One of the undoubted strategies of Covid totalitarianism deniers is the use of the so-called “relativisation of the Holocaust” to shut down debate over the heinous nature of lockdowns, associated NMIs (non-medical interventions) and vaccine mandates. The approach is to attack anyone who (like me) from time to time invokes comparisons of our current surge towards totalitarianism with the origins of European fascism in the 1930s.
The post-Nazi Germans even made a law against it, and anyone, including Palestinian leaders who fall into the trap of comparing some current atrocity to what happened in Nazi Germany, are called out.
https://www.eurotopics.net/en/286887/what-does-abbas-holocaust-relativisation-mean#
It might have begun as a tool to combat Holocaust deniers.
Relativising the Holocaust has been one of the classic techniques of some of those engaged in Holocaust denial; they have sought to minimise Nazi atrocities by listing them alongside the British concentration camps of the Boer War, the terror bombing of German cities during World War II and, perhaps most effectively, the purges and Gulags of the Soviet Union under Stalin. When, during the 1980s, the eminent German historian Ernst Nolte suggested that the Third Reich was a symbiotic product of Soviet terror and that the atrocities it perpetrated might be typical of certain modern states experiencing massive internal reconstruction and expansion, he unleashed an international furore.
https://www.open.edu/openlearn/history-the-arts/history/the-holocaust/content-section-5.1
Now it is used far more broadly as a convenient debating weapon, by (among others) those with a vested interest in their own form of relativising – of diminishing the genuineness of Covid totalitarianism.
The prehistory of pushback against Hitler analogies in fact started with the right, but the left went on often to compare so-called right-wing figures as the embodiment of Adolf Hitler. The most popular recent targets have been George W Bush and Trump. This gave rise to what became known as Godwin’s law.
Godwin's law, short for Godwin's law (or rule) of Nazi analogies, is an Internet adage asserting that as an online discussion grows longer (regardless of topic or scope), the probability of a comparison to Nazis or Adolf Hitler approaches.
I was once banned from Facebook for displaying a very funny meme featuring Mark Zuckerberg and Hitler. Comparing the Australian quarantine camps to Nazi concentration camps can give rise to fevered retorts from those with an interest in “nothing to see here” defences of Covid fascism. Recently I compared Australia’s Biosecurity Act 2015 with the Nazi Enabling Act of 1933 that was triggered by the Reichstag fire. Here is what I said:
“If the architecture of Australia’s Covid fascism and its parliamentary enablement sounds a little familiar, well, it should. Anyone remember the Nazis’ Enabling Act?
The Enabling Act allowed the Reich government to issue laws without the consent of Germany's parliament, laying the foundation for the complete Nazification of German society. The law was passed on March 23, 1933, and published the following day.
Without the consent of parliament. So that’s how they did it. But whatever you do, don’t compare Australia’s Covid State to Nazi Germany if you wish to avoid the acrimony of the social media chatterers. And we even achieved our own version of tyranny without the help of a Reichstag Fire.”
The comparison here is entirely appropriate to make the point of the possible dangers of an apparently innocent looking law created ahead of its actual use in alleged “emergencies” and which bypassed parliamentary scrutiny. In Australia’s case, it may or may not have been completely innocent in 2015. The perpetrators of the legislation were Peter Dutton, Barnaby Joyce and, yes, Tony Abbott. No Hitlers there. But the legislation was actually prepared by (among others) health bureaucrats who during Covid, as we have seen across the world, leapt to the replication of the essentially fascist “Chinese approach” to managing the virus. Cutting out the middle man (that is, we-the-people) during a crisis has long been the desire of at least some, possibly many, policy-makers and citizens with a collectivist bent. Every last communist and many socialists, for a start. As well as Rousseauians who wish to trample individual rights in pursuit of something sinister called “the general will”. And not forgetting the many utilitarians who wish to maximise the “happiness”, however defined, or “safety”, in the case of the WuFlu, of the majority. Liberal democracy can be mighty inconvenient for these people.
Let’s look at some of the Covid State’s acts of totalitarianism to see if the comparisons to the 1930s stack up. Remember, it isn’t a competition between different strands of totalitarianism to see who was the worse (or worst). We just wish to make the case that Covid containment responses by parliamentary democracies have, indeed, been classic forms of dictatorship.
Reducing opposition and reducing debate is a shared objective of different forms of totalitarianism. By-pass parliaments, for a start. Didn’t we see a lot of that during the Australian biosecurity “scare” under the guise of Emergency Orders? Shut borders. Restrict people movements to five kilometres. Secure red zones with army helicopters. Heaps of stuff the dictators of yore never remotely contemplated for the broad citizenry.
What about killing people? Surely, we haven’t done this. Or have we?
Here we should mention the now widely accepted view that lockdowns, the prohibition of life-saving drugs like Invermectin, the use of vaccine mandates and assorted other Covid policy responses have caused tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths. Possibly many more than this. History is bound one day to record just how many. The excess deaths in 2021-22 now routinely reported across multiple jurisdictions all but prove it.
The architecture of totalitarianism has long been the concern of many political theorists and historians interested in how Nazi Germany happened. Hannah Arendt’s much cited masterpiece, The Origins of Totalitarianism, is probably best-in-breed. Worthy successors include the Dutch psychology scholar Mattias Demset. Their interest as social scientists is better to understand how liberal societies (well, moderately liberal in the case of 1920s Germany) can sleep-walk into dictatorship.
Another point of comparison between the 1930s and the 2020s is in the shared popularity of dictators during perceived crises. Just look at Hitler’s numbers – his popularity rated in the 90 per cent range at various stages of the late 1930s. Exhibit Two, Dictator Dan south of the Murray. He is more than likely to obtain another Danslide come November 2022. Exhibit Three. The execrable Mark McGowan, who all but wiped out his opposition in Western Australia. Of course, the unspellable Premier north of the Tweed also marched back to power on the back of fear-driven Covid containment. Craven punters seem to love being pushed around, having their rights and freedoms traduced. Especially in the case of an imagined enemy, whether it be an innocent, law abiding race of people like the Jews in 1930s Germany or a middling virus now. So long as those in charge keep us all SAFE.
Then there is the shared totalitarian silencing of dissent, by Big Tech and Big Media in particular these days and the Gestapo of old. Silencing, censorship, ridiculing, isolating, gaslighting. All have been critical tools of the Covid class. The control of information flows (including language) was core to Orwell’s depiction of totalitarianism, of course. (Speaking of isolating dissidents, did the introduction of quarantine camps and dragging off indigenous, unvaccinated people in the Northern Territory to vaccination camps not remind at least some of us with long memories and a sense of history of other, more lethal camps?)
Finally, there is the use of fear and the creation of enemies of the State. Here we cannot go past Laura Dodsworth’s 2021 mini-classic account of the United Kingdom’s experience of Covid, A State of Fear, what with the use of Nudge Units in Number 10 Downing Street and the rest. Here is the excellent Neil Oliver on Laura’s work:
So dark and compelling, and yet woven throughout with the determination - the heartfelt need - to get beyond these dreadful days. When governments sow fear they must reap a bitter crop. From the beginning of lockdown I have been worried to death about the certain and unavoidable consequences of making and keeping an entire population frightened. Already we see that too many people regard their fellow citizens - even family and friends - as the enemy, petri dishes swimming with contagion. As a population and a society we are atomised as never before. I can scarcely imagine how the damage done might be undone. Most of all I fear what all of this has done - and will continue to do - to compromise the futures of our children. All of these concerns and many more besides are given a desperately needed airing between the pages of this book. This is a timely piece of work, shot through with the voices of frightened people. Those voices must be heard and properly listened to. Altogether this is a fascinating consideration of how fear has been used again and again throughout history and in one civilisation after another, so that governments and others in authority might get their own way. A State of Fear is an affecting and troubling read.
https://www.booktopia.com.au/a-state-of-fear-laura-dodsworth/book/9781780667201.html
We are speaking here of the very fabric of society being torn asunder. No minor, passing, everyday crisis of democracy. One of the defining marks of totalitarianism is its capacity for getting right into our lives and forcing us to change everything we do. Making enemies of our families and neighbours, another key strategy, is more than a little reminiscent of Orwell’s 1984 Hate Weeks and two-minute weekly hate sessions:
Hate Week is a fictional event in George Orwell's 1949 dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. Hate Week is a psychological operation designed to increase the hatred of the population for the current enemy of the totalitarian Party, as much as possible …
It is essentially a psy-op, like many of the strategies deployed in the Covid era. The Covid fear campaign, of course, was prefigured by the absurdly concocted “war on terror” conducted by the aforementioned George W Bush, the Covid State lunatic Tony Blair and the NeoCons in the 2000s in response to 9/11 (as Paula Jardine) has noted. She also notes the overlap between war-on-terror era Bush appointees and the emerging “bioterror” bureaucracy in the United States two decades back. Bioterror bureaucracies across the globe started working on us with SARS One, bird flu, swine flu, ebola and all the other global biosecurity non-events of the early twenty-first century.
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/the-murky-road-to-lockdown-part-2/
Weaponising fear is also the core strategy of the Climate cultists, as a number of observers have long known and pointed out.
The crazy, extremely worrying current German Government (whose economic minister is a member of the Greens and her past experience for the position was as a children’s books author) has even considered making the unvaccinated (and no one else) wear masks in public, thus making quite visible the enemies of society. Again, does this not sound familiar?
So, we have at least six compelling points of direct comparison between 1930s German totalitarianism and the Covid Zero containment madness of our own time – the bypassing of parliament and enacting potentially lethal legislation, killing people, the popularity of totalitarian regimes, the crushing of opposition by whatever means are to hand, the use of fear, and the creation of enemies.
That Zuckerberg-Hitler meme I mentioned involved the two of them together, falling about laughing at the weapons of social media now available to obliterate dissent. No, it seems entirely reasonable to suggest that the use of Nazi analogies is right on the money. And I will stick to my reference to the Nazis’ Enabling Act of 1933.
Paul Collits
31 August 2022
Among us ordinary people there has been much comparison of current fascism to historical fascism. The great fear and anxiety expressed at these comparisons is because it is painfully accurate and his home. The best way to cause a furor on social/internet media is to state something close to the truth. Start a firestorm, or get kicked off Twitter, you know a nerve has been touched. Fascism=fascism.