Is the Yellow Star Really an Inappropriate Reference for the Vaccine Passport?

Before we get to the controversy surrounding the Yellow Star badge — examining various pertinent facts of World War II with the help of one of our generation's greatest historians in the process (in the second third and in the third third of this post, below Bruegel's Renaissance painting) — let us set the stage somewhat: Glenn Reynolds reproduces two memes in the New York Post from mask bullies that Ann Althouse saw on Facebook. 

One read: “It took ‘click it or ticket’ to get people to wear a seatbelt. I wonder if ‘mask it or casket’ might work.” The other said: “It’s a face mask, not a Star of David or pink triangle, you whiny, privileged dolt. You’re not being shoved into a cattle car and taken to camp. You’re going to Walmart for twinkies and Diet Coke. Grow up.”

They’re both poor efforts at persuasion, of course: Generally, calling people names, threatening them and saying they’re stupid are ineffective ways of winning them over.

 … Maybe the mask fanatics are just poor persuaders. But it seems just as likely that they are engaging in poor persuasion because they aren’t trying to persuade.

As with so much that goes on in today’s society, and especially on social media, this sort of thing isn’t aimed at convincing those who disagree, but rather at garnering high-fives from people who agree and, ultimately, creating an ideological veneer for unquestioned elite rule. 

"I don't want to villainize anyone here," (re)assures Arnold Schwarzenegger — right after calling any mask-averse person "a schmuck" in addition to spitting out "screw your freedom" (if that ain't the height of gaslighting, I don't know what is) — "but I just wanted to tell everyone, let's work together and let's stop fighting."

Playing both good cop and bad cop, the "Austrian loudmouth" wants it both ways, effectively saying, both as a threatening bully and as a gentle father figure, Shut up, ye despicable deplorables, and show pride as ye join the growing army of valiant fellow travelers (or, if you prefer, as ye join behind our intrepid leftist leaders in yet another “moral equivalent of war” or as ye join our archbishops in their latest holy crusade).

Here is one of the memes that I chanced upon, with the final word doubling as a sexual (homophobic?) command to stuff your face and effectively "Shut up":

"lol Imagine having the eligibility and access to get the vaccine and saying nahhhhh" writes one Philip DeFranco with a couple of smileys. "Also to the pearl clutchers offended by this tweet yes I am calling you stupid and you can go fuck yourself you ignorant selfish fuckface."

Leftists can't debate; those drama queens are so full of scorn and… hatred (yes, correct, they are the true haters — with Caroline Glick explaining why below) for the despicable deplorables that they can only insult and demand we shut up. (Danke Schön for the link, Ed Driscoll.)

"The illogical structure of “Click it or Ticket” bugs me every time I see it," JPS tells Althouse:

Setting aside the parallel illogic, “Mask it or casket” would be self-discrediting. “Wear your seatbelt or you’ll get a ticket” only works as a threat if you then have a fairly high chance of getting a ticket if you don’t. “Wear your mask or you’re going to die,” for a malady with a case fatality rate under 2%, tells people who aren’t already on their side, Yes. You people are panic-mongers.

Lloyd W. Robertson adds that 

Something has changed in the way people are accepting conformity that is enforced in one way or another. A mask mandate: if the evidence is in dispute, we are asked to believe the onus is on citizens to prove the inconvenience is comparable to being shipped to a concentration camp and perhaps killed. Isn't the onus on public officials and their alleged experts to prove there is some good goddam reason to do all this? Isn't liberty precious, even during a pandemic? 

The overlying problem with the drama queens' attitude is that not only is the dire seriousness of the Coronavirus not proven, everything points in fact toward it being no worse than the pandemics of 2009 and 2002 (not to mention the 1968, the 1957, and the 1889 outbreaks), or even a common flu season. (The comparison with getting "people to wear a seatbelt" is therefore immaterial and beside the point, as is Arnold Schwarzenegger's parallel with deliberately driving through a red light…)

In view of the fact that during those other pandemics, not to mention during the annual flus,
• the authorities did not force (or even simply ask) the population to wear unhygienic, oxygen-blocking face coverings;
• did not try to destroy the economies of the Western world (with bankruptcies running into the tens of thousands);
• and did not try to implement a freedom-destroying vaccination passport,
some of us are somewhat skeptical as to why any one of those should be necessary this time around…

Related: Here Is the Key Question Regarding the Coronavirus
• And here are the 7 Basic Points about Covid-19 that You Need to Know
And from the March 2020 and April 2020 archives:
• Is There 100% Irrefutable Proof that the Covid19 Pandemic Is Overstated?
• Anti-Americanism in the Age of the Coronavirus, the NBA, and 1619

Now let us examine the central point of this post: to what extent, if at all, is it inappropriate to use the Yellow Star badge as a comparison for the vaccine pass?

Calling the comparison nothing less than odious, Chuck has assembled a list of nefarious villains ("schmuck" and "whiny, privileged dolt" are far too gentle for this this liberal; "ignorant selfish fuckface" is more like it — Chuck is seething with hatred for those dastardly despicable deplorables):

The "Star of David" reference is purely reactive in the context of the vaccine debate. The list of Trumpublicans who began this odious chapter in the saga of the COVID vaccine have made specific references to the Jews' holocaust-era forced wearing of the Star of David is almost too long for a single comment. But...

A GOP state representative in Washington actually wore a yellow star:
https://www.newsweek.com/rep-jim-walsh-wears-yellow-star-david-protest-covid-vaccine-mandates-washington-1605698

Congressional maniac Marjorie Taylor Greene did it back in May:
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/marjorie-taylor-greene-holocaust-vaccine-b1853545.html

The Chairman of the Oklahoma GOP engaged in the comparison:
https://www.oklahoman.com/story/news/2021/08/01/john-bennett-oklahoma-gop-defends-comparing-covid-vaccine-mandates-treatment-jews-holocaust/5447961001/

Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) made a more general holocaust comparison. Check out this delightful takedown from The Bulwark:
https://www.thebulwark.com/should-lauren-boebert-visit-auschwitz/

There are many, many more links. But you get the idea.

Actually, Chuck, yeah, we get the idea. We get the idea that the left's drama queens, panic-mongers, and outrage peddlers are again at work.

But let us examine the question: in this particular case, might the leftists have a point?

But it turns out that the true question is actually this: is it even a correct assessment to state that (clueless) conservatives using the Star of David image cannot see the difference between those wanting to (cough) protect us from China's Wuhan virus and the instigators of the Holocaust?

Leave aside, for the moment, the — entirely legitimate — point that the drama queens outraged by the Jewish badge (besides putting on regular displays of antisemitism) have themselves been —  invariably — comparing everything and everybody to Hitler and to National Socialists for years, nay, for decades.

They invent the so-called Godwin's Law (click here to see Mike Godwin in person reacting — haughtily and dismissively (i.e., in a typical liberal fashion) — to our blog's pointing out his Law's greatest flaw, i.e., its double standard; see Update 3); and then the drama queens segue into comparing everybody and everything to Adolf and to Nazis and to fascists, from presidential candidates to their wives through the rest of the conservative population…

Related: Calling Republicans "Hitler" since… the 1940s
• WikiLeaks reveals John Podesta's rule for Democrats:
"Compare Your Opponent to Hitler"

Like Antifa and BLM seething with rage at despicable deplorables, and doing all in their power to make them second-class citizens and rain violence upon their heads, the leftists do not realize that if we are seeing seeing echoes of Hitler's Germany, Nazism, and fascism, it is clearly on one side only: that of Antifa, BLM, and like-minded liberals.

Listen to Caroline Glick's insight:

 … the Democrats have repeatedly projected all of their prejudices, malicious actions and plans onto Trump and the Republicans

 … What is clear … is that if you want to understand who the Democrats are and what they are doing, all you need to do is look at what they are accusing Trump and his colleagues of being and of doing.

Chuck derides the comparison of the vaccine passport with the "Jews' holocaust-era forced wearing of the Star of David" while the meme quoted by Ann Althouse said "You’re not being shoved into a cattle car and taken to camp."

What is the truth?

The truth is that the Yellow Star and the Holocaust, although (obviously) related, are not exactly the same thing.

The Holocaust did not start until after the eruption of war, and only (so to speak) two years and almost six months after it broke out, to wit only after the Wannsee Conference in January 1942, although in Soviet occupied territory, it started as early as August 1941 (albeit by bullets, not by gas).  

That was three years and six months after the Yellow Star was introduced, at the end of the 1930s, as a means of a means to publicly identify, humiliate, and isolate despicable and deplorable elements of the population. But no one imagined at the time — including the top leaders of the Third Reich (as we shall see)! — what horrors it could, or would, lead to.

Nazi propaganda minister Josef Goebbels was the first to suggest a "general distinguishing mark" for German Jews in a memorandum in May 1938.

The yellow star led to the second-class citizens' removal from public life but it — and the accompanying ostracizing, scorn, and hatred (along with their easy identification) — did not have to lead to their internment in concentration camps, although it eventually did.

The demonization and internment of the second-class citizens did not have to lead to, second, the horrors of the Shoah, but it eventually did.

In any case, the whole point of the Star of David badge imagery is not the Holocaust; it is that it is the start of a slippery slope…

However, at the outset of the Yellow Star policy, few people had imagined the Final Solution. As Antony Beevor states below, they include the Third Reich's top leaders, not excluding, as incredible as it may sound, the fiends who would eventually meet at Wannsee…

Indeed, leftists: Any Jew, or any other person, for that matter, including pro-Nazis, who would have predicted in the late 1930s, that the Yellow Star would lead to the Shoah would have been as ridiculed and vilified as American conservatives are being in the 2020s, as mad, as outrageous, and as insulting to the (Third Reich) government.

Moreover: Had any Americans of the 1930s charged that the Weimar Republic was curtailing freedom by simply registering firearms (not even banning them), might they not have been mocked and vilified as well? And yet the policies of their Democratic predecessors allowed the National Socialists, once in power and that only years later, to confiscate the weapons, from Jews and non-Jews alike.

What we have, here, is from the good ol' Democratic playing book (aka the handbook of Saul Alinsky?): Just like leftists charge that despicable Republicans are against immigration — when conservatives are only against illegal immigration — they charge that republicans are "anti-vaxers" (sometimes they add "flat earth" anti-vaxxers to hammer the alleged anti-science point home) when conservatives are only against forced vaccination. And the leftists pretend that conservatives are using the Holocaust as a comparison when they are only using the instigating Yellow Star as one.

All what I have written is confirmed by Antony Beevor in his history of The Second World War. The Rassenkrieg chapter provides interesting details:

Until September 1939, the Nazis had hoped to force German, Austrian and Czech Jews to emigrate through maltreatment, humiliation and the expropriation of their property. Once war began, that became increasingly difficult. And the conquest of Poland brought a further 1.7 million Jews under their jurisdiction.

In May 1940 during the invasion of France, Himmler had written a paper for Hitler entitled "Some Thoughts on the Treatment of Alien Populations in the East." … [Regarding] the Jews, he wrote: "I hope completely to erase the concept of Jews through the possibility of a great emigration to a colony in Africa or elsewhere." At that stage, Himmler considered genocide — "the Bolshevik method of physical extermination" — to be "un-German and impossible."

Himmler's idea of shipping European Jews abroad focused on the French island of Madagascar. (Adolf Eichmann, still a junior functionary, was thinking of Palestine, a British mandate.) … The problem was that, even if Vichy France agreed, the 'Madagaskar Projekt' would not work in the face of British naval superiority. Yet the idea of deporting Jews to a reservation somewhere still remained the preferred option.

So: let us review some core points here:

• At its outset, the Yellow Star was passably benign, relatively speaking, brought about to humiliate the despised second-class citizenry, and was meant to lead to their banishment from public life and eventually to their emigration out of the homeland

• At the time, as improbable as it may sound, the Final Solution had not been thought of, not even in the minds of the worst Nazis (such as Himmler and Eichmann)

• As an aside, even the fascists initially considered genocide as an exclusive communist way of operating (how many socialist-loving kids are taught about this communist trait in school?)

FYI, Antony Beevor starts that Rassenkrieg section in his Second World War history by pointing out that 

There were essentially two parts to the Holocaust — what Vasily Grossman later called "the Shoah by bullets" and "the Shoah by gas" — and the process which eventually led to the industrialized murder of the death camps was uneven, to say the least.

 … The "Shoah by bullets" is usually remembered by the activities of the 3,000 men in the SS Einsatzgruppen. As a result, the massacres carried out by the 11,000 men in twenty-one battalions of Ordnungspolizei, acting as a second wave well to the rear of the advancing armies, have often been overlooked.

 … there seems to have been no official indication at this stage of encouraging the murder of Jewish women and children.

The killing of Jewish males began as soon as the German armies crossed the Soviet frontier on 22 June [1941]. Many of the early massacres were carried out by Lithuanian and Ukrainian anti-semites, as [Reinhard] Heydrich had predicted. … the process became self-escalating. The original targets of "Jews in party and state positions" immediately expanded to include all male Jews of military age, then to all males regardless of age.

 … The "Shoah by gas" also had a haphazard development. … As several historians have emphasized, the Nazis' [earlier] euthanasia program provided not just the blueprint for the Final Solution, but also the foundation for their ideal of a racially and genetically pure society. … Only from the month of August [1941] did total genocide become standard, with Jewish women and children also killed en masse.

So, as it turns out, the Yellow Star debate (or outrage) fits just about as beautifully as any other "controversial" subject into Larry Correia's summary of the matter (via Instapundit):

THE LEFT WING INTERNET ARGUING CHECKLIST

1. Skim until Offended
2. Disqualify that Opinion
3. Attack, Attack, Attack
4. Disregard Inconvenient facts
5. Make Shit Up
6. Resort to Moral Equivalency
7. Concern Trolling
8. When all else fails, Racism!

As Kurt Schlichter writes (Danke schön to Ed Driscoll),

There’s an important lesson here for when the fake outrage weenies try to swarm you on social media. Never apologize, never explain, always mock. They suck, and they are nobodies.