Comparisons of health measures to segregation and the Holocaust are ignorant, harmful

Here we go again. More comparisons of health safety measures to the Holocaust. And now a comparison to racial segregation.

Nampa City Council member Darl Bruner compared separating unvaccinated, unmasked people from other people with racial segregation, and Nampa City Council member Sandi Levi said yellow caution tape meant to maintain social distancing reminded her of Star of David symbols Jews were required to wear under Nazi Germany.

Kin, a Boise restaurant that requires proof of vaccination, reported angry residents equating them with Nazis.

We’ve heard similar comments before from the likes of Ammon Bundy and Republican state Reps. Heather Scott and Judy Boyle.

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These comments are not just ignorant; they are also dangerous.

They’re ignorant because safety measures meant to protect public health in a global pandemic are nothing at all like racial segregation or exterminating people based on a belief that one’s race makes a person inferior to someone of another race.

“Nobody in their right mind, who really felt the sheer weight of segregation in America, would make that comparison,” Phillip Thompson, executive director of the Idaho Black History Museum, told Idaho Statesman reporter Rachel Spacek.

These comparisons are also dangerous because they minimize and fail to acknowledge the lessons we should have learned from racial segregation and the Holocaust.

If you think that a restaurant refusing service to unvaccinated people in order to keep its customers safe and its business open is the same thing as the systematic extermination of 6 million Jews, you clearly do not understand who the Nazis were and what the Holocaust was.

In a previous editorial, I spoke with the director of the Holocaust Center for Humanity about why these comparisons are so damaging to the effort to remember what the Holocaust was, so that we may learn from that atrocity and prevent it from ever happening again.

“I think what it does is it trivializes the Holocaust,” Dee Simon, executive director of the center, told me last year. “It allows us to think of it as not as unique as it was, the idea of the government murdering 6 million people ... with complicit individuals murdering millions of people.”

Trivializing the Holocaust, she said, prevents us from recognizing its true hallmarks — scapegoating; treating a group of people as subhuman; using race, religion or ethnicity to turn citizens into noncitizens of your community; and eventually forming a justification for murdering millions of people.

“As soon as we start to diminish its meaning and start to compare it to many other things, we lose its ability to educate,” Simon said. “And I think that’s the greatest risk we run when we minimize our costs.”

Shameful, too, are Nampa City Council members Victor Rodriguez, Jacob Bower and Randy Haverfield, who applauded Bruner and praised his words, further diminishing the lessons we should have learned from racial segregation in this country. How insulting it is to people who lived that experience.

Perpetuating the faulty likening of what we’re going through now in a pandemic with the Holocaust and racial segregation only shows that some people — Bruner and Levi in this case — don’t understand the lessons we should have learned from those terrible periods in our history.

And you know what they say about people who fail to learn from history.

Scott McIntosh

Opinion Contributor,

Idaho Statesman

208-377-6202

Scott McIntosh is the Idaho Statesman opinion editor. A graduate of Syracuse University, he joined the Statesman in August 2019. He previously was editor of the Idaho Press and the Argus Observer and was the owner and editor of the Kuna Melba News. He has been honored for his editorials and columns as well as his education, business and local government watchdog reporting by the Idaho Press Club and the National Newspaper Association. Sign up for his weekly newsletter, The Idaho Way. Support my work with a digital subscription