Calling anti-vaxxers ‘the new Jews’ is a sick joke

People take part in a protest of anti-vaccination activists in Vienna, Austria. Picture: AFP

The Warsaw ghetto. An elderly Jewish couple huddle in the corner of the apartment they share with eight other families. Their home has been taken, their business destroyed. People are beginning to disappear, deported to who knows where. Their grandchildren have been shot dead in the street.

“But there’s bad news,” says the husband.

“All of a sudden?” says the wife.

“Yes,” says the husband. “It’s about to get a bit harder to go to nightclubs.”

This, I’m afraid, is to be a column in which I argue that the plight of the modern-day antivaxer is not, in fact, terribly similar to the plight of the Jews of mid-century Europe. Because, remarkably, it would appear that somebody must.

In Austria this weekend, protesters against Covid regulations wore yellow stars. You know, like the one worn by Anne Frank’s dad. I vaguely knew, I suppose, that some American antivaxers have been wearing them for years, even pre-Covid, when campaigning against the measles vaccine. But I also thought, well, so what? How upset can you be about people wearing badges in a land where they’re also allowed to wear a bazooka to the grocer?

Perhaps I should have cared more when the same badges turned up - but still only a couple, mind - at a demo on the streets of London in April. That was the month that the Auschwitz Museum in Poland asked people to stop doing it. This, you might recall, while nuttier Covid conspiracists had started talking about the new Nuremberg trials they were preparing for, um, doctors on Covid wards. Still, I thought. It’s not the mainstream. Nutters gonna nut. Don’t make a fuss.

A demonstrator holds a placard reading 'against compulsory vaccination' during an anti-vaccination protest at the Ballhausplatz in Vienna, Austria. Picture: AFP

When, though, do you make a fuss? Last week, the Dutch far-right politician Thierry Baudet called the unvaccinated “the new Jews”. There’s a limit to how much you need to know about the wider politics of Baudet, but let’s just say that some members of his party seem a lot more keen on these “new Jews” than they ever were on the old ones.

This weekend, the idea was offered up as a thinky talking point on LBC radio. A couple of days later, on Talk Radio, Tony Hinton of the Hart group of lockdown-sceptical doctors pointed out the “irony” of Austria’s lockdown of the unvaccinated being announced on the same day that Austria unveiled a Holocaust memorial. “They’ve forgotten history,” he said.

Then, just this weekend, the former telly archaeologist and noted unnecessary-scarf-wearer Neil Oliver went in, full-throttle, on GB News. “In Poland in 1941 there was a propaganda campaign that spread the message that Jews spread typhus, a lethal disease,” he intoned. “Blaming an identifiable minority for the spread of disease is a ghost we should have laid to rest long ago.” Perhaps this isn’t quite the mainstream, either. But it’s getting pretty close.

Oliver’s remarks, I think, are the most interesting. You can tell he knows he’s straying into dodgy territory, but he’s desperate to find a way to say it anyway. As a result, what he does say is near to gibberish. For a start, the historian has got his history wrong, because a great many Jews in Poland in 1941 actually did have typhus, and died of it, because that’s what happens when you put people into ghettos and they can’t practise social distancing. The propaganda campaign came the year before, as the pretext for getting them there. Either way, I’m not sure that targeting an ethnic minority via a baseless health smear is really all that similar to pointing out that a disease might get spread by people who have formed a political identity around not doing the main thing they could do to prevent themselves from spreading it.

It’s also worth pondering whether the unvaccinated are in any sense an “identifiable minority” in the first place, albeit not for very long, because they obviously aren’t. Or at least, not until they start wearing badges. They have freely opted into their status, unlike the Jews, who were kinda famously stuck with it. I’m sorry to make this personal, but it’s not like my own great-grandparents made an active choice to be dragged off by the stormtroopers, having been inspired to be ethnically Jewish by a Facebook post.

As it happens, I’m opposed to mandatory vaccines, at least outside a healthcare context, and Austria’s plan to introduce them strikes me as extraordinary, unworkable and illiberal. And yet - and this may be the maddest sentence I’ve ever had to write - I do feel that the Holocaust was worse. “Ah,” say the Oliverites, “but this is how it starts!” To which the only credible response is, “No, it isn’t”. It starts with two millennia of hatred, blood libel and pogroms. Which isn’t all that similar to people calling you selfish for not wearing a mask on the Tube.

This is a dim and tawdry level on which to have to argue. I appreciate that. What, though, is the alternative to descending to it? Just like viruses from wet markets, bad and stupid ideas can spread, particularly when they have melodramatic heft in place of a spike protein. This one has. How long before we first hear this nonsense from one of our own MPs, similarly keen to cash in on the tremulous thrill of antivax victimhood?

It was the author Mike Godwin who way back in 1990 created what became known as Godwin’s Law: the observation that all internet discussions are destined to lead to somebody being compared to the Nazis. The bleakest lesson of this yellow-star batshittery, I suppose, is that all politics is now destined to end up resembling internet politics.

There’s a downhill, mobbish, surrendering of sanity to it; a very contemporary vibe of people being ridiculous on purpose before swiftly forgetting they didn’t mean it. Notice it, fight it, stamp it out. Or, if it’s you, just bloody stop it.

The Times