Neither Hitler nor Stalin Took Power Through the Health Department
Public health officials who’ve been honest, diligent, and courageous have become the targets of calumny and threats of physical violence, because they’ve advocated a variety of public health policies, including the wearing of facial masks and the administering of vaccines.
This whole mess would be laughable if it weren’t so serious. Sadly the debate concerning the role of masks and vaccines in fighting against the Covid-19 outbreak is just another in a long list of paranoid and extremist horror shows that have infested public health policy discussions in the past, including such issues as adding fluoride to water or vaccination requirements. We can now add the toxic movement of anti-vaxxers to the deadly resistance to sensible anti-pandemic policies. Claiming that vaccine mandates are government trampling on personal freedom are absurd.
The claim that public health mandates like mask-wearing and vaccine requirements is part of a long standing tradition in right wing, anti-government nonsense. It’s part of their orthodoxy to make what I call The Big Brother argument about public health requirements. It goes like this: First you require people to wear masks or vaccinate. Then you tell them when and where they can congregate. Then you dictate what businesses can stay open. And that policy road supposedly leads to some nasty fascist or communist dictatorship. It’s a straightforward slippery slope story.
We have a load of dictatorships, past and present, to examine. We can check to see how many of them have slipped down the polished ramp of public health as a way to consolidate dictatorial power. Perhaps someone else can find it, but so far as I know there is not a single instance where the onset of dictatorship or otherwise repressive regime came to power via health and personal safety regulations.
There is no accounting for how some people take the fictitious General Jack D. Ripper of Dr. Strangelove fame seriously. Apparently we will always be burdened by those who believe that there is a nefarious conspiracy out there, to “sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids” through vaccines mandated by the government.
So what does appear to be associated with the collapse of democratic government? Well, it’s complicated. But here are some key factors. They include such things as large scale, enduring economic misery, on-going military adventures and their associated casualties and burdens on society. Police and military organizations abandoning democratic norms and siding with anti-democratic politicians have abetted authoritarianism. The rise of paramilitary organizations and private militias seem often to accompany the threat to democratic rule too. Restrictions on labor unions, attacks on judges and lawyers, scientists and intellectuals seem to play a role. And always there are attacks on journalists and the independent, critical press.
Of course, in a democracy people have a right to say most anything in public policy debates. But silence shouldn’t be the default or polite response in the face of fanciful, data-free, and unreasonable claims. Yes, we are free to pretend that the truck coming at us is really just a cute teddy bear, but there are dire consequences for magical thinking
It is, of course, appropriate in a democracy to debate the effectiveness of any public regulation or other government measures designed to reduce the spread of a disease. Any public regulation can be counterproductive or wasteful and deserves scrutiny, reform, revision, or termination. Let data and reason prevail.
However, the casual linking of conventional, effective, or needed public health policies to the demise of democracy is, to coin a technical term, rancid baloney. Such claims trivialize the tragedy and evil of dictatorship. Conjuring up threats to democracy with claims that mandated social distancing and face-masks or vaccinations are threats to freedom and democracy are nothing more than cheap propaganda or the chirping of crazed ideologues.
During this horrific public health crisis, another feverish episode of the “paranoid style” or American anti-intellectualism mucking up data-driven policy development is the last thing we need. Hitler, Stalin, or any of their ilk didn’t come to power via the health department.
