For any insensitivity
A hat shop in Nashville, Tennessee, has drawn condemnation and protests after it advertised an anti-vaccine yellow star like those forced on Jews by Nazi Germany.
The shop, Hatwrks, said in a now-deleted Instagram post that it was selling the patches for $5 (£3.50).
The shop was criticised online and targeted by protesters, who held a sign saying “no Nazis in Nashville”.
A local rabbi said the star was an insult to Jews killed under the Nazis.
Being urged to get a vaccination against a lethal pandemic is not very comparable to being murdered by a fascist antisemitic state.
In a later Instagram post, the shop apologised “for any insensitivity”. It said it did not “intend to trivialise the Star of David or disrespect what happened to millions of people”.
Don’t be schewpid. Of course you did. You can’t flaunt a picture of a giggling person wearing a yellow star with “vaccination” on it without intending to trivialize the real yellow star.
During the pandemic some conspiracy theorists have been denounced for making extreme comparisons between Covid-19 measures and the fascist policies of Nazi Germany.
This week Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene was criticised for equating Covid mask mandates with Nazis forcing Jews to wear yellow stars.
You have to watch out for the rabbit-hole beliefs because you just don’t know where they’ll take you. You don’t want to end up believing masks are like yellow stars or men are women if they say they are.
The “No Nazis in Nashville” sign was protestors? I thought the shop had posted the sign, claiming that the government was acting like Nazis by forcing people to have “vaccination papers” and denying rights to the un-vaccinated. Live and learn. It’s hard to tell which side is being accused of being Nazi-like these days.
I had a, well, disagreement with a family member over “look for the Nazis” as a useful rubric for determining which side to support; I said everybody gets accused of being like Nazis, she said just look for the “actual” Nazis. That did not clarify things for me.
I think it’s clear that the shop very much overstated the issue by claiming kindred with the victims of one of the world’s greatest atrocities over a simple matter of immunization verification. I don’t think they were claiming killing millions of Jews was “right”, any more than they were saying killing unvaccinated people is “right”. They were perhaps minimizing the Holocaust by comparing it to a minor inconvenience. But I don’t think calling them “Nazis” is either useful or apt.
In any event, I’m glad the store is getting an appropriate comeuppance.
You could be right about the signs. Or the protesters could have been confused. Or both.
The Nazi party was dissolved in 1945; the real Nazis (actual past members of the Nazi party) that are still alive, are in their 90’s. It really is a watered down and overused bit of finger pointing anymore. Even Seinfeld’s “soup Nazi” and Rush Limbaugh’s “femiNazis” are meant as jokes, because the Nazi party hasn’t been extant in many decades. Mocking The Holocaust by using yellow Star of David patches may actually be anti-Semitism, depending on how sensitive your Jew hate detector is, but they aren’t Nazis. So if someone want’s to ‘punch a Nazi’, they will have to go to Germany and find some elderly nonagenarian who would admit to being in the Nazi party (good luck with that). :P
My father, had he lived, would be 98 this year. He enlisted in the US Army Air Corps when he was 18. He knew what a Nazi was.
That’s not really true though, there are neo-Nazis. They of course can’t carry out their wishes the way the original Nazis could, but they do exist and they really do adhere to the ideology.
Well, neo-Nazis are Nazis as trans-women are women in my opinion. ;)
I think that’s a mistake though. It’s not that the Nazis were special, it’s that they had the opportunity. Neo-Nazis don’t have a Third Reich behind them, but if they did, they would do what the ur-Nazis did.
They are posers, pseudos, wannabe’s. It’s not a perfect analogy, I agree, but neo-Nazis self identify with a shared ideology, like a cult. They are not genuine Nazis.
The real point I was making is the use of the word Nazi, which in reality is more of an exaggerated derogatory label that, the more it’s misused and overused means less and less. It doesn’t point to actual Nazi party members anymore. Neo-Nazis and their attempt to revive Nazism are just pathetic, and as you say, powerless compared to the might of the actual Nazi party.
Rush may have been using feminazi as a joke (I don’t know, but possibly not), but people who used it to me were not using it as a joke.
I have to side with Ophelia on this. The party itself doesn’t exist, but the ideology does, and that is serious. I do dislike the diluting of Nazi by applying it to everyone from Barack Obama to Captain Kangaroo. (Okay, I made that last up; I haven’t actually heard anyone refer to Captain Kangaroo as a Nazi, but some of the ones they do use it for are just as ridiculous).
I’m coming at it from the banality of evil aspect as opposed to the “don’t call everything you dislike ‘Nazis'” aspect (the Godwin aspect). Of course what the ur-Nazis did is way out of the ordinary, but the people who did it weren’t.