Image from here
I watched a documentary the other night about a woman living with the sins of her Nazi camp commandant father who took perverse pleasure in abusing, humiliating, torturing, and murdering Jews.
It was a harrowing film. As I watched it, I began to question this assertion our movement has that people with unpopular lifestyles are being treated as Jews and other undesirables were treated over many years by the Nazis before they designed "The Final Solution" to wipe the race they disliked so much from the face of the earth.
The Nazi's daughter, Monika Hertwig, met a former inmate of the camp, Helen Jonas, whose life was saved because the camp commandant liked to have her around as a housemaid to bully, physically abuse and ridicule. She witnessed and felt the hell of that era.
During that emotional meeting, you could feel the weight of that burden of shame on Monika and the sheer anger deep inside Helen at what this woman's father had done to her family and friends.
Then Monika said something that made me think again to the effect of (if not verbatim): "I was told that people were taught to hate the Jews, to believe they were diseased and they carried disease that could harm good families..."
Helen, angry, jumped in defence of Jews of course and Monika clarified that it was NOT what she thought. She knew nothing until she began to ask but knew that was how it was done and how it began.
Today's modern persecuted groups which includes smokers at the top of the list, are not being transported to death camps nor are we being tortured in a physical sense, if we can claim to be harassed and abused in a psychological way, and you could say that we are not losing family members through horrific means.
But then when you look again, and try to remove the blinkers of what you are not supposed to think, the psychological parallels are obvious.
Smokers are thought to be dangerous to children and many smoker parents do have enormous rifts with their children brainwashed by anti-smoker propaganda over a generation.
Smokers have been sacked from work for not smoking at work, they have been excluded from every public place and now denied healthcare.
The state does not make smokers wear any physical form of identification like the Yellow Star but it is intent on outing them and forcing them into situations where they can be easily identified and forced to change their culture, or be excluded from society, by the corporate lies backed by political ideology.
Smokers, like Nazi Jews, have had property taken from them just ask Nick Hogan who was the first smoker jailed for his beliefs and political stance.
And then there are others who are inventing lies to get law abiding smokers thrown out of their own homes. Australia is the world leader in following Nazi methods to engineer enforced change.
Now a new fraud is being pushed into the public psyche to ensure that smokers'properties become worthless, and they become homeless and unemployable.
"According to a recent study led by Georg Matt of San Diego State University, nicotine will persist in a house previously occupied by smokers even if the rooms are given fresh layers of paint, new carpeting and standard cleaning."
One comment I saw on this drew the same comparisons as came to my mind:
"We should start an e-petition to ban the open discrimination and hatred of this minority group of smokers. The Nazis also seized Jewish property as the next phase of their hate crime. Are we next?"
But my favourite had to be this one from a commentor on the Huffington Post scare story even though I doubt that common sense is worth much to those with Smokerphobia - a phobic mental health condition that should be further investigated :
You know what they say - "50% of smokers die prematurely because they smoke". It can also be said with equal credibility that 50% of people die prematurely because they don't smoke. All the rest don't die prematurely and on average not much is remarkable at all. If you bought into second hand smoke and now third. How much more can they sell you, without raising your suspicions? You're either awfully gullible, or you are being paid for your efforts.
I just want it all to stop and for the general public not to be duped by paid-for propaganda as the Germans were back in the 1930s. Just because this denormalisation, stigmatisation, humiliation, theft, scaremongering, and exclusion is not aimed at Jews or any other religious or ethnic group doesn't mean to say it isn't happening.
History is meant to be a warning not a guide on how to get rid of and punish people you don't like without consequence. It is time some realistic perspective was brought to the smoking issue before the paranoia spirals to dangerous levels.