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Twelve Million Cold, Dead Hands
On Thursday, Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson sat for an interview on CNN with Wolf Blitzer (the relevant exchange begins at 6:48):
Carson’s views were quickly highlighted (and distorted) by liberal media, with headlines such as:
- “Ben Carson Says Guns May Have Stopped Holocaust” [BBC]
- “Ben Carson Suggests Holocaust Would Have Been Less Likely If Jews Were Armed” [ABC]
- “Ben Carson Blames Holocaust On Gun Control” [Huffington Post]
- “Ben Carson Says Holocaust Would Have Been ‘Greatly Diminished’ if Jews Had Guns” [TIME]
- “Ben Carson Suggests Holocaust Might Have Been Stopped If Jewish People Had Guns” [The Independent]
- “Ben Carson Says Gun Control To Blame For Holocaust” [Telegraph]
The Anti-Defamation League also weighed in. “Ben Carson has a right to his views on gun control, but the notion that Hitler’s gun-control policy contributed to the Holocaust is historically inaccurate,” said Jonathan Greenblatt, National Director of the organization. “The small number of personal firearms available to Germany’s Jews in 1938 could in no way have stopped the totalitarian power of the Nazi German state.”
Maybe not. But I once met a German Holocaust survivor who said that his biggest regret was that he complied with the law when Jewish gun ownership was outlawed. Never, he said, would he go unarmed again.
Survivors who migrated to Palestine shared this sentiment. Syrian Arab attacks on Jewish settlements prompted the formation of the Jewish self-defense league, or Haganah, which evolved into the modern-day Israel Defense Forces. Palestinian Jews would seek peace, but if necessary, they would defend themselves — with guns. This ethos is central to the modern State of Israel.
Today Israel finds itself in a new wave of Palestinian Arab terrorism. Hour by hour, there is news across the country of murders and attempted murders with guns, with stones, with firebombs, with knives, with screwdrivers, with vegetable peelers. In many cases, security personnel with guns were nearby and were able to respond quickly. In others, responses were longer in coming.
It’s important to note, though, that Israeli notions of self-defense have been collective rather than individual. To own a gun for self-defense, Jewish Israelis must meet strict permitting requirements, which include a demonstration of need. Anyone granted a permit is allowed only a single firearm. So it’s noteworthy that Israeli attitudes may be changing. Nir Barkat, the mayor of Jerusalem — who tackled a terrorist himself earlier this year — is encouraging Jewish residents of his city with permits to carry their weapons all the time. “One advantage that Israel has is that there are quite a few ex-members of military units with operational combat experience…. Possessing weapons increases the confidence of residents, who know that in addition to police there are many people who are not afraid to intervene. If we look at the statistics in Jerusalem and elsewhere, we see that aside from the police, civilians carrying weapons have foiled terror attacks. They will increase the likelihood of fast intervention.”
This proactive approach security has a respectable pedigree in Jewish history and theology. “If one comes to kill you, arise and kill him first,” exhorts the Talmud (BT Sanhedrin 72a), and gives examples of rabbis who did just that (BT Berakhot 58a). The rabbinic tradition understands — as did the authors of the Declaration of Independence — that we are all born with God-given rights to life and liberty. And moreover, that those rights are meaningless without the further right to forcibly resist those who seek to murder or enslave us. None of us, Jew or gentile, is required to be a victim.
Ben Carson, in his defense of gun rights, appears to understand this well. Unfortunately, the elites at the heights of journalism, government, and culture — our President among them — appear not to. Perhaps someday they will learn. In the meantime, those of us who truly value freedom will continue to cling to our guns and defend our right to keep them. Because without them, the phrase “Never again” is not much more than an empty slogan.
Published in Guns, History
I disagree. Because then there was all of World War II to hide the continuing Holocaust.
Churchill basically gave up trying to save France from Hitler. He decided to write it off.
No, they could have slowed it down. But help was not coming.
Right, but they were able to hide the evidence of the Holocaust because there was no resistance. If there was an armed, potentially organized resistance operating from the start, it would have been much more difficult for the Nazis to cover up. It’s possible, maybe certain, that help wouldn’t have come, but even if it hadn’t, the resistance would still have weakened Germany.
Agreed – 1,000 times.
The Nazis were not generally popular (in Germany!) and they realized this, as is made abundantly clear in the new Goebbels biography. If you look at the mounting historical evidence the Nazis held power by a very interesting combination of acquiescence, short-term economic success (with an expanded welfare state), controlling information, and the threat of terror with real examples to punctuate the threat. They also purposely divided German society and played the elements off each other as best they could, and yet, they didn’t have a solid hold on the German public. The problem with the German public was a toxic mixture of economic failure, politics as public theater (with violence, racism, and under-mining of their own government/constitution as pro forma), a culture that refused to except much of what had happened in World War I, and a national sense of self-pity at that historical/political moment that allowed them to be trapped by the terror element of the Nazis once in power.
The general unwillingness of Jews to fight back, the general public’s desire to end strife, Nazi intimidation, and a general culture of obedience and public order was devastating. Yet, the Nazi knew they could lose their grip at any moment if the war went against them. Their ideologically incoherent anti-Semitism became a toxic trap when they began to pursue their ideas via mass-murder in a political and psychological gambit to entrap an entire society in the guilt of genocide to ensure the will to fight and to in some way “make-up for” the mounting military reverses of 1941-1944; before totally collapse came home as a reality for even the most ardent true believer, by which point it was too late for the majority of Jews in their territory.
I think the amount of money, energy, material, and lack of support that the Holocaust soaked up helped destroy the Third Reich, the waste of railway resources alone.
A healthy tradition of public dissent, plus a more distrustful minority with arms could have done much. And the majority of Germans knew something awful was happening, if not exactly when, where or to what extent as the increasing number of private diaries from Oma’s attic are being made available to historians.
MarciN is right about the general sheeplike behavior of the Jews. But there were plenty of times and places where people DID try to resist. Had they been armed, they would have stood much better odds.
As it is, the Warsaw Ghetto uprising happened with almost no weapons available to the Jews under assault, and the Germans committed substantial resources to crushing it – at a time when those forces would have been quite handy on the Eastern Front.
Carson’s point is in the here and now: an armed populace is capable of making a police officer or soldier think twice before they carelessly abuse citizens.
I would agree that today, if we are speaking about an educated populace, with the benefit of our knowledge of Hitler, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, Stalin, Mao Zedong, Castro, and Saddam Hussein, that that group would be able to stop a Holocaust or genocide that was moving from neighborhood to neighborhood, town to town, city to city, if that group were armed. I believe that is possible.
I do not believe that anyone in Europe or the United States had that knowledge prior to western civilization’s experience confronting Hitler and the Nazis.
I saw an amazing film clip on the History Channel of Americans surrendering their gold when they ordered to do so–including jewelry and family heirlooms–that was bone chilling.
The belief that the government was worthy of our respect was worldwide at the time of World War II. It was a byproduct of democracy, that these were our peers who were doing their duty.
The lesson we need to learn from the Holocaust is how to recognize it when it starts.
We’re still having trouble with that.
You’re not supposed to compare anything with the Holocaust until the death count is the same.
iwe is right. There were many who fought back.
Good example was the subject of the little known movie Defiance.
Some here will laugh at this: my husband and I were just talking about this, and he thinks I’m totally wrong, that if the Jews had had their own weapons, they could have fought off a lot of Nazis. :)
Ricochet at home. :)
Forgive me, I didn’t mean to imply that none fought back, I thought that had been covered already in the discussion of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. I meant “general unwillingness” and was focusing on within Germany during the run-up to the Holocaust in its most virulent form.
Defiance was a great film, I saw it in the theaters when it came out.
In Poland and the Ukraine there were those, also Italy as the newly published works of Primo Levi reminded me when I read a review of them this afternoon. I don’t want to detract from those who fought, suffered and died, nor did I mean it as a moral condemnation of those who didn’t resist hoping for the best that turned out to be the nightmare of the Lager.
And my comment on sentimentality was about the non-Jewish German population 1918-1933.
I agree with everything you said and don’t personally have a problem with Carsons example.
My point is the politics. Carson is brilliant but he has not yet learned how to vet his own words through the media prism before stating them.
I agree. I don’t think the nazi confiscation of guns is a poor example — to the contrary.
But I still would have loved it if Carson went into the Democrats in Dixie taking guns away from the freedmen. It might have been nice to see Wolff Blitzer speechless…
I’m sorry I suggested that connection. I did not mean to.
Since the time of the Pharoahs and before there have been brutal and sadistic dictators.
The Holocaust was different in some significant ways.
That said, it does have some important similarities. The point I was trying to make is that the one thing western civilization can get from studying the Holocaust is how to predict the point at which these dictators need to stopped. I hope we figure this out soon. Pot Pot, Idi Amin, Mao Zedong, Stalin, Castro, and Saddam Hussein came after Hitler. Clearly we haven’t learned how to deal with these evil tyrants yet.
No. Sadly. Even if the Jews had been armed, so would all of their neighbors. And their neighbors were—at best—indifferent. The best defense against another Holocaust is the refusal of a whole people to allow any sub-group to be targeted (see Danish Jews, Rescue Of). If the French people had refused to allow it to happen, French Jews would have survived in much greater numbers.
The huge advantage we have today that the Germans (Gentile or Jewish) did not have is a historical example of how bad things can really be.The Holocaust was actually unprecedented and, comparisons with the horrifying Stalinist regime notwithstanding, remains essentially unique. So the German Jews who might have left Germany didn’t, because they believed that this, like all previous waves of anti-Semitism, would pass. Shooting your way out wasn’t really a choice—especially since you would then have to shoot your way into a country that refused to take in refugees. The Warsaw Ghetto uprising, while splendid and inspiring, isn’t really a model for what ordinary Jews in Germany in the 30s could have done, given that they lacked the one piece of information abundantly available by 1943 to the inmates of the ghettos—namely that Chelmno was the final destination. Chelmno, Treblinka, Auschwitz—none of these existed in the 30s.
Indeed, the Holocaust wasn’t a fully-formed plan from the get-go; it developed over time, with the goal of the Nazis evolving from “encourage them all to leave” to “deport them to Madagascar” to “work them to death” to “murder them wholesale.” At what point in this slow ratcheting-upward of pressure would any individual Jew (or, for that matter, communist, homosexual, Jehovah’s Witness or other member of a targeted group) feel it was the right time to break out the Saturday Night Special? Given that even in the Warsaw Ghetto, there were fierce arguments over the advisability, timing and strategy for an uprising; and this was when German intentions were at their clearest.
I don’t blame your friend for never taking his physical safety for granted again. I’d feel that way, too. But his safety —the safety of all of us, really—ultimately depends on what we as a society countenance or refuse to countenance, and what risks we are willing to take to ensure that we don’t ever find ourselves sliding down that particular slippery slope again.
I am entirely in agreement with your point. I was just being sarcastic about the way the issue is often treated public discourse.
This is the point I’ve been trying unsuccessfully to make all afternoon. Thank you. :)
Counterfactual history is fraught with difficulty, and nothing anyone says about it can be conclusive. But having said that, I have to say that I think what Ben Carson had to say about guns in Nazi Germany is correct.
He is not saying that with guns the Jews would have defeated the Nazis. I don’t understand him to be saying that a significant number of Jews would have been able to save themselves from the death camps.What I hear him saying is that the people’s lack of guns makes it much easier for a tyranny to work its will, and that the tyrant, knowing this, makes it his first order of business to take those guns away.
I don’t see how he is wrong. I think that others have distorted and extended his comments to make it seem that he made claims that are more difficult to defend.
double post
I agree with that. I have no quibble with Ben Carson. At the moment, he is very near the top of my would-like-to-see-as-president list. :)
I react negatively to statements that the Jews should have fought harder. I have heard people use that as an excuse for the inaction of the rest of the world. And I’ve seen countries go to extraordinary lengths to absolve themselves of responsibility.
Didn’t The Anti-Defamation League bemoan all the domestic terrorism being waged by “anti-government extremists”? Would love to hear how The Holocaust was the fault of anti-government types.
I agree with this post, but take issue with the title. Large numbers of the Jewish victims were children or otherwise incapable of using a weapon. The more important point, that I think we need to emphasize in these arguments, is that we aren’t arguing that every Jew should have been armed, but that they should’ve had the choice to be. It’s easy to fall into the trap of looking like a loon who wants each citizen to possess a military-grade arsenal. Similarly, it should be emphasized that having weaponry is not a guarantee against tyranny and genocide, but what chance do you have otherwise? The Jewish (and other) victims likely would have died either way, but at least being armed would have given them a means to resist.
This is more important than some people seem to realize (I don’t mean Ricochet people).
I’m reminded of a line I heard from a guy who came from a military family, a father who was an ex-marine, if memory serves, and several grown sons and their families. The father told the sons, regarding the possibility of a Muslim takeover of the US someday, “Sons, if they come to put burqas on your women, you had all better be dead.”
Actually, it was, at least in the sense that the Nazis were very much against the form and function of the existing government. Hitler tried to overthrow it in the Beer Hall Putsch, and having manipulated himself into power began dismantling the Weimar Republic from the inside, and grooming the country for systematic violence along with war. Indeed, that’s the one, true genius I saw in Hitler—his realization that it was all about reading the people, and incrementally conditioning them to accept more and more terror and violence.
There are a lot of lessons to be learned in studying how the Nazis came to power and how their ideology and actions evolved. (Frankly, I haven’t found anything yet that really indicates that owning guns would have made much difference and, like MarciN, I react viscerally to it because it sounds like blaming the victim (not Ben Carson, that is, but as a general rule). )
I agree in principle with MWTA.
I’d say that the first issue was “polite” anti-Semitism, which was not confined to Germany, by the way, but present to varying degrees in the rest of Europe and the U.S. as well. So: watch out for “polite” bias and bigotry. This is, incidentally, what the lefties are attempting to counter with their excessive zeal for political correctness, bless their little hearts and pointy heads
Next, I’d say the Nazis—having encouraged and intensified violence against Jews then simply did not allow the normal mechanisms of protection (police, courts) to act for them. If Jews had been armed, they could have shot their civilian attackers…and then what? The police and courts would arrest and punish them, and use their self-defense as further justification for brutality (which indeed is exactly what happened when Jews, communists, etc. did defend themselves).
Non-enforcement and non-response are the most common complaints about the police among inner-city blacks, for example, far more than complaints of excessive policing, and the result is a felt need for self-defense; e.g. guns. The epidemic of gun violence in the inner-cities should be aggressively addressed, not dismissed as “thugs killing thugs” on the one hand, or ignored completely in favor of a focus on Ferguson on the other.
Then there was the ever-tightening set of restrictions on whether and how Jews could earn a living, where they could live, eat, walk, send their kids to school… and the effect was to separate them more and more from their gentile neighbors, not just physically but in the sort of socio-economic ways that subtly undercut compassion. Formerly “normal” prosperous, well-dressed Jewish neighbors become increasingly shabby, humiliated, anxious and depressed, and then they are moving across town to live in one of the Jew Houses…out of sight and out of mind of those who might have stuck up for them when they seemed more “like us.”
To me, this is a warning to be very wary of any attempt to divide the American people into us/them categories, either rhetorically or—God forbid—legally or physically. This doesn’t mean the differences between us aren’t important, even very, very important. It means that there has to be a level of ultimate solidarity —the solidarity demonstrated by rescuers, and by the Danes as a whole, who refused to allow those initial steps of separation by which the Nazis inaugurated their program first in Germany and later in each of the conquered countries.
The Danes, incidentally, did this with sheer determination; they had no real means to resist the Nazis with guns. Instead, the leaders (including the King, the Communists, the Social Democrats, the police, academics, clergy, all the groups that flunked this moral test so utterly in Germany) exploited every means at their disposal to defend their Jewish citizens. That’s what I mean by “let’s be Danish.”
Lastly—because I’ve spent probably too much time studying the Holocaust (and before that, the Civil Rights era)—this is why I’m inclined to see and celebrate racial diversity, for example the splendidly diverse line-up of Republican candidates, and the fact that we elected a black president and could do so again, if Ben Carson wins. I doubt he will… but I need not doubt it because he’s black; isn’t it wonderful, given American and European and, indeed, human history in all its grimness, that we can honestly say this? What a great country we live in. Let’s keep it.