“Nicotine Nazis strike again”: a brief analysis of the use of Nazi rhetoric in attacking tobacco control advocacy | Nick K Schneider, Stanton A Glantz. Preface by Robert Proctor
Article Published: 2008
Details:
Type: Articles and Dissertations
Funding Source: National Cancer Institute (grants CA-113710 and CA-87472)
Published By: Tobacco Control October 2008 Vol 17 No 5
Further Information
This article illustrates the concern of Tobacco Control on the association and identification of its goals, ideology and methods with the Nazi ideology in particular, and with totalitarian ideologies in general.
Terms like “Nicotine Nazis”, “Health Nazis” and “Public health Fascists” have become common place amongst people and media to describe not only the systematic suppression of smoking, but also the general attitude that intends to pilot and control mass and individual behaviour in the name of public health optimization. The authors attempt to dismiss these definitions as a manoeuvre of the tobacco industry to discredit Tobacco Control.
This paper is answered by a FORCES position paper that demonstrates that there is far more than PR manoeuvres and cheap rhetoric behind those terms. There is, in fact, a new historical proposal of a “21st century Nazism” where the racial and antireligious elements are replaced with lifestyle elements, but that has preserved the social conditioning programs, the hatred, the propaganda, the general ideology architecture and the totalitarianism of its German predecessor – but, this time, it acts on a global scale.
