Reminder: Mentioning the Nazi ‘Health Pass’ is Forbidden — Mickey Z.

Mickey Z. — World News Trust

October 26, 2021

Nazi Germany had a health pass, too. There… I said it. I even posted a photo of one such Gesundheitspass above. The Nazis also used other methods to segregate their own population. Try mentioning this within the context of a Covid-19 vaccine passport and prepare for the onslaught. Intellectually competent humans lose all capacity for nuance. In their closed minds, such a mention is the equivalent of disrespecting the victims of the Nazi Holocaust. More tightly, it is "anti-semitism" and cause for cancelation. 

The term antisemitism is not unlike terms like racist, transphobe, and anti-vaxxers. Once invoked — accurately or not — these labels stain the targeted person or persons forever. Everyone knows this. That’s why vaccine-resistant people are being libeled in the corporate media for their stance. Part of that libel is a desire to prevent anyone from evoking any Nazi reference unless it directly relates to someone of Jewish descent. 

“You can’t imagine how much that upset me. This comparison is hateful. We must all rise up against this ignominy,” Holocaust survivor Joseph Szwarc recently stated about French vaccine protestors who wore yellow stars to highlight their suddenly lesser-than status. While some folks have made inaccurate apples-to-apples comparisons, the vast majority of vaccine resistors are not doing so. Rather, they are highlighting how frighteningly easy it is for governments to incrementally increase repression until it's too deeply embedded to be revoked. 

It’s almost as if there’s a copyright on terms like genocide and holocaust. For an examination of this trend, let’s revisit the actions of Elie Wiesel. While Wiesel’s documentation of the Nazi Holocaust earned him international acclamation and a Nobel Peace Prize, he was not always predisposed to yield the genocide victim’s spotlight. In 1982, for example, a conference on genocide was held in Israel with Wiesel scheduled to be honorary chairman. The situation became complicated when the Armenians wanted in. 

The Israelis did not want the Armenian genocide included in the conference. As a result, the ever-loyal Wiesel withdrew. He even begged Israeli Holocaust historian, Yehuda Bauer, to also boycott the conference. Why not welcome the Armenians, you wonder? Chalk it up to two conspicuous factors: the need for Israel to monopolize the Holocaust™ brand and the geopolitical reality that Turkey (the nation responsible for the Armenian genocide) was a rare and much-needed Muslim ally for Israel at the time. 

None of this comes as a surprise to anyone who knows about Wiesel’s silence on Israel’s role in Central and South America in the 1980s. It served as a U.S. proxy for proving arms to murderous regimes like that of Guatemala. In 1981, shortly after Israel agreed to provide military aid to this oppressive regime, a Guatemalan officer had a feature article published in the army’s Staff College review. In that article, the officer praised Adolf Hitler, National Socialism, and the Final Solution — quoting extensively from Mein Kampf and chalking up Hitler’s anti-Semitism to the “discovery” that communism was part of a “Jewish conspiracy.” Despite such a seemingly incompatible ideology, Israel’s estimated military assistance to Guatemala in 1982 was $90 million.

What type of policies did the Guatemalan government pursue at the time with the help they received from a nation populated with thousands of Holocaust survivors? Consider the words of Gabriel, one of the Guatemalan freedom fighters interviewed in 1994 by Jennifer Harbury: “In my country, child malnutrition is close to 85 percent. Ten percent of all children will be dead before the age of five, and this is only the number actually reported to government agencies. Close to 70 percent of our people are functionally illiterate. There is almost no industry in our country—you need land to survive. Less than 3 percent of our landowners own over 65 percent of our lands. In the last fifteen years or so, there have been over 150,000 political murders and disappearances. Don’t talk to me about Gandhi; he wouldn’t have survived a week here.”

Similar stories can be culled from countries throughout the region, but apparently have had no effect on the rulers of the Jewish state. For example, when Israel faced an international arms embargo after the 1967 war, a plan to divert Belgian and Swiss arms to the Holy Land™ was implemented. These weapons were supposedly destined for Bolivia to be transported by a company managed by Klaus Barbie… as in “The Butcher of Lyon.”

One Jewish figure that might be expected to find fault with such policy was, of course, Elie Wiesel. Here is an episode from mid-1985, documented by Yoav Karni in Ha’aretz, which should put to rest any exalted expectations of the revered moralist: 

When Wiesel received a letter from a Nobel Prize laureate documenting Israel’s contributions to the atrocities in Guatemala, suggesting that he use his considerable influence to put a stop to Israel’s practice of arming neo-Nazis, Wiesel “sighed” and admitted to Karni that he did not reply to that particular letter. “I usually answer at once,” he explained, “but what can I answer to him?” 

One is left to only wonder how Wiesel’s silent sigh might have been received if it was in response to a letter not about Jewish complicity in the murder of Guatemalans but instead about the function of Auschwitz in 1943. 

In the words of Guatemalan president Juan José Arévalo (whose term gave that country a ten-year respite from military rule during which he provoked U.S. ire by modeling his government in many ways after the Roosevelt New Deal), after World War II: “The arms of the Third Reich were broken and conquered but in the ideological dialogue, Roosevelt lost the war. The real winner was Hitler.”

Bringing this back to the Covid hypocrisy, it’s fascinating to watch the nations with vaccine passports posture when it comes to Nazi references. Where were they were the actual Nazis were doing Nazi things? We’re led to believe no one knew about the death camps. If they did, of course, they would’ve intervened. Well, my first book is an alternative history of the “good war,” and I can tell you this is far from the truth. 

The most frequently evoked after-the-fact rationale for the deadliest war in human history being labeled a moral battle was the Allies' supposed aim to stop the Nazi Holocaust. Hitler's "Final Solution" took the lives of roughly six million Jews along with millions of more Slavs, Eastern Europeans, Roma, homosexuals, labor leaders, communists, and others suspected of such “crimes.” If decency and morality played any role, the U.S. would have taken action against Germany sometime during the 1930s. 

On the contrary, the U.S. business class had nothing but love for the Nazi regime. Before, during, and after the Good [sic] War, the American business class traded with the enemy. Among the U.S. corporations that invested in the Nazis were Ford, GE, Standard Oil, Texaco, ITT, IBM, and GM (top man William Knudsen called Nazi Germany “the miracle of the 20th century”). 

In December 1933, for example, Standard Oil of New York invested one million dollars in Germany for the making of gasoline from soft coal. Undeterred by the well-publicized events of the next decade, Standard Oil also honored its contracts with I.G. Farben — a German chemical cartel that manufactured Zyklon-B, the poison gas used in the Nazi gas chambers — right up until 1942. 

U.S. investment in Germany accelerated by more than 48 percent between 1929 and 1940, while declining sharply everywhere else in Europe. All of these businesses were more than happy to see the German labor movement and working-class parties smashed and for many of these companies, operations in Germany continued during the war (even if it meant the use of concentration-camp slave labor) with overt U.S. government support. 

“Pilots were given instructions not to hit factories in Germany that were owned by U.S. firms,” writes Michael Parenti. “Thus Cologne was almost leveled by Allied bombing but its Ford plant, providing military equipment for the Nazi army, was untouched; indeed, German civilians began using the plant as an air-raid shelter.” With the elites behaving in such a predictable manner, it only follows that they wouldn’t allow a little thing like widely-known genocide to get in the way of profits.

“The plight of Jews in German-occupied Europe, which many people thought was at the heart of the war against the Axis, was not a concern to Roosevelt… [who] failed to take steps that might have saved thousands of lives,” wrote Howard Zinn. “He did not see it as a high priority." 

As Benjamin V. Cohen, an advisor to FDR, later commented, "When you are in a dirty war, some will suffer more than others... Things ought to have been different, but war is different, and we live in an imperfect world.” Swirling around the subject of the Holocaust in our "imperfect world" are many questions. Who knew about Hitler's plan and when? What was done to stop it? Were there complicit roles played by factions within the United States? 

Apologists can pretend that the details of the Holocaust were not known and if they had been, the U.S. would have intervened, but as historian Kenneth C. Davis explains: "Prior to the American entry into the war, the Nazi treatment of Jews evoked little more than a weak diplomatic condemnation. It is clear that Roosevelt knew about the treatment of the Jews in Germany and elsewhere in Europe, and about the methodical, systematic destruction of the Jews during the Holocaust. Clearly, saving the Jews and other groups that Hitler was destroying en masse was not a critical issue for American war planners." 

Indeed, when a resolution was introduced in January 1934 (!) asking the Senate and the President to express "surprise and pain" at the German treatment of the Jews, the resolution never got out of committee. Such inaction was not reversed even as more specific details began to reach the average American. 

On October 30, 1939, the New York Times wrote of "freight cars… full of people" heading eastward and broached the subject of the "complete elimination of the Jews from European life" which, according to the Times, appeared to be "a fixed German policy." As for the particulars on the final solution, as early as July 1941, the New York Yiddish dailies offered stories of Jews massacred by Germans in Russia. Three months later, the New York Times wrote of eyewitness accounts of ten to fifteen thousand Jews slaughtered in Galicia. 

The German persecution and mass murder of Eastern European Jews was indeed a poorly kept secret and the United States and its Allies cannot honestly or realistically hide behind the excuse of ignorance. Even when the Nazis themselves initiated proposals to ship Jews from both Germany and Czechoslovakia to Western countries or even Palestine, the Allied nations could never get beyond negotiations and the rescue plans never materialized. 

One particularly egregious example was the 1939 journey of the St. Louis. Carrying 1,128 German Jewish refugees from Europe, the ocean liner was turned back by U.S. officials because the German immigration quota had been met. The St. Louis then returned to Europe where the refugees found temporary sanctuary in France, Great Britain, Belgium, and the Netherlands. Most were eventually captured by the Nazis and shipped to death camps. 

"The rescue of European Jewry," writes Henry L. Feingold in The Politics of Rescue, "especially after the failure to act during the refugee phase [1939-1941], was so severely circumscribed by Nazi determination that it would have required an inordinate passion to save lives and a huge reservoir of goodwill toward Jews to achieve it. Such passion to save Jewish lives did not exist in the potential receiving nations." 

A lack of acknowledgment from the Roosevelt Administration and barely a peep from the U.S. public, Feingold believes, convinced men like Goebbels that the “Allies approved or were at least indifferent to the fate of the Jews.” Goebbels's line of thinking was not too far from the truth. 

Even when eyewitness accounts from Auschwitz reached the U.S. Department of War and some in the Roosevelt Administration were finally pushing for the bombing of the death camp or at least the railways leading to it, the word came down that air power could not be diverted from vital "industrial target system." It was claimed by American military planners, according to Feingold, that Auschwitz was "beyond the maximum range of medium bombardment, diver bombers and fighter bombers located in [the] United Kingdom, France or Italy.” Reality: Allied bombers passed within five miles of Auschwitz.

In March of 1943, Frida Kirchway, editor of The Nation, summed up the situation succinctly: "In this country, you and I, the President and the Congress and the State Department are accessories to the crime and share Hitler's guilt. If we behaved like humane and generous people instead of complacent cowardly ones, the two million lying today in the earth of Poland . . . would be alive and safe. We had it in our power to rescue this doomed people and yet we did not lift a hand to do it."

In April 1943, an editorial in the London New Statesman and Nation contemplated the legacy of Allied indifference to the victims of the Nazi Holocaust, predicting "when historians relate this story of extermination, they will find it, from first to last, all but incredible." That editorial writer would probably be stunned to learn that today, the only thing that’s incredible is how we now worship the “greatest generation,” gloss over their myriad sins, and use censorship to keep the concept of “holocaust” reserved for one group and one group only. 

To all those being segregated now, yes, the thought of standing up to oppressors can be absolutely daunting. But, I’ll leave you with one more Holocaust reference to mull over: The resistance fighters who participated in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising had a much higher rate of survival than those who did not rebel.

Until the laws are changed or the power runs out, Mickey Z. can be found here. He is also the founder of Helping Homeless Women - NYC, offering direct relief to women on New York City streets. To help him grow this project, CLICK HERE and donate right now. And please spread the word!

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of World News Trust.)