Damned Tea Party! Why can't the Right Wing be honest about history? Why do they do such a sloppy job of revisionism?

I am heartily sick of the right wing nuts trying to exploit the horror of the holocaust with factual inaccuracy

The right wing nuts and the gun nuts have been combining together, running around in circles screaming, with their hair on fire.  Once again, I am ashamed of my fellow Americans on the right, and the appalling ignorance they display, as well as their belligerence towards their government and their fellow Americans.

This time it is over the issue of gun control, but we've seen it over a laundry list of pretexts. These people are angry, they are ignorant, and it would be fair to say they are angry in large part because they are ignorant, because they believe things that are not even remotely true or reasonable.

Salon - correctly - laid the blame for the lie squarely at the feet of the right wing extremists, including Wayne La Pierre of the NRA:

The NRA, Fox News, Fox News (again), Alex Jones, email chains, Joe “the Plumber” Wurzelbacher, Gun Owners of America, etc., all agree that gun control was critical to Hitler’s rise to power. Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership (“America’s most aggressive defender of firearms ownership”) is built almost exclusively around this notion, popularizing posters of Hitler giving the Nazi salute next to the text: “All in favor of ‘gun control’ raise your right hand.”

In his 1994 book, NRA head Wayne LaPierre dwelled on the Hitler meme at length, writing: “In Germany, Jewish extermination began with the Nazi Weapon Law of 1938, signed by Adolf Hitler.”

And it makes a certain amount of intuitive sense: If you’re going to impose a brutal authoritarian regime on your populace, better to disarm them first so they can’t fight back.

Unfortunately for LaPierre et al., the notion that Hitler confiscated everyone’s guns is mostly bogus. And the ancillary claim that Jews could have stopped the Holocaust with more guns doesn’t make any sense at all if you think about it for more than a minute.

University of Chicago law professor Bernard Harcourt explored this myth in depth in a 2004 article published in the Fordham Law Review. As it turns out, the Weimar Republic, the German government that immediately preceded Hitler’s, actually had tougher gun laws than the Nazi regime. After its defeat in World War I, and agreeing to the harsh surrender terms laid out in the Treaty of Versailles, the German legislature in 1919 passed a law that effectively banned all private firearm possession, leading the government to confiscate guns already in circulation. In 1928, the Reichstag relaxed the regulation a bit, but put in place a strict registration regime that required citizens to acquire separate permits to own guns, sell them or carry them.

An example of the kind of inflammatory - and inaccurate - highly emotional propaganda that they promote are images like this:

The facts are that Hitler never made this statement quoted at left, there was no change in gun control laws in 1935 about which Hitler MIGHT have made this statement, and gun control actually changed in 1938 under Hitler to become NOT more stringent, but more lenient.  Prior to this fake quotation, Germany was disarmed, both civilian and militarily, after the Treaty of Versailles ending World War I, an action forced on the German as a condition of surrender which the German government then had to enforce.

This was well before Hitler came to power, and had nothing whatsoever to do with Hitler or the Nazi party.  It was never a goal of the Nazis, it was never a plan of the Nazis, it was never a component of their planning.


In 1938, when der Fuhrer did relax the gun laws, he did not include the Jews among the groups who now could own hunting rifles, and hand guns under very limited conditions, with strict annual registration.  Possibly the most significant change was that the age limit for owning firearms was lowered from 20 to 18; but there were no military style weapons allowed.

During the time before the outbreak of WW II, however, Herr Hitler did two things that were far more significant to the subsequent events were the attempts to push Jews into willing or unwilling emigration out of Germany, and the efforts to make Germany a military power again.  There is no evidence of which I am aware that in the late twenties to mid-1930s or even the latter 1930s that the Nazis had plans for the extermination of the Jews or anyone else.  That appears to have been a development as the war began and progressed. In Mein Kampf, Hitler described separating out the Jews from all aspects of German life, essentially outlining his plan to expel them from Germany, not kill them.  Hitler was reported to have indicated an early intention to engage in genocide, according to Gerald Fleming's 1987 book, "Hitler and the Final Solution", reportedly said to a reporter at the time, but which can be taken more as idle threats and trash talk, since Hitler had no remote expectation of holding that kind of power in 1922:

Once I really am in power, my first and foremost task will be the annihilation of the Jews. As soon as I have the power to do so, I will have gallows built in rows—at the Marienplatz in Munich, for example—as many as traffic allows. Then the Jews will be hanged indiscriminately, and they will remain hanging until they stink; they will hang there as long as the principles of hygiene permit. As soon as they have been untied, the next batch will be strung up, and so on down the line, until the last Jew in Munich has been exterminated. Other cities will follow suit, precisely in this fashion, until all Germany has been completely cleansed of Jews.

What we do know is that there were different kinds of anti-semitism in Germany and in other parts of Europe, and that expressions of a desire to kill Jews was not new or unique to Nazis or Hitler.  There was also a long standing pattern of efforts, some successful, some not, where countries would periodically purge Jews from within their boarders, which was more common in practice unlike genocide. The initial purpose of the concentration camps was to 're-educate' those who did not conform, either politically and ideologically, or socially - like homosexuals who the Nazis intended to subject to brutal 'reparative therapy' to change them from being gay. In that regard they are remarkably similar to some of the anti-gay right wing nuts who engage in 'reparative therapy' that uses techniques like electrical shock to genitalia, where the Michele and Marcus Bachmann clinic only engages in allegedly psychological and emotional torture with their 'reparative therapy' techniques.

What we also know is that the assertion that gun control prohibiting Jews from owning or possessing firearms had nothing whatsoever to do with the subsequent Holocaust in which 6 million Jews were murdered, and as many as another 11 million civilians and prisoners of war, Gypsies, Homosexuals, mentally ill, handicapped, Marxists, Communists, Anarchists and other political outliers were killed.

The reality is that most of those who died, especially Jews, came from outside Germany, from as many as 35 other countries, prisoners who were transported to the concentration camps for killing or otherwise worked to death. During the time that Hitler rose to power there were less than a million Jews in Germany.

According to the U. S Holocaust museum data:

According to the census of June 16, 1933, the Jewish population of Germany, including the Saar region (which at that time was still under the administration of the League of Nations), was approximately 505,000 people out of a total population of 67 million, or somewhat less than 0.75 percent. That number represented a reduction from the estimated 523,000 Jews living in Germany in January 1933; the decrease was due in part to emigration following the Nazi takeover in January. (An estimated 37,000 Jews emigrated from Germany during 1933.)

Some 80 percent (about 400,000) of the Jews in Germany held German citizenship. The remainder were mostly Jews of Polish citizenship. Many of the Polish Jews had been born in Germany and had permanent resident status.

And the preeminent history authority on the Third Reich, author Raul Hilber, in "The Destruction of the European Jews" makes it clear that those few Jews that comprised the 0.75% (or less as more of them emigrated out of Germany before 1939) which included children and the elderly, not all people capable of fighting if they had wanted to do so for the most part didn't want to arm themselves even if they could have done so.

The reaction pattern of the Jews is characterized by almost complete lack of resistance. In marked contrast to German propaganda, the documentary evidence of Jewish resistance, overt or submerged, is very slight. On a European-wide scale the Jews had no resistance organization, no blueprint for armed action, no plan even for psychological warfare. They were completely unprepared. . . . Measured in German casualties, Jewish armed opposition shrinks into insignificance. . . . A large component of the entire [destruction] process depended on Jewish participation, from the simple acts of individuals to the organized activity in councils. . . . Jewish resistance organizations attempting to reverse the mass inertia spoke the words: "Do not be led like sheep to slaughter." Franz Stangl, who had commanded two death camps, was asked in a West German prison about his reaction to the Jewish victims. He said that only recently he had read a book about lemmings. It reminded him of Treblinka.

Then we have the right wing nuts and gun nuts who claim that if those Jews JUST HAD GUNS, things would have been different, or that the deaths of those Jews and others would somehow have been better or more noble or heroic..........who knows what. Dead is dead, and the glory that goes with a pyrrhic victory is pretty limited, and not terribly desirable in this case since the resistance tended to be long on the pyrrhic part and very short on any victory.

For example, we see the right routinely exaggerate the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto uprising, as noted in a Salon article, The Hitler gun control lie

Gun rights activists who cite the dictator as a reason against gun control have their history dangerously wrong By Alex Seitz-Wald

Besides, Omer Bartov, a historian at Brown University who studies the Third Reich, notes that the Jews probably wouldn’t have had much success fighting back. “Just imagine the Jews of Germany exercising the right to bear arms and fighting the SA, SS and the Wehrmacht. The [Russian] Red Army lost 7 million men fighting the Wehrmacht, despite its tanks and planes and artillery. The Jews with pistols and shotguns would have done better?” he told Salon.

Proponents of the theory sometimes point to the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising as evidence that, as Fox News’ Judge Andrew Napolitano put it, “those able to hold onto their arms and their basic right to self-defense were much more successful in resisting the Nazi genocide.” But as the Tablet’s Michael Moynihan points out, Napolitano’s history (curiously based on a citation of work by French Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson) is a bit off. In reality, only about 20 Germans were killed, while some 13,000 Jews were massacred. The remaining 50,000 who survived were promptly sent off to concentration camps.

Robert Spitzer, a political scientist who studies gun politics and chairs the political science department at SUNY Cortland, told Mother Jones’ Gavin Aronsen that the prohibition on Jewish gun ownership was merely a symptom, not the problem itself.

and this further quote from the same source:

Bartov added that this misreading of history is not only intellectually dishonest, but also dangerous.  “I happen to have been a combat soldier and officer in the Israeli Defense Forces and I know what these assault rifles can do,” he said in an email.

He continued: “Their assertion that they need these guns to protect themselves from the government — as supposedly the Jews would have done against the Hitler regime — means not only that they are innocent of any knowledge and understanding of the past, but also that they are consciously or not imbued with the type of fascist or Bolshevik thinking that they can turn against a democratically elected government, indeed turn their guns on it, just because they don’t like its policies, its ideology, or the color, race and origin of its leaders.”

So then we have the insurrectionist-wannabees, the 'from my cold dead hands' gun junkies, the jack-asses like the Security Company CEO who threatened to start shooting people, and the idiots like Sharron Angle who ran for Harry Reid's senate seat that boasted that if the right wing nuts didn't get their way at the ballot box they would resort to the bullets in their ammo boxes -- which was clearly all bullshit. And of course we have the various 'patriot' movement militias who are anything but real patriots or legitimate militias, which is why they have to mislabel themselves, because the truth is too embarrassing.  Consistently they start out full of bluster and bullshit, and then they have to start walking it back as hard and as fast as they can peddle. Here is the CEO example:

So while this guy makes a lot of noise about what he's going to do to people "cummin' fer his gunz", the reality is that this guy has lost his gun permits due to a 'material likelihood of risk to the public'.  This guy, and the other gun nuts like him are wrong. The 2nd Amendment is consistent with the rest of the U.S. Constitution, including Article 3, Section 3,

 Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.

which makes it treason to take up arms against the government, and which specifies the death penalty, the ONLY place in the constitution to do so.  Further the courts, who unlike this ignoramus, are qualified and have the right to make determinations about what is consistent with the constitution, have upheld gun bans like the one in Washington DC that has gone through the test of federal courts banning both assault style/military style firearms, and expanded capacity magazines. And the reality that blows away the argument that gun confiscation results in tyranny and people being hauled off to the gas chamber is shown to be the false argument by the actions of most of the nations of the civilized world that permit only the most limited gun ownership - including Israel, which allows only a single hand gun in private hands, and then only if you can prove a legitimate need for one. Part of the error in thinking of the 'gun nutz', the tea party crazies, and the other wacko right wing extremists and radical domestic terrorists are that they have omitted from their education the reality that the founding fathers did not support their interpretation of the 2nd Amendment.  In point of fact, the continued existence of the militias referenced in the 2nd Amendment had to do entirely with not only defense from external foreign enemies, but to put down the kinds of insurrection that they fools contemplate, as they did with Shay's rebellion and the Whiskey rebellion.  The original articles of confederation were not strong enough to hold the country together when every crackpot with a black powder weapon could decide to start shooting up the country over a personal difference of opinion, so the founding fathers returned to the drawing board to make come up with a stronger agreement to prevent that from toppling the government of the new nation.  In point of fact, the founding fathers had little to no tolerance for any such action as described by Mr. Yeager, Ms. Angle, or the rest of the right wing extremists. The reality is that if these crazy fools start shooting at their fellow Americans over gun control, they will lose their guns forever, and they will be looking at a range of penalties that will include time behind bars, or possibly their lives for attacking our government and our citizens.  It is worth noting here that Timothy McVeigh was executed for the militia movement inspired attack on the Murrah building in Oklahoma City, and that Terry Nichols is behind bars for the rest of his life for attacking the federal government, and the citizens who it represents and protects. If the militant wackos, the belligerent fools, and the angry violent right wing gun nuts want a fight, like our founding fathers, we are resolute. Bring it; you will lose.