Last night I listened to a speech by Naftali Bennet, the new Prime Minister of Israel. He spoke about “clean citizens” and “clean countries”. He spoke at length about the “duty the unvaccinated owe the rest of the country”. He then laid out his draconian executive orders which will in effect divide Israel into the living (the vaccinated holders of “green passports”) and the living dead (the “unclean” who will be allowed to shop for groceries but nothing much else). One cannot listen to his speech and not feel shivers run down one’s spine. And as horrible as it is to admit to myself, I cannot but cast my mind back and think about the events of 80 years ago, when the goons who had seized Germany were planning to annihilate the Jewish nation and almost succeeded. There is absolutely no doubt that the Israeli PM’s words echo that horrible time when the unclean were murdered by the million, while the clean were free to go about their lives. The reaction on social media was instant. Comparisons to Goebbels and Goering popped up, I even saw a meme in which the Israeli flag had a swastika in its center, instead of the Start of David - the kind of chicanery previously practiced by Hamas. While I understand and share the anger, and while I think Bennet is not fit to serve and should be recalled immediately, I believe it’s important that we weigh our words carefully before we speak. As George Orwell - the greatest literary prophet of the 20th century - knew very well, words are everything. After all: in the beginning there was the word. By naming we create our reality and maintain it. If we name incorrectly - yes, semantics is important - we will perceive reality incorrectly. And we know where that path leads: our leaders, including the oafish Bennet, have committed that very error! They name things wrong and their reality - and by extension ours - gets distorted.
The reality is this: Bennet is no Goebbels. It’s becoming clearer by the day that some very dark, very underhanded machinations have gone on for some time in Israel, first under former PM Netanyahu. A secret agreement was apparently signed with Pfizer, giving Israel first dibs on the vaccine on condition that the country become a large testing pool and undertake to vaccinate 85% of its population. Despite a very high vaccine uptake, that number has not been reached and now the government is panicking. Who knows what kickbacks have been stashed away, what other fraudulent business has been tied to vaccine distribution. Journalists have obtained some information under the FOI act but most of the documents are so heavily redacted that they make little sense. My own feeling is that Bennet, an unimaginative, unoriginal politician is running scared and starting to use dictatorial tactics to coerce the rest of his nation to submit to the Pfizer shot - or else! Somehow, in his febrile state, he imagines that his call to arms is akin to General Dayan’s and Golda Meir’s in 1967, when those leaders called upon the nation’s noble spirit and purity of its arms. Israel won an overwhelming victory in just six days, decimating its much more numerous enemy (“Do not fear the foe, do not regard his number”)Bennet (and Netanyahu) seem to forget that SARS CoV2 is not Gammal Abdul Nasser and that there is no need to draft the whole nation into battle against a virus and incite brethren against brethren to win some imaginary campaign. He is too deep in the sea of corruption to understand this. But let us be very clear: the Israeli leaders are not Nazis.
Using such direct comparisons and tossing around the names of Goering, Goebbels and the one whose name I will not utter - may he suffer the fires of hell for eternity - is hurtful in the extreme. I was born only eight years after WW2. There was a plaque on the building next to ours, commemorating the death of a young man who had died defending the city of Prague in the waning days of the war. He had died fighting the real Nazis. The sociopathic thugs who decided that as the Master Race, it’s incumbent upon them to destroy the non-Aryan world. I saw the plaque every day when I walked to school: “Jan Novak* fell here, defending his homeland and his beloved city. He was 24 years old” My mother and father told me stories about how they had managed to survive the war: my father mostly in hiding, then later fighting alongside the Red Army. My mother mostly in Auschwitz, where chances of survival were less than 1:1000. I absorbed WW2 history in school, where teachers talked about the subject almost exclusively. Yes, the instruction was soaked with Communist propaganda, nevertheless, we understood well who the Nazis were and what they had wrought from a young age.
We are at a crucial, and potentially tragic, crossroads of history. We see institutions struggle and tumble under the weight of collectivist propaganda - be it CRT, the redacting of history and erasure of collective memory, or the Covid Kabuki Theater that threatens to tear us apart daily. That’s why it’s more important than ever to pay attention to semantics. Call out the criminal politicians, the absurdly corrupted public health mob, the enablers, the crooked scientists, the whole rogue’s gallery of reprobates who are trying to steal our lives. Call them medical fascists, call out the Democrat socialists - they are. But Israeli PM Bennet is no Nazi and I never wish to see the flag of Israel desecrated by a swastika again. Let’s think clearly, let’s speak clearly and let’s act decisively!
This is so true. I was appalled listen to that speech. It affected me deeply. These are indeed dark times. Words have lost their meaning. People don't understand the meaning of "keeping ones word," let alone anything else.