The most prevalent rhetoric of the Covid anti-vaxxers is that government requirement vaccine mandates are fascist. In fact, allusions to Adolf Hitler, the Nazis, and the Holocaust are rampant in their rhetoric. What these protestors don’t understand is that the GOP’s extremists like Greg Abbott in Texas and Ron DeSantis in Florida, as well as the screwball crew at Fox News, are taking a page straight out Hitler’s playbook.
How?
Because the Nazis were anti-vaxxers, too.
Before the Little Corporal became Der Fuhrer, Germany had a
long history of compulsory vaccination. In 1847, after a smallpox epidemic
killed tens of thousands of Germans in Prussia, the government ordered all
newborns and military recruits vaccinated against the scourge as well as other
diseases.
The German vaccination programs were quite successful. But
in the waning years of the democratic Weimar Republic, an antivaccination
movement took root. Called the Lebensreform, or Life Reform Movement, it
advocated replacing vaccines with healthier lifestyles such as getting more sun
and eating special diets.
Fearing protests, the Weimar government loosened its vaccine
policies. When the Nazis came to power in the 1930s, they did not issue
mandates for vaccination and what mandates were still in effect were largely
ignored. In fact, like today’s GOP, they went out of their way to appease the
Life Reformers. In 1935, Hitler’s Reich interior minister, Wilhelm Frick, said,
“the popular character of the health laws, which must appear to be absolutely
desirable in the National Socialist state, is better served if unnecessary
restlessness is avoided in the implementation of the laws in the population.”
In other words, don’t rock the boat. German vaccination
requirements under the Nazis became voluntary.
The Nazis’ nonchalance toward vaccination wasn’t just
politically convenient. It had a more sinister side. Hitler and his cronies
knew that the Germans they considered less desirable—Jews, gypsies, the
mentally and physically handicapped—were also less likely to get vaccinated
and, therefore, more likely to die. As the black shadow of Nazism spread across
Europe and Russia, the party’s antivaccine policies became an even bigger
genocidal weapon.
According to Hitler’s
Table Talk, a compilation of Der Fuhrer’s droning monologues, this was
the Nazi leader’s ideas on vaccines and public health in the occupied countries:
“Their conditions of life will inevitably improve under our jurisdiction, and
we must take all the measures necessary to ensure that the non-German
population does not increase at an excessive rate. In these circumstances, it
would be sheer folly to place at their disposal a health service such as we
know it in Germany; and so—no inoculations and other preventative measures for
the Natives! We must even try to stifle any desire for such things by persuading
them that vaccination and the like are really most dangerous!” (Emphasis
added.)
Is this so different from the sentiments of the far-right
extremists of the GOP or the anti-vax “reporting” of Fox News? They know the
Covid vaccines aren’t dangerous. Most of them—hell, probably all of them—are
vaccinated. We know the talking head yo-yos at Fox News are vaccinated—it’s a company
mandate. They also know Covid is dangerous; at this writing, at least
seven anti-vax and anti-mask conservative activists have died from Covid and
its complications.
So why all the antivaccination rhetoric?
Could the GOP extremists be taking a page out of the Nazis’
antivaccine playbook? They know Covid deaths are highest among those they don’t
consider desirable voters—the poor, people of color, the elderly—people who
don’t normally vote Republican. Have the Republicans become so power hungry
they are willing to sacrifice their own voters—who are, in fact, dying in
droves from Covid—in order to “cleanse” the nation of those they don’t want to
cast votes by trying to, in Hitler’s own words, “to stifle any desire for
such things by persuading them that vaccination and the like are really most
dangerous!”?
Just asking.
