Parallels to 1930s Nazis

Editor’s note: The following is an unabridged version of what appeared in print in the Longboat and Sarasota/Siesta Key Observers.

Wake up, America. While Americans remain focused on the Hamas-Israel war, in the following commentary, Lewellyn Rockwell Jr. reports chilling parallels between what has been occurring in the U.S. now and in the past three years with what occurred in Germany in the early 1930s. It’s real. — Matt Walsh

The heroic Dr. Naomi Wolf’s new book, “Facing the Beast: Courage, Faith and Resistance in a New Dark Age,” exposes the plot to depopulate the world though the so-called COVID “vaccines.” The book also does much more than this: 

It encourages and inspires those who are fighting to preserve freedom by putting the struggle in a spiritual dimension that involves the whole universe.

The insidious plot didn’t reveal itself right away. The first stage was the imposition of quarantines and lockdowns, which Dr. Wolf compares to the early years of Nazism:

“I am asking how they can be suppressing the respiration of children intentionally; how they can be consigning friends and colleagues to eat in the street like outcasts, or sending cops to arrest a woman and terrify a nine-year-old child, whose crimes were that they tried to visit the Museum of Natural History in New York without “papers”?

How could “nice” people in the humane West have been put on the agenda in Washington State just two weeks ago where there are plans to detain those exposed to a “contagious disease” in forcible quarantine — without charge or trial and dependent on a court order and good behavior to get out?

All of this happened in America — in the land of people who, since the Civil Rights Act of 1964, have had the principle of equality governing human relations as a matter of law; a nation that had passed laws against the abuse of or corporal punishment of children in public schools in the 1970s in virtually every state; and a people who have been raised in a culture of freedom and civility compared with lawless or totalitarian regimes.

How could good people be going along with this?

There are lessons from history that we have to learn, or re-learn, and quickly.

Like early Nazism

Some leaders and commentators (including myself) have passionately and publicly been comparing these years, 2020-2022, in the West and in Australia, to the early years of Nazi leadership. Though we face criticism for doing so, I won’t be silenced about this. The similarities must urgently be addressed.

People need to re-read their Nazi history. They are getting it wrong in demanding, “How dare you compare?”

While the popular imagination of the Nazi era is familiar with deaths camps, the fact is that many years led up to that horror. Germany invaded Poland in 1939. The extermination camps were established years into the Nazi drama: 1941. Dr Josef Mengele, “The Angel of Death,” began his medical experiments in Auschwitz after 1943.

No one sensible is talking about comparing what we are living through now to those years and those horrors.

Rather, the vivid similarities between our moment in the West since 2020, and the earliest years of Nazi Germany’s civil society policies, are to the years 1931-33, when so many vicious norms and policies were set in place. But these were often culturally or professionally policed, rather than being policed by camp patrols. That’s the point that better-informed analysts of these similarities are making.

That is to say, during these years, mass societal cruelty and a two-tier society itself that perpetuated this cruelty were built up and policed, as like today, by polite civil society institutions tasked with snarling and baring its teeth.

Casual, escalating cruelty, a culture of degradation of the “othered” and a two-tier society were built up in those years certainly at the behest of Nazi social policy. But the construction of a world of evil out of what had been a modern civil society, if a fragile one, was also endorsed and even policed by doctors, medical associations, journalists, famous composers and filmmakers, universities, neighbors, teachers and shopkeepers for years before the death camp guards were tasked with their own far more heinous cruelty.

Amos Elon’s poignant history, “The Pity of it All: A History of Jews in Germany, 1743-1933,” reveals how many Jewish civil society leaders warned about the imperceptible shifts day by day in the direction of evil. 

In 1931, street violence was directed against Jewish storefronts and led to smashed-in windows. In other contexts, Jews were beaten upon leaving synagogues. Commentator Theodor Wolff warned, “This simply cannot continue. All decent people, irrespective of party, must form a common front…”

So one might say today. Especially as we witness the hatred toward Jews here and abroad. 

But … but decent people did not form the “common front” then. Wolff’s call to action was to no avail. Elon calls these years “these last spasms of freedom.”

As today, those issuing alarms were suppressed and censored.

As today, emergency laws then were the benchmarks that would allow democracy to collapse. 

“Hitler wanted full powers like Mussolini’s in Italy,” writes Elon. “He knew exactly what was needed to turn a government into a ‘legal’ dictatorship: emergency powers under Article 48.”

See if you notice any echoes here. Currently, 47 U.S. states are operating with emergency measures, which suspend or bypass normal legislative checks and balances, including New York, the state in which I am writing. Under emergency measures, pretty much anything can be done.

The fact that people don’t seem to understand that most of the country is living under emergency measures is what is stunning about our current moment. This is why I keep saying these days that the coup d’etat has already occurred in America. By definition, when you are living under emergency measures, you no longer have a functioning democracy.

In Germany, to move back in time, the demonically intelligent incrementalism of Nazi policy continued. In 1933, the year Adolph Hitler was appointed chancellor of a new cabinet, Hitler gave his word that “the Nazis would remain a minority in any future cabinet.” Even in 1933, though, some prominent Jews still believed that “nothing can happen to us.”

But “Theodor Wolff was one of the few who warned that Hitler’s appointment was merely the first stage of a coup d’etat in installments [Italics mine]. Wolff predicted that ‘a cabinet whose members have been proclaiming for weeks and months that salvation — by which they mean their own — is at hand, in the form of a coup d’etat, a breach of the constitution, the elimination of the Reichstag, the muzzling of the opposition and in unbridled dictatorial rule … will do everything in its power to intimidate and silence its opponents.’

“For millions of Berliners,” writes Elon, “nothing seemed to have changed at first … Few seemed aware of the watershed they had just passed”

“Few seemed aware…”

Democracies die day by day

Let me just summarize where we are right now in America, as well as in the West, in case you have gotten too used to it to see it clearly. I warned in “The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot,” that democracies usually do not die with a cinematic scene of goose-stepping Brownshirts suddenly in the streets. They tend to die, rather, just as Elon described incrementally, day by day, collapsing grotesquely in some areas of society and in regard to some institutions, even as other aspects of society and other institutions look and feel, at least superficially, exactly the same as they did before.

Just because the settings are familiar to us now, does not mean that a 1931-like reality, if not yet a 1933-like reality, isn’t upon us.

In this country, citizens are being forced to take their second or third experimental gene-therapy injection, to go back to school or keep their jobs as truckers crossing borders or as soldiers and sailors and military pilots and hospital workers. 

Millions of other workers just narrowly escaped this coercion; and millions have not escaped this coercive experiment, in effect, upon them, in parts of Europe. Minors are being forced to submit to this experimental gene therapy simply to keep playing high school basketball or tennis.

Thousands of adverse events are being recorded in VAERS, including deaths shortly after vaccination, but the forcing of injections continues despite their having no effect on transmission and against all existing laws.

Voices of opposition to tyrannical overreach are being censored en masse; payment processors are declining to process funds of entities offering medical therapeutics. “The View,” that formerly cozy group of gals, just called for the censorship of podcaster Joe Rogan. Musician Neil Young also called for music streaming service Spotify to censor Rogan’s “misinformation.” 

Calls for censorship of opposition voices echo across the internet. Dissident platforms such as Parler have been deplatformed from their hosting services or from their payment processors, a digital version of boycotting businesses.

Leaders are calling for one group of citizens to be denied health care; in some areas of Canada, leaders have told grocers that it is optional to allow this group to buy food. Children in Canada are being told, “No mask, no voice.” 

Children as young as two are subjected in New York by a smiling new governor to facial coverings that restrict their breathing and impair their ability to acquire language, bond with other children and recognize and express emotions.

Certain citizens, set apart as “other,” falsely called infectious and positioned as “unclean,” may not enter buildings or restaurants in New York, in Washington, D.C., San Francisco and Los Angeles. Everyone is being asked to hate and resent them, and irrationally blame them for the nation’s predicament.

People are asked to join a cult and offer up their bodies; if they don’t, they are ostracized and denied social life and professional advancement.

Small businesses, restaurants and movies theaters; small hotels and venues, small real estate holdings and entire livelihoods are being crushed by arbitrary dicta, by the unrestrained powers of boards of Health and the CDC to crush whole sectors, and thus to destroy, or in effect to transfer, entire classes of assets from one targeted group into the hands of another group — to the institutional investors, or shall we say, to allies of the current oligarchs.

In Washington State, as noted above, proposals were put forward — similar to those that have been enacted in Australia and elsewhere — to detain Americans, and turn the boards of health into entities with police powers; to establish militias, in effect, in the service of unelected, unaccountable boards of Health. 

U.S. “fact-checkers” claimed this was not true, but it was true. 

Reports are proliferating of the unvaccinated treated abusively in hospitals, and therapeutics have been withheld via government agencies’ pressure from an entire population, leading to countless avoidable deaths. A class of therapeutics, monoclonal antibodies, has just been withdrawn by the FDA from ill people’s access. 

Medical entities such as the formerly respected Mayo Clinic are being sued because they are refusing treatment to a dying man, for which his wife is begging. 

What do you call all of this, if not an early Nazi-like set of practices?

Dark, satanic forces

In the early years of Nazi policy, as Robert Proctor’s magisterial 1990 “Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis” points out, the State tasked doctors and gave them special status and authority to single out “life unworthy of life” and elaborate on racially based policies that separated the “clean” and privileged from the “unclean” or “degenerate” and restricted. 

In 1933, doctors began to sterilize the unfit. As Michael A Grodin, M.D., Erin L Miller, B.A., and Jonathan Miller, M.A., point out, in “The Nazi Physicians as Leaders in Eugenics and ‘Euthanasia’: Lessons for Today”: 

“A series of recurrent themes arose in Nazi medicine as physicians undertook the mission of cleansing the State: the devaluation and dehumanization of segments of the community, medicalization of social and political problems, training of physicians to identify with the political goals of the government, fear of consequences of refusing to cooperate with civil authority, bureaucratization of the medical role and the lack of concern for medical ethics and human rights.”

Half of Germany’s physicians joined the Nazi party.

“The devaluing and dehumanization of segments of the community”….

Proctor shows how medical associations embraced the rise in the status and authority of physicians, and how, then as now, “public health” was the anodyne label under which the early structure of emerging horrors was erected. He shows how doctors led the way.

The author even addresses the “health pass” that was established by Nazi public health policy, a pass that separated those who could participate fully in Nazi society, from those who were singled out for deprivation and disgust.

Proctor tracks how eugenics allowed for increasing arguments, similar to those being resuscitated today, that “useless eaters” or the “unfit” do not deserve food or are a burden on public resources and should not be a drag on hospitals or receive medical care.

Proctor shows what a short slide it was from public health officials identifying “life unworthy of life,” these “useless eaters,” to the same officials using the language of “hygiene” and public safety to set up the first Nazi euthanasia programs — programs targeting those who were identified as “less than” or in some way impaired.

Then as now, anodyne language, whether around “public health” or “racial hygiene,” as in the 1930s, or around “public health,” “safety” and “harm reduction,” as today, concealed then, and now conceals, the true nature of what should be a visible, nauseating, daily-spreading evil.

Historians such as Proctor have argued that public health glosses the invocation of medical authority, while compartmentalization and bureaucratization permitted evil in the early Nazi past to flourish.

I would argue that the same exact things in similar guises, cloaked in similar language, are recurring today.

But the vaccines made things much worse. They kill people, interfere with women’s reproductive systems and are truly “Mengele medicine.” 

We are in a battle with dark satanic forces.

“When ordinary would-be-tyrants try to take over societies, there is always some flaw, some human impulse undoing the headlong rush toward a negative goal. There are always factions, or rogue lieutenants in ordinary human history; there is always a miscalculation, a blunder, a security breach or differences of opinion at the top.

Mussolini’s power was impaired in his entry to World War II by being forced to share the role of military commander with King Victor Immanuel. Hitler miscalculated his ability to master the Russian weather — right down to overlooking how badly his soldiers’ stylish but flimsy uniforms would stand up to extreme cold. Before he could mount a counter-revolution against Stalinism, Leon Trotsky was assassinated in Mexico City in his bath.

But none of that fracturing or mismanagement of normal history took place in the global rush to lockdowns; to the rollout of COVID hysteria; to mandates or masking; to global child abuse; to legacy media lying internationally at scale; to thousands of “trusted messengers” parroting a single script; or to forced or coerced mRNA injections into at least half of the humans on Planet Earth.

I reluctantly came to the conclusion that human agency alone could not coordinate a highly complicated set of lies about a virus and propagate the lies in perfect uniformity around an entire globe. Human beings, using their own resources alone, could not have turned hospitals overnight from places where hundreds of staff members were united and devoted to the care of the infirm to killing factories in which the elderly were prescribed “run-death-is-near (Remdesivir)” at scale.

Also look at the speed of change. Institutions turned overnight into negative mirror images of themselves, with demonic policies replacing what had been at least on the surface, angelic ones. Human-history change is not that lightning fast.

The perception of the rollout, the unanimity of a mass delusion, cannot in my view be explained fully by psychology; not even as a “mass formation.” 

There have been other mass hysterias before in history, from “blood libel” — the widespread belief in medieval Europe that Jews were sacrificing Christian children to make matzo; to the flareup of hysteria around witches in Salem, Mass., in 1692; to the “irrational exuberance” of Tulipmania in the 17th century in the Netherlands. 

But all of these examples of mass frenzy had dissidents, critics and skeptics at the time; none of these lasted for years as a dominant uninterrupted delusional paradigm.

What we have lived through since 2020 is so sophisticated, so massive, so evil and executed in such inhumane unison that it cannot be accounted for without venturing into metaphysics. Something else, something metaphysical, must have done that.”

Let’s do everything we can to support the great Dr. Naomi Wolf in her battle against the monsters of evil.

Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr. is founder and chairman of the Mises Institute and editor of LewRockwell.com.