A lot of people are getting upset having their conduct during covid compared to Germans supporting the rise of Nazism.
Let's recapitulate.
A fifth of the population was legally classified as unclean. They were barred from most public spaces, including theatres, restaurants, movies, pubs, clubs, swimming pools, sporting events, concerts, conventions, etc.
To access public facilities, people had to carry a digital mark with them so authorities could confirm they weren't unclean.
The unclean were fired and barred from most jobs: education, healthcare, courts - all public sector work, most major union jobs and a wide smattering of major private employers. When they were fired, the unclean were denied employment insurance, the reasoning being that they had been fired for cause on account of being unclean.
The unclean were banned from travel on trains, planes, and chartered boats. They had no legal means of leaving the country. Even if they wanted to, they could not escape the country that obviously hated them so.
It became illegal to socialize with the unclean. They weren't allowed to attend weddings or funerals, or visit sick relatives or friends in hospital.
Special laws were made for the unclean subjecting them to house arrest if they were around a person who had recently had a positive PCR test. The unclean had to continue to cover their faces in public when universal masking was dropped.
It became socially acceptable to wish death upon the unclean in social media and in major news organizations. Public health figures and other politicians gave press conferences to shame and insult the unclean. The public developed shared pejorative names for them, and relished in insulting the unclean.
News media regularly ran polls asking if the unclean should be arrested or fined. Public figures openly and proudly spoke about witholding medically necessary healthcare from the unclean - letting them die. The unclean were removed from organ transplant lists, condemned to almost certain death.
No end date for these measures was ever suggested, no timeline given. To the contrary, this was called the "new normal".
Criticizing any of these developments made you a social pariah, and likely cost you most of your friendships and family relations, if not your job.
The lesson of the Holocaust - and of covid - isn't that Germans or Albertans or people of the 21st Century are uniquely gullible or evil. It's that for most people, "morality" is not a matter of principle, but rather of adopting what they perceive to be the dominant group ideology - even if that ideology is marked by wanton irrationality or brutal inhumanity.
Indeed, as in certain cults or gangs, the brutality or irrationality of the acts or beliefs required to signal group inclusion further entrench people into the ideology, rather than repel them; a kind of perverse sunk cost fallacy writ large.
So, yes, if you're a typical person - Albertan, Canadian or otherwise - it is overwhelmingly likely that you would have been a Nazi if you were born in Nazi Germany. If you cheered along lockdowns and mandates, that likelihood approaches certainty.
Repent.
~ Dan Wilson @DNSWilson
