This campaign is a joke. There is nothing shocking or cutting edge about it. Its horny Hitler is hilarious. The fact that he, Hussein and Stalin are all deceased adds a certain necrophiliac irony to the whole cartoonish exercise. For a campaign with a digital component, they seem to have forgotten the lessons of Godwin's Law, which points out the absurdity of making online comparisons to Adolf Hitler. If anything is disturbing, it's the fact that the "logic" behind this campaign makes sense to anyone -- especially an AIDS-awareness group like Regenbogen, whose members include people with HIV.
"AIDS" is not a "mass murderer." It's a health condition caused by an untreated viral infection. HIV is the virus that can lead to AIDS, usually after many years and in the absence of medication. HIV is a significant medical condition, and there are countless reasons why anyone who doesn't have that virus should avoid getting it, and that anyone who does have it should avoid passing it on to anyone else.
But it doesn't help anyone to confuse HIV and AIDS with one another, or to exaggerate the impact of HIV by inextricably linking it to death. Dr Joseph McGowan of North Shore University Hospital recently counselled a parent about her 10-year-old son's HIV infection on the medical website TheBody.com: "If he is monitored carefully there is no reason your son ever has to progress to AIDS. He can expect to live a very long life." This is the current reality of HIV for most people in developed countries. The constant, hyper-emotional assertion that HIV equals guaranteed death ought to be calmly challenged every time it rears its insistent head. Neither is it "murder."
And since "AIDS" is not a person, let alone a "murderer," who are we really talking about here? Of course, we are talking about people who have HIV in their bodies. The Regenbogen campaign isn't actually about AIDS itself at all. It's about the risks of (presumably unprotected) sex with regard to HIV transmission, arguing that passing on HIV is akin to Nazism, and suggesting that the other person engaging in sex has no role other than that of victim. Notably, the mass murderers in the campaign are all men and their victims are all women. Meanwhile, the most recent high-profile HIV-criminalization case in Germany targeted a woman, Nadja Benaissa of the pop group No Angels.
Did the campaigners not think twice about wrongly comparing human sexual behaviour to the Holocaust, and inappropriately demonizing people with HIV in the process? The insistence on seeing HIV transmission as villainy obscures the most stubborn fact about the epidemic -- far from being the realm of malevolent or sociopathic people, HIV is transmitted through behaviours that are otherwise completely natural and normal, such as penetrative intercourse -- or behaviours that may often be hard to control rather than "intentional," such as needle sharing in the context of addiction. We already know that those most infectious with HIV usually don't know they have it, and that most people with diagnosed HIV take great pains to prevent further transmission.