The American author Mike Godwin is known for ‘Godwin’s Law’, which holds that ‘As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one’. 

Godwin shared his adage in 1990, when Mark Zuckerberg was 14 years away from creating Facebook and seven away from assuming human-like form. 

It would be another 16 years, meanwhile, before Jack Dorsey took Hieronymus Bosch’s 4-track demo into the recording studio and created Twitter. 

With the growth of those platforms, Godwin’s Law has become increasingly relevant.

Vaccine passports, masks and boosters are all apparently reminiscent of Nazi Germany. The Nazis, of course, famous for wanting to avoid millions of people dying.

Aside from being wildly disproportionate and incredibly disrespectful, it gives us an excuse to disregard everything you say. 

In 2015, the writer Clive James said: “I save time on the web by reading nobody’s opinion that contains the word ‘methinks’.” 

In 2021, this can be applied to anyone who believes having to show a QR code in order to get into #TagTuesdays at the Garage is on a par with the genocide of six million Jews.

It would be quicker to walk down Sauchiehall Street with a sign around your neck saying ‘I’M NOT A SERIOUS PERSON’. 

With the Omicron variant leading to more uncertainty and restrictions, it’s completely understandable that we’re frustrated right now. I’m frustrated. To quote a noted Scottish philosopher, “It’s a s**** state of affairs to be in”. 

Glasgow Times:

There are few positives to be taken from the pandemic. There’s no ‘Well, at least we got x out of it’ silver lining (Elton John’s ‘Ahaaam Dill Dandin’ performance notwithstanding). 

During the first lockdown, there was a sense of togetherness. We made sacrifices for each other, checked in on friends and applauded NHS workers. 

Twenty-one months on, though, that mood is unrecognisable. We’re at each other’s throats constantly. The relentless anger is inevitable, and it has to go somewhere.

That doesn’t excuse the Nazi comparisons. Nothing does. 

These comments come from people devoid of empathy and with no sense of perspective. Everything’s a massive drama with these narcissists. The same people who constantly bang on about ‘snowflakes’ and how we need to ‘man up’ are the ones making us look like a nation of Livia Sopranos. 

Speaking to the BBC on Monday about vaccine passports, Conservative MP Marcus Fysh said: “This is not Nazi Germany”. 

Marcus Pysh.

Some might say it’s interesting that Fysh chose this particular measure for a Nazi Germany comparison just days after voting in favour of Priti Patel’s Nationality and Borders Bill, which Amnesty International says will “put a refugee at grave risk of neither receiving the protection to which they are entitled nor being treated in accordance with human rights and refugee law while their asylum claim is considered”. 

I’m not saying I’M saying it’s interesting, I’m just saying SOME people might say it is.

There are some who have protested vaccines by wearing a yellow star. That’s the same star that Jews were forced to wear as a means of identification during the Holocaust. As someone whose great grandfather was murdered at Auschwitz, that level of ignorance makes me want to cry or punch a wall.

Those anti-vaxxers might want to ask themselves whether they too have been forced to wear the yellow star, or just chose to put it on and out themselves as ghouls.

You’re entitled to disagree with the idea of vaccine passports, but casually tossing about terms like ‘Apartheid’ and ‘Nazi Germany’ trivialises those monumental crimes and shows no consideration for the experiences or feelings of their victims.

They’re right about the country being ‘divided into two tiers’, but those tiers are ‘Empathetic Majority’ and ‘Selfish Minority’. 

We’re not talking about children still learning compassion, or 19-year-old internet edgelords. These are men and women in their forties, fifties and sixties who have just completely lost the run of themselves since March 2020. 

When asked to get jagged and wear a mask in Tesco so as to help protect society’s most vulnerable, these brave freedom fighters opened their windows and declared ‘I’m mildly inconvenienced, and I’m not going to take it anymore’. 

Laurence Fox felt that Yom Hashoah - a day of Holocaust commemoration - was an appropriate occasion on which to say of compulsory vaccinations: “Mengele would have no doubt approved”. 

That’s Dr Josef Mengele, known as the ‘Angel of Death’, who performed sadistic experiments upon and murdered children at Auschwitz.

That cheap, shameless grifter’s career should have ended on the spot. Instead, the tweet hasn’t even been removed by Twitter, where Fox has 302,000 followers and a pinned tweet complaining about his freedom of speech being threatened.

My gran is an 87-year-old German Jew who survived the Holocaust and has lived the majority of her life in Glasgow thanks to the Kindertransport. She’s also had her booster. 

I’ve not heard her swear once in my entire life, but if someone dared compare any aspect of the pandemic to Nazi Germany in front of her I’m confident she would tell them to f*** off. 

And rightly so.