I am now starting to know how people like Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Martin Niemöller felt. They looked around at what was happening to a once free and democratic Germany, and they saw the slow but certain rise of totalitarianism. Worse yet, they saw most of their fellow Germans fully supporting what was happening – and that included most German Christians.
I believe that in many ways things today are ominously similar. No, I am NOT saying we are on the exact same road. However, there most certainly are some very real and worrying parallels. But let me pause and deal with a common criticism that will arise at this point.
Godwin’s Law is an adage that says this: “As a discussion on the Internet grows longer, the likelihood of a person/s being compared to Hitler or another Nazi, increases.” It involves the idea that someone has lost a debate when they resort to Nazi analogies or parallels.
Sure, sometimes folks can falsely and fallaciously drag up some historical parallel or comparison with the Nazis. But sometimes folks are entirely justified in doing so. Indeed, at times not to would mean to violate Santayana’s ‘law’ about those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it.
The more I study history, the more I see history repeating itself. What is happening in the once free West over Covid is just too similar to what occurred in the once free Germany in the 1930s. Tyranny seldom happens overnight, but usually arises incrementally – step by step.
In the name of “keeping us safe” governments have been imposing the most draconian measures, including the suspension of basic human rights such as freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of movement, and freedom of religion. Yet for too long the masses have happily gone along with all this.
Hitler and the Nazis even used the excuse of ‘public safety’ as they implemented their totalitarian policies. Indeed, most tyrannies have done this. Recall that in revolutionary France Robespierre and Co via the National Convention set up “The Committee for Public Safety” in 1793 as part of their terror campaign. Remember the guillotine!
As one site says: “The Convention acquiesced in the committee’s draconian measures—such as surveillance committees, preventive detention, and controls on civil liberties—seen as necessary to secure the republic to a point at which the suspension of the democratic constitution of June 1793 could be lifted.”
Hmm, sounds just like Dan Andrews’ Victoria, and so many other jurisdictions. But let me return to pre-war Germany. One of the major concerns we face today are things like compulsory medical mandates – the sort of things covered in the 1946 Nuremberg Trials.
Part of this is the push for vaccine passports and the creation of a new medical apartheid. A new Covid underclass is arising. Those who for any reason may have legitimate reasons for Covid vaccine hesitancy (no, not anti-vaxxers – just those questioning these new vaccines) are now treated as a group of untouchables.
They are unclean, and must be treated like pariahs. They must be punished for their evil recalcitrance, and they must be separated and isolated from the rest of society – in order to ‘keep us safe.’ That too was a major feature of life in Germany in the 1930s and 40s.
Simply consider the Untermensch (underman, sub-man, subhuman). As an online resource puts it, this is:
A Nazi term for non-Aryan “inferior people” often referred to as “the masses from the East”, that is Jews, Roma, and Slavs (Russians, Ukrainians, Poles and Serbs etc). The term was also applied to Mulatto and Black people. Jews were to be exterminated in the Holocaust, along with the Polish and Romani people, and the physically and mentally disabled. . . . These concepts were an important part of the Nazi racial policy.
Hmm, this too sounds familiar. Increasingly the unvaccinated are being seen in the same way. They are said to be the reason why Covid continues, and they are now a despised minority. Various leaders and government officials and media outlets have already told us they should not even be allowed to get medical treatment – in addition to all the other freedoms stolen away from them!
I have personally been told by some of these haters that they hope I die of Covid. Feel the love baby. Such concern for humanity. A new two-tiered society is now upon us, and it looks far too much like what we witnessed last century. And we already have the same snitching on others, the same dobbing in of neighbours that we had back then.
No wonder one person recently said this: “I’m starting to learn who would have hidden Anne Frank and who would have turned her over to the Nazis.” But getting back to a new class of health untouchables, another article reminds us of how most Germans back then viewed the Jews:
A recurrent theme in Nazi antisemitic propaganda was that Jews spread diseases. To prevent non-Jews from attempting to enter the ghettos and from seeing the condition of daily life there for themselves, German authorities posted quarantine signs at the entrances, warning of the danger of contagious disease. Since inadequate sanitation and water supplies coupled with starvation rations quickly undermined the health of the Jews in the ghettos, these warnings became a self-fulfilling prophecy, as typhus and other infectious diseases ravaged ghetto populations. Subsequent Nazi propaganda utilized these man-made epidemics to justify isolating the “filthy” Jews from the larger population.
And one scholarly article entitled “In the Name of Public Health — Nazi Racial Hygiene” begins this way:
In democratic societies, the needs of public health sometimes require citizens to make sacrifices for the greater good, but in Nazi Germany, national or public health — Volksgesundheit — took complete precedence over individual health care. Physicians and medically trained academics, many of whom were proponents of “racial hygiene,” or eugenics, legitimized and helped to implement Nazi policies aiming to “cleanse” German society of people viewed as biologic threats to the nation’s health. Racial-hygiene measures began with the mass sterilization of the “genetically diseased” and ended with the near-annihilation of European Jewry.
Let me mention two recent pieces looking at the current Covid situation in relation to what the world witnessed just 90 years ago. One piece says in part:
This is 1938. I’m a Jew. I now understand just a little of what it felt like to be a Jew in 1938. No, it’s not the Holocaust. Nothing can be compared to the Holocaust. Ever. But 1938 was not the Holocaust. It was the pre-Holocaust. It was the time before the nightmare, when the foundation was being laid to destroy the freedom, free speech, businesses and lives of millions of Jews. Everything happening today to the American people … to the U.S. Constitution … to freedom … and particularly to unvaccinated Americans reminds me of 1938. This is only the beginning. It gets much worse from here.
First, “the papers.” Vaccine mandates and vaccine passports are just like 1938, when the Gestapo demanded papers from every German. Republicans asked for “papers” from migrants who had broken into our country. Criminals. Democrats said, “No, that’s racism.” Republicans asked for “papers” once every two years for federal elections, to prove you have a right to vote. Democrats said, “No, that’s racism.”
Now Democrats want American citizens, not illegal aliens, not criminals, but patriots born in this country, to produce papers 24/7. We’ll need papers to enter restaurants, bars, nightclubs, concerts, casinos, conventions and hotels and to board a train, plane or bus. We’ll need papers to enter a supermarket, or we’ll starve to death. All for the crime of being unvaccinated.
He continues:
By the way, this isn’t about vaccines. If you want the vaccine, take it. I’d never stop you. I’d never limit your freedom, your choice. This is about vaccine mandates – forcibly injecting Americans who don’t want it. That’s 1938…. But there’s much more in common with 1938. Mask mandates. If you’re scared, wear them. I’m not scared. I don’t want to wear them. Mandates are about forcing individuals to lose their freedom, choice, individuality and human rights. That’s 1938.
Lockdowns are a match with the Warsaw Ghetto. Jews were locked down. Jews couldn’t work. Jews couldn’t travel. Jewish businesses were labeled “nonessential.” If government can force us to close our businesses, to kill our jobs, to decide who is nonessential, then this is 1938. Stars on clothing. It’s coming. The vaccinated get into restaurants, bars, concerts, supermarkets, planes and trains. They keep their jobs. The rest of us are marked as “subhuman” for life. That’s the star. That’s 1938.
Media and social media as the public-relations wing of the government. That’s called propaganda. Remind you of 1938? Back then, the Jews’ books were burned. Today, it’s those of conservatives, patriots and specifically the unvaccinated. We are silenced. Our facts are labeled “misleading.” Only the facts that agree with big government’s agenda count. That’s 1938.
OK, I can see the critics already chirping: ‘Ah, that is just some nutjob conspiracy theorist, some rightwing loon.’ Then let me finish by citing someone who knows what they are talking about. It so happens that we still have some Holocaust survivors with us today, and many of them do NOT like what they are witnessing. Here is the story of one of them:
Holocaust survivor and medical activist Vera Sharav said recently on a podcast that we should be feeling “more than nervous” about the current state of public health measures, including lockdowns, forced vaccinations, and testing. Referring to the Nazi movement, Sharav said, “Fear is an extremely powerful psychological tool, that has been used by politicians always, the Nazis were particularly adept at it.”
Sharav was brought on to the podcast to discuss the host’s concerns about the direction in which she believes public health measures are going. They discussed a range of topics having to do with the response to COVID-19 taken by various governments.
In the opinion of the host, Trish Wood, there are parallels between the narrative surrounding the COVID-19 situation and the narrative common in Germany under Nazism that was used to subjugate citizens. Vera Sharav agreed that it is logical to see similarities between that time and our time. Of particular concern to Sharav and Wood is the fact that doctors then, as now, were largely caught up by ideas that harmed people on a significant scale….
In her opinion, it is “nonsense” to suggest that sacrificing the rights of individuals is conducive to the greater good; she said this in reference to the accepted orthodoxy of locking down society to protect a subset of the population.
“As public officials they talk about the greater good. Who has the authority to decide what is the greater good? … If the individuals are oppressed or relegated to third-class citizens … what kind of society is it? We are now at the gate of that.”
When asked about whether or not she believed we are in fact on the cusp of a Nazi-like society and why, Sharav replied emphatically: “I absolutely do… One of the main things that has happened in these 18 months of the pandemic is that fear has been the major weapon, which has really crippled people from thinking straight. It has isolated people and taught children to distrust other people: ‘They might be infected, they might infect me’.”
In addition, she stated that vaccination passports “are the gateway to a totalitarian surveillance state.” She added, “it was under the Nazis, it was under Stalin, it was under Mao – it still is in China – this is where we’re going if we allow it to happen.”
Sharav said that the Holocaust involved a unique link between the medical establishment and the goals of the Nazis. “Hitler then, as rulers now, deferred to the health officials. We are constantly being told, ‘we are following the science’.” As a result she says we are now witnessing a “complete overthrow of human civilization.”
As I say, people like this ought to know. If you refuse to believe them and learn from history, then we are already doomed.
