Elon Musk's Looming Disease Holocaust

[Passages]

The shadow president is gutting America’s vast humanitarian aid system. Millions may die.

by Ryan Cooper March 3, 2025


In the days after 9/11, a professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado-Boulder, Ward Churchill, compared the victims of the attacks to the infamous Nazi Adolf Eichmann, a major organizer of the Holocaust. Accusing the office workers at the World Trade Center as somehow implicated in American imperialism in Iraq and elsewhere, Churchill called them “little Eichmanns.” It was an egregious example of the habit some “radical” academics have of drawing attention to themselves with outrageous hyperbole, but his phrase has lived on.

Eichmann, of course, was famously described in Hannah Arendt’s book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil as a dimwitted lackey who didn’t particularly hate Jews himself, but readily set up the logistics of their extermination because that’s what he was told to do. His name has become a stand-in for how easily ordinary people can participate in terrible crimes.

But there is a better comparison for the sundry criminals and neo-Nazis who are carrying out Elon Musk’s illegal orders to shut down USAID and gut America’s foreign aid budget through mass cancellation of contracts. Reinhard Heydrich, Eichmann’s boss, was not following orders but giving them. He was a viciously sadistic antisemite who gloried in cruelty and violence for its own sake. He was notorious even among the Nazi leadership for his brutality; Hitler called him “the man with the iron heart.”

What Musk and his little Heydrichs at DOGE, the State Department, and elsewhere are doing to millions of people around the world is not the banal evil of “just following orders.” It is gleeful, intentional evil of the worst kind: the mass murder of helpless innocents.
https://prospect.org/world/2025-03-03-musk-doge-pepfar-hiv-tuberculosis/

[highplainsdem]

1. There's a term for it that we should be using more: social murder.

https://www.democraticunderground.com/100220092249

[Passages]

2. Damn, that is precise.

Here we are referring to our government doing monstrous things and having to label them properly.

I don't know what to say.

[highplainsdem]

3. I'm seeing it more and more on social media. It's a term that gets attention, covers a lot of the monstrous

things the Trump/Musk admin is doing, and puts the blame on the right people.

It isn't a matter of "having to label them properly." You don't have to use it. But it's useful.

[Passages]

5. Oh, I think it is perfect. Better suited than the term Holocaust.

My comments are more about how low we have sunk within our government that you and I are having a conversation over these terms.

It's so tragic that it hurts.

[sop]

4. To no one's surprise, Elon's "holocaust" is targeting countries in sub-Saharan Africa.

(Washington Post) "USAID spent $40 billion of the $68 billion that the U.S. allocated for foreign aid programs last year...providing food, health care and clean water for tens of millions of people. Over the past five years, countries in sub-Saharan Africa have accounted for more than a third of U.S. foreign assistance spending.“

"'We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper,' billionaire Elon Musk, whom Trump has put in charge of a new pseudo-government office tasked with cutting waste, boasted Monday on X. Calling the agency a 'radical-left political psy op' and 'a criminal organization,' Musk said it was 'time for it to die.'"