Proving once again that white people do not understand irony, Trumpflakes have released a new line of whining that compares the COVID-19 pandemic responses to the Nazi Holocaust. I'm not even making this up. Some of these imaginative historians revive a favorite rightwing myth: as Nazis rose to power and perpetrated the Holocaust, Germans and/or Jews "just followed orders" "like sheep" and "did not fight back." Blaming the victim is just not even a concern for these big hearted folk.
The first problem with that, besides its blatant inhumanity, is, of course, that it's false. They did resist. There were riots in the ghettoes where the Jews were forced to live, sometimes forcing soldiers out. The White Rose youth movement resisted until its leaders were captured and guillotined - just like "sheep," I suppose. Newspapers debunked Nazi lies and violence, but every Trumpflake knows who the real liars are. Many brave souls spread propaganda against the Nazis, engaged in passive resistance or armed uprising . Many fled but were captured in other European countries as the Nazis expanded their brief empire. A shipload of Jewish refugees was turned away at one point from US shores and forced to return to face the Holocaust, like all refugees apparently should. And so on. Even as the Nazis rose to power Communists fought them in the streets, but the Weimar Republic police cracked down hard on the Communists while Pres. Hindenburg noted what very fine people the Nazis were and many Germans criticized the Communists for protesting more than the police for shooting them. The Nazis were partly responsible for engineering this attitude, of course, loudly proclaiming their patriotism and spreading lies about their enemies, including the infamous Reichstag Fire. Conservative Germans, more afraid of leftists than Nazis, agreed to all kinds of restrictions on civil and political rights, and a combination of Nazi violence and conspiracy theories - despite floods of responses debunking them - ushered in the Nuremberg Laws marginalizing the Jewish population.
And here's the second problem with this clever little bit of snark (besides the blatant inhumanity of it). It wasn't that the victims didn't resist, but the rest of society, those who were not targeted, those who were praised and promised support and a "national renewal" of German glory, did not join with their fellow human beings to resist bigotry and authoritarian rule, but welcomed it. They resisted all appeals to reason and humanity, all criticism of their glorious leader as unfair derision of the only man trying to save them and their country.
There's a lot more to be said about the resistance to reason and evidence, from the roots of fascism in the Dreyfus Affair through many delirious marches to death and destruction to the shadow of fascism today. But that, gentle reader(s?) will have to be for another blog. (I bet you just can't wait!)
