“The idea that Haitians in Springfield are abducting people\u2019s pets and eating them is not just a normal lie, the way that Trump has long accused migrants of selling drugs and committing street crimes. The idea of barbecuing a neighbor\u2019s beloved pet is such a violation, so alien in nature, that it renders the alleged targets outside the scope of what we recognize as human behavior. It is an attack on Haitians not only as individuals, but as an entire group. It is a kind of dehumanization that has historically led to deadly violence against the targeted group \u2014 often by design.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Two New York Times columnists, Lydia Polgreen<\/a> and Jamelle Bouie<\/a>, have labeled the animal eating rhetoric a \u201cblood libel\u201d for this reason.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The term originates in medieval Europe, specifically to describe the lie that Jews were abducting Christian children and using their blood to bake matzah (an unleavened bread we eat during the Passover holiday). The calumny, which persisted through the Nazi era<\/a>, was designed explicitly to cast Jews beyond the pale of acceptable society \u2014 to link Judaism as a religion and identity to barbarism and brutality. It was, as Bouie notes, frequently employed to whip up violence against the Jewish community.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You don\u2019t need to be a historian to see the obvious connections between accusing Jews of eating children and Haitians of eating pets. And since the Haitian Revolution, Americans have often treated Haitians as the embodiment of the terrifying racial \u201cother\u201d<\/a> in the same way that Europeans displaced their fears and resentments onto Jews<\/a>. The crank presidential candidate<\/a> Marianne Williamson helpfully made the subtext the text in a tweet, saying<\/a> that Democrats dismiss Trump\u2019s lies at their peril because \u201cHaitian voodoo is in fact real.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The same is true with another Vance lie about Springfield: that Haitians are responsible for a surge in communicable diseases, including HIV\/AIDS. I say it\u2019s a lie because there\u2019s no public evidence supporting it, and authorities on the ground contradict it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cA common myth that I\u2019ve heard is that we\u2019ve seen all of our communicable diseases skyrocket and go through the roof. And really, when you look at the data, that\u2019s not supported,\u201d Chris Coon, a county health commissioner, told<\/a> the local ABC affiliate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Once again, this lie has a deeply troubling history. Immigrants have long been falsely accused of bringing disease to keep them out; Nazis did the same to Jews.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Specifically, Nazi propaganda would regularly accuse Jews of spreading typhus<\/a>, a lice-borne disease that killed millions in early 20th century Europe. Much like HIV, typhus was a stigmatized ailment stereotypically associated with the moral defectiveness or dirtiness of the afflicted. Nazi doctors wrote pseudo-scientific papers<\/a> accusing Jews of spreading typhus due to our alleged \u201clow cultural level\u201d and \u201cuncleanliness,\u201d part of the justification for cramming Jews in Polish ghettos before shipping my ancestors and their co-religionists to death camps.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the past, attention to these kinds of glaringly obvious Nazi parallels might have seemed like enough to shame the Trump campaign into at least toning down its rhetoric. But now, those normative guardrails no longer hold.<\/p>\n\n\n\n On the right today, there is a pervasive sense that any allegation of fascism, authoritarianism, or racism is a bad-faith smear designed to delegitimize conservative policies and politicians. It is a tactic used by American defenders of Viktor Orb\u00e1n\u2019s regime in Hungary<\/a>, but one most often used to excuse bad behavior at home. It can be used even to whitewash the flirtations with open fascism that are common among young rightists nowadays<\/a>, like the inclusion of a Nazi symbol in a video pushed out by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis\u2019s primary campaign.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I\u2019m sure it\u2019s frustrating to be constantly accused of backing a fascist for president when you genuinely don\u2019t see yourself in that light. But at the same time, it gives the green light to ignore an awful lot of extremely dangerous behavior.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n