— by Polydamas
On October 9, 2015, Republican Presidential candidate Dr. Ben Carson was interviewed on CNN. He cogently observed that “I think the likelihood of Hitler being able to accomplish his goals would have been greatly diminished if the [Jewish] people had been armed. I’m telling you there is a reason these dictatorial people take guns first.”
In response to Dr. Carson’s comments, the Jewish Anti-Defamation League (ADL) released a statement that “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. 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.”
Dr. Carson proceeded to double down on his initial comments, claiming on ABC’s Good Morning America that the ADL’s position is “total foolishness”. He continued that “I’d be happy to discuss that in depth with anybody but it is well known that in many places where tyranny has taken over they first disarm the people. There’s a reason they disarm the people. They don’t just do it arbitrarily.”
The statement by the ADL that Jewish civilians’ possession of personal firearms would not have stopped the Holocaust reflects its statist world view. Daniel Payne’s marvelous October 12, 2015 opinion piece in The Federalist titled “Ben Carson Is Right About Nazi Gun Control” (http://bit.ly/1hEiNNY) capably dismantles the ADL’s position as a historically-inaccurate straw man’s argument. Mr. Payne appropriately concedes that “it is unlikely that a fully armed German Jewry could have stopped the merciless onslaught of the Final Solution. The program was backed by the full might of the Nazi government, and even a tightly coordinated attack by all the able-bodied Jews in Germany would have likely been futile.” Instead, Mr. Payne cogently reframes the issue that “‘If the German government hadn’t stripped the German Jewish population of arms, would it have been easier for the Jews to fight back, and would more lives have been saved?’ The answer is obviously yes. The Holocaust might not have been ‘greatly diminished,’ as Carson claimed, but there would have been a better-than-average chance that many people could have been saved, and it assuredly would have been better than nothing.”
Mr. Payne is rhetorically modest that, had the Jews not been disarmed prior to the Holocaust, “it assuredly would have been better than nothing”. The lessons of the Jewish uprising at the Warsaw Ghetto teach us that numerically-inferior civilians with even minimal firearms are capable of offering significant resistance in urban environments, holding up their better-armed attackers for significants lengths of time, and exacting a heavy price for every inch conquered. Similarly, the armed opposition by the partisans and the French resistance during World War II, the asymmetrical warfare waged by guerrilla forces throughout the 20th and early 21st centuries, and even the various recent wars of occupation demonstrate the heavy toll upon armies that can be inflicted by modestly-armed yet desperate civilians.
Although there is no way for determining with exact certainty how history could have been altered, it is quite probable that armed Jews and other persecuted minorities could have minimized or possibly even deterred the Kristallnacht attacks by the German mobs in the same way that armed Korean store owners in South-Central Los Angeles protected their stores in the early 1990s from fires and looting during the race riots in the aftermath of the Rodney King verdicts. Perhaps the Nazi leadership would have determined that, while exterminating Europe’s armed Jews was certainly possible, it did not justify the substantial additional investment of military forces, armaments, ammunition, time, and effort. More importantly, Nazi Germany could not have fought off the Allied forces for six years while also contending with domestic armed resistance by determined Jews. It is quite possible that World War II could have ended much sooner in a decisive Allied victory over Axis powers with far fewer Jewish casualties, fewer Allied dead and injured, and even fewer dead and injured among the Germans and their Axis allies.
The ADL does not own exclusive rights to the lessons of the Holocaust. It certainly appears to have a vested interest in magnifying the helplessness of European Jews in order to advocate for grand, liberal, statist solutions. Other Jewish organizations, such as Jews for the Preservation of Firearm Ownership (www.jpfo.org), have a dramatically different take on the issue that is no less legitimate than the ADL and the liberal Jewish intelligentsia.
History provides us with a far more appropriate object lesson from just a few years after the Holocaust. When five Arab armies attacked the State of Israel after its establishment in May of 1948, its citizens defended themselves with weapons, mostly rifles and pistols, that they had accumulated and secreted during the British mandate over Palestine. Had the British succeeded in completely disarming Israel’s citizenry prior to 1948, as Great Britain and Australia had done to their own citizens approximately half a century later, Israel would have never survived its War of Independence. In 1948, completely disarmed Israeli citizens could not have opted for the recommended statist solution of dialing 9-1-1 and asking the United Nations for protection from the Arab armies, which would not have timely arrived or at all. Even now, more than 65 years later, Israel cannot depend on the United Nations, the United States or any other country to protect it from its enemies. Of all people, Jews should not forget this particular lesson.
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Ben Carson Is Right About Nazi Gun Control
If the Nazi regime didn’t think Jews with guns were a threat, then why did the Nazis ban Jews from owning guns?
Daniel Payne
The Federalist
October 12, 2015
There has been a great deal of ridiculous outrage over some perfectly defensible comments Ben Carson made last week. During an interview with Wolf Blitzer, Carson was asked to clarify something he’d written in his book, “A More Perfect Union”:
German citizens were disarmed by their government in the late 1930s, and by the mid-1940s Hitler’s regime had mercilessly slaughtered six million Jews and numerous others whom they considered inferior … Through a combination of removing guns and disseminating deceitful propaganda, the Nazis were able to carry out their evil intentions with relatively little resistance.
With Blitzer, Carson added: “[T]he likelihood of Hitler being able to accomplish his goals would have been greatly diminished if the people had been armed.”
For even the most amateur of historians, Carson’s statements are obviously, objectively true: Germany in the late 1930s did indeed have a strict gun-control regime, and by the mid-1940s the German death camp machine had vaporized millions upon millions of defenseless victims, all with very little resistance from the civilian population.
History Is Even Stronger Than Ben Carson’s Telling
But Carson is only telling half of the anti-Semitic Nazi gun-control story. In addition to the disarmament that took place in the late 1930s, for about five years in the early-to-mid-1930s the Nazi Party had engaged in a massive nationwide seizure of weapons from political opponents. The Jews were predictably among the targeted groups.
In Breslau in 1933, Jews were ordered to “surrender [their] weapons forthwith to the police authorities” on the basis that “Jewish citizens have allegedly used their weapons for unlawful attacks on members of the Nazi organization and the police.” This was a regular occurrence all over Germany until the Waffengesetz of 1938, which effectively banned Jewish firearm ownership in all of Germany (though this had been something of a reality for a while, as in 1935 the Gestapo had ordered no weapons permits to be issued to Jews without the approval of the Gestapo itself).
The Nazis were also happy to exploit actual instances of Jewish quasi-insurrection. In early November of 1938, after a young Jewish man attempted to assassinate the German ambassador in Paris, a general campaign was launched to disarm the Jewry of Berlin. As the Berliner BörsenZeitung reported, Jews in Berlin found still in possession of a weapon without a “valid weapon permit” would be treated with “the greatest severity.”
So it went. The disarmament of the Jews was a political and social fact in Nazi Germany. It is uncontestable and inarguable. It was one of the many harsh realities of German Jewish life in the 1930s: if you were a Jew and you had a gun, the Nazis wanted to take it. Adolph Hitler himself knew it: “The most foolish mistake we could possibly make,” he said, “would be to allow the subject races to possess arms.” The Nazi Party was ruthlessly methodical. It knew that disarmament was a pretext to annihilation. You could not easily kill a Jew if he could easily kill you back.
F*** Off, History, We Hate Guns
So, both historically and practically, Carson is right and his clueless, hysterical critics are completely wrong. The Nazi government was a zealous disarmer of Jews, and this disarmament made it easier to eventually ship the Jews to death camps in boxcars. This is patently obvious.
Yet the general reaction has been one of almost comical obtuseness. Rabbi David Wolpe accused Carson of “blaming the victims.” Both the fashion magazine GQ and pot-smoking fartsmith Seth Rogen told Carson to “fuck off.” At The Guardian, Nigel Jones called Carson’s remarks “ignorant, offensive, and downright stupid.” The Twitterverse exploded with indignation. All of this was spectacularly witless and uninformed.
Carson’s detractors do at least have this on their side: it is unlikely that a fully armed German Jewry could have stopped the merciless onslaught of the Final Solution. The program was backed by the full might of the Nazi government, and even a tightly coordinated attack by all the able-bodied Jews in Germany would have likely been futile.
But given the realities of the Wehrmacht, the issue should not be one of, “Could a civilian militia have defeated the German army and prevented the Holocaust?” Rather, the question is this: “If the German government hadn’t stripped the German Jewish population of arms, would it have been easier for the Jews to fight back, and would more lives have been saved?”
The answer is obviously yes. The Holocaust might not have been “greatly diminished,” as Carson claimed, but there would have been a better-than-average chance that many people could have been saved, and it assuredly would have been better than nothing.
If Facts Won’t Persuade You, Try This
By the time of the Wannsee Conference, it was probably too late for anyone outside of an invading army to do anything to stop the sure march of extermination. But prior to the full implementation of the Final Solution, an armed Jewish population would almost certainly have had a positive effect on the Jewish casualty rate.
The forced-labor camps, the einsatzgruppen, some of the pogroms and ghettos, Kristallnacht—an armed Jewish population could have had a lot of success pushing back against certain elements of anti-Semitic hostility in Nazi Germany. Armed civilians might have saved a decent number of lives from the clutches of the Nazi Party. This is a fact.
But it’s a fact the Left cannot treat with: to acknowledge that Hitler disarmed the Jews in order to make them weaker opponents, and to acknowledge that the Jews, with guns, could have had moderate success fighting against the Nazis would offer legitimacy to one of the Left’s most hated boogeymen: an armed civilian populace.
Progressives refuse to believe civilian armament has any utility whatsoever. Indeed, they claim gun ownership is actually a threat to civil society and should be tightly regulated, if not banned altogether. So when Carson points out what even Hitler himself acknowledged—that Jews in Nazi Germany would have been better off with firearms instead of without them—they cannot acknowledge the sheer obviousness of his position. Their response: “Fuck you, Ben Carson.”
You cannot reach these people with logical, well-reasoned historical arguments. So instead, to all of those people who think Carson is both wrong and crazy, we can pose a simple, easy to answer question: if you could be transported back in time and assume the role of a Jew in late-1930s Poland, would you rather be disarmed—or would you rather have a gun?
Daniel Payne is a senior contributor at The Federalist. He currently runs the blog Trial of the Century, and lives in Virginia. Follow Daniel on Twitter.