Recently, a respected botanist we know and used to admire was photographed and quoted at a fascist anti-vax march against public health measures here in NYC. He wore a large yellow star on his clothes in a brazen attempt to align himself with Jewish victims of Christian European anti-Semitism over the centuries, but particularly in the 1930s and 1940s. That was when the Nazis humiliated, beat, tortured, and raped Jewish people in Germany and then across occupied Europe before systematically murdering them by the millions with bullets and gas simply because they were Jewish.
By wearing the yellow badge, he told us he thinks he’s experiencing the moral equivalent of the Shoah for refusing vaccination. He’s claiming to be suffering the same treatment because he selfishly demands to be a public health risk.
That those resistant to helping their family members, neighbors, co-workers, and strangers in the street by taking commonsense public health measures against an infectious disease should paint themselves as victims is, in of itself, remarkable, and a telling comment on the way the pernicious ideology of libertarianism has morally-maimed so many in this country.
That they should do so by appropriating the symbols of Nazi persecution is more than remarkable, however—it is monstrous. Particularly since the side they ally themselves with is avowedly fascist and in some cases actually Nazi.
As others have pointed out, as the Nazis intentionally let people die of typhus, some anti-fascists struggled to—wait for it—get vaccines into the the Warsaw Ghetto.
Republicans/fascists/white supremacists manufacture persecution fantasies over and over again — they’re coming for your collection of 15 assault rifles; they’re coming to replace you with brown people; they’re coming to prevent you from celebrating Christmas; they’re coming to lurk in your bathrooms; they’re coming to indoctrinate your children, seduce your children, steal your children, etc, etc.
These fantasies are all about the violent capture and maintenance of power. For that you need foot-soldiers, since there are never enough plutocrats do it themselves. The freelance freikorps of our day call Anthony Fauci “Dr. Mengele.” They assault mask-wearers. They threaten school board members with assassination. They massacre people in synagogs. And then they insist they themselves are the victims.
Note, too, that these people also compare themselves to African Americans during the Jim Crow era. How fucking dare they?
Backyard and Beyond 
Leave a reply to Linda Musial Cancel reply