As a World War II Latvian refugee from both Communism and Nazism, I find it hurtful to hear those terms applied to silly things and not the reflection of the inhumanity of a despotic reality.

The dictionary defines isms and phobias as discriminatory (and often hostile) beliefs and behaviors based on stereotypes, fear, and ignorance.

 

To wit, some conservatives claim that having a mandate to wear a facemask is a step toward Communism. They claim it is the government encroaching on our freedoms.

The Britannica definition of Communism is a political and economic doctrine that aims to replace private property and a profit-based economy with public ownership and communal control of at least the major means of production (like mines, mills, and factories) and the natural resources of a society. Whew, did you get all that?

Here is the real lowdown on what Communism is from our family who lived through it and escaped from it. And I would love for everyone to spend a couple of years running from the Commies before trivializing Communism. It is when an “official” comes to your house and says it is no longer your house but belongs to the state. The same goes for your 40 acres and your seven dairy cows. Your land is now part of a collective farm, and anything the collective produces belongs to the state, and you must meet your quota, you are told. Furthermore, all the books you have must be destroyed because they have a false view of history and the class struggle, and that flag you had flying has to be burned and replaced with our flag. And your radio: hand that over for we don’t want you to listen to foreign propaganda.

Surprise, you weren’t told not to wear a facemask.

You were told, though, that your name must be changed to a Russian one, and you must learn the Cyrillic alphabet and meanings. And the language you have been speaking is not to be used. If you disobey any of these rules, you will be sent to Siberia or even be inflicted with harsher penalties.

Yep, this is much stricter than being told you must wear a facemask.

Another ism, Nazism, is the body of political and economic doctrines held and put into effect by the Nazis in Germany from 1933 to 1945, including the totalitarian principle of government, the predominance of especially Germanic groups assumed to be racially superior, and the supremacy of the führer. Remember, Russian President Vladimir Putin said the Russians are in Ukraine to fight the Nazis and that countries that belong to NATO are neo-Nazis. This would mean that, by his definition, I as Latvia’s consul am a Nazi — even though I fled from it.

Some U.S. conservatives have said that being forced to take vaccines against COVID-19 is like the Nazi medical experiments and that Dr. Anthony Fauci is the spitting image of Josef Mengele, the Nazis’ “angel of death,” who was in charge of their experiments. I must add this personal note: Dr. Fauci is from the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn where I lived as a child and where my mother bought medicines from Dr. Fauci’s father’s pharmacy. So, I survived his medical treatments!

When the Nazis came to our door after they chased the Russians out of Latvia, they wanted all able-bodied men to go work in their factories or “volunteer” in the German army to go and fight Russians. Everyone else was considered useless and needed to be eliminated — lots of luck if you were Jewish or a Gypsy (Roma). My grandmother was in a hospital when the Nazis came in, and she was murdered the very next day.

To make this ignorance of Nazism more appalling here, some conservative politicians have even called the Nazi police ”gazpachos” (a cold soup) instead of Gestapo.

I really want to put people who misuse these isms on a bus (not the boxcar in which my family and I fled Latvia) and send them to where they can see what totalitarian governments are really like. At least we are seeing this play out in plain view in Ukraine, which Putin wants to make part of “Mother Russia” again.

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John Freivalds of Wayzata, Minnesota, is the author of six books and is the honorary consul of Latvia in Minnesota. His website is jfapress.com. He wrote this for the News Tribune.