A Kansas lawmaker compared COVID restrictions to the Holocaust. Why does it keep happening?
During a Kansas legislative hearing last week, a lawmaker compared mask and vaccine requirements imposed to reduce the spread of COVID-19 to the treatment of Jewish people in Nazi-controlled Germany.
The comment of Rep. Brenda Landwehr — that the restrictions were “racism against the modern day Jew” — was swiftly condemned. It wasn’t the only comparison made in the hearing. The Wichita Republican was echoing sentiments expressed earlier by Cornell Beard, president of the Wichita Machinist and Aerospace Workers union. Beard later apologized for his comments, according to the Associated Press.
Over the course of the pandemic, a steady drumbeat of speakers — elected officials and members of the public — have invoked the Holocaust when voicing opposition to COVID-19 public health measures. The analogy equates those who risk getting fired for refusing a life-saving vaccine to a mass population arrested, stripped of property, sent to concentration camps and systematically murdered.
Around six million Jews perished in the Holocaust — more than the estimated 5.8 million Jewish adults that currently live in the United States. That does not include hundreds of thousands of political prisoners, LGBTQ people, Roma and millions of Soviet and Polish civilians.
Why has this comparison become more common in political arguments? Experts can identify no clear-cut reason. A polarized political environment, antisemitism and lack of education about the Holocaust are all cited.
“They really don’t understand what took place and the persecution that took place,” said Gary Nachman, the plains states regional director for the Anti Defamation League. “To use the analogy of a genocide that you have no control over to a mandate that helps the betterment of all people is just a bizarre stretch.”
The history of comparisons to Nazi Germany stretches back to World War II itself. In the 1950s, a political philosopher coined the term Reductio Ad Hitlerum to describe the likening of unpopular policies to those imposed by Hitler.
In 2018, Edna Friedberg, the historian of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, put out a letter denouncing the rise of casual references to the Holocaust and the Nazis in political rhetoric.
“Careless Holocaust analogies may demonize, demean, and intimidate their targets,” Friedberg wrote. “But there is a cost for all of us because they distract from the real issues challenging our society, because they shut down productive, thoughtful discourse.”
Despite the outcry that inevitably follows these sorts of analogies, they only appear to have increased in the Trump era.
Last month, Georgia Republican U.S. Senate candidate Herschel Walker canceled a fundraiser because the host’s profile picture on Twitter was an illustration of syringes in the shape of a swastika. Protesters at public meetings in Missouri, Washington and Alaska wore yellow paper cutouts of the Star of David, the religious symbol used by the Nazis to identify Jews.
U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican from Georgia who was stripped of committee assignments in Congress because of her controversial statements, was criticized this summer for comparing mask mandates to the Holocaust. She later went on a tour of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and apologized.
On Tuesday, she used the term “vaccine Nazis” when she was interviewed on a podcast.
“This was something that was considered a solemn enough memory that even if people invoked Hitler in almost every argument, you didn’t go to the Holocaust,” said Christopher Browning, a professor emeritus at the University of North Carolina who studies Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. “But now that taboo of course has been utterly shattered like every other taboo that has any political weight.”
For the 20 years following World War II, the Holocaust wasn’t front and center in discussions about the war, Browning said. It wasn’t until the 1970s that Holocaust memory became more prominent. The more distance from it, the more it entered popular culture as people realized it was a defining event for the 20th century.
Browning said the fact that someone who was 18 at the end of World War II is now 94-years-old likely has little to do with the fact that using the Holocaust in political messaging has increased.
“These are people for whom history, evidence, fact doesn’t count anyway,” Browning said.
Instead, both Nachman and Browning attributed the increase in comparisons to an increasingly polarized political environment where controversial statements can help someone draw attention.
“It’s shattering one more thing about which there used to be some kind of consensus,” Browning said. “We could all kind of share that the Holocaust was beyond the pale as something to cheaply use and exploit, it wasn’t something that you hauled out in a way that cheapened its memory.”
They also pointed to the strain of antisemitism in the anti-vaccine movement.
Nachman said there have been conspiracy theories about Jewish people and the vaccine, noting that neo-Nazis have been spreading the term “holocaugh” as a way to promote getting Jewish people sick with COVID-19.
Browning said that where neo-Nazis used to deny or downplay the Holocaust, messaging has shifted to the point where now some neo-Nazis are either openly approving of the Holocaust or inverting it to paint themselves as victims.
He referenced Charlottesville, where neo-Nazi’s marched and chanted old Nazi slogans and that someone who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021 was wearing a shirt that said “Camp Auschwitz.”
“It’s both appropriating it and cheapening it,” Browning said. “So it’s most certainly an attack on Holocaust memory and an attack on what the Holocaust was about.”
This story was originally published November 3, 2021 at 2:08 PM with the headline "A Kansas lawmaker compared COVID restrictions to the Holocaust. Why does it keep happening?."