Antismoking Nazis

Back to Simon Clark, and his remark in the comments here:

As I have said many times, repeated references to a totalitarian regime that slaughtered six million Jews is inappropriate and embarrassing in relation to tobacco control. In terms of building support for our cause, it is entirely counter-productive.

 Tuesday, April 10, 2012 at 14:29 |  Simon

So he’s saying we shouldn’t call Tobacco Control a bunch of Nazis. It’s inappropriate and embarrassing and counter-productive, he says.

And I can well see his point of view. Once you’ve called people Nazis, you’ve sort of got off on the wrong foot in any debate with them. A civilised debate of any sort requires a modicum of respect for the other guy, by giving him a fair hearing, and treating him with consideration, as a moral equal.

Trouble is, though, that antismokers don’t do the same for smokers. And they don’t do debate either. Antismokers see smokers as sorts of subhumans, addicted to tobacco, who need to have their best interests determined for them by antismoking professionals prescribing appropriate treatments – smoking bans, smoking cessation therapies, drugs, etc, etc. What smokers think is as irrelevant as what hospitalised malaria patients babble in their delirium before onlooking doctors. The antismokers see themselves as doctors treating sick people. And many of them actually are doctors. The first antismoker I ever encountered, Dr W, was a medical doctor. It is always going to be impossible to conduct any sort of debate with people whose fundamental premise is that their opponents are sick people.

So you can’t have a debate with antismokers. Debate requires some sort of equality, some equivalence of respectability. And that is something that antismokers deny smokers from the outset. As I just said, a civilised debate of any sort requires a modicum of respect for the other guy, by giving him a fair hearing, and treating him with consideration, as a moral equal. And antismokers don’t have any respect at all for smokers. And they don’t see them in the least bit as moral equals.

So Simon Clark is never going to get anywhere by treating antismokers as respectable people who should be given a fair hearing. Because the antismokers are never going to return the courtesy, and do the same for smokers. He will hear them out – and they will ignore him. Which is what they do, all the time.

If anything, by treating them with courtesy, he’s actually lending them a respectability they don’t deserve. By dealing civilly with these uncivil people, he is actually helping them. A bit like opening a door to a burglar, and inviting him in, and asking him if he’d like coffee and biscuits. It’s the polite and civil thing to do, perhaps – but not with burglars.

My view is that the profound contempt that antismokers have for smokers in itself betrays something of a Nazi mentality, because it denies moral equivalence to smokers, denies them any respectability, and denies any need for consideration for them. And the result is that they are treated worse than animals. And this is how one would expect Nazis to treat people.

And it’s not just their contemptuous attitude to smokers. This is a comment I left here today

“People often say that you lose an argument the moment you call someone a fascist or a Nazi.”

But what if they actually are Nazis? What do people have to do to qualify as Nazis? Wear black uniforms and jackboots and goosestep wherever they go? I doubt if most of those historical sorts of Nazis wore those uniforms very much, and goosestepped even less.

As far as I’m concerned, a Nazi is someone with Nazi attitudes. And this is principally an eugenic view of life, whereby society is to be improved by expelling/eradicating the ‘unfit’ or ‘diseased’ members of it. In the past, those ‘diseased’ people were Jews and Gypsies and homosexuals and a variety of others. Now they are smokers (and increasingly also drinkers and fat people). Conversely, the ideal human type is athletic and strong, and while the ‘unfit’ are publicly denigrated, the ‘fit’ are celebrated in Olympic games and the like.

So that’s one aspect of antismoking Nazism. But there’s also the fact that antismoking ‘science’ actually started life in Nazi Germany, and the post-war British and American antismoking researchers simply continued with it, using the same methodology. And they have advanced their conclusions (which were in fact the premises of their ‘research’) that smoking is harmful using the Nazi method of the Big Lie that is told over and over again. And they are setting out to impose their antismoking ideology by excluding smokers from society, firing them from their jobs, refusing them medical treatment. In the end, the logic of this will lead to murdering them, which is what many of them openly wish to do.

Any one of these things would be enough to justify the Nazi jibe. But the evidence of Nazism is actually overwhelming. So much so, that you have to wonder whether they actually do wear the black uniforms and the death’s head insignia and all the rest of it when they meet up with each other.

Nazi Germany was defeated in 1945, but Nazi ideology was not. And it has gradually grown stronger and more confident in the subsequent 50 years. But they still don’t like being called Nazis, even though that is exactly what they are.

So my view is that these people must be called Nazis. Anything else is actually dishonest. They must have respectability withdrawn from them, just as they have themselves withdrawn it from others. They must be treated with the contempt with which they treat other people.

And there is nothing to debate with them anyway. The debate is over. It never happened in the first place, actually. When was there ever any “debate” about smoking bans?

What we have is a state of war. And the sooner that people like Simon Clark recognise it, the better. We must set out not to debate with these people in a civilised manner, because that is impossible. We must set out to defeat them, and to destroy them, and destroy everything that they stand for, everywhere in the world.