Wayne La Pierre = Intellectual Lead Poisoning

I have long been opposed and offended by the efforts of conservatives, particularly the tea party crazies, to try to revise history so as to be historically inaccurate in order to conform to their failed ideology.  They are dumbing down America and trying to mislead the nation to right wing extremism.

While this is an argument that is made across the anti-gun control spectrum, it seems to be concentrated  from specifically conservative factions.  The Nazi Gun Control myth has been refuted by a number of those on the anti-gun control side, like this from GunCite.com on the Myth of Nazi Gun Control, from way back in 2001.  So, clearly NOT all anti-gun control advocates share the crazy; that kind of factual inaccuracy is unique to the right wing, and becomes more extreme the further you get into the fringe.

Those who misrepresent the Holocaust are as evil and as wrong as the Holocaust deniers. The ONLY way to prevent another Holocaust, and to fight antisemitism, is to understand correctly the lessons of history. That can only be done by knowing the facts of history - the ACCURATE facts.

Perhaps the greatest irony here is that Israel has far more restrictive gun control than the U.S. has ever contemplated, and has had it for a very long time; and they are especially restrictive about guns in the hands of Palestinians...... their gun control is even MORE strict than Hitler's in 1938, but no one on the right is comparing their gun control to Nazis.

A case in point, from the JTA, the world-wide Jewish News Service reporting on the Anti-Defamation League, a prominent pro-Jewish organization that dates back to 1913. For those of you not familiar with the ADL, while sometimes controversial, they have a long and distinguished history of opposing antisemitism.:

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) is an international non-governmental organization based in the United States. Describing itself as "the nation's premier civil rights/human relations agency", the ADL states that it "fights anti-Semitism and all forms of bigotry, defends democratic ideals and protects civil rights for all," doing so through "information, education, legislation, and advocacy."

From the JTA:

ADL calls on conservatives to keep Nazi analogies out of gun debate

January 25, 2013

WASHINGTON (JTA) -- The Anti-Defamation League called on conservatives to keep Nazi analogies out of the gun control debate.

"The idea that supporters of gun control are doing something akin to what Hitler’s Germany did to strip citizens of guns in the run-up to the Second World War is historically inaccurate and offensive, especially to Holocaust survivors and their families," Abraham Foxman, ADL's national director, said Thursday in a statement.

The statement cited the proliferation of such arguments among gun control opponents in the wake of calls for greater gun controls after last month's massacre of first graders in Connecticut by a lone gunman.

The Drudge Report headlined the White House's announcement of such proposals with mug shots of Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin and an array of conservative pundits have claimed that the Holocaust would not have been inevitable had Jews been able to bear arms.

The instances in which Jews managed to obtain arms, as they did in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943, were symbolically important but would not have headed off the Nazi machine, the ADL said.

"Gun control did not cause the Holocaust," it said. "Nazism and anti-Semitism did."

Whether Godwin's rule properly applies has everything to do with an analogy being an appropriate or correct one, or whether it is a totally bogus load of bullshit.

Wayne La Pierre's analogy, in his 1994 book, and in his public statements about gun control regarding German Jews in 1938 is not just a load of bullshit, it is a whole trainload of railroad cars loaded to overflowing with highly toxic bullshit..  Mike Godwin made his 'rule' or law to reference instances where bringing up Nazis was inappropriate to the discussion or argument at hand. It applies here because conservatives believe that opponents to gun control, like Whiney La Pierre of the NRA, was right. They use misrepresentations about the Holocaust for the purpose of selling more guns, by trying to fear monger to their base, who already too often believe crazy conspiracy theories.

Jews being prohibited from having guns had absolutely nothing to do with the Holocaust. If anything the argument could be made that we - the Allies from WW I - should never have allowed Germany to re-arm militarily again after WW I, and that enforced disarmament would have saved millions upon millions of lives.

Jews had been part of the German military in WW I which had drastically affected their segment of the population as much as any other in the roughly 2.5 million German casualties from that conflict, nearly 4% of their population. In 1933 when Hitler came to power, Jews in Germany comprised roughly 0.75% of the German population (according to the records at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum), despite the efforts of Anti-Semitism to demonize and scapegoat them for a disproportionate amount of their problems. By 1938, when Hilter relaxed gun control, except for Jews, as a result of the efforts to drive the remaining Jews out of Germany, not kill them, that number was greatly reduced.

From wikipedia, as a source more readily available online:

Before the war, the Nazis considered mass exportation of German (and subsequently the European) Jewry from Europe. Hitler's agreement to the 1938–9 Schacht Plan, and the continued flight of thousands of Jews from Hitler's clutches for an extended period when the Schacht Plan came to nothing, indicate that the preference for a concerted genocide of the type that came later did not yet exist.^[73]

Plans to reclaim former German colonies such as Tanganyika and South West Africa for Jewish resettlement were halted by Hitler, who argued that no place where "so much blood of heroic Germans had been spilled" should be made available as a residence for the "worst enemies of the Germans".^[74] Diplomatic efforts were undertaken to convince the other former colonial powers, primarily the United Kingdom and France, to accept expelled Jews in their colonies.^[75] Areas considered for possible resettlement included British Palestine,^[76] Italian Abyssinia,^[76] British Rhodesia,^[77] French Madagascar,^[76] and Australia.^[78]

Of these areas, Madagascar was the most seriously discussed. Heydrich called the Madagascar Plan a "territorial final solution"; it was a remote location, and the island's unfavorable conditions would hasten deaths.^[79] Approved by Hitler in 1938, the resettlement planning was carried out by Eichmann's office, only being abandoned once the mass killing of Jews began in 1941.

Germany was not the only country which tried to force a Jewish exodus from their borders; it was paralleled in other countries like Poland. Because of the number of Jews who fled, the remaining Jewish population, according to the extant census records,  had declined to approximately 0.5% of the German population - about half of one percent. And clearly, not all of those comprising that half of 1% would have been capable of any effective use of guns against Hitler's military; some would have been elderly or children, disabled, etc.

Further, because the treaty of Versailles, signed in 1919 rightly disarmed Germany of forearms, both military and civilian, specifically to AVOID a repeat of WW I,the number of people trained and capable of using firearms would have been an even smaller fraction of one percent. When you further look at the distribution of Jews across Germany, dispersing those few numbers even more, and then think of the larger massed military, supported by artillery and aircraft that were easily over-run by Hitler's blitzkrieg warfare, the idea of small groups of isolated individuals armed with a few handguns and shotguns being in any way effective is so blatantly ludicrous as to be laughable as a premise.  This might make for a fun premise for dystopian science fiction, or bizarre tea party revisionist history fantasy, but it is not accurate history or remotely plausible theory.

The professionally armed and trained and led military forces of entire countries were unable to stop Hitler, notably Poland in 1939, the year after Hitler relaxed the laws regulating private gun ownership in Germany except for Jews and other prohibited groups. It is worth noting regarding the invasion of Poland that this, too, was an action that was initiated by a response to violence directed at the Nazis.  In the case of the invasion of Poland, the Nazis used the Gleiwitz incident, a false flag attack on a radio station staged by Nazis pretending to be Poles as their pretext.

Clearly ANY armed resistance by the German Jews would have resulted in more of the Kristallnacht violence by civilians and by government authority, not less repression, and equally clearly, it would have been utterly ineffective. And it is incontrovertibly true that the response made by the Jews to the Nazis was a considered decision, a deliberate choice made from a variety of choices which included violent action, and not an unavoidable outcome due to an absence of firearms available to them.

For German Jews, even if they HAD been able to arm themselves with the kinds of guns available to their fellow Germans, such an effort would have been massively LESS successful than the saber-armed cavalry charge of the British Cavalry at Balaclava into the massed artillery of the Russians with particularly deadly fields of defensive fire, known as the charge of the light brigade that resulted in minor casualties to the Russians, and massive casualties to the British. In the case of the charge of the Light Brigade, miscommunication sent the cavalry to attack the wrong artillery unit; trying to wage an armed resistance to the Nazis as a deliberate choice would have simply been stupid, not the kind of error in communication that occurs in the 'fog of war'.

But more than that, the German Jews, probably quite correctly, along with Jews in other countries like Austria and Poland, deliberately CHOSE not to try to push back against Anti-Semitism with guns and violence, making the argument that to do so would have escalated the fear and hatred and violence against them at that time. The premise that guns would have helped slow or prevent the Holocaust totally ignores the event which was the catalyst for Kristallnacht, the assassination by the 17 year old German Jew, Herschel Grynszpan of Nazi foreign service officer, Ernst vom Rath, in Paris, using a revolver, in the fall of 1938. The result was the systematic destruction of Jewish businesses in Germany, attacks on Synagogues, 91 Jews killed, and another 30,000 rounded up and taken to concentration camps.

The reality is that Hitler's Nazi regime was determined at that point leading up to WW II, to drive the Jews out of Germany, to make life unpleasant, but not to kill them.  They even tried to develop a relocation plan similar to those in the U.S. who wanted to send African Americans back to Africa.  Had the Jews acted violently, either with legal or illegally obtained guns, Hitler would have had the justification to start annihilating them much sooner, as well as having ample means to do so.

This is not just my humble opinion. The notion that Jews did not CHOOSE to take this route, that they were not seeking firearms to defend themselves against the Nazis, is supported by the leading scholars of the era, including Raul Hilberg, who was himself a Jew in Austria, driven out of his home at gunpoint by Nazis. Hilberg is considered the leading authority on the effort to exterminate the Jews in Europe, with his three volume Opus, The Destruction of the European Jews  noted - from both his research and his personal experience:

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.

So the notion that had that less than half of one percent of German Jews JUST had access to guns, the course of the Holocaust would have been different is ridiculous. It might have accelerated the killing of Jews by Nazis, but it would not have prevented the Holocaust or even remotely slowed it down. Whiney La Pierre and his fellow right wing nuts not only make false claims about guns and the Holocaust, they use a fake Hitler quote to try to sell it to their history-illiterate followers.

Wayne La Pierrre - No. Wrong. Bad. Stupid. We need to push back against the dumbing down of America with the intellectual equivalent of lead poisoning our national thinking by conservatives. Shame on the Tea Partiers, the Extremists, the nutso conservatives for trying to subvert, distort, and outright lie about a tragedy that affected so many many people. That is a particularly heinous act.