-line because mask and vaccine mandates are trivial. If that is the case, then why do their supporters fight for them so fervently? The force with which they insist upon these mandates contradicts the notion of their supposed innocuousness.
People also tend to forget that the Nazi regime was obsessed with, and frequently justified its actions in the name of, public health – volksgesundheit. Nazi race laws were inextricably intertwined with the concept of “racial hygiene,” and the Nazis embarked on sweeping public health campaigns, including campaigns against tobacco smoking and unhealthy food. Hitler himself was terrified of bodily infection, and he repeatedly and explicitly compared Jews to a “disease” on the German body.
Sanctity has been recognized by psychologists such as Jonathan Haidt as a moral foundation, wrapped up with our biological sensitivity to disgust and rooted in our ancestors’ drive to avoid the omnipresent threat of contamination. Jews and other groups targeted by the Nazis were viewed not just as a burden on society, but a public health menace, a potential source of contamination, to be treated with all the revulsion afforded to lepers.
In our modern era, many of those on the left who consider themselves beyond such thinking have fallen into just that mindset as it pertains to those who make the personal choice to show their faces in public, or to not get an experimental vaccine. These feared anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers are viewed not just as political dissidents, but as contamination threats, practically purveyors of germ warfare, fit only to be cast out with stones like a rabid dog might be.
The historical parallels on this issue are so clear that we should be thoroughly ashamed that it has been left to a rather controversial congresswoman from Georgia’s 14th District to call them to our attention. If my fellow American Jews cannot see the danger in subordinating personal choice and self-determination to the collective good, of denying full civil rights to certain subsets of the population based on the rationale of “public health,” then they demonstrate only that they have failed to learn the true lessons of Jewish history.
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