Thread by @ArchibaldHeath1

Several of my Jewish follows have objected to people using yellow Stars of David either as actual symbols of not being COVID vaccinated, or as analogies for such.

I want to unpack this particular phenomenon and look at it from two angles. 1/

First, I understand the potential for insult here, and the concern about trivalizing genocide. "Never again" is much harder to achieve if the original event becomes a tool for scoring points, or a stick for one's political enemies. 2/

Which brings me to my first angle: moral vocabulary.

Alasdair MacIntyre writes in _After Virtue_:

"From our rival conclusions we can argue back to our rival premises, but when we do arrive at our premises argument ceases and the invocation of one premise against another..." 3/

"... becomes a matter of pure assertion and counter-assertion. [2nd ed., p. 8]"

Moral discourse has decayed because we no longer share a common moral vocabulary; words such as "justice" and "virtue" and even "ought" no longer describe shared understanding [p. 10] 4/

Yet, though MacIntyre doesn't say this (there are not even references to the Nazis in the index), our culture still has certain totems or condensed symbols of evil.

The most potent of those is Nazi Germany. 5/

Just as the word "Fascism" no longer refers to a specific ideology but instead to "something not desirable" as Orwell says in "Politics and the English Language," the specific horrors of Nazi Germany don't matter. It stands for all that is evil and worth opposing. 6/

But since we lack a coherent shared account of what makes things right and wrong, anyone and anything can be Fascist, Nazi, even "literally Hitler."

Behold emotivism: "But moral judgments, being expressions of attitude or feeling, are neither true nor false... 7/

"... and any agreement in moral judgment...[i]s to be secured, if at all, by producing certain non-rational effects on the emotions or attitudes of those who disagree with one. [p. 12]"

Seen in this light, the yellow star comparison is ridiculous on its face. 8/

But what happens if we look beyond Nazi Germany as a totem and dig into the specifics of what the Nazis did? From this, my second angle, the result is a bit different.

Nazi propaganda depicted Jews as a kind of vermin, diseased, dangerous to good Germans. 9/

Forcible measures needed to be taken to separate them from the pure, and those measures needed to become more and more stringent over time, until at last the most stringent measure of all, mass execution, was the only possible "solution." 10/

I trust the parallel with the vaccinated and the unvaccinated (or the masked and the unmasked) is clear. Recent Twitter rhetoric, mandatory vaccination in France, and the sudden promotion of vaccine passes in England makes the comparison more apt rather than less. 11/

Those who argue for the similarity between vaccine discrimination and the Nazi treatment of Jews do so on this basis, fearing that, once again, this trajectory will lead to genocide, or at the very least mass oppression. 12/

The demonization of one segment of a population almost always ends with mass death (France, Armenia, Soviet Union, China, Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia).

And yet our Nazi-totem fixation makes it harder to object to these evils. 13/

If such a comparison is to be made, it must be made from a combination of historical understanding and correct moral argument, for which we must retrieve the moral vocabulary that makes such argument possible. That vocabulary is also a defense against tyrants and demagogues. 14/

So do I think the yellow star/unvaccinated comparison is appropriate? I think a legitimate analogy can be drawn given what has happened for the last year, and should lead us by sound moral analysis to reject vaccine segregation. 15/

Do I think it needs to be done? No. It can be dropped to avoid antagonizing people. The same conclusions can be reached without the analogy, even from those classical liberal principles our society is supposed to support but often does not. 16/

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