Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert doesn’t like the idea of government representatives going round knocking on people’s doors to convince them to get vaccinated. We don’t like the idea either, but the knockers would not be Nazis in any way, shape or fashion.
Adults should get vaccinated. COVID is a continuing threat. The vaccine is a blessing. But if people have concerns, they will not be alleviated by an unasked for knock on the door. It would be an invasion of privacy, a government overreach. Unfortunately, all concerned will have to acknowledge that, given the mixed messages over the course of the pandemic by government authorities — for example: mask! social distance! uh, unless it’s to protest — many people’s concerns will not be alleviated.
Why that should merit the invocation of Nazism is — we could say decades ago — beyond us. But now, 76 years after the end of the Holocaust, the invocation of Nazism as a metaphor is a sign of the increasing distance from the Holocaust and increasing ignorance of the Holocaust, of its utter, unprecedented deviance, depravity and scope.
The invocation of a Nazi metaphor is wrong not because it is “inappropriate,” not because it “offends Holocaust survivors,” not because it is politically incorrect, not because the Jewish constituency is offended, but, simply, because it offends the truth. It violates reality. It compares the incomparable. It screams: I have never read a single memoir of the extermination camps.
We cannot expect public officials to be familiar with everything, but the Holocaust was mass murder on a scale and with a singleminded hatred never before seen in history. We expect a public official to know this, and to vocalize positions accordingly.
Copyright © 2021 by the Intermountain Jewish News
