So there emerged during the pandemic a metaphysical, seemingly a satanic, level of evil. We are not done with it, though we’d like to take a breath and assume that the worst is behind us. It is gathering force and mutating in form.
Vaccines did not manage to wipe out humanity’s ability to reproduce, though live births are down 13 to 20 percent: so the same darkness is coming at us in late 2023, via central bank digital currency plans; and via Fifteen-Minute Cities; via the all-in surveillance of Smart Cities, and the Internet of Things; via the confiscation of land of Dutch farmers; via the debanking of well-known figures in both the UK and the US, for no other crime than their political or medical views; via climate-related lockdowns or restrictions that are still under discussion—all of these plans are now underway, or else they are gleams in the eyes of the World Health Organization and the World Economic Forum and their allies. Neuralink, a “brain-computer interface,” is bearing down on us; ChatGPT was unveiled; the transhumanist world used to be a catchphrase that suggested the very margins of discourse if not sanity, and now it’s clear that there really are powerful people planning a future in which humans and machines have merged. We see patterns in the eruptions of fires in food processing plants in North America and Europe; in attacks on our food supply; in the plans to inject mRNA into cattle; in the propagandizing of shifting from meat to lab-grown “meat” to insects; in the efforts in every nation to manipulate wedge issues, such as artificially inflated rhetoric around racial issues or indigenous rights, to divide the people and destroy unity. We see in every Western nation attacks on the role of the family; attacks on the very idea of biological gender, though it is not a cultural construct; the sexualization of children and the darkening of culture.
No, evil is not done with us.
I sought to explain how people raised to know about human rights and the rule of law could go about their days doing evil, with whole hearts. I sought to understand how otherwise nice people—and indeed Western people, who grew up with post-Enlightenment norms—could suppress the respiration of children; how they could consign friends and colleagues to eat in the street like outcasts, or send cops to arrest a woman and terrify a nine-year-old child, whose crimes were that they tried to visit the Museum of Natural History in New York without “papers.”
How could “nice” people in the humane West, have put on the agenda in Washington State in January 2022, plans to retain regulations that allow those exposed to a “contagious disease” to be placed in forcible quarantine, without charge or trial.
All of this happened in America—in the land of people who, since the Civil Rights Act of 1964, have had the principle of equality governing human relations as a matter of law; a nation that had passed laws against the abuse of or corporal punishment of children in public schools in the 1970s in virtually every state; and a people who have been raised in a culture of freedom and civility compared with lawless or totalitarian regimes, that led them, for the most part, to be, on the scale of decency to cruelty, until a few years ago, very decent people.
There are lessons from history that we must learn, or relearn, and quickly.
Some leaders and commentators (including myself) have passionately and publicly been comparing these years, 2020 to 2022, in the West and in Australia, to the early years of Nazi leadership. Though we face criticism for doing so, I won’t be silenced about this. The similarities must urgently be addressed.
People need to reread their Nazi history. They are getting it wrong in demanding, “How dare you compare?”
While the popular imagination of the Nazi era is familiar with death camps, and think of them when Nazi policy is invoked, the fact is that many years led up to that horror. Germany invaded Poland in 1939. The extermination camps were established years into the Nazi drama, in 1941.1 Dr. Josef Mengele, “The Angel of Death,” began his medical experiments in Auschwitz after 1943.2
No one sensible is comparing the COVID years to those years and those horrors.
Rather, the vivid similarities between our moment in the West since 2020, and the earliest years of Nazi Germany’s civil society policies, are to the years 1931 to 1933, when so many vicious norms and policies were set in place. But these were often culturally or professionally policed, rather than being policed by camp patrols. That’s the point that better-informed analysts of these similarities are making.
During these years, mass societal cruelty, and a two-tier society itself that perpetuated this cruelty, was built up and policed, as today, by polite civil society institutions tasked with snarling and baring their teeth.
Casual, escalating cruelty, a culture of degradation of the “othered,” and a two-tier society were built up in those years, certainly at the behest of Nazi social policy. But the construction of a world of evil out of what had been a modern civil society, if a fragile one, was also endorsed and even policed by doctors, by medical associations, by journalists, by famous composers and filmmakers, by universities; by neighbors, by teachers, by shopkeepers—for years before the death camp guards were tasked with their own far more heinous cruelty.
Amos Elon’s poignant history, The Pity of It All: A History of the Jews in Germany, 1743–1933, reveals how many Jewish civil society leaders warned about the imperceptible shifts day by day in the direction of evil. In 1931, street violence was directed against Jewish storefronts, and led to smashed-in windows. In other contexts, Jews were beaten upon leaving synagogues. At the time, commentator Theodor Wolff warned, “This simply cannot continue. All decent people, irrespective of party, must form a common front.” But Wolff’s call to action was to no avail. Wolff’s publisher told him to “tone down his warnings in the interest of advertising and circulation.”3 As we saw during the pandemic, those issuing alarms were also suppressed and censored.
“Hitler wanted full powers like Mussolini’s in Italy,” writes Elon. “He knew exactly what was needed to turn a government into a ‘legal’ dictatorship: emergency powers under Article 48.”4 As we saw during the pandemic, emergency laws then were the benchmarks that would allow democracy to collapse.
In late 2021, forty-seven US states were operating with emergency measures, which suspended or bypassed normal legislative checks and balances, including New York, the state in which I live. Under emergency measures, pretty much anything can be done. When you are living under emergency measures, you no longer have a functioning democracy. See if you notice any echoes here.
In Germany, to move back in time, the demonically intelligent incrementalism of Nazi policy continued. In 1933, the year Adolph Hitler was appointed chancellor of a new cabinet, Hitler gave his word that “the Nazis would remain a minority in any future cabinet.” Even in 1933, though, some prominent Jews still believed that “nothing can happen to us.”5
But “Theodor Wolff was one of the few who warned that Hitler’s appointment was merely the first stage of a coup d’etat in installments.[italics mine] . . . Wolff predicted that ‘a cabinet whose members have been proclaiming for weeks and months that salvation—by which they mean their own—is at hand, in the form of a coup d’etat, a breach of the constitution, the elimination of the Reichstag, the muzzling of the opposition, and in unbridled dictatorial rule . . . will do everything in its power to intimidate and silence its opponents.’”6
“For millions of Berliners,” writes Elon, “nothing seemed to have changed at first. . . . Few seemed aware of the watershed they had just passed.”7
“Few seemed aware . . .”
Let me just summarize where we are right now in America, as well as in the West, in case you have gotten too used to it to see it clearly. I warned in The End of America that democracies usually do not die with a cinematic scene of goose-stepping Brownshirts suddenly in the streets. They tend to die, rather, just as Elon described—incrementally, day by day. Just because the settings are familiar to us now, does not mean that a 1931-like reality, if not yet a 1933-like reality, isn’t upon us.
In this country, citizens were forced to take their second or third experimental gene-therapy injection in order to go back to school or to keep their jobs as truckers crossing borders, or as soldiers and sailors and military pilots and hospital workers.8 Millions of other workers narrowly escaped this coercion; and millions did not escape this coercive experiment, in effect, upon them, in parts of Europe.9
Minors were forced to submit to this experimental gene therapy simply to keep playing high school basketball or tennis.
Thousands of adverse events have been recorded in Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS), including deaths shortly after vaccination, but the forcing of injections continued, against all existing laws, despite their having no effect on transmission.
Voices of opposition to tyrannical overreach were censored en masse; payment processors declined to process funds of entities offering medical therapeutics. The View, that formerly cozy group of TV-talk-show gals, called for the censorship of podcaster Joe Rogan. Musician Neil Young also called for music streaming service Spotify to censor Rogan’s “misinformation.”10 Calls for censorship of opposition voices echoed across the internet. Dissident platforms such as Parler were deplatformed from their hosting services or from their payment processors, a digital version of boycotting businesses.11
Leaders called for one group of citizens to be denied health care; in some areas of Canada, leaders told grocers that it was optional to allow this group to buy food. Children in Canada were told, “No mask, no voice.” In New York, children as young as two were subjected, by a smiling new governor, a woman, to facial coverings that restrict their breathing, that impair their ability to acquire language, to bond with other children, and to recognize and express emotions.
Certain citizens, set apart as “other,” falsely called infectious and positioned as “unclean,” were not permitted to enter buildings or restaurants in New York; in Washington, D.C.; in San Francisco; in Los Angeles. Everyone was asked to hate and resent them, and irrationally to blame them for the nation’s predicament.
People were asked to join a cult and offer up their bodies; if they didn’t, they were ostracized and denied social life and professional advancement.
Small businesses, restaurants, and movies theaters; small hotels and venues; small real estate holdings; entire livelihoods, were crushed by arbitrary dicta, by the unrestrained powers of boards of health and the CDC to crush whole sectors and thus to destroy, or in effect to transfer, entire classes of assets from one targeted group into the hands of another group: to institutional investors, or shall we say, to allies of the current oligarchs.
In Washington State, proposals were put forward—like those that have been enacted in Australia and elsewhere—to turn the boards of health into entities with the equivalent of police powers; to provide detention powers to unelected, unaccountable boards of health. “Fact-checkers” claimed that this was not true, but it was true.12
Reports proliferated of the unvaccinated being treated abusively in hospitals, and therapeutics were withheld, via government agencies’ pressure, from an entire population, leading to countless avoidable deaths. A class of therapeutics—monoclonal antibodies—were withdrawn by the FDA from ill people’s access.13 Medical entities such as the formerly respected Mayo Clinic were sued for refusing to give treatment, for which his wife begged, to a dying man.14
What do you call all of this, if not an early Nazi-like set of practices?
In the early years of Nazi policy, as Robert Proctor’s magisterial 1988 Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis points out, it was doctors who were tasked by the State, and given special status and authority, with singling out “life unworthy of life” and elaborating racially based policies that separated the “clean” and privileged, from the “unclean” or “degenerate” and restricted. In 1933, doctors began to sterilize the unfit. As Michael Grodin, Erin Miller, and Jonathan Miller point out, in “The Nazi Physicians as Leaders in Eugenics and ‘Euthanasia’: Lessons for Today”:
A series of recurrent themes arose in Nazi medicine as physicians undertook the mission of cleansing the State: the devaluation and dehumanization of segments of the community, medicalization of social and political problems, training of physicians to identify with the political goals of the government, fear of consequences of refusing to cooperate with civil authority, bureaucratization of the medical role, and the lack of concern for medical ethics and human rights.15
Half of Germany’s physicians joined the Nazi party.
“The devaluing and dehumanization of segments of the community . . .”
Proctor shows how medical associations embraced the rise in the status and authority of physicians, and how “public health” was the anodyne label under which the early structure of emerging horrors was erected. He shows how doctors led the way.
The author even addresses the “health pass” that was established by Nazi public health policy, a pass that separated those who could participate fully in Nazi society from those who were singled out for deprivation and disgust.
Proctor tracks how eugenics allowed for increasing arguments, like those being resuscitated today, that “useless eaters” or the “unfit” do not deserve food, or are a burden on public resources, and should not be a drag on hospitals or receive medical care.
Proctor shows what a short slide it was from public health officials identifying “life unworthy of life,” these “useless eaters,” to the same officials using the language of “hygiene” and public safety, to setting up the first Nazi euthanasia programs—programs targeting those who were identified as “less than,” or in some way impaired.
Then as now, anodyne language—“public health” and “racial hygiene” in the 1930s, and “public health,” “safety,” and “harm reduction” today—conceals the true nature of what should be a visible, nauseating, daily spreading evil.
Historians such as Proctor have argued that gloss of public health language, the invocation of medical authority, compartmentalization, and bureaucratization permitted evil in the early Nazi past to flourish, in spite of its taking root in what was still supposed to have been a modern civil society.
I’d argue that the same exact things in similar guises, cloaked in similar language, recurred in the years 2020 to 2022.
If we don’t wake up, see exactly where we stand, and quickly read back in history about a demonic time that overtly mirrors, and in many ways foreshadows, where we are—then most of us will be fools, even as some of us are already monsters.
If we don’t forcibly and immediately call out monsters where we see them—where they walk among us—whether they wear nice earrings and sit demurely at the helm of the CDC, or whether they gather in white coats, in all their authority, at the Mayo Clinic, standing between a dying man and his desperate wife—we will fail forever to deserve the blessing of the Constitution, and of the rule of law, that are supposed to be our heritage.
And no doubt: the next chapter will surely be for us, as it was for others in the past, darker still.