In comments first made last week and reiterated multiple times since, fascist Georgia Republican Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene has continued to equate the wearing of a mask to protect humans from the ongoing pandemic, which has killed nearly 1 million in the US and nearly 10 times that globally, with the persecution of over 6 million Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe who were forced to wear an identifying yellow fabric star on their clothing before being sent to extermination camps.
Speaking for openly fascistic sections of the financial oligarchy, which see the continuation of any public health measures to stem the spread of the coronavirus pandemic as an impediment to their profit accumulation, Greene has repeatedly attacked the rule established by Speaker Nancy Pelosi that all members continue to wear a mask while in the House chamber.
Greene first made her obscene comments during an appearance on the right-wing Christian Broadcasting Network's Real America’s Voice last Thursday, after she and other right-wing members of the Republican House, who refused to wear a mask inside the chamber, were issued fines.
“We can look back in a time in history when people were told to wear a gold star and they were definitely treated like second-class citizens,” said Greene. “They were put in trains and taken to gas chambers in Nazi Germany. And this is exactly the type of abuse Nancy Pelosi is talking about.”
Many members of the Republican caucus, including Greene herself, have refused to get vaccinated, necessitating Pelosi’s precautionary health measure. Given the existence of breakthrough cases even in those who have been vaccinated, the rule would still make sense even if 100 percent of the Congress were to be vaccinated.
Greene has been given assistance in her right-wing campaign against the wearing of masks by the Centers for Disease Control’s politically-motivated loosening of mask and social distancing requirements, which was pushed by President Joe Biden and has been championed by the rest of the Democratic Party, in opposition to recommendations from leading epidemiologists.
Greene proceeded to double down on her putrid comparisons in an interview with an NBC reporter last Friday, “I stand by all my statements,” said Greene. “I said nothing wrong and I think any rational Jewish person didn’t like what happened in Nazi Germany and any rational Jewish person doesn’t like what’s happening with overreaching mask mandates and overbearing vaccine policies.”
Over the weekend Greene, an ardent supporter of Trump and his “America First” fascist agenda, continued to spew unhinged anti-scientific and anti-socialist conspiracy theories on her social media accounts. She accused Pelosi of being a “tyrant” for attempting to “shame, ostracize, and brand Members of Congress who choose not get vaccinated or wear a mask.”
This invocation of “tyranny” against Pelosi is the same language used against Democratic governors in Michigan and Virginia last year by Trump and Republicans in opposition to pandemic-related lockdowns. Those governors were later targeted by fascist militias as part of a wide-ranging multi-state assassination plot to force businesses reopenings and eradicate any public health restrictions. The storming of the Capitol in Lansing on April 30, 2020 served as a dry run for the attempted coup in Washington on January 6 this year.
Joining Greene in calling for no “discrimination or coercion” against those who refuse to wear a mask or get vaccinated was Michigan Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey, who posted on Twitter May 25 a photo of himself with a wristband that claimed he was “Naturally Immunized.” Like Greene, Shirkey has documented connections with fascist militia members, including the Null brothers, who have been charged in the assassination plot against Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer and who participated in the storming of the Lansing Capitol last year.
On Tuesday, five days after her initial comments, Greene, on Twitter again, equated receiving a life-saving vaccine with the Nazis’ “final solution,” writing that “Vaccinated employees get a vaccination logo just like the Nazis forced Jewish people to wear a gold star. Vaccine passports & mask mandates create discrimination against unvaxxed people who trust their immune systems to a virus that is 99% survivable.”
That comment drew a wave of condemnation from most of the political establishment and more broadly. A Change.org petition calling on House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (California) to expel Greene has garnered over 133,400 signatures as of this writing.
A tweet the Auschwitz Memorial wrote in response to Greene went viral on Tuesday. They wrote: “The instrumentalization of the tragedy of Jews who suffered, were humiliated, marked with a yellow star, isolated in ghettos & murdered during the Holocaust, in a debate on different systems that aim at protecting public health is a sad symptom of moral and intellectual decline.”
Forced to finally respond on Tuesday, McCarthy issued a short statement saying, “Marjorie is wrong, and her intentional decision to compare the horrors of the Holocaust with wearing masks is appalling. The Holocaust is the greatest atrocity committed in history. The fact that this needs to be stated today is deeply troubling.”
However, in the next sentence McCarthy accused Pelosi of ignoring “anti-Semitism” within the ranks of the Democrats because a tiny minority of lawmakers, chiefly members of the so-called “Squad,” Ilhan Omar (Minnesota), Rashida Tlaib (Michigan) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (New York), made mild criticisms of Israel’s ethnic cleansing campaign against Palestinians in Gaza and East Jerusalem.
Undeterred by the mild scolding from McCarthy, Greene even retweeted and then deleted a comment which described McCarthy as a “moron” and a “feckless c*nt” after McCarthy released his statement on Tuesday. She continued her fascistic provocations, repeating her death threat against the nominal “left” members of the Democratic Party, regurgitating her fascist rebranding of the “Squad” as the “Jihad Squad” while accusing the group of supporting “terrorists Hamas.”
As the World Socialist Web Site has previously noted, the charge by Greene that Democratic representatives are supporting “terrorists” must be seen as a death threat, not only to these elected officials, but to the entire working class. In addition to agitating against mask mandates, Greene, and fellow coup-supporting Republicans like Andy Biggs of Arizona, have repeatedly attacked Pelosi’s rule prohibiting firearms on the House floor.
These near-constant provocations by fascistic members of the Republican Party who continue to back Trump’s lie that the election was stolen and that Biden is illegitimate have created a definite political climate in the Capitol. “American politics is being conducted under the threat of violence,” Michael Gerson, former speechwriter to President George W. Bush, wrote in a recent opinion column for the Washington Post .
The fact that fascistic violence is now openly acknowledged as a reality in American politics by spokesmen for the ruling class testifies to the advanced decay of American capitalism, personified in the thuggish figure of Trump, who despite being impeached twice and losing the election by over 7 million votes, remains the dominant figure in the Republican Party.
The Democrats, beholden to the same financial aristocracy as the Republicans, are more concerned with protecting their decomposing and unequal social order than exposing and eliminating the fascist threat. The turn by sections of the ruling class to figures like Greene, a conspiracy-spewing, gun-toting fascist, is a testament to the desperation and weakness of the ruling capitalist class and underscores the necessity of building the socialist alternative to the capitalist system as a whole.