BC Conservative Candidate’s Campaign Shared Graphic Comparing Public Health Policies to Nazi Holocaust
BC Conservatives already facing calls to remove candidate Brent Chapman after posting anti-Muslim and anti-refugee content
A BC Conservative candidate who is facing calls to be removed from the ballot also shared a graphic comparing public health policies to the Nazi Holocaust.
Brent Chapman, the BC Conservative candidate for Surrey South, shared a graphic on one of his campaign’s official social media account a little over a month ago that equates public health “harm reduction” strategies with the murders of six million Jews by the Nazis during the Second World War.
Chapman is currently facing calls to resign or be removed as a candidate after posts surfaced earlier this week showing the BC Conservative candidate falsely claiming Muslims and Palestinians are the products of inbreeding.
Chapman was also a prolific participant in private right-wing Facebook groups. In one now-deleted posting surfaced by PressProgress, Chapman promoted a “boycott” of Air Canada to stop airlifts evacuating Syrian refugees.
The BC Conservative candidate issued a statement acknowledging his comments were “completely unacceptable” but noted he made the comments a “decade ago” and “do not reflect who I am today” (Chapman was 62-years-old at the time).
BC Conservative leader John Rustad resisted calls to remove Chapman as a candidate, stating that while the comments were “offensive,” they were likewise “comments from 10 years ago.”
However, the Holocaust meme shared on Chapman’s campaign’s official social media account was not posted 10 years ago, it was posted a little over one month ago.
On his campaign’s official X dot com account, Chapman shared a meme equating public health policies and “harm reduction” with the Holocaust.
The meme features an iconic photo from the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising showing a young Jewish boy being led out of a bunker at gunpoint by Nazi SS officers.
“Nazi scum gave children candy before the kids entered the gas chamber, the meme states. “NDP and Liberal scum hand out ‘safe supply’ and encourage youth to visit injection sites.”
The meme features an iconic photo from the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of a young Jewish boy being led out of a bunker at gunpoint by Nazi SS officers.
The photo was taken by a Nazi photographer and depicts Jewish families being removed from Warsaw to be sent to concentration camps.
The boy has never identified and has been described as the Holocaust’s symbolic “Unknown Victim.”
Lise Kirchner, the Education Director at the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre, a non-partisan organization devoted to Holocaust-based anti-racism education and commemoration, says the meme itself represents a “distortion” of the Holocaust.
“The meme is similar to what we saw during the pandemic with people wearing the yellow star,” Kirchner told PressProgress. “Making any kind of comparison is a gross injustice, not just to the history but to the individuals that suffered — there’s nothing comparable here.”
Kirchner said the idea of using this iconic photo in a political meme is “exploiting the pain and suffering” of the Holocaust and “makes light of that through a joke.”
“That’s not something we joke about,” Kirchner said. “That photo itself has become a symbol of the suffering of the Jews at the hands of the Nazis but also the spirit of resistance in the Jewish community itself.”
“The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising is just an incredible piece of history,” Kirchner added. “They knew that they were sacrificing their own lives, that they would not survive that uprising. It’s just so disrespectful to take that moment in history and make a joke of it, if that’s what this is, or exploit it for political purposes.”
“It’s shocking.”
The meme is the creation of Bruce McGonigal, a vitriolic social media user who promotes anti-vaccine views and conspiratorial content. McGonigal has also posted homophobic and digitally-altered photos depicting politicians in sexual acts.
McGonigal’s provincial election content has also been amplified by Jordan Peterson.
Neither Chapman nor the BC Conservatives responded to multiple requests for comment from PressProgress.
The graphic was still publicly viewable on Chapman’s official campaign account at the time of publication of this story.
Update: This story was updated to include comments from the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre which were received after this story was first published.
Our journalism is powered by readers like you.
We’re an award-winning non-profit news organization that covers topics like social and economic inequality, big business and labour, and right-wing extremism.
Help us build so we can bring to light stories that don’t get the attention they deserve from Canada’s big corporate media outlets.
Donate