Cartoon equating Kansas mask order with the Holocaust is even more offensive than stupid
That GOP county chairman’s homemade cartoon that showed Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly sending Jews off to Nazi death camps because she’s trying to keep Kansans from getting COVID-19 is even more offensive than it is stupid. (“Lockdown Laura says: Put on your mask...and step onto the cattle car.”) And oh, it is very stupid.
At first, Dane Hicks, the Republican chairman and owner and publisher of the weekly Anderson County Review, said anyone criticizing him was surely one of those “liberal Marxist parasites” and “my enemy.” But when he finally did apologize, he said something so damning and true that we should think about it. Until some Jewish leaders walked him through exactly why his photoshopped funny was so hateful and hurtful, he said, “it’s apparent I previously lacked an adequate understanding of the severity of their experience and the pain of its images.”
That a minor inconvenience endured for the purpose of saving lives does not compare to the slaughter of six million for the purpose of making Jews extinct is not something any community leader should need to have spelled out.
That he did shows what learning more propaganda than history has done to us: It’s convinced some Americans that if we don’t agree, then we’re enemies — “enemies of the people” is a phrase the Nazis used.
It’s made anyone who disagrees with us out to be a “parasite” — another word Nazis and other anti-Semites have used to describe Jews.
Apparently, the horror of the Holocaust registers so faintly, in the lifetime of survivors, that an American newspaper publisher in business for decades could say, “I previously lacked an adequate understanding of the severity of their experiences.”
More and more, Americans see both science and history as whatever we say it is, because the freedom to choose what we think it should say is the important thing. And during this pandemic, this insanity is having the fatal results that Kelly called out at a Monday news conference.
“The cartoon serves as an example of how politicized commonsense public health measures have become. Using this type of rhetoric to describe a mask mandate didn’t start with (the) Anderson County Review,” the governor said. “Many elected leaders in this state and across the country have chosen to dismiss recommendations from public health experts in favor of short-term political points. Thanks to social media, anti-public health rhetoric and bogus science can be shared in homes all across our state.”
The almost 3,500 new cases reported in Kansas in the past two weeks reflect the steepest rate of increase since the pandemic began, with 118 active clusters and more than 16,000 total cases — 1,000 of them reported since Friday.
Kansas Republicans have described Kelly as a “totalitarian” and a “tin-pot wannabe dictator” because she’s trying to keep this pandemic under control. But would her mask mandate really be so dastardly if some responsible Republican had proposed it?
Is it despotic of Texas’ Republican Gov. Greg Abbott to be closing bars back down, with cases spiking in his state? No, he’s trying to keep Texans alive — and not incidentally, trying to keep the economy alive, too.
President Donald Trump, who actually had the chairs at his Mount Rushmore Fourth of July rally tied together so that no one could socially distance, never stops stoking the idea that we’re warring tribes, and that the most important thing to think about preserving right now is not lives but Confederate monuments and symbols.
But you are not somehow giving in to billionaire George Soros — another anti-Semitic trope — if you wear a mask to keep those around you safe, in case you have this virus and don’t know it. If we can’t see that our real common enemy is this virus, a lot more of us of all stripes are going to die than needs to be the case.
I have more than one Republican loved one with a compromised immune system, and I’ll bet you do, too. Wear a mask for them, if that makes it easier.
As for Kelly’s “totalitarianism,” she again explained on Monday that the only enforcement that’s really happening is in the way of education and counseling: “This really isn’t intended to make criminals out of people. This is just intended to save their lives and the lives of their friends and their neighbors.”
Every true public servant, regardless of tribe, is doing the same.
