Literally Hitler
Literally Hitler
Did a vaccine mandate advocate catch the glimpse of his own reflection?
A provocative article invokes the metaphor the American left was once so comfortable applying to totalitarian safetyism - in defense of totalitarian safetyism. In so doing, the lessons of Nazi Germany vaccine culture are distorted beyond recognition.
My myopic focus on The Asylum’s ongoing deluge of protogenocidal propaganda is not just a product of that outlet’s prolific output: It is an arrangement of convenience.1 For a slick, streamlined, and young, but not too young-leaning representation of the Purge Them Now Fever propagating throughout the entirety of coastal media, The Asylum can not be beat. They are thus a better representation of what the future regime will think, and feel, than even The Failing New York Times or Washington Post - which, besides voicing critiques of the prevailing narrative, are still running op-eds by mystified octogenarians who have no internal awareness of the bloodshed they are encouraging.2
But even the authors at The Asylum, of course, may on occasion be surpassed by their rivals:3
This triumphantly deranged essay nimbly combines horrifically simplistic historical account and faulty argument into one dizzyingly stupid “pop quiz”:4
Pop quiz [, hotshot]: What allowed the Nazis to seize and hold on to autocratic power in Germany for more than a decade, and carry out the horrific crimes they’re known for? Was it a police state that trampled on the rights to privacy, protest, and speaking out, enforced by brutal and sometimes secret paramilitary forces with the help of a pervasive surveillance state? Or was it a vaccine mandate?
So, to be clear… As long as a militarized police state that suppresses privacy and protest and pervasively surveils its subjects (as in Australia, Canada, Lithuania5 already) does have a vaccine mandate, that would mean it isn’t like the Nazis…?
Rücksichtsloser Härte
In litigating the correct answer to his quiz, Marcetic first relies on erecting a straw-man for the opposing argument, the “right-wing” apparatchik who thinks vaccine mandates are a classic tool for fascism:
Since Joe Biden issued a sweeping vaccine mandate last week, right-wing media and politicians wasted no time in deploying the Nazi comparisons, calling the move “fascist,” “totalitarian,” “authoritarian,” and invoking swastikas and the Nuremberg Code.
There’s only one problem: the Nazis didn’t actually issue a vaccine mandate.
That a mythically singular “Nazi policy” of alleged vaccine liberalism is actually a “problem” for the likening of vaccine mandates to Naziism, of course, is a circular argument. Marcetic merely defines the goalpost to be atop of the soccer ball from the outset, and then spends the remaining 1,220 words celebrating his nonexistent kick.
But what is and isn’t “fascist” cannot be defined by blunt, side-by-side comparison with a single real-world instantiation of fascism, not only because of contextual variation (are beach buggies fascist?; is racism fascist?; is the Mongolian Khas fascist?), but because human reality is messy, inconsistent, and self-contradictory.
Vaccine mandates, after all and as Marcetic himself acknowledges, predate the rise of 20th-Century authoritarianism generally, German National Socialism specifically, and in fact the German unification itself. They originate not in Prussia, but in the UK, and quickly take foothold in the urbanizing American northeast,6 launching a century of abusive state medical coercion in the Anglosphere.
By the time National Socialism shakily ascended to power, Mary Mallon was nearing the end of her doctor-imposed, three-decade life sentence of “quarantine” on a rock in the East River, Britain had made force-feeding of imprisoned suffragette dissidents official law, and over half of American states had adopted compulsory sterilization laws of some form; thus, the prospect of Hitler “out-Naziing” the liberal West in the field of medical coercion by any means was dim, even before considering the political context in which “German citizens,” as defined by the party, were meant to be a classless polity of universal exceptionals basking in the bounties of Kraft durch Freude, “Strength through Joy.”
In fact, the most coherent criticism of the likening of vaccine mandates to fascism is that the mandates do not incorporate the collaborative theatre of liberty and collaborative machine of repression which are in fact the sine qua non of fascism. Vaccine mandates preserve the delineation of “person” and “unperson” which makes arbitrary state violence and murder possible, but discard the mythical construction of universal exceptionalism which allows for the state-defined “person,” at least for the moment, to enjoy a legal fiction of freedom. To be a “citizen” in the fascist state is to be a member of an oxymoronically universal elite club - literally, when it came to the Hitler Youth and Opera Nazionale Balilla - one that has visibly ceased to purge and over-police its own members, and turned its murderous designs outward in search of equally fictional Lebensraum, “living space.”
As long as this fiction held, the fascist state could afford to outsource social control to society itself; norms could somewhat easily be fabricated and edited through party-controlled media and education, and - within the Futurist or biological supremacist homeland - thereafter readily endorsed by the groupthink of the Volksgemeinschaft, or “people’s community.” So, of course the shift of vaccination from legal requirement to artificial social norm was not only possible, but essential - as well as convenient for a party / state which, despite its self-declared rücksichtsloser Härte, was nowhere near as competent and omniscient as the modern Hollywood myth makes it out to be.
To understand how “Strength through Joy” differs from run-of-the-mill statist propaganda and FREEDOM IS SLAVERY double-speak, it is perhaps best to understand 20th-Century fascism as the wolf of totalitarianism dressed in liberty’s clothing. In the Futurist or biological supremacist dream, it is not just in delivering material goods to the common man that the fascist utopia will excel where the liberal West has failed: It is in the universalization of human actualization. The universal exceptionals will enjoy not only more comfort than the downtrodden subjects of the fallen republics of the West, but more leisure, physical adventure, philosophical stimulation, spiritual contentment, and above all, personal liberty. So why wouldn’t the fascist regime seek to distinguish itself from the most notoriously intrusive state policy of the preceding German empire and republic, a policy still ongoing in the contemporary fallen republics of the West? When the West had just been torturing dissident women with feeding-tubes, when the West was still stealth-sterilizing Black and Hispanic women under color of law (treatment a fascist regime would only apply to the unperson, of course), when the West had metastasized into a thousand different locally-administered Public Health Sultanates which were medically experimenting on children in plain sight,7 when Wilson’s League of Nations itself had endorsed universal promotion of the same vaccine that led to the disaster in Lübeck two years later,8 adopting at least a fig-leafed version of medical liberty was the most politically natural choice possible; even if this meant the Reich was signaling medical choice with one hand and sterilizing the Minderwertige with the other.9 But in particular, the political value of drawing a contrast from the universally unpopular, repopulation-motivated Weimar smallpox vaccine mandates was likely paramount, in terms of reifying the exceptional status of the state-defined “citizen” under Nazi rule.10
Moreover, even the authentic liberal republic depends for long term survival on the compatibility between state interests and the various pro-social norms that are enforced by the quasi-state of the public square. For consensus-defined taboos and virtues to supplant state coercion, they must align with the principle interest of the state, which is civic order. The difference, in the liberal republic, is not the degree of oppression and conformity enforced by the public square - nor the inevitable proliferation of hypocrisies and fig-leafs - but that the people are the author of their own consensus; in the fascist regime, the norms of the “people’s community” are authored by the party.11 Here, because of the intense German mistrust of vaccines after the Lübeck scandal, the residual habits of political contrarianism among the small-hold farmers and lofty landowners of the agrarian leagues who married into the Nazi party, as well as the contradictions between the Nazi notions of “biological purity by selection” and the Public Health concept of “biological purity by supplement,” that authorship was not as potent, and the party was intentionally circumspect. It was, thus, the people themselves - or rather, the droves of “figurative Nazis” in the medical and Public Health professions, which in the turn away from documentable childhood vaccination had lost their own access to power over their fellow citizens - who stepped up to provide the in-person pressure on reluctant parents to ensure the successful expansion of the diphtheria vaccine, which had already become common in the West for over a decade. German historian Malte Thießen describes the first major diphtheria campaign as follows (Google translated):12
The evaluation of one of these experiments, a diphtheria mass vaccination in Westphalia in 1935, showed that the vaccination of 320,000 children carried out here required the cooperation of the medical profession, National Socialist People's Welfare (NSV), Red Cross, administration and mass media as well as coordination the health authorities. The latter were initially only responsible for the “supervision” of vaccinations in the law on the “standardization of health care”, but in April 1935 the Reich Ministry of the Interior awarded them a leading role in vaccinations. After all, they provided both “particularly suitable facilities” and the necessary staff, so that “the implementation of public vaccinations was preferably entrusted to the doctors working in the health authorities”. The dates, locations and benefits of vaccinations were publicized in the press and on the radio. In the vaccination centers, the doctors received support from NSV and paramedics of the Red Cross, the [National Socialist Women's League] took care of worried mothers, the class teachers in turn kept files on the vaccinated and were able to rely on the help of police officers. The data were collected in the health authorities, from which the results were also statistically processed. They also ensured that the vaccination halls were supplied with vaccines and propaganda material and gave doctors, support staff and the press “precise instructions”.
Simultaneously, doctors and educators began devising means of obtaining “consent” from children and delivering vaccines in absence of the parent. On the matter of Public Health, the situation in Nazi Germany can be seen as a symbiotic relationship between self-interested medical professionals who had become disempowered by the Lübeck scandal, and the party / state which for reasons of propagandistic expediency wished to perpetuate widespread faith in authentic, realized medical autonomy.13 The ideology of National Socialism, which was conflicted on the notion of medicalizing the (selected, supremacist) body, as well as the Nazi “people’s community,” were themselves thus contorted into instruments of the power-seeking medical profession - a signal of that sector’s predatory rücksichtsloser Härte which Hitler could not have failed to recall when writing his letter to Bouhler and Brandt.14
The 1935 diphtheria campaign was an inflection point in the lifestyle and culture of the Nazi “people’s community.” The equivalence of diphtheria vaccination with public duty became ever more normalized, and the administrative competence of the party to enact future regulation over “free” citizens expanded with every shot.15 The antiquated and unpopular smallpox vaccine, though still legally mandated, was all but discarded as a Public Health effort in favor of the more popular and lower-friction diphtheria injection. Additionally, it signaled the beginning of a slow turn away from confident dreams of universal biological supremacy by selection, toward fear, medicalization, and psychological atomization.
The definition of fascism offered here - as performatively, or even conditionally liberal totalitarianism - obviously consigns the system to a single, unavoidable fate: It is in a temporary stasis; an unstable, high-energy transitional state on the way to more oppressive forms. What distinguishes fascism from the Orwellian totalitarianism it will eventually transform into, thus, is that “freedom” is still an ostensibly valid political construct, the de facto destruction of which is never made overt.16
But the coming mandates for the Covid “vaccines” will offer no such transitional fiction. After all could anything be more overt, for the citizens who will remain after the unvaccinated have been, by whatever means, “reduced,”17 than having to wave a remotely-managed QR-Code affirming their provisional biological purity to literally buy groceries?
The tragic, ultimate absurdity of Marcetic’s argument thus speaks for itself: Vaccine mandates cannot be likened to Naziism, because even the Nazis didn’t go that far. After all, it is not as if Marcetic is arguing that since literal Nazis endorsed discretionary exceptions to childhood smallpox vaccination in 1934 and 1935 as a matter of political expediency, adult Americans today should enjoy at least the same freedom!
Perhaps this is why he attempts to camouflage his ultra-totalitarian argument by nonsensically yoking it to a second, totally unrelated analysis of Nazi policies in those same conquered regions which were being purged by the Einsatzgruppen, to clear the grounds for “living space.” Gratuitously and idiotically asserting an extrapolation from this one, inhuman context to “any policy mandating vaccines,” he writes:
What’s more, it’s clear from the evidence they left behind that Hitler and other Nazis understood that any policy of mandating vaccines would have worked against their genocidal aims.
When the S.S. was conducting genocide in the rural east, lining villagers up to be shot to death while their children clung to them, Marcetic brilliantly points out, they weren’t injecting them with medicines beforehand! But this observation, besides reinforcing the Strangelovesque farce of the essay, is merely a sophistic resort to masked man fallacy: "Republicans think that vaccine mandates are a precursor to state control. But actually, not having vaccines is a precursor to state eradication (and therefor having them cannot be a precursor to control)."
This, simply, isn’t true. The value of vaccine mandates in the context of genocidal eradication is not the same as the value of mandates in any authoritarian context. Hitler could easily have mandated vaccines for pet iguanas, for example, without meaningfully sabotaging the Holocaust.
Eradication and control are two separate evils, even if they are as intimately intertwined as yin and yang. Whenever total eradication is possible without control, it may be preceded to directly. When total eradication is only possible with control, control must be established beforehand. And to establish control, requires partial eradication.18 Vaccine mandates achieve control via partial eradication.
Philosophical incoherence through time is a feature, not a bug, of the totalitarian killing machine.19
Luftschlösser
Returning to Marcetic’s “pop quiz”, we, the pupils, must wonder a bit at the high-sheen, blue-filtered, Hollywood production reality the author constructed for the “correct” answer:
a police state that trampled on the rights to privacy, protest, and speaking out, enforced by brutal and sometimes secret paramilitary forces with the help of a pervasive surveillance state20
This portrays the Nazi state as a wonder of efficient and omniscient intrusion into private life, rather than the bungling apparatus rife with in-fighting, contradiction, and legal infinite loops that it more closely resembled.
Nothing so defines the post-70’s American reanimation of interest in Nazi Germany (following 25 years of active disinterest) as the simplistic view of the fascist state as the author of its own power. According to the Hollywood-ified notion of the era, men in drab uniforms wrote things, and other, armed men in drab uniforms materialized somewhere, and the will of the state was carried out, transforming reality upon whim. Naziism and the Holocaust are imagined, in the American mind, as the automatic and inevitable manifestations of faulty “political values;” the people of the Third Reich were only instrumental insofar as it was their essential “German-ness” that somehow predestined the Reich’s ruthlessness and moral aberrance.
That German employers interfaced the gender, age, and marital status of the worker with the state; that German doctors interfaced the biological propriety of the child with the state; that German Jewish community leaders sent lists of names to Eichmann; that more distant countries turned their backs on Germans Jews who were eligible for bribe-based exportation, most unjustly the British who obstructed “select” Jewish immigration (administered by Palestinian Jewish emissaries and supported by the Nazi party in 1938) to Palestine as being against their colonial interests; and that nearby (non-eastern) countries, when vanquished, rounded up their own Jews with far more exuberance and efficiency than Germany had ever managed - including France who had already interred her (often German, refugee) Jews before the war even began - these realities are all discarded, in the American reimagining. In reality the eyes, ears, hands, and feet of the National Socialist party / state, were none other than the “free” and “protectorate” citizens it ostensibly controlled.21 It had no power without them. The six years of stasis between the economic ostracizing of German Jews and the transportation of German, Austrian, and West Polish Jews to occupied (but presumably eventually Soviet) East Poland, six years in which every attempt was made to achieve the expulsion of Jews through public-private partnership (and fleece Jewish expatriate wealth to sustain the state), are the best evidence of the profound limits of the party / state’s power. As with the political capital surrounding vaccines, the early Nazi state’s logistical capacity was limited by temporal context, in this case the ongoing Great Depression; otherwise, we ought to imagine no reason for the events of 1939 not to have occurred earlier. It was thus not only necessary but convenient throughout the mid-30s that while the Nazi state was still far from realizing the dreams of “Strength through Joy,” the army was growing only slowly, and unemployment had only been lowered by legalistic fictions, German Jews were still abundantly visible enough to be declared “our misfortune.” So, while it does appear that Marcetic did at least some research for his essay, he seems to have crafted his review of the research with that fundamental American figment of reality as his reference frame: If Hitler had wished all German children to get vaccinated, the American mind imagines, well, he would have simply “mandated” it.
Besides this frame, Marcetic appears to have based his reconstruction of the history of vaccines under National Socialism almost entirely on the superb essay by Malte Thießen already quoted extensively above: “From the immunized national body to the “preventive self.” Vaccination as biopolitics and social practice from the German Empire to the Federal Republic.”22 (Google-translated.) I’ll leave it to the future government censors who seize Marcetic’s laptop in a Wrongthink Raid to determine whether he discovered this essay via a quora.com search for “nazi vaccine,” which quickly produces an authoritative-sounding answer that happens to link to the German wikipedia page for Impfpflicht, which ties Thießen’s essay to the only sentence mentioning National Socialism (Google-translated):23
This compulsory vaccination [of smallpox] was cautiously relaxed in the Weimar Republic and in the initial phase of National Socialism.
But as we have already seen, the relaxation of the smallpox vaccine requirement was supplemented almost immediately by the successful implementation of a nearly universal diphtheria vaccination regime, one which transformed the values of the “people’s community” to make a state mandate politically illogical. Marcetic elides this milestone event, as well as misrepresents the complex changes that would occur in the era of totalen Krieg.
Thießen, on the other hand, portrays the war in the east, in particular, as something experienced within the homeland as a cataclysmic event. Not only wounded German soldiers and prisoners of war, but forced laborers brought into the German workplace, seeded the homeland with the eastern disease of typhus, leading to widespread outbreaks at the same time as success on the eastern front depended on shielding soldiers from infection. The typhus vaccine of the time, meanwhile, was of only limited efficacy and even scarcer supply. With a thousand conflicting state interests suddenly arising all at once, the idea of a coherent pro- or anti- mandate policy is nonsensical. The reality was disarray.
Typhus vaccines were mandated for soldiers to prioritize the conquest of the east, but when vaccinated soldiers returned from the front they asymptomatically spread the disease, prompting more demand at home. Typhus vaccines were mandated for German staff within the factories which employed forced laborers, but for German staff only, leaving the forced laborers susceptible to outbreaks - which, of course, only increased the exposure of the German nurse. As for the German nurse, she, per the dictates of the same local health authorities that were already complicit in the Holocaust, would have to wait her turn (Google-translated):24
In 1942, a North German health department pointed out that when vaccinations are required, first think of the doctors, then of the community nurses and only then of the nursing staff, although the latter had the most intensive contact with “Russian workers”.
Meanwhile, dreams were laid out for impressing the conquered subjects of the “living space” who had not been targeted for ethnic cleansing with the logistical brilliance of the German fascist way of life: Namely, by co-opting and expanding existing vaccine manufacture and distribution in the east. While the reversals of the eastern war and the self-amplifying cycles of demand in the Reich ensured that these dreams could never even partially come about, it is notable that the Nazi party now, finally, explicitly associated vaccination with (totalitarian) state competence.25
But what does Marcetic take from all this chaos and contradiction, including literal vaccine mandates for the armed forces abroad and Labor Front staff at home? Again:
What’s more, it’s clear from the evidence they left behind that Hitler and other Nazis understood that any policy of mandating vaccines would have worked against their genocidal aims.
In a particularly tasteless move, Marcetic supplements his narrow-focused presentation of war-era Nazi policies with a quote from Martin Bormann sourced from, of all things, Daniel Goldhagen’s Worse Than War, a book whose aim is to demonstrate the universal instrumentality of genocide to any human us-vs-them construction, including war. To remove genocide, in other words, from the artificially-constructed American conception as “a thing caused by faulty political values.” Thus, as if unable to take a single step without trailing down more contradictions on his own head, the Bormann quote that Marcetic poaches is only one page separate from the following, salient reprise of Goldhagen’s central motif (emphasis added):26
We can further examine these variations by looking at certain regimes, conventionally called totalitarian, that, in seeking to refashion society or the multitude of societies, have initiated vast domestic and international eliminationist programs to exert total control, purify, fend off the apocalypse, bring about the promised paradisial future.
And it is precisely the persistent American misunderstanding of the Holocaust as the byproduct of “faulty political values,” not a universally translatable existential angst against the impure that can be unleashed at the first signal of media and state approval - all to the ultimate service of the empowerment of the media and the state - that has rendered it so easy for us to embark upon one of our own.
But with such a blinkered view, not only is it natural not to see the parallels between the present moment and the (economic) unpersoning of German Jews in 1933, it is impossible to do otherwise.
Once that unpersoning was at last “physically consummated,” of course, the transition from fascism (as performative liberty) to outright totalitarianism was complete. The program of “Strength through Joy” was furloughed. There was no more pretense of freedom for the universal exceptionals who remained, after the Jewish purge. The German worker, if he or she was not subject to a vaccine mandate, was only so distinguished as a result of rationing, infighting, and chaos, as the now fully totalitarian regime hurtled toward destruction.27
See “We Silly Rabbits.”
See Murrow, Lance. “You Are Living in the Golden Age of Stupidity.” (2021, August 29.) The Washington Post.
An unintentionally apt critique of the global rollout of an experimental intervention into the human self-destruct button.
Marcetic, Branko. “You Know Who Else Opposed Vaccine Mandates? Hitler.” (2021, September 18.) Jacobin.
Marcetic’s recent output begs for further analysis and ridicule, as he not only interleaves anniversary-inspired elegies for the dismantling of civil rights by War on Terror-era Republicans with pleas for Pandemic-era Democrats to dismantle civil rights, he affirms and relishes in his own hypocrisy in a single, combined document:
When just under three thousand people died in the September 11 attacks, the US government instituted a variety of radically invasive measures that are still in place today […] If their rampant violation of privacy rights wasn’t bad enough, these measures also happen to be consistently ineffective at actually protecting people from terrorism. By contrast, while there’s mounting evidence vaccines don’t prevent vaccinated people from passing on the latest mutation of the virus, it’s clear they are remarkably effective at stopping hospitalization and death for those who do get it
Marcetic himself fails to articulate his own argument in its purest form, even though it is an argument that I suspect will rise to preeminence on the left in the coming months: The War on Terror was wrong, and besides it didn’t protect those waging it. The War on the Unvaccinated “protects” those it is being waged against, so it is right. (Does that mean the War on Terror would have been right if it was effective? The answer vanishes, in this philosophical shell-game.)
Yet Marcetic’s “Hitler” essay, more or less a panicked screed produced by a reeling mind confronted by a glimpse of its own reflection, reveals that the left will remain hyper-sensitive to being called out on their embrace of authoritarianism and mass purges and betrayal of the spirit of “resistance” to state control, no matter what rhetorical contortions they use to justify it. Until the (both small and big-L) liberal, secular mind acknowledges its worship of science as a religion, it will not cease to fabricate justifications for Secular Theocracy.
There’s a virus on a bus…
For a running update on Lithuania, see “Covid Pass in Lithuania and throughout Europe,” by @gluboco
Ignoring several limited attempts to mandate vaccination in semi-feudal lands still ruled by absolute monarchs.
https://www.historyofvaccines.org/timeline#EVT_100706 The dating of 1929 does not seem to be supported by most other sources, which date the disaster to 1930.
Despite the League recommendation, the BCG vaccine was not mandated or commonly used in Germany at the time. However, the Lübeck accident was a national scandal.
See Thießen, Malte. “Vom immunisierten Volkskörper zum „präventiven Selbst.”” (2013, January 22.) De Gruyter Oldenbourg. p. 45. With Google translation:
Scandal hit the headlines of the national and international press. Numerous newspaper editors sent their reporters north to document the reign of terror of “Herod von Lübeck ”. This case set the stage for the debate for the years that followed. Because although the accident was "only" a consequence of incorrectly stored vaccine and the tuberculosis immunization was hardly practiced in the Reich, let alone ordered by the state, health policy in general and the smallpox vaccination in particular were suddenly put to the test.
There is, moreover and as noted elsewhere in this essay, a tension between the Futurist or biological supremacist notion of a nation of combat-honed Figli della Lupa, and the state declaration of intrinsic, universal, biological incompleteness at birth. Though, again, tension and contradiction are the very nature of the movement. Perhaps the vaccine could be declared the wolf’s milk…
(Thießen, p. 41, 43.) With Google translation:
Second, after the end of the war, they saw themselves in a "demographic transition" that seemed to be exacerbated by the loss of millions of young men. The containment of the “people's epidemic” promised land gains in the fight against the “death of the people”, which was often proclaimed in Weimar. The compulsion to protect against smallpox was therefore the order of the day, as vaccination had proven to be a powerful weapon against child mortality in the 19th century. [...] The state coercive measures and the power of the vaccinators were controversial from the start, but the critical voices became louder over time. After the revolution of 1918, this opposition was fed by social democratic and communist, but also from bourgeois and denominational circles, so that a cross-party, albeit extremely heterogeneous opposition was articulated in the criticism of the compulsory vaccination. It included doctors, social physicians and politicians such as the social democrat Julius Moses, who did not doubt the effectiveness of vaccination, but the benefits of compulsory vaccination. Other forces, however, refused the vaccinations in principle. They organized themselves in associations such as the “German Reich Association to Combat Vaccination” with 300,000 members, they published magazines, brochures and books or invited to “popular assemblies against the vaccination craze”. Such agitations have occasionally been dismissed in research as "sabotage", as backward, even naive criticism of the health care system.
And, of course, the people cease to be the authors of their own norms in the liberal republic immediately upon the arrival of national media. Note, for example, the essential disintegration of both bourgeois pater familias and working class monoculture facilitated by the bombardment of Hollywood depictions of alt culture into the American home. This expresses itself everywhere, from the Lord of the Flies-ification of the public school system to the kaleidoscopic political crises of gender politics. But it well predates late 20th-Century Hollywood cultural progressivism. “Deep state,” foreign office manipulation of the urban press in France and the UK greatly contributed to the cultural reprogramming that pre-conditioned the expansion of a limited war against Serbia into the first World War, for an example of the media’s ability to rewrite consensus even in the pre-radio era.
(Thießen, p. 51-52.)
Thießen also provides a helpful analysis of the power dynamics of vaccination from the perspective of the medical profession. From the discussion of the 1925 renewal of the smallpox vaccine mandate, p. 42., Google-translated:
Fourth, vaccination programs opened up considerable opportunities for social control; after all, vaccinations were not only systematically carried out, but also systematically documented. The health status of the vaccinated persons and the development of the health situation in individual "vaccination districts" were then included in the Reich statistics. The authorities thus received a precise picture of the health status of the population, differentiated by community and social class. In other words: With the help of the smallpox vaccination one believed to be able to see the stature of the “people's body” and its weak points better. This possibility of control was due to the fact that vaccinees had to be thoroughly examined because of the complications they feared. This is one of the reasons why the response to forced vaccinations was particularly great among doctors. Thanks to the compulsory vaccination, they received both a regular additional income and a documented right of access to the residents of their vaccination district.
What would later be named Aktion T4.
(Thießen, p. 51-52.)
Here, again, an apt compound word was constructed within the party media apparatus: The Zustimmungsdiktatur, or “dictatorship of consent.”
See “Reducing the Number.”
Note that for the Third Reich, the “partial eradication” that inaugurated the transition from failing republic to metastatic fascism was not only limited in scope, but degree. It was initially economic and political. Besides the assassination of political opponents in 1934, Jews were targeted for economic ostracizing in 1933 and declared unpersons in 1935, but not yet scheduled for state murder. As mentioned above, the following years of stasis are easy to understand in the context of limited available state resources at the time, and the advantageousness of taking bribes for expatriation; geopolitics no doubt contributed to further delays, as war removes or delays the “external” costs to genocide that are brought to bear by bad press. Thus the expulsion of German and Austrian jews into East Poland in September 1939 coincided with first overt, inwardly-directed killing program (“Aktion T4”), which was targeted at Lebensunwertes Leben - the physically inferior “lives not worth living,” as discerned in practice by, who else, private doctors.
Why does Marcetic require so many words to say this.
See, broadly, Arendt, Hannah. (1964.) Eichmann in Jerusalem. Penguin Classics, 2006.
(Thießen.)
(Thießen, p. 58.)
(Thießen, p. 60.)
Goldhagen, Daniel. (2009.) Worse Than War. p. 364. PublicAffairs.
But if the ability of the German medical profession to co-opt the Nazi “people’s community,” and on the matter of creating an intrusive administrative apparatus encompassing the entire polity to “show the Nazis how it’s done” weren’t impressive enough, consider that profession’s ability to adapt and cope to the fall of the dream. As the war, through its reduction and disruption of daily life, perforated the “people’s community” and finally tore it to shreds, the medical profession recalibrated its own propaganda so that universal voluntary vaccination survived the totalitarian atomization of the German psyche.
Here Thießen enters the realm of the speculative, as fewer sources exist to describe policies and practices in the last two years of the war. But by the bifurcation of Germany in 1945, the medical paradigm of appealing to community and duty had somehow already been replaced by a perfect fit for the coming modern era: The “preventative self.” In the interim period of the late and post-war when disease, displacement, and near-starvation were rampant, in other words, a new cultural relationship with medicine was born without the government’s input. Doctors had already learned how to market vaccinations to the alienated, anxious mindset of the Cold War era, before it even arrived.
