You’d think I would have learnt by now. Clicking on the comments section of a social media post about vaccines is a grim recipe for madness, a descent into MC Escher-like logic loops in which, as you spiral down, you might be lucky enough to spot the unholy trinity of Bill Gates, Joe Biden and Anthony Fauci, gorging on the marrow of pureblood martyrs.
Yet, I did. And there it was, in all its plodding pedestrian glory — the luminous sign that 12 years of school may have almost taught its author how to spell, but left him without any workable way to discern a Steers menu from a history textbook. "This is how Nazi Germany started," said the message.
If there’s one thing this pandemic has bequeathed us, besides lockdowns and an awkward new insight into some people close to us whom we’d hitherto assumed reasonable, it’s a new high watermark in atrocious Nazi analogies.
To be fair, it’s a practice that predates Covid, foreshadowed by American lawyer Mike Godwin in 1990, who proposed "Godwin’s law", which is that "as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one."
The Nazi-comparison had got out of hand, Godwin told Wired magazine. In early newsgroups, "the labelling of posters or their ideas as ‘similar to the Nazis’ or ‘Hitler-like’ was a recurrent and often predictable event."
Any talk of gun control prodded the trolls to point out that Hitler banned guns; any mention of abortion elicited hysterical comparisons with Auschwitz; any whiff of regulation sparked libertarians into wide-eyed tales of "incipient Nazism".
Besides being offensive, said Godwin, any promiscuous comparison with the Nazis is a glib label that illogically trivialised the holocaust and the social pathology of the Nazis.
Covid has now allowed the room-temperature-IQ grunts and man-children who invoke these comparisons to expand their litany of grievances: it’s 5G; it’s "what the Main Stream Media won’t tell you" (hint: stuff that mostly can’t be verified); it’s the "war on Ivermectin"; it’s "Critical Race Theory".
A few weeks ago, the Daily Show’s Jordan Klepper interviewed antivaxxers protesting against mandates in New York. One woman, who claimed "people are having their DNAs wiped out", said it was "like we’re living in Nazi Germany, and the only thing missing is the camps and the gas". Her evidence: she can’t go to a gym without being vaccinated.
We don’t allow people to drive on the wrong side of the road. We check people for guns at airports
Klepper replied: "You think that’s what it was like in Nazi Germany? People bitching about not going to a gym?"
The hatWRKS store in Nashville, Tennessee, even began selling yellow stars — like the ones Jews were forced to wear by the Third Reich — proudly saying "not vaccinated".
As the Globe & Mail’s André Pickard wrote a few months back: "There can be no comparisons made between the state-sponsored mass murder of 6-million Jews and the temporary shutdown of the local mall."
It’s a quintessential case of false equivalence: asking people to get a vaccine, to minimise their risk to others, isn’t even in the same ballpark as Nazism. Hitler did a whole lot worse than bar Jews from his restaurant.
To say otherwise doesn’t just speak to an overblown victim-complex, it speaks to a crippling failure of basic reasoning. The kind of people who make these comparisons aren’t just having problems on the internet. Their lives must be one fractious tussle with everyone in any queue they ever stand in, let alone their own monthly sweaty-browed argument with their own bank balance.
Angelo Zachariades, who owns a Mozambik restaurant franchise in Pretoria, is one of those derided as a "Nazi" for tweeting a few months ago how all his staff had been vaccinated. "Right-wing libertarian twitter had just been waiting for some company to announce a vaccine mandate for customers," he tells the FM. "We didn’t even do that — we just spoke about our staff. But this small group on Twitter went ballistic, threatening my wife, my daughter, sending e-mails to the head office trying to cancel me."
After that, Zachariades says, whenever he posted something positive about vaccines, he’d be bombarded with hate mail and images of yellow stars. "It’s bizarre, since none of their objections are local talking points. It’s right-wing Trump-style talking points, imported from Fox News. Their argument typically doesn’t survive two questions, but they’re not here for a genuine debate anyway," he says.
Ultimately, Zachariades does expect mandates in restaurants and churches. "But I don’t see the restaurant industry taking the lead. You’d need a government mandate first, and you’d need proper digital certificates," he says.
Luckily, the fracas hasn’t hurt his business. Turnover has risen recently. But if anything, Zachariades deserves a flood of new clients for so stoutly resisting the zealots.
News of the Omicron variant last week triggered a whole new wave of bile. Suddenly, every South African, simply by virtue of living in the country where it was first announced, felt emboldened to wade into social media with treatises on epidemiology. It was SA’s peak Dunning-Kruger effect moment — the cognitive bias in which people with limited knowledge in a specific field vastly overestimate their expertise.
But the catalyst was the realisation that the 59% of South Africans who haven’t got vaccinated are posing a rather more direct threat to society, and that vaccine mandates — like those in the US or France — are on the cards.
This is where the indulgence of the flabby martyrdom of Nazi analogies rubs up against social reality. We don’t allow people to drive on the wrong side of the road simply because they prefer to do so. We still give polio vaccines to babies. We check people for guns at airports.
And this isn’t the same as killing 6-million Jews.
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