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/