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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
The Holocaust should not be off limits to use as an object lesson for contemporary moral and political issues. It can be very instructive regarding the nature of evil, the ability of otherwise decent people to turn a blind eye, the effect of dehumanizing language, the powers that government should and shouldn’t have, and a thousand other things.
I don’t like the corollary to Godwin’s Law which holds that whoever first mentions Nazis or Hitler loses the argument. That might apply if the issue is Bill Belichick or Time-Warner Cable, but if the issue is ISIS or Putin or Hezbollah or North Korea the comparison might be apt and valuable.
When Ben Carson gives an opinion about why the Nazis confiscated civilian firearms that is a valid point that may or may not be convincing on the contemporary issue of gun rights. But there is no reason in the world why he can’t use the example. It is not insulting. It is not trivializing. It is not nonsensical.
His critics, mostly on the left, who claim it is these things should man up and refute him on the facts.
I really do wish he’d do this, and then end it with a “Gotcha” and laughter.
“I was just fooling with ya. You know only Leftists pull that.”
I’m afraid I didn’t have time to read all the comments. But, there’s this:
The Soft Bigotry of Ben Carson – The New York Times
This is why I would never read “Pravda on the Hudson” (with thanks to Dr. Rahe).
My local rag today ran an Op-Ed suggesting that Ben Carson (“and his confederate flag”) should be disowned, and anyone who disagreed with that decision should be expelled from the city limits.
Anti-aircraft fire comes to those who are over the target….
Ben Carson may not be the candidate for being the actual president, but he is the best candidate for improving the level of campaign discourse. At least lately he has been.
From comment #55:
“The Move group deserved to be attacked, as they were shooting at cops and keeping children in horrendous living conditions. But unfortunately for the mayor (a black man, Wilson Goode) the incendiary bomb got out of control and burned down an entire city block and killed a bunch of people in the Move houses.”
Whence does the Mayor of Philadelphia derive the authority to conduct an aerial bombardment against citizens of his city? It matters not how disreputable MOVE was or who was a member. The Mayor of Philly and his upper level advisors should have been imprisoned for this travesty.
Hard to argue against that.
I will add that the MOVE group was more than disreputable. They committed murders. They shot at police who came to evict them. They were guilty of who knows how many lesser crimes and of creating nuisances in their neighborhood of all types: noise, stench, rats, you name it.
Something needed to be done. This happened about 8 years prior to the Waco siege, so they didn’t have that event to learn from.
I’m not arguing, but is there a difference in dropping a bomb, as they did, and simply shooting the heck out of the place, as was done with the Symbionese Liberation Army that had previously kidnapped Patty Hearst, and in the process setting their hide-out on fire and burning some of them alive?
Yes, he has identified the problem as the media — I’m all for this approach. I only wish that he would attack them as not being professional. This is where the media are weakest. They are not professionals — that’s the issue. They are partisans but they lie about that simple easy to see fact.
Brilliantly put. I wish I had wrote that. Ben Carson’s whole “anti-islam deal” was essentially saying that Islam as it exists now has a big problem with the freedom enshrined in the American Constitution. Rather than deal with Islam’s problem with freedom everyone wanted to attack Ben Carson.
It would have been better for the world if every liberal writer had written essay about how Islam can further liberal freedom through reinterpreting the Q’ran.
It’s not just German Jews who learned this lesson….
“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?… The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If…if…We didn’t love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation…. We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.” ― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
So I will not give up my weapons. No matter what Executive Order, Law or Constitutional Amendment is enacted.
They don’t want to disarm everyone. They want a State monopoly on force, one they believe they will (probably rightly) control.
Do you happen to know in which of his works this quote appeared?
Don’t think it’s from a book. I believe it’s from an interview.
The ADL tool referred to Carson’s statement as “historically inaccurate.” But what Carson was talking about was not a matter of history as it happened, it was a counterfactual, a hypothetical situation. It was analogous not to “How many tanks did France have in 1940,” but rather to “What would have happened if Charles de Gaulle had been put in charge of building a strong French armored force?”
We cannot know for certain what would have happened if German Jews had had guns and used them, but I think it is reasonable to think it could have changed history. “The totalitarian power of the German state” was not the same in 1933 or 1936 or even 1938 as it was in 1940. Fierce Jewish resistance to all anti-Semitic violence would certainly have had an impact, for one thing, it would have undercut the Nazi meme that Jews were weak cowards interested only in money.
Also, there were a considerable number of Jews who had served in the German Army during WWI and were quite familiar with the use of firearms.
Axeman, thank you for a measured response to my provocations.
Yes. Bombarding a city is a military function. The Governor if not the POTUS needs to be part of that decision and the military needs to be running things. Shooting up a hide out is a matter for local police, assuming that they are under active attack from within.
I worked in Philly during the MOVE debacle. It went from nothing to a burned out block and a dozen deaths in no time flat. There is no excuse for the actions of the PPD yet this matter has disappeared down the memory hole in ways that less egregious offenses–say, Kent State–have not. One wonders, is this because the Mayor of Philly was a (corrupt, ignorant, in-way-over-his-head) black political hack, rather than a (scared, threatened, in-way-over-his-head) white National Guard captain?
Wish I knew which one.
Last time I tried to find a Solzhenitsyn quote on the internet I was not successful, even though his Letter to the Fourth National Congress of Soviet Writers is printed inside the covers of an edition of the English translation of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.
I think that is right. A white mayor having dropped that bomb would have received a whole lot more blowback. He might have, as you earlier suggested, ended up in prison.
This is the problem.
Seldom do we have literally nothing left to lose. It took time for the inhabitants of the Warsaw Ghetto to realize that the choice really was “die now, fighting, or die later” and even then, there were ghetto dwellers who hoped and argued for another way.
The passengers on Flight 93, on 9/11, only knew that their moment had come because the hijackers had allowed them to keep their cell phones, and thus learn the fate of the other two planes.
Whenever we talk about what other victims should have done or could have done in the face of a threat —Adam Lanza appearing at the door of the first grade classroom, the Oregon shooter asking the Christians to identify themselves, a given Jewish or Russian or other victim of totalitarian terror hearing the knock at the door— we are attempting to make a parable out of a moment in someone’s real life.
If you don’t mind my saying so, these are attempts to counter the awareness of our own potential helplessness and vulnerability. “That wouldn’t happen to me! They wouldn’t be able to make me kneel on the edge of a pit to be shot; I’d fight them!” And we imagine heroic defeat at least, if not victory.
There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with this. In fact, visualizing yourself doing something is a kind of preparation, even training, and it can actually make us more effective in fact, not just in fantasy.
Still, unless we are pretty scrupulous about investigating the facts of the case, we can easily get the moral of the story wrong. By the time the Jews were being rounded up and taken to the camps—with their faint hopes being deliberately and artificially maintained, in many cases, all the way to the door of the crematory—they had already been stripped of work, social standing, family and neighborhood support, food and medical care. What valuables they owned were either stolen from them, or were sold for a pittance. Unless you have been locked in a boxcar for three days without water, it is hard to imagine how you could bring yourself to exchange your wedding ring for a glass of water; how many days would your kids go without food before you’d sell any guns the government allowed you to keep?
Until you have lived under real oppression, real terror, it is difficult to say with any certainty how you would respond, or even how you should respond.
In Germany, if a Jew had fired on an SS group that had arrived to take him and his children away…would Hitler have hesitated longer than the Mayor of an American city to bomb and burn the building?
The Nazis had a lot of memes about Jews. One of them was that the Jews were perfidious instigators of violence. Kristallnacht was “provoked” by the shooting of a German diplomat by a Jew, Herschel Greynszpan, in despair at the deportation of his parents. Two days of pogrom left a hundred Jewish Germans dead, hundreds more beaten, raped and robbed, and over 250 synagogues destroyed.
Then —still claiming that the shooting of the diplomat had been evidence of treasonous Jewish conspiracy—Hitler had 30,000 Jewish men rounded up and incarcerated at the new concentration camps where they were brutalized and tortured. Goring forced the Jewish community to pay a billion reichsmarks to pay for the damage done during the riots.
This marked a pattern in how the Germans dealt with attempts at resistance by Jews and others throughout: attacks on Germans by Jews and escapes from custody were met with horrifying punishment for the perpetrator, and mass retaliations against innocents. When Reinhardt Heydrich was assassinated, Hitler had an entire Czech town destroyed on the basis of a single document mentioning this town found at the scene.
So tell me again how the Jews could have resisted Hitler?
I also have ancestors who say they left Germany in the early 30s because they saw it coming, though they were Catholic by birth (and Lutheran in practice), not Jewish. Given their differing situation, I’d wager it’s unlikely they saw “it” identically. But it would be interesting to know how much of what they saw coming was in common.
I’ve inherited some experience from my parents who experienced both the Soviet Terror and Nazi Germany. Step one ALWAYS starts with “disarm the kulaks” ( or the Jews or the Tea Party). So when they tell you to turn in your guns, it’s time…..
They would have lost, but they could have taken some of the Nazi bastards with them.
In retrospect, the fact that the Nazis exacted extreme vengeance for resistance doesn’t mean the resistance would not have ben worth it. They all died anyway, except for the ones who were enslaved and starved to near death.
Why should they tell you again when they already told you once?
The following is fictional, but then so are your proposed scenarios as well everyone else’s. It’s from the Wikipedia page about the Novocherkassk massacre.
I’ve watched most of the long TV dramatization based on the massacre. I can’t understand it all because there are no English subtitles, but the parts based on the actual historical record are not too hard to follow. There seems to be some fuzziness about whether the victims had guns; but mostly they were unarmed.
Kate Braestrup:
“This marked a pattern in how the Germans dealt with attempts at resistance by Jews and others throughout: attacks on Germans by Jews and escapes from custody were met with horrifying punishment for the perpetrator, and mass retaliations against innocents. When Reinhardt Heydrich was assassinated, Hitler had an entire Czech town destroyed on the basis of a single document mentioning this town found at the scene.”
I’m aware of the Lidice atrocity, also there were retaliations against the civilian population in other countries in which there were Resistance movements. Would you conclude from this that the various European resistance groups should have done nothing, just waited for the Allied armies to rescue their countries? Do you think Churchill’s establishment of Special Operations Executive, with the mission to “set Europe ablaze” by instigating and supporting local resistance movements, was mistaken?
Of course he would not have bombed or burnt an apartment building. Jews in Germany lived in mixed apartment buildings, and Hitler was highly sensitive to the general contentment of German civilians.
What difference? They were coming to take them to death camps.
As was mentioned already by Ricochetti David Sussman; if you want to know what is ‘possible’ go read the book ‘Defiance’ by Nechama Tec.
These brothers did the ‘impossible’ against impossible odds. The movie plays a little loose with the facts but the book tells that the facts are frank and brutal and the options were few to none, so they did what they had to do.
Guns in the hands of people willing to stand up for themselves and their families and friends do make a difference and they make doing evil as difficult as possible.
Thought experiment:
You have a person living in your home that you believe is psychotic with a high probability of committing a murder. You can’t get him out of the house for the foreseeable future.
Question: Would you prefer to have a gun in your bedroom to protect yourself? Or would you worry even more that the psychotic might use the gun against you.?
False premise. You carry.