Anti-vaxxers and yellow stars - a deliberate provocation?

 

This nonsense is not OK on any level.

 

NurPhoto/Getty Images

In any hierarchy of crassly offensive gestures, anti-vaxxers appropriating the yellow star badge used by the Nazis to mark out millions of Jews for abuse and, ultimately, murder comes pretty close to the top. But what is there to say about this, other than the obvious point that it's a self-evidently terrible, insulting, ignorant comparison?

Talia Bracha Lavin uses this wholly imagined conflation of the control of a pandemic disease and genocide as a teachable moment, in a Substack essay on the real connection between the Holocaust, disease and vaccination. In this case the disease was typhus, which tore through the crowded ghettoes and camps of  occupied Europe and the Reich. 

The connection with vaccination was the heroic and clandestine work of people like Rudolf Weigl, who created a typhus vaccine in the 1930s. When the Nazis seized Poland, he was ordered to produce the vaccine for the use of the occupiers but, at great personal risk, smuggled tens of thousands of vaccine doses into the Warsaw Ghetto. Or Buchenwald inmate Ludwik Fleck, a  Jewish biologist who the Nazis used to develop another typhus vaccine in a camp laboratory. Fleck, again at appalling personal risk, managed to deny effective batches of vaccine to his captors, while creating doses real vaccine which he reserved to inoculate his fellow prisoners.

It's a fascinating piece of history which I wasn't previously aware of, and you can read the whole thing here.

The subset of anti-vaxxers appropriating the yellow star is, from the viewpoint of anybody with any sense of proportion or historical perspective, being needlessly, horrendously offensive. But why would anyone do this? Mere ignorance might seem to be the reason, but many of these anti-vaxx groups seem to have well-funded backers (AstroTurf organisations like HART and Us For Them) and sophisticated media strategies, so my guess is that the generation of outrage is quite deliberate and calculated in this case.

It also fits in with strategies which contrarian reactionaries have already successfully used to gain attention, trip up their opponents and claim unearned victim status. There could be several ways in which such provocateurs/trolls benefit by weaponising offence. 

1. Provoke, then double down. If your aim isn't to engage in good faith argument, but to dismay and wrongfoot opponents, do or say something obnoxious. When angry people push back, don't even try to defend what you said or did. Instead, throw their reaction back in their faces and accuse them of over-sensistivity, of being "triggered." "Facts" you can say "don't care about your feelings." Claim a performative "win" because you kept your cool and made them "emotional" and "irrational":

"I triggered you, you snowflake. That means I win."

2. Use provocation to game social media algorithms and the attention economy:

By privileging posts that promote “engagement”—meaning people reading, liking or replying to posts on Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram—Facebook ensured that people stayed on its platform for much longer.

What's engaging? Among other things, content that makes people angry enough to respond and get into arguments. If you can be obnoxious enough to instigate fights on social media, but not quite obnoxious enough to get yourself kicked off whatever platform you're on, you and your social media platform can enjoy a toxic, symbiotic relationship. Posting a selfie of you and your anti-vaxx buddies doing Holocaust cosplay carries a low risk of getting you kicked off a platform like Twitter, but a high probablity of attracting hostile engagement from normies who find your gesture sickening. This form of engagement mirrors the cynical old hacks' slogan about how the sensational and shocking sells newspapers or TV airtime: "If it bleeds, it leads."

3. Flip the script, play the victim. On one level, the people appropriating the yellow stars are already, playing at being victims, putting on the literal fancy dress of opression without actually being oppressed in any meaningful way. But they can also rhetorically claim victim status. The title of a book by professional contrarian Claire Fox shows how it's done. It's called I Find That Offensive:

"When I say whatever I like, that's my free speech. If you dare to push back, that's your cancel culture."

This is the "triggered" meme with a twist. Instead of merely arguing that push back against a provocateur being obnoxious is proof that the troll's opponents are weak and emotional, Fox and her fellow bad faith actors argue that, if you push back against abuse or punching down you are the oppressor, an enemy of "free speech." Obviously there's a contradiction between 1. ("You're a weak, emotional soyboy cuck") and 3. ("You're oppressing me with your cancel culture, you bully"), but bad faith actors will just ignore the contradictions in their own positions and bluster on regardless:

"The enemy is both strong and weak. 

By a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak."  (from Umberto Eco's essay, Eternal Fascism)

As far as I'm aware, Claire Fox herself hasn't actively supported the yellow star-sporting anti-vaxxers. She's a mainstream media personality, a former Radio 4 regular and (God help us), a member of the House of Lords and has a reputation (albeit unearned) to preserve. But she and her fellow enablers demonstrate how defending the indefensible in the name of free speech is typically done. 

A bad faith actor in her position isn't there to directly voice the worst, most divisive and abusive messages. Her role is to provide an intellectual fig-leaf for her side in the culture wars, to dog-whistle support for being able to punch down, to be abusive towards minorities, to be grossly offensive in the name of "free speech." 

She doesn't personally sit on the football terraces booing a racially diverse team of England footballers when they take the knee. Her role is to give the people who do a veneer of respectability - they're not intolerant bullies punching down at minorities and the people who dare to show solidarity with them, she insinuates, but free speech warriors who are themselves being oppressed by "cancel culture." 

From a position of apprent respectability as a public "intellectual", people like Fox actively and cynically embolden the worst among us to equate free speech with their inalienable right to say anything, no matter how hateful, divisive and, yes, offensive while dismissing any counter-argument as Orwellian "cancel culture." 

Yes, Claire I do find *that* (your unqualified support for punching down and the presumed absolute right to cause offence without consequences) offensive. 

If I was a wedding guest and started insulting and abusing the bride and groom for no other reason than me deciding that I have absolute free speech, that I'm damn well entitled to say what I like and if you don't like it, tough, facts don't care about your feelings, you'd rightly call me a jerk.

Insult the memories of six million murdered and countless more bereaved, abused and traumatised for no other reason than being themselves and you're a jerk times several million.

"Instrumentalization of the tragedy of Jews who suffered, were humiliated, marked with a yellow star, and finally isolated in ghettos and murdered during the Holocaust, in order to argue against vaccination that save human lives is a sad symptom of moral and intellectual decline." (From the Auschwitz Memorial's Twitter feed).