Day 116: Godwin's Law

Brazil surpassed Russia yesterday to earn the #2 slot. The UK is currently in the long penumbra of weird Spanish case reporting, where the real numbers make Spain #4 but Spain's artificially deflated numbers would make the UK #4. (Spanish case reporting in fact got weirder recently when Spain stopped disclosing its antibody test results at all, but Worldometers is still keeping track somehow.) Chile has surpassed Saudi Arabia on the way to China, and may even get there tomorrow.

The US is at 1.72 million cases with 100,000 deaths. The British press once again fails to resist a non-story about starving American rats. Back on Friday, California passed Massachusetts in cases to rob us of our #4 position. Next up is Pennsylvania, but they're still 20,000 cases behind. Then again, our cases are up only half a percentage point today, so even the most nominal of efforts would do it.

David Cole, amateur Holocaust historian and no stranger to Godwin's Law or purple pandemic prose, has brought Hitler and coronavirus together in his latest column, A Lockdown Line in the Sand. As late as May 1940, Cole recounts, Hitler and Himmler thought themselves above the notion of exterminating the ethnic minorities to the east. But over the next two years, times changed.

The Nazis did not go into World War II planning to break that taboo. They were hesitant, in fact, and that’s the point. They knew there was a taboo, they knew there was a line, and their first instinct was not to cross it. But eventually they did, and we have to ask ourselves, what did they gain? Did they win the war? In fact, not only did they not win, but Himmler would rather sheepishly concede in 1944 that they’d made a major oopsie by killing so many Jews in 1942 that they now needed to import Jews from Hungary to fill the labor vacuum left by the mass killings.

But what does Hitler have to do with a touch of the Wuhan flu? you might ask. Cole thinks the lockdowns crossed a similar, if less immediately deadly, line:

The most basic constitutional rights of worship and assembly (and other things the Founders didn’t think they’d have to enshrine, like the right to sit down and the right to leave one’s home barefaced) have been abrogated because some tin-pot state and local officials invoked the “cuz I sez so” rule. That’s a crossed line of dreadful magnitude. And just as with the Nazis, prior to crossing that line, the powers that be recognized the line, and respected it.

He continues with an informative history of how unthinkable quarantining the sick (never mind the well) really was, a mere five years ago—but only to reinforce the horror of our current state of rule by governors and uppity mayors instead of laws. Next time, he concludes, these thousand little cut-flower Stalins will act even more quickly to stomp on our faces and our rights.