When Jonas Salk made the Polio vaccine, conservatives whined that it hadn’t been tested and couldn’t be safe. So many people talked on every platform they had to decry the vaccine as “unsafe”, to the point that Salk had to make the statement “It is safe, and you can’t get safer than safe.”
Sixty-six years later, and conservatives still shout the same thing, this hasn’t been a “rise”. It’s been an awakening for those who didn’t realize the American right has always been anti-vax.
That’s a good point actually, and I’d like to emphasize/highlight it:
Conservatism, practically by definition, resists and rejects new things. Conservative means wanting things to stay the same, or go back to the way they used to be previously if they can make it happen. Any perceived change to the status quo is hostile. And what’s worse is, perceptions can be wrong. DRASTICALLY wrong. People are fallible, can be misled, our senses can even hallucinate. When someone thinks the only power they can exert is to dig in their heels and scream “NO!”, they’re gonna. And they’ll also use any emotional excuse they can justify it with. Fear and hate are a hell of a (proverbial) drug and easy to replicate in great quantities.
Conservatism, practically by definition, resists and rejects new things.
Conservatives reject blindly accepting new things, yes. That’s called looking before you leap and taking time to rationally weight the risks vs rewards.
Society is a complex machine. It’s impossible to gauge the effects of something like a vaccine in a few short lived lab tests. If we inject a vaccine into children, during their most formative years, how is that going to effect their development a decade from now? Is it going to stunt their growth? Increase their risk of cancer? Give them some other subtle illness years down the road? And for what benefit? All scientific evidence so far says that children have essentially no risk of being injured by Covid.
But asking such reasonable scientific questions gets you branded anti-vax and anti-science by people who understand neither.
We know the elderly with pre-existing conditions do have a substantial risk of being injured by Covid, and even if the vaccine has long-term health effects, that’s not something someone with an average 10 years of life left has to worry about. So that cost/benefit analysis makes sense for them to take the risk on a new vaccine.
Progressives are prone to blindly accept anything new for novelty’s sake, especially from government, which they use as a substitute religion. No one screaming for everyone to take the vaccine is doing so because they’re a scientist and have read peer-reviewed studies showing it’s safe. They’re doing it because it’s a change, which they love, ordered by their government masters, which they irrationally believe unconditionally.
When Jonas Salk made the Polio vaccine, conservatives whined that it hadn’t been tested and couldn’t be safe. So many people talked on every platform they had to decry the vaccine as “unsafe”, to the point that Salk had to make the statement “It is safe, and you can’t get safer than safe.”
And they were lying back then too. The Cutter incident involved a defective polio vaccine rollout from Cutter Labortories that resulted in 200,000 children being infected with live polio. Around 40,000 children would develop polio, with hundreds being permanently injured from it and some even dying from it.
Turns out the people working in government and scientific labs are, in fact, people, and therefore fallible. Blindly trusting them is a mistake. Trust is earned, and our government bureaucracy has done nothing to earn anyone’s trust in a very long time.
Sixty-six years later, and conservatives still shout the same thing, this hasn’t been a “rise”. It’s been an awakening for those who didn’t realize the American right has always been anti-vax.
I’m old enough to remember a year ago, when multiple Democrats were saying the vaccine could not be trusted because Trump was endorsing it and, God forbid, even rushing it into production.
“Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden on Wednesday rejected President Donald Trump’s charge that he is spreading fear about the safety of a potential coronavirus vaccine, urging Trump to defer to scientists and not rush its rollout.”
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/09/05/kamala-harris-trump-coronavirus-vaccine-409320
“Democratic vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris said she wouldn’t take President Donald Trump’s word on the reliability of any coronavirus vaccine released before the election.”
I never realized what anti-vaxxers our glorious President and Vice President are. No wonder more people have allegedly died of Covid in 2021 than in 2020.
I don’t understand the class interests that fuel these pseudoscientific movements. Both the working and the owning classes benefit from the proliferation of vaccine acceptance. The former avoids dying and the latter retains a workforce. So why do these bs movements exist in the west?
This pandemic has resulted in one of the biggest wealth transfers to the top that we’ve ever seen. The thing to realize is that there is a difference between petty bourgeoisie such as mom and pop shops and the real bourgeoisie who have serious capital.
The pandemic is a disaster for anyone who needs recurring revenue or income. However, people who have significant amounts of capital can easily weather it out. As smaller bourgeoisie go out of business the real bourgeoisie are able to buy up their assets for pennies on the dollar.
So, what we’re actually seeing is massive concentration of capital with the few owners at the top. These people are very happy with the current state of things and any measures to stop the pandemic would directly cut into their profits and ability to consolidate capital.
That, unfoetunately, makes a lot of sense.
The other thing I’ll add, is that the bourgeoisie doesn’t have much need for their domestic workforces anymore. Surplus value extraction has mostly moved to the global south, and aging first world workers become a burden in health costs. Its cheaper to let these unnecessary workers die than it is to vaccinate them. Right wing anti vaxx conspiracy theories play right into that.
Even the vaccines themselves become a product, whose sale to other countries must be profitable and treated as intellectual property. Not very far sighted, but those are the standard short term incentives.
Marx said that capitalism tends to destroy its 2 sources of wealth: nature, and human beings. We’ve reached that late stage now.
I want to joke like “hE tRiEd tO wArN uS” but it’s not a joke at all, he really did >_<
Yeah, that’s an important point as well. The system is starting to eat itself from the inside out now.
What Yog said is true, but it should also be mentioned that the far-right has used crazed conspiracies to convert followers for generations, and anti-vax is one of many.
If they can prey on a person’s mental illness (in this case paranoia), then they can convince this person that only the far-right has the answers that can solve this problem, that they made up. This is why Infowars and Breitbart were popularized in the early 2000s, and are still massive far-right entities today. All of the wild conspiracies of this nature, the Illuminati, reptilians, aliens at A52, Op Jade Helm being a training op for enacting modern enslavement of Americans, FEMA mass-producing coffins (they were actually just helicopter basket liners) being evidence that the government intended to lead a genocide of Americans, etc. are all intended to bring people on the fringe into the far-right. And this propaganda absolutely works, in fact, it worked on teenage me.
Yeah. Feels like anti-science thought is bound to emerge and propagate from bourgois ideology.
You’re making several false assumptions. The working class, who are largely young and healthy, aren’t dying in any meaningful way from not taking the vaccine. They’re more likely to die in a car crash or from heart disease, than from Covid.
This is clearly a propaganda piece intended to paint people who are unvaccinated as evil, and equate them with fascists. Note how the (scarce) facutal evidence is clearly cherry-picked, and there is no attempt to explain why people might be against vaccination (people generally have a reason for their decision, even if you dont agree with it). Instead we get this marvellously framed piece of writing:
In a frightening show of force, marauding fascist mobs have taken over the streets of Melbourne for three days running. They have smashed up union offices and occupied major arterials for hours. This is a disastrous development.
I watched videos of that demonstration, and it was just that, a demonstration. It looked mostly peaceful, but of course any large demonstration has some vandals. The confrontation at the union office was because most grass-root members opposed covid measures, while the leadership fully agreed with state mandates. And no, people demonstrating for their cause is not a disastrous development, its a basic human right.
I think the real danger here is that the ruling class manages to divide people based on this narrative of “pro vaccination” or “anti vaccination”. But the real problem is the terrible leadership of politicians during this health crisis. They will surely not be held accountable for their mistakes and their corruption if we get distracted by the relatively minor topic of vaccination
Oh no, people who believe it’s their body and therefore their choice! Heavens to meteoroid!
Don’t those fools realize that without the vax, they risk a 0.0001% chance of death?!?!?!
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Yeah, it’s pretty transparent lefty propaganda. Whatever happened to “my body my choice”? If I want to murder my unborn child, that’s fine, but if I don’t want to inject an experimental vaccine into my body to avoid a 0.0001% risk of death, I’m a lunatic trying to kill everyone?
It’s proof even liberals don’t even completely trust the vaccine, since if they believed it worked, it wouldn’t matter if you took it or not.
The real dangerous aspect to this is there’s no exit strategy to the left’s vision. Scientists are predicting Covid isn’t going away. It’s literally a strain of the flu, which mutates every year, just like the flu. If you believe huge sections of the economy have to be shut down, and everyone has to take rushed expensive vaccines twice a year, and we can’t be within 6 feet of another living person, or else everyone’s going to die, you’ll be living like that for the rest of your life.
Of course, the pharma industry is loving all this fear, propaganda and paranoia. They’re racking in the cash. All while being immune to lawsuits over injury as a result of their “completely safe” vaccines.
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ah ye olde tHe NaZIz WeRe SocIAliSt line of argument
I encountered some anonymous modern day Nazis that blabbered the same crap. It is going to be tough for everyone from here on.
You encountered a modern day Nazi who hates National Socialists?
I thought by definition NAZIs would hate socialists…where does this argument come from?
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too funny, I know what NAZI stands for, but I never thought about the “socialists” part of it based on what I was taught of Hitler! But what you say makes alot of sense for back then and perhaps for people’s apparent misunderstanding today.
Hell, remember the ‘first they came for’ sequence?
It literally STARTS with “First They Came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out–because I was not a socialist.”
The NSDAP was also anti-union. The very SECOND line was, “Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out–because I was not a trade unionist.”
Anti-Socialism and Anti-Union are CORE NAZI PRINCIPLES.
Now I can’t help but give everyone who is against socialism and against unions the hard side-eye.
But they always hated and fought against real socialist and anarchists.
That’s a No True Scottsman argument.
The Nazis instituted a ton of socialist welfare programs, issued a lot of propaganda to that effect, and even instituted universal healthcare and free higher education.
By the textbook definition, they were socialists.
The argument comes from capitalists who want to scare people away from socialism.
so weird tho! Why don’t people understand what fascism is? I guess nothing surprises me insofar as what people will believe these days.
Basically, it comes down to ignorance. This stuff isn’t taught in the schools in the west, and most people can’t even define what capitalism, socialism, communism, or fascism actually are. This is why communists implore people to read theory and history. Education is the first step towards actually acting effectively in one’s own interest.
I went to school in the west! In the US, we take US History (over and over again!) We definitely covered WWII and definitely learned about Fascism. But, yeah, it seems better education could solve alot of problems.
US history taught in schools is probably whitewashing all the genocide they commit and making it look as if they’re the heroes, so it’s no surprise no one knows what fascism is even though the US is exactly that and served as inspiration for literally the nazi Germany.
It’s because the definition of fascism has been intentionally diluted to mean “anything I personally do not like” - especially by people who match the pre-diluted definition.
But look to the etymology of it:
Fasces. To bundle or bind.Fascists view themselves as the ‘connective tissue’ holding their civilization together and protecting it from nefarious “OUTSIDERS”. This is an illusion that serves only as a surface level justification for destructive actions. In reality it can look an awful lot like a paranoia-based psychological contagion that causes its infested drones to reflexively congregate into an exclusive ‘in-group’ that collectively hallucinates out-groups to scapegoat. Every time an out-group is neutralized, they choose a new out-group to destroy. This will continue until there is no one else lift, whereupon they will form internal factions and start to tear each other apart.
THAT. IS. FASCISM.
And it’s existed as long as humanity has, long before we came up with a name for it.
Fascists view themselves as the ‘connective tissue’ holding their civilization together and protecting it from nefarious “OUTSIDERS”.
That’s a dangerously broad definition that effectively describes almost every modern political party today. Most people want to protect their community, both from threats internal and external. When Joe Biden talks about his need to protect the “soul of the nation” from an outsider like Trump, that fits your definition exactly. When Democrat activists argue they need to punch conservative political pundits for saying things they don’t like, that fits your definition exactly.
Nazis weren’t fascists. Fascism was an Italian political philosophy.
Yes they were
Hitler’s inspiration was Mussolini (originally, it did go south eventually, of course), Nazism is fascism with a racial component added to it. It wasn’t just Italy…there was Spain and Japan that embraced Fascism at that time period.
The argument comes from historians who know how to read books and are aware of all the socialist programs the German National Socialists instituted as part of their socialist ideology.
The idea that the Nazis weren’t socialists comes from sheltered kids who got their entire history education about the early 1900s from Hollywood war movies that depict Germans as either murderous psychopaths or blank faced robots to be gunned down FPS-style by the “good guys.”
The argument does not come from historians. In fact, anyone who’s read a book in their life knows that nazis actively broke up unions, and eradicated socialists and communists. The idea that nazis were socialists comes from idiots.
Nazis were socialists. It’s literally in the name. National Socialists. Hitler instituted a ton of government welfare programs for Germans.
As much as I detest socialists, to be fair to them, Hitler’s brand of socialism was also coupled with jingoism, which called for those socialist programs to be provided for by invading all “lesser” peoples and taking their stuff.
Socialists hate being reminded that the National Socialists were, in fact, socialists and believed in things like the “right” to housing, food, healthcare.
All provided by a benevolent government that definitely would always have their best interests in mind and would never do anything evil.
Meanwhile in the real world:
To impose a full measure of austerity upon workers and peasants, the ruling economic interests would have to abolish the democratic rights that helped the masses defend their modest living standards. The solution was to smash their unions, political organizations, and civil liberties. Industrialists and big landowners wanted someone at the helm who could break the power of organized workers and farm laborers and impose a stern order on the masses. For this task Benito Mussolini, armed with his gangs of Blackshirts, seemed the likely candidate.
In 1922, the Federazione Industriale, composed of the leaders of industry, along with representatives from the banking and agribusi- ness associations, met with Mussolini to plan the “March on Rome,” contributing 20 million lire to the undertaking. With the additional backing of Italy’s top military officers and police chiefs, the fascist “revolution”—really a coup d’état—took place.
Within two years after seizing state power, Mussolini had shut down all opposition newspapers and crushed the Socialist, Liberal, Catholic, Democratic, and Republican parties, which together had commanded some 80 percent of the vote. Labor leaders, peasant leaders, parliamentary delegates, and others critical of the new regime were beaten, exiled, or murdered by fascist terror squadristi The Italian Communist party endured the severest repression of all, yet managed to maintain a courageous underground resistance that eventually evolved into armed struggle against the Blackshirts and the German occupation force.
In Germany, a similar pattern of complicity between fascists and capitalists emerged. German workers and farm laborers had won the right to unionize, the eight-hour day, and unemployment insurance. But to revive profit levels, heavy industry and big finance wanted wage cuts for their workers and massive state subsidies and tax cuts for themselves.
During the 1920s, the Nazi Sturmabteilung or SA, the brown- shirted storm troopers, subsidized by business, were used mostly as an antilabor paramilitary force whose function was to terrorize workers and farm laborers. By 1930, most of the tycoons had con- cluded that the Weimar Republic no longer served their needs and was too accommodating to the working class. They greatly increased their subsidies to Hitler, propelling the Nazi party onto the national stage. Business tycoons supplied the Nazis with gener- ous funds for fleets of motor cars and loudspeakers to saturate the cities and villages of Germany, along with funds for Nazi party organizations, youth groups, and paramilitary forces. In the July 1932 campaign, Hitler had sufficient funds to fly to fifty cities in the last two weeks alone.
In that same campaign the Nazis received 37.3 percent of the vote, the highest they ever won in a democratic national election. They never had a majority of the people on their side. To the extent that they had any kind of reliable base, it generally was among the more affluent members of society. In addition, elements of the petty bour- geoisie and many lumpenproletariats served as strong-arm party thugs, organized into the SA storm troopers. But the great majority of the organized working class supported the Communists or Social Democrats to the very end.
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Anybody who knows a modicum of history knows that NSDAP was not socialist in any way, shape, or form. In fact, their main focus was on eradicating communists in Germany.
