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Who Really is the Enemy of the People?
As a physician and scientist, I have a special aversion to the phrase “Enemy of the People,” not to mention that being Jewish, these words raise my alarm hormones (epinephrine, cortisol) to sky-high levels. As the Nazi antisemitic newspaper Der Stürmer (whose English namesake The Stormer is alive and well on the internet today) wrote in 1938:
“The Jews don’t want to go to Madagascar.* They cannot bear the climate. Jews are pests and disseminators of diseases. In whatever country they settle and spread themselves out, they produce the same effects as are produced in the human body by germs. … In former times sane people and sane leaders of the peoples made short shrift of enemies of the people. They had them either expelled or killed.”
That was 1938. Two years later, the Jews were indeed killed, first by the thousands, later by the millions.
Why you might be wondering, would the physician/scientist part of me get alarmed when I hear the words “Enemy of the People” being thrown about by the President? He’s “only” going after the press, right?
Those who don’t know their history are doomed to repeat it
At the end of the 19th century, Henrik Ibsen wrote a play called “An Enemy of the People”…
