In the news now we find actress Gina Carano, who not long lost her role as co-star in the popular Disney streaming series, 'The Mandalorian'. Evidently Disney's guardians of the brand located some of her "abhorrent and unacceptable" social media posts and gave her the heave ho. As in fired.
Carano, who's had a turbulent time as a Lucasfilm - Star Wars cast member had made a number of - how shall we say - politically incorrect comments on mask wearing, the 2020 election and other issues reflecting an embrace of the conservative ideology. None of these by themselves might have cost her the Mandalorian gig, but when she trivialized the treatment of Jews under Hitler in Nazi Germany, she crossed a line. In that very ill -considered case she actually compared "hatred of conservatives" to the persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany.
This quite naturally led to an explosion of protests and justified outrage, and yeah, calling for her dumb head. (Given she clearly knows so little about the history of the Jews under the Nazi Reich). By her ill- advised comment she showed a gross lack of awareness that:
- Jews at all times had to wear yellow stars of David bearing the inscription 'JUDE'
- Jews had their properties - homes and businesses -- expropriated by the Nazis and sold or given to German non-Jews. Jewish businesses not immediately seized often had their fronts defaced.
- Jews could be targeted by any German, or storm trooper (S.A.) and tormented where he or she stood, being forced to humiliate themselves or face severe beating. Say by picking up cigarette butts off the streets - with their teeth.
- After the Reichstag fire Jews were rounded up, tagged with the same yellow stars of David and dispatched to Dachau or other concentration camps. There forced to live on roots, grubs, maggots and made to perform degrading tasks such as cutting grass using their teeth.
- Ultimately, most of Germany's Jews were sent to the Nazi mass extermination camps, at Auschwitz. Treblinka or Mauthausen. There to be gassed using Zyklon B (hydrogen cyanide crystals) dropped via canisters into mock shower stalls. The Nazis tried their best to destroy as much evidence of their horrors as possible but weren't completely successful as the allies found remnants of the operations at Auschwitz, including crematoria, and stacked bodies at Mauthausen, e.g.
So one can understand - even if a simpleton- how a still living Jewish survivor, or descendant of one, would be totally apoplectic at any comparison of how American conservatives are treated, e.g. by "cancel culture" and how German Jews fared under the Nazis. Again, the crime was in making such a vile comparison that totally trivializes the treatment of Jews. For that Carano did indeed deserve her firing from the Disney show.
Let's also remind readers that "free speech" does not enter the picture, as I pointed out in a previous blog post,
You enter a corporation to work - in whatever capacity - and you give up the right to free speech protections. So Disney was fully within its own rights to cut Carano loose when she revealed herself as a loose cannon on social media. As reported also in the Feb. 11 WSJ (Business and Investing, p. B1) Disney eked out a profit of $21.2 m in the past year thanks to its streaming service. That profit arrived because of Disney's careful branding as a family friendly service, also one that respects cultural norms and political boundaries of decency. Carano violated the latter when she made her crass comparisons of conservatives being hated to Jews being persecuted under Hitler.
Alas, some recent WSJ contributors have lost sight of this, including one Matthew Hennessey who actually compared ('Star Wars: The Blacklist Strikes Back', p. A13, Feb. 12-13) Carano's treatment to that of suspected commie actors and screen writers in the McCarthy era, e.g. being blacklisted.
But Hennessey's most egregious twaddle is when he wrote at the end:
"If it's wrong for someone to lose his job because he's a communist it's wrong for someone to lose her job because she's a conservative."
Except Carano didn't lose her job because of being a conservative. She lost it for making outrageous statements comparing the treatment of conservatives to the treatment of Jews under Hitler's Reich. As I showed above there is no valid comparison given we don't see conservatives losing their homes and businesses, or being targeted and humiliated on every street corner, or sent to concentration camps. So in effect what Carano wrote ended up trivializing the treatment of the Jews under Hitler, and that means also trivializing the history - indeed, degrading it for her own self promotion and grievance peddling.
Cry all you want, she deserved what she got.
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