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Who Are the Easy Targets?
One only needs to look at modern history to recognize that attacks against the Jews persisted through the centuries with little resistance from the Jews themselves. During World War II, there were pockets of rebellion, but Jews mainly lined up like lambs heading for the slaughter. Depending on the country and times, Jews were desperate to fit in with the societies in which they lived, sacrificing their beliefs, their knowledge of history, and even their common sense to deny imminent dangers. Until the country of Israel was established, with its heroism and demands for survival, the Jews lived in denial. And yet the seeds for survival may have been planted as a result of the Warsaw ghetto revolt.
Warsaw, Poland, was no exception to the rounding up and imprisoning of Jews. As they had often demonstrated, the Jews complied with the efforts of the Nazis to detain them:
Shortly after the German invasion of Poland in September 1939, more than 400,000 Jews in Warsaw, the capital city, were confined to an area of the city that was little more than 1 square mile.
In November 1940, this Jewish ghetto was sealed off by brick walls, barbed wire and armed guards, and anyone caught leaving was shot on sight. The Nazis controlled the amount of food that was brought into the ghetto, and disease and starvation killed thousands each month.
Similar Jewish ghettos were established in cities throughout Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe during World War II. The Warsaw ghetto was the largest in Poland.
When Heinrich Himmler decided to “resettle” the Jews to the extermination camps, the Jews finally realized, based on other information that had reached them, that they were certain to die.
It was finally time to fight back. Their resistance didn’t emerge just from the desire to be free of the Nazis, but from a commitment to their very survival. After many of the Jews were deported, those remaining fought back:
An estimated 55,000 to 60,000 Jews remained in the Warsaw ghetto, and small groups of these survivors formed underground self-defense units such as the Jewish Combat Organization, or ZOB, which managed to smuggle in a limited supply of weapons from anti-Nazi Poles, and the Jewish Military Union.
On January 18, 1943, when the Nazis entered the ghetto to prepare a group for transfer to a camp, a ZOB unit ambushed them. Fighting lasted for several days before the Germans withdrew. Afterward, the Nazis suspended deportations from the Warsaw ghetto for the next few months.
By May 16, the ghetto was firmly under Nazi control, and on that day, in a symbolic act, the Germans blew up Warsaw’s Great Synagogue.
An estimated 7,000 Jews perished during the Warsaw ghetto uprising, while nearly 50,000 others who survived were sent to extermination or labor camps.
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Are we living in times different from the Jews in WWII? Do we take our freedom for granted? Are we so determined to “fit in” that we won’t fight back when we see our way of life being threatened? Do we assume that if we comply with the demands of the radical Left, somehow everything will work out? Or do we think it is a temporary blip in the threats to our values, freedoms, and beliefs?
The 21st century may be the first real threat to maintaining the American way of life. How long are we willing to watch and wait until we realize that the Left is prepared to detain us, too?
Published in Group Writing
So many (non-religious!) Jews are themselves part of the radical left. They quite mistakenly believed that Trump was a threat to their “values, freedoms, and beliefs,” when in fact it’s their compatriots. As the Bundist Jews found out–too late–their leftism will not protect them.
All good questions. Sadly there are answers that we hope are true, and answers that will be true. Everyone one of us needs to make our own decision and commit to a course whether or not anyone else takes the same course. With fortune we can avoid the rhyme of history.
When I began reading your article your question popped to mind. Very similar folks in charge, similar approach and the end will be the same, including the final end of those in charge, but there won’t be a US to rebuild it all so it’s hard to imagine what the disintegration and post disintegration will look like. They think we live in a brave new world where our betters arrange a well functioning top down place. It doest work that way and won’t even after the Chinese take over.
It’s so difficult, Rodin, to imagine what we would be called to do in these strange times. How far can we let a situation go before we must act? And are we truly prepared to act alone? Do I have that kind of courage? I hope I never have to find out.
Utterly. There is no comparison.
I agree, Zafar. And yet there are echoes that remind us that we should never make assumptions about our future.
There are indeed echoes. These people remind me of the Nazi’s in the early stages before they eliminated any competition. Is there that much difference between totalitarians? Tactics, nobody will knowingly go a full socialist fascism like the Soviets did. Complex mixed systems take time to consolidate, but as we saw, not much, which we can use if we recognize it, but it’s inevitable if we don’t. Same end.
When you’re embedded in the process, it’s hard to develop perspective, IWalton.
With respect to everyone here, I’m generally opposed to comparing anything- current or historical- to the Holocaust, because it is not comparable. Aside from the extremely important lessons learned by Jews who survived and their descendants, the most important lesson is that it is a very short fall from the heights of civilisation to the depths of barbarity.
“History never repeats itself but it does often rhyme.”
Anything is comparable with anything. Some comparisons are even useful.
Fair point.
The first time as tragedy, the second time as farce?
I’m not sure there is a 1st and 2nd time if the two items being compared don’t have enough similarities to be thought of as a sequence.
For example, one could compare the U.S. Constitutional Convention with the Holocaust, but one wouldn’t find many points of similarity between the two, and certainly not enough to consider the first item a tragedy and the 2nd a farce.
I’m in favor of people doing all the comparing and contrasting that they can, but not all comparisons are of much use in learning anything.
Fair enough. “Equating” would have been a better word.
I’ll throw my “racist” two cents in here.
I’ve always thought the Jews are a very pacifist people. That would surprise every leftist on the planet who thinks Israel is a fascist invader but then again, they have no idea what is going on. It’s not surprising that so many Jews put up little resistance to the Nazis during the Holocaust. When you look at a chart of the origins of the Jewish-Arab conflict during the British Mandate period in Palestine, you will notice that riots, terrorist attacks, and mass-killings were all perpetrated by the Arab side from 1920 till 1936.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_and_massacres_in_Mandatory_Palestine
It took some 17 years for the Jews to start fighting back, mainly through the Irgun, which today is labeled a “terrorist group” but was very mild and civil compared to what we call terrorist groups today. I once read an account by a British official serving in Palestine who described the Jews as very outspoken and argumentative, but rarely violent. He said something about the Arabs being very kind to your face, but then stabbing you in the back when you weren’t looking. If I remember correctly, the criminal records of Palestine under the Brits showed something like 6 or 7 Jews sentenced to death for murder, and 600 or 700 Arabs sentenced to death for the same thing.
Except for Israel, I don’t know of a single country that has ever existed that has ever held back from warring while getting daily rocket attacks from another country for ten years. It is almost absurd. And they’ve never even had a death penalty! They felt moved to make a single exception for one Nazi mass-murderer but I think even that took some overcoming of their instincts. My jaw has dropped every time I used to hear about Israel letting out hundreds of prisoners from their jails, many of whom were convicted mass murderers and terrorists, in exchange for one Jewish hostage, or even worse, for someone’s dead body! Can you imagine Mexican Drug cartels demanding that the U.S. empty its Federal Prisons in exchange for sending us one dead American?? It wouldn’t happen. Even under the cretinous house plant sitting in the White House right now.
It reminds me of what I read in the “Gulag Archipelago” about Stalin’s rounding up of the intellectual classes after the revolution and sending them to the Gulags. Solzhenitsyn said that these intellectuals were mostly peaceful people who were not used to violence and put up little resistance to their communist masters.
Most pacifist people, like many Jews, need a strong kick in the butt in order to get them to defend themselves against violent people.
This is what got Gina Carano in trouble with the Twitter mob. She said that the Nazis first dehumanized the Jews and then implemented their programs. The Left heard Nazi and reacted with ‘you’re calling us Nazis’. No, she was seeing early stage similarities and warning people to stop going down that path.