Camden: Think twice on Nazi comparison

It shouldn’t be necessary to say this, but here goes: Wearing a face mask to prevent the spread of COVID in 2021 America is not the same as wearing an arm band to mark you as a member of a religious faith in antisemitic 1930s Nazi Germany. The former is a public health measure, and the wearers are not going to be rounded up for extermination. The comparison is offensive to the survivors of the Holocaust, their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. And to anyone with a passing knowledge of history.

Such a requirement for masking at work might tempt opponents to compare any state efforts to enforce it to “Brown Shirts,” a reprise of last year’s complaints about state enforcement of “the stay safe, stay home” order. Please note that the Brown Shirts were organized thugs given the tacit approval to terrorize people and destroy things, not public servants trying to keep others safe.

This is not to suggest that only Republicans are likely to fall into a trap sometimes referred to as Godwin’s Law, that posits the longer a discussion continues, the more likely someone is to make an analogy to Hitler or Nazis.

During the Trump administration, Democrats and liberals sometimes compared the president’s public spokespersons to Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s master of propaganda, despite the fact that such mastery was sometimes lacking. The former president’s insistence that he won the 2020 election but it was stolen from him by massive fraud is referred to as “The Big Lie” by his opponents and liberal commentators.

The Big Lie was a term coined by Hitler as mendacity so audacious that people would believe it because no one would dare to make something like that up. He used that technique to convince Germans the country didn’t lose World War I on the battlefield but were betrayed from within by Jews and others.

Considering that there is no evidence of massive fraud in the 2020 election while there are evidence and court rulings to the contrary, Trump’s claims might be considered mendacious enough to be “a” big lie. But the phrase is also generally followed by some kind of statement that the claims are baseless or unfounded or already refuted, so it’s not quite the same as the Nazi government’s Big Lie reinforced by their heavily controlled news media.

To quote Walsh in his radio mea culpa: “You can’t use some things as a metaphor, because they go beyond the pale.”

A sign of the times

As Washington crossed the threshold of 70 percent vaccination for those who are eligible to get the shot, Inslee did something he hadn’t done in about 15 months. He held a media briefing in the governor’s conference room with reporters present.

Everett Herald reporter Jerry Cornfield joked that he’d have to work on asking a follow-up question, which is easy to blurt out in person but not possible on a Zoom call when the governor’s staff controls the mute button.