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You are here: Home / Open Threads / Bad Historical Analogy Theater: Jewish Armed Resistance Against the NAZIs

Bad Historical Analogy Theater: Jewish Armed Resistance Against the NAZIs

by Adam L Silverman|  October 9, 201511:06 pm| 114 Comments

This post is in: Open Threads

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Anne Laurie brought our attention to Dr. Carson’s recent comments regarding Jewish Armed resistance, or the lack thereof, against the NAZIs during World War II. Earlier today, between a conference call and doing some other work related stuff I came across Steve M’s much fuller treatment on the topic. Steve traces the history of the assertion that had Jewish Germans been allowed to keep and bear arms, then they would have been able to either provide significant resistance to the NAZIs. This argument originated, as Steve noted, with the founders of Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership (JPFO) who did an analysis of the German firearms laws and restrictions – both those from the late 1920s and the latter set from the late 1930s.

I recently dealt with this at another website – this is the unplanned guest post that I have mentioned a couple of times in comments. I want to follow up and address this here too and I’m adapting some of what I had written at the link above, as well as adding some new information. There are really three different issues to be addressed here: 1) is there really a historical analogy between the German context in the interwar period?; 2) what exactly was the context for Jewish Germans and based on that context would more permissive German firearms laws have made any difference?; and 3) was their actually any Jewish Armed resistance against the NAZIs during WW II? I’m not going to take these in order, in fact I’m going to go backwards (and jump around a bit) – it’ll make more sense this way.

The US Holocaust Memorial Museum actually covers the topic of armed Jewish resistance against the NAZIs. This is how it is treated on its website:

http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005441

and here:

http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005213

So to does the Yad Vashem in Israel:

http://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/holocaust/about/07/resistance.asp

There was Jewish and non-Jewish armed resistance against the NAZIs. However, most of this resistance came late, after 1942, when it became very, very clear that the Final Solution was NOT simply ethnic cleansing through relocation, but ethnic cleansing through industrial scale extermination. Even where there was armed resistance, such as the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, it was not effective for very long. And while I’m a big fan and supporter of the right of self defense, especially in extremis, in this case it simply would have prolonged the inevitable.

The reason for this is that the NAZIs were first fielding the powers of the state as they consolidated their control, then that of an actual military with the resources of the German state. Ultimately they were also able to utilize the resources of many of the states they had conquered. And all of this would eventually be directed to the support of the military, its needs, and its dual mission of conquering Europe and executing the Final Solution. So we know and can document as a fact there was significant, if somewhat belated resistance. This includes both the Jewish armed resistance and that of both non-Jewish Germans and non-Jewish citizens of other European countries. Some of this is the partisan activity of underground and irregular forces, but it also include the actual armed forces of a number of European states. These actual armies and militaries where unable to stop the NAZIs in one on one fights, so what chance would armed Jewish Germans have really had? Very little.

There are several reasons for this. Despite limiting formal party affiliation for several years out of internal security concerns, the NAZIs still managed to mobilize the vast majority of German society either explicitly or implicitly behind their activities. This is, essentially, the Goldhagen thesis, but even if the cooption of German state, society, and citizenry was not as complete as Goldhagen argues, it was still sufficient to have rendered any real Jewish German resistance futile. The NAZIs had a state and society as a resource, which allowed them to mobilize the power of the state through force – using all elements of national power (diplomatic, informational, military, economic, financial, intelligence, and law enforcement/DIME-FIL) to achieve their ends.

Prior to Kristallnacht in November of 1938, and despite being very vocally anti-Semitic, the NAZIs held their cards pretty close to their vests. Kristallnacht was basically an internal, blitzkrieg like pogrom. It is important to note that only 1% of the German citizenry were Jewish – about 500,000 out of a total German citizenry of 67 million. Only a portion of this 1% were emancipated (secular/assimilated as Germans who’s religion just happened to be Jewish as opposed to the very visible ultra-orthodox Jewish Germans). This means that there were less than 500,000 Jewish Germans that might have been acculturated/socialized enough to modern notions of self defense and that might have been willing to resist. Aside from the fact that these are not good odds, and ignoring the fact that Jewish Germans began to flee or go underground or actually engaged in forms of resistance, it ignores a more important concern: there was no Jewish German, let alone Judaic, way of war at that time.

One of the things that I have both had to account for operationally in the work I’ve done for the Army, as well as teach US military personnel to think about, is how do people in other societies conceptualize war and/or warfare. It is true that at this time the Jews of the Yishuv in Mandatory Palestine were in the process of developing a concept and understanding of war and warfare, the Jews of Germany had nothing to fall back on. The Rabbinic Judaism that had developed in Europe had little to say about the use of Force – either offensively or defensively – because Jews in Europe were never in control of a political entity. As a result it was simply not a real consideration. So while there was some minimal commentary and analysis in the Talmud based on commandments to the Israelites about the different types of war that they were ordered to undertake to make it to and then capture the Land of Canaan, these were very abstract portions of Judaica.

There were some Jewish German veterans of World War I. Their understanding of war, provided they were involved with the German military long enough and at a high enough level to worry about such things, would have been German, not Jewish. So even had a good portion of that less than 500,000 Jewish Germans been armed (which they weren’t as it wasn’t part of the Jewish German tradition), and had they had advanced warning of Kristallnacht and the beginning of the Final Solution (which they didn’t), there was no context other than sheer survival for Jewish Germans to have acted on. And while sheer survival instinct is powerful, we begin to stretch the counterfactual assertions to argue that uncoordinated Jewish German resistance, that was not widely or uniformly engaged in across a very small minority population, would have yielded positive results. This argument just isn’t logically or historically persuasive. Even had that portion of 1% of Jewish Germans been armed, and all of them situationally aware enough to somehow pick up on what the NAZIs were really planning, and kept their weapons where they could be brought to bear in an emergency, just how many brownshirts are you going to take out in the middle of the night when your store, above which is your home, has just been firebombed? Additionally, there is a bit of victim blaming here. If only Jewish Germans had fought back, had exercised their natural rights to self-defense (ignoring, of course, that Judaism has no concept of natural rights), and had somehow been able to arm themselves in violation of German law, they wouldn’t have gone like sheep to the slaughter. Frankly, that’s just insulting, as well as being a gross misunderstanding and misrepresentation of what actually went on.

Now this discussion of understanding of war or way of war is somewhat abstract, it is still important to understand the dynamic here. It took hundreds of years for the emancipated Jewish Germans to be accepted as Germans. And part of their understanding of their emancipated status was that the religiously based anti-Semitism had been largely left behind so it was safe to assimilate and become Germans that just happened to be Jews. This turned out to not be the case, but we have the actual history and know what actually transpired. Yes there were firearms restrictions on the books. The first batch from the late 1920s were NOT instituted by the NAZIs. Rather they were put in place by the Weimar Republic and applied to all Germans – not just Jewish Germans. It was only the latter NAZI instituted restrictions from 1938 that specifically targeted Jewish Germans.

It is important to remember, as Harcourt does in his article linked to above, that the actual historiography and reality is not as simple as: Jewish Germans were disarmed and they couldn’t fight back. It is for this reason that the ADL issued a statement in 2013 requesting that because the historiography is ambiguous, it is exceedingly unclear how many of the even assimilated Jewish Germans were firearms owners (a fraction of the 1% of all Jewish Germans), that the experience of Jewish Germans in the Holocaust should not be politicized. The historiography makes it very difficult to figure out if the NAZI recodifications beginning after 1938 were symbolic or not and just how the reimposed restrictions were carried out. It therefore becomes impossible to determine if in a coordinated, planned surprise event like Kristallnacht a shocked and terrorized community, even one that that included firearm owners, would have been able to actually respond in any meaningful way as events unfolded. It is because of this that the ADL has asked that these assertions not be used to score political points.

Regardless of the ADL’s request, an armed population of less than 500,000 out of a total population of 67 million was not going to hold off the NAZIs and even pockets of resistance weren’t going to hold out for long. While armed resistance might have bought time for some to escape or slowed things down a bit, what happened in the 1930s in Germany is not analogous to any arguments over the 2nd Amendment here in the US. The historical context is just far too different. The US has not suffered a battlefield defeat in an interstate war followed by the imposition of unconditional surrender with severe and severely disproportionate terms imposed upon America at the cessation of hostilities as was the case with Germany post WW I. These terms were so out of proportion that instead of allowing the WW I allies to win the peace it in fact made the post war peace impossible and set the conditions for future war with Germany in Europe. Moreover, the foundational post WW I German law did not speak to issues of implicit or explicit firearms/weapons ownership, so the creation of laws pertaining to firearms and weaponry through the normal legislative process would not create any sort of constitutional crisis or raise a constitutional concern. The experience of Jewish Germans prior to and during World War II may have much to teach us about implied rights to self defense, and even though self defense is now part of the current Constitutional understanding of the 2nd Amendment as a result of the Heller opinion, the historical reality of Jewish Germans and pre World War II German firearms restrictions cannot be stretched far enough to inform us about 2nd Amendment jurisprudence in the US in 2015. The problem with historical analogies is that they are never perfect and context always matters. In this case the actual historical differences are a bridge too far.

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Reader Interactions

114Comments

  1. 1.

    Adam L Silverman

    October 9, 2015 at 11:07 pm

    Sorry for the disappearing/reappearing post. It was showing me paragraph breaks and then, once I hit publish, they went bye bye. It seems to be fixed now.

  2. 2.

    dedc79

    October 9, 2015 at 11:12 pm

    If you want a sense of how deeply ingrained this fantasy is among the gun nuts, read Charles Cooke’s defense of Carson, and, even more alarmingly, the comments to that post.

  3. 3.

    Adam L Silverman

    October 9, 2015 at 11:18 pm

    @dedc79: I’m well aware of how deeply ingrained this belief is.

  4. 4.

    Omnes Omnibus

    October 9, 2015 at 11:20 pm

    Thanks for posting this. Very informative. Also on the topic of historical analogies, are you familiar with Thinking in Time by Neustadt and May? I pimp it every time the topic comes up.

  5. 5.

    Viva BrisVegas

    October 9, 2015 at 11:27 pm

    Hi Adam, your erudite and accurate summation of the counterargument to Carson’s assertions, however valuable to sane people, makes no difference to the Right.

    What Carson is actually arguing is this:

    Nazis = Gun Control
    Liberals = Gun Control
    Liberals = Nazis

    This is a form of logic impervious to fact.

    Carson is making an argument that can’t really be refuted reductio ad absurdum, because it starts out already absurd and goes downhill from there. In other words, right wing logic.

  6. 6.

    Tissue Thin Pseudonym

    October 9, 2015 at 11:38 pm

    I agree with the general thrust of the post, but categorically disagree with this part (admittedly tangential to the main thesis):

    These terms were so out of proportion that instead of allowing the WW I allies to win the peace it in fact made the post war peace impossible and set the conditions for future war with Germany in Europe.

    Out of proportion to what? Certainly not out of proportion to what peace treaties had demanded in the past. Out of proportion to what would have been just? Not only did Germany invade France and fight for four years in the French industrial and mining heartland, subjecting it to severe destruction just from the fighting, they systematically dismantled French factories and shipped them wholesale back to Germany. As they retreated in 1918, they did their absolute best to wreck French mines and other industry.

    At the same time, physical capital in Germany suffered little dislocation. They were in terrible economic shape by the end of the war, but the tools were all there to rebound. A peace that didn’t impose massive reparations on Germany would have resulted in a war that they were primarily responsible for starting and then lost, but that crippled two of their three major enemies without doing so to the Germans. Justice and the balance of power both demanded what Versailles delivered.

    The problem isn’t that Versailles was so harsh that it guaranteed the next war. It was less harsh than what the Germans imposed on the French in 1871, and vastly less harsh than what was imposed on Germany in 1945. (It completely baffles me how anyone can seriously argue that the peace after WWII was magnanimous relative to 1919; when someone does, it’s a sign that they really haven’t thought through what happened in 1945.)

    The problem was that Germans simply refused to admit that they had lost the war. They concocted ridiculous conspiracy theories about being stabbed in the back by Jews and socialists, and insisted that they would have won had they kept fighting. Then they deliberately destroyed their own economy in order to avoid paying reparations. The whole thing was German self pity at its absolute worst.

    Compare it to the French, who, after 1871, made it a point of pride to pay the reparations the Germans demanded ahead of schedule, despite the fact that they were a larger share of French GDP than the Versailles reparations were of Germany’s. The Germans could have paid the reparations; they just chose not to. (Yes, it was politically impossible for any Weimar government to pay them, but that’s just a symptom of Germans refusing to accept the consequences of losing the war; economically, they could have paid them.)

    And, of course, let’s compare the Versailles Treaty to what the Germans imposed at Brest-Litovsk, or the way they effectively turned Tsarist Poland and Lithuania into slave labor districts between 1915 and 1918; their occupation policies were closer to those of 1941-44 than most people realize. The Germans had, and still have, zero basis for complaining about the peace imposed by anyone else. What they’re saying is that the rest of the world should have started an entirely unprecedented approach to the treatment of defeated enemies the instant those defeated enemies were German and with complete disregard for how Germany treated its own foes.

    There is zero evidence that a milder peace would have furthered either the cause of justice or have helped to prevent World War II. Until the Germans were forced to surrender unconditionally, occupied for an extended period, and had their state structure dictated to them by victorious opponents, there was destined to be more war.

  7. 7.

    mdblanche

    October 9, 2015 at 11:38 pm

    This is far more words than Ben Carson is worth.

  8. 8.

    jl

    October 9, 2015 at 11:43 pm

    Thanks to AS for very interesting post and links.

    I’m pretty old school on second amendment: like other rights enumerated in Constitution, it is not an unconditional right. IANAL, but my understanding is that the majority of the current Supreme Court is operating on the assumption that the phrase ‘A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state’ is mere introductory throat clearing and does not substantially alter the right granted in the next clause. Which is a sign of idiocy or extreme bad faith, in my opinion.

    What I find most irritating is the idea that the second amendment somehow implies that the right of committing violence against the government is somehow a constitutional right, and part of the Constitutional order. That is ridiculous. And late in life Madison explicitly rejected this idea in his reflections on the earlier nullification controversy. Madison wrote that such a recourse must always be an extra constitutional right, it is a natural right and those who commit violence have to take their chances with natural law, which is not very reliable. The alternative will lead to violent anarchy.

    (edit: in other words, Madison said that anyone who wants to shoot up the place as a redress of grievances has throw their fate to the chances of natural law, they can have no refuge in Constitutional rights, otherwise it will end with people fighting out everything in little reckenings in little rooms)

    And gun nuts can cite the lines supporting the second amendment in the Federalist Papers all they want, it doesn’t affect Madison’s point at all.

    I don’t know if it has been an intentional strategy on the part of the NRA and reactionary forces in our society, but it does fit in with the normalization of gun violence as a part of ordinary daily social order. That includes gun happy police, ever broader and more outrageous ‘stand your ground laws’ that in effect create special rights for anyone who decides to shoot a gun at somebody, demands that the mass of the citizens should put up with the violence that necessarily attends unrestricted rights to carry guns (that they should be prepared to commit suicide charges against deranged shooters who may pop up at random, otherwise they are somehow at fault if they get shot).

    So, sooner or later we know how this will end. The vast mixed race majority of the US will be happily living their ordinary lives, while the deluded, racists, bigots,and crazies who will resist imposition of reasonable restrictions will be sitting unarmed in the pokey. We just have to hope that as few people get hurt in that inevitable evolution as possible.

  9. 9.

    Omnes Omnibus

    October 9, 2015 at 11:43 pm

    @Tissue Thin Pseudonym: I love the fact that this blog has commenters who will spend multiple paragraphs disputing a sentence that is, by the commenter’s own admission, tangential to the FP’s actual point.

  10. 10.

    JG

    October 9, 2015 at 11:44 pm

    Thanks AL. Great stuff! History is complicated.

  11. 11.

    Adam L Silverman

    October 9, 2015 at 11:46 pm

    @Omnes Omnibus: Yes, we used it in the core curriculum at USAWC.

  12. 12.

    jl

    October 9, 2015 at 11:49 pm

    @Viva BrisVegas: Well, you know who else liked lots of people in lots of cars on freeways, don’t you? Hmmm….

  13. 13.

    benw

    October 9, 2015 at 11:49 pm

    This is a very thoughtful, well-researched, factual, historically accurate response to a bunch of complete psycho gun-nutter bullshit. In their heads, they’re some combination of Arnold and Stallone, guns in the hands of the hero are always perfectly accurate with a clever quip while firing. “Hey Hitler, try this on for SIZE” and then have sex with the hot co-star in your fantasy. Thanks for picking up on the victim-blaming: those cowardly Jews, real men would never have been Final Solutioned like that!

  14. 14.

    Tissue Thin Pseudonym

    October 9, 2015 at 11:50 pm

    @jl: The funny thing is that Alexander Hamilton tried very hard to get Madison to understand all of that from the beginning.

    It’s also amusing that the gun nuts like to cite Federalist #28 and #29 in support of the idea that there is a Constitutional right to revolt and that the militia is a part of it. Those essays do kind of imply that, though they get really vague on specifics. But more serious analysis founders on the rock that they were written by Hamilton, who was totally bullshitting. He believed nothing of the sort; in fact, he thought the state militias were basically worthless and more trouble than benefit.

  15. 15.

    Omnes Omnibus

    October 9, 2015 at 11:51 pm

    @Adam L Silverman: Cool, I picked up a copy in a sale bin at a Star and Stripes bookstore in Bamberg twenty-five years ago. Nice to know that I, as a 1LT, was reading the stuff the future top brass was reading. (Or: God, was I a nerd. I was reading for fun what the future top brass were being assigned.)

  16. 16.

    Tissue Thin Pseudonym

    October 9, 2015 at 11:52 pm

    @Omnes Omnibus: Invite the autistic guy to post, and when an issue the autistic guy has banged his head against for years, you’re going to get a loooooooooong answer.

  17. 17.

    Omnes Omnibus

    October 9, 2015 at 11:53 pm

    @Tissue Thin Pseudonym: You know, as time goes on, Hamilton seems to grow in prescience. The man deserves his musical.

  18. 18.

    Omnes Omnibus

    October 9, 2015 at 11:54 pm

    @Tissue Thin Pseudonym: On this, I see you as one of our ordinary pedants.

  19. 19.

    jl

    October 9, 2015 at 11:57 pm

    @Tissue Thin Pseudonym: The Federalist papers were written to give arguments about why ratifying it would be a good idea. So, there are lots of arguments in it that are not good argument about how the Constitution works, or how laws would work under the Constitution.

    That seems a very simple and obvious point to me, but sometimes it seems to be lost in current debates.

    If Madison or Hamilton gave a natural law argument in favor of parts of the Constitution, that doesn’t mean that the Constitution adopts their ideas about natural law and makes them part of the Constitution.

  20. 20.

    kdaug

    October 9, 2015 at 11:59 pm

    tl;dr Why do I give a fuck about Israel?

  21. 21.

    Heliopause

    October 10, 2015 at 12:01 am

    It might be worth mentioning that not only some Jews, but four of the mightiest industrial-military powers of the last 150 years offered armed resistance to the nazis, and though they ultimately prevailed it was touch and go for a while.

    Some historical questions are convoluted and difficult. Some are easy. This is one of the latter.

  22. 22.

    Omnes Omnibus

    October 10, 2015 at 12:02 am

    @kdaug: Post wasn’t about Israel.

    ETA: Jews/Judiasm/etc.=/= Israel.

  23. 23.

    kdaug

    October 10, 2015 at 12:08 am

    @Omnes Omnibus: Hmm. Complicated. Be back in a second.

  24. 24.

    Adam L Silverman

    October 10, 2015 at 12:10 am

    @Tissue Thin Pseudonym: I think you’re missing the point of what was, essentially, tangential context. You are correct that the Germans imposed much harsher surrender terms on a number of other European states prior to WW I and that it had done terrible damage in France and Belgium and other places. And you are also correct that the Germans created a dolschstoss legend in order to be able to conceptually deal with their defeat in WW I.

    All of that misses something important and something that too often isn’t worried about: conflict/war termination, the nature of victory, and securing the (post conflict/war) peace. The terms of the Treaty of Versailles went a long way in contributing to not securing the peace. So much so that we actually had a post war plan for WW II. Much went into ensuring that the ultimate European loser in WW II had a chance to have a part of the victory that was the post war peace. We had Civil Affairs officers trained in military support to governance and ready to go as post war administrators to get things up and running under the Marshall Plan. And even though the US, of all the Allies, was the real driver behind establishing the post war war crimes tribunal at Nuremberg, we managed it in such a way as to create limited and to some extent symbolic justice while at the same time recognizing that if we actually tried to hold accountable everyone in Germany or (Vichy) France or Italy or other states and societies that were involved we’d hobble the ability to rebuild and reconstruct these societies.

    There is a separate and important discussion to be had about conflict termination, victory, and securing the peace – basically how does one win the war and secure the peace. It is only tangential to this discussion, but the way that WW I was resolved, both on the battlefield and in the halls of Versailles, left much to be desired in the quest to secure/win the post war peace.

  25. 25.

    Adam L Silverman

    October 10, 2015 at 12:13 am

    @Tissue Thin Pseudonym: and JL, I’m always partial to Lincoln’s formulation in his first message to Congress on 4 JUL 1861:
    “It is now for them to demonstrate to the world that those who can fairly carry an election can also suppress a rebellion; that ballots are the rightful and peaceful successors of bullets; and that when ballots have fairly and constitutionally decided, there can be no successful appeal back to bullets; that there can be no successful appeal, except to ballots themselves, at succeeding elections. Such will be a great lesson of peace; teaching men that what they cannot take by an election, neither can they take it by a war; teaching all the folly of being the beginners of a war.”

  26. 26.

    Adam L Silverman

    October 10, 2015 at 12:15 am

    @Omnes Omnibus: That is what Bibi would like everyone to believe… Apparently the hasbara money has claimed a victim.

  27. 27.

    kdaug

    October 10, 2015 at 12:16 am

    @Omnes Omnibus: I appreciate you giving me the benefit of the doubt.

  28. 28.

    Gin & Tonic

    October 10, 2015 at 12:16 am

    I’m trying to think of an example in the 19th or 20th (or 21st, now) centuries when the military-industrial power of a nation-state was brought to bear on an ethnic or economic minority which then, by virtue of ownership of small arms, prevented their own military destruction. I’m coming up empty.

  29. 29.

    Omnes Omnibus

    October 10, 2015 at 12:17 am

    @kdaug: Not complicated. Simple. Bitchy comments in tl;dr mode often lead to mistakes.

  30. 30.

    Omnes Omnibus

    October 10, 2015 at 12:20 am

    @Adam L Silverman: If WASPy WASPs like me get it, anyone can.

  31. 31.

    Adam L Silverman

    October 10, 2015 at 12:22 am

    @Gin & Tonic: there was some limited, initial success by freed African Americans during the early portions of Reconstruction in communal self defense against the initial Lost Causers, which gave way to successful gun control measures implemented to disarm them.

    One could also argument that Narbona’s irregular and unconventional war against the US Army and the territorial government and population of the New Mexico Territory.

    There’s also a good argument that the actions of the Haganah against the British Mandatory authorities in Palestine were also effective.

    And certainly the efforts of the Arabs that were organized and led by T E Lawrence were very successful.

  32. 32.

    pseudonymous in nc

    October 10, 2015 at 12:23 am

    The pernicious aspect of this narrative is how it makes it very easy for Brooklyn Ultra-Orthodox Jews to move to Israel and start shooting Palestinians because guns equals freedom.

    It is a fucked up narrative and Mister Surgeon Carson (because surgeons aren’t doctors, let’s remember that) keeps it fucked up.

  33. 33.

    Adam L Silverman

    October 10, 2015 at 12:25 am

    @pseudonymous in nc: that’s actually harder than you think. Getting a firearms permit in Israel isn’t easy and there is a lifetime limit on ammo. Which means training and practice to ensure some degree of ongoing competency with one’s weapon/weapons is difficult to do. This is why you see a lot of the price tag attacks by the ultra-devout settlers, as well as by the Haredim communities in the Old City, using weapons and methods other than firearms.

  34. 34.

    dedc79

    October 10, 2015 at 12:27 am

    @pseudonymous in nc: how’d you get from a to b?

  35. 35.

    Hungry Joe

    October 10, 2015 at 12:28 am

    Outstanding post. Thanks.

  36. 36.

    pseudonymous in nc

    October 10, 2015 at 12:29 am

    @Adam L Silverman:

    Getting a firearms permit in Israel isn’t easy and there is a lifetime limit on ammo.

    I’m totally willing to incline to you on this, but does that apply to the settlements? Because there’s definitely the perception that the settler ‘outposts’ — the illegal extensions that are usually made post-facto legal — are defended by Americans with semi-automatic rifles and crates of ammo.

  37. 37.

    Adam L Silverman

    October 10, 2015 at 12:30 am

    @Adam L Silverman: okay, I missed the edit window on the Narbona bit. Narbona’s efforts were successful against the US Army up to a point. The Army was unable to resolve the conflict through force, despite bringing in Kit Carson and ordering him to engage in wholesale slaughter should he need to. Carson disobeyed orders and found other means to bring the Dine (Navajo) in. This, of course, led to the disaster that was the Long Walk of the Dine and the Bosque Redondo.

  38. 38.

    Mike J

    October 10, 2015 at 12:33 am

    Both sides do it:

    Ohio Gov. John Kasich said Friday that a New Hampshire audience member would “get over” cuts to Social Security payments as a result of his reform plan — and the left is already pouncing on the comment.

    http://cnn.it/1LE6vTG

  39. 39.

    Adam L Silverman

    October 10, 2015 at 12:34 am

    @pseudonymous in nc: the settlements have armed guards. And they’re authorized by the government to have them. But it isn’t easy to get a permit and there is a definite limit on ammo. The other important thing to remember is that the majority of armed Israelis that are seen are actually those that are doing their military service. Because of the national service component – three years for male Israelis and two for females – followed by a long period in the reserves and subject to recall, the Israelis are basically a society under arms or with a more formal militia than most places. The majority of the settlers are ultra-devout and this community has had exemptions from military service from the founding of the state. The argument was, traditionally, that Torah (Law) study provided a better (and Divine) defense than force of arms.

  40. 40.

    Redshift

    October 10, 2015 at 12:34 am

    an armed population of less than 500,000 out of a total population of 67 million was not going to hold off the NAZIs and even pockets of resistance weren’t going to hold out for long

    Of course, the people pushing this historical fantasy also believe they have to keep their guns to hold off the US Army if the government turns tyrannical, so good luck getting them to accept that.

  41. 41.

    Steeplejack (phone)

    October 10, 2015 at 12:39 am

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    And yet I found his long comment well argued and very informative. Sometimes digressions or asides are valuable or interesting. Most of this blog is like that, probably.

  42. 42.

    Adam L Silverman

    October 10, 2015 at 12:39 am

    @Redshift: That silliness aside, it also ignores the fact that national security professionals, whether uniformed or civilians, take our oaths seriously. I was socialized/normalized to the idea that out ultimate client was the Constitution and our service is on behalf of the American citizenry. This is why the Oath Keeper and III Percenter stuff is so silly. Anyone who believes that US military and/or Federal law enforcement professionals will simply accept what would clearly be extra legal orders, doesn’t understand how these professionals conduct themselves.

  43. 43.

    PJ

    October 10, 2015 at 12:41 am

    @Adam L Silverman: Any peace requires the victors to be willing to enforce it. France and Britain did nothing to stop Hitler from rearming Germany, and it looks like they could’ve easily deposed him (certainly compared with what it took to depose him later) when he reoccupied the Rhineland. In contrast, the US occupied West Germany, and the Soviet Union occupied East Germany, for more than 40 years after WWII. The fear that the Germans, like the South, might “do it again” should not be discounted. (And there’s an interesting comparison to the US’s failure to enforce civil rights in the South following Reconstruction due to an unwillingness to be that occupying force, and, of course, racism in the non-Confederate states.) The fact is that, at least since the late 19th century, the Germans thought that they should dominate, if not directly rule, Europe by military might. The complete destruction of the German state was the only thing that put an end to this dream (and enabled them to embark on the economic domination of Europe.)

  44. 44.

    J

    October 10, 2015 at 12:42 am

    OK let’s pretend that the US government became a tyranny, that it began persecuting ethnic and religious minorities, that it deprived citizens of rights–and their citizenship–because, say, their parents were Mexicans, that it suspended civil liberties, that it put opponents into ‘protective custody’ and so on. And let’s pretend that armed resistance against it stood a chance. What I can’t imagine is that the gun nuts would oppose this instead of cheering it on and volunteering their services to round up ‘undesirables’.

  45. 45.

    Omnes Omnibus

    October 10, 2015 at 12:43 am

    @Steeplejack (phone): Okay. How does this disagree with my comment?

  46. 46.

    Omnes Omnibus

    October 10, 2015 at 12:47 am

    @PJ:

    and it looks like they could’ve easily deposed him

    Support for this?

  47. 47.

    Tissue Thin Pseudonym

    October 10, 2015 at 12:49 am

    @Adam L Silverman: I agree that the post World War I peace settlement was poorly handled. My disagreement was with the idea that the poor handling involved a disproportionate or overly harsh peace treaty. That bit of entrenched conventional wisdom badly misreads the situation in 1918.

    I also agree that it’s a subject that needs a lot of study, but at the same time, all of the studying in the world wouldn’t have helped that set of events. The British and the French didn’t really trust each other, for good reason on both sides, and had radically different ideas about what a peace should look like. Wilson wandering into the discussion late and assuming that he could just dictate peace terms to the rest of the world was also wildly unhelpful.

    Having a set of allies that are even reading from the same book is a precondition for them all ending up on the same page, and in 1918, the Allies were so far apart on basic issues that planning for the peace wouldn’t have been possible even if they’d realized that it was necessary. One advantage that everyone had in 1945 is that you had two dominant powers who agreed to divvy up Europe and each impose their idea of what constituted a proper settlement in their own portion. Britain got to make suggestions and the French got some crumbs, but it was clear where the critical decisions were being made. All of that makes planning a lot easier.

    And in fairness to the Allies in 1918, by foregoing an actual invasion and occupation of Germany, they really didn’t have any control over a lot of the key elements of winning the peace.

  48. 48.

    Liberal With Attitude

    October 10, 2015 at 12:55 am

    The problem with the argument iS even more basic.
    Guns dont change the balance of power. If you are a small hated minority battling a state, weapons of the type the 2nd Amendment talks about aren’t going to do squat.

    I know the Wolverines! fantasy dies hard, but insurgent guerilla campaigns survive by making the state the hated minority.

  49. 49.

    Steeplejack (phone)

    October 10, 2015 at 12:56 am

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    It doesn’t, if your comment was sincere. I thought that, after reading your comment about “ordinary pedants,” I detected a note of sarcasm.

  50. 50.

    Chris

    October 10, 2015 at 12:58 am

    @J:

    This has always been the ultimate reason I find these people to be full of shit – they wouldn’t be La Resistance, they’d be the Brownshirts.

    You want some inkling of how they’d behave in the face of an oppressive police state? Ask the gun nuts how they feel about police abuses in the inner cities, and the dead black people that result. If any more than one out of ten of them sides with the victims instead of the cops, I’ll eat my hat.

  51. 51.

    Omnes Omnibus

    October 10, 2015 at 1:00 am

    @Steeplejack (phone): No sarcasm this time around.

  52. 52.

    PJ

    October 10, 2015 at 1:03 am

    @Omnes Omnibus: @Omnes Omnibus: William Shirer, The Collapse of the Third Republic

  53. 53.

    Chris

    October 10, 2015 at 1:03 am

    @Tissue Thin Pseudonym:

    If I can go off on a tangent to your tangent – how do you figure Germany was “primarily” responsible for World War One? My understanding is that as far as proximate causes go, it was Serbia and Austria-Hungary, which through the alliance system eventually involved everyone – but that as far as deeper causes go, all of Europe was itching for a fight – including Germany, but basically everyone. (This is stuff remembered from high school history books, so I’m not surprised if it’s off the mark).

  54. 54.

    PJ

    October 10, 2015 at 1:08 am

    @efgoldman: I was abbreviating because the US was calling the shots, but, yes, the Brits and French also were intent on keeping the Germans down militarily. I was at a lecture a few years back by a historian from Harvard, who relayed that Thatcher called up Gorbachev as the Berlin Wall was coming down and advised him to send in tanks to stop it from happening – a united Germany was her worst nightmare (so much for freedom-loving Maggie). (She had instructed her people to stop recording the conversation, but the Soviets kept the tape rolling, and thanks to the brief bit of openness in Russia in the 90s, this fun fact is available to the public.)

  55. 55.

    NotMax

    October 10, 2015 at 1:09 am

    Doesn’t require anywhere near this much analysis or refutation, as Carson’s statements are not even in the category of revisionism, but rather bullcrap on their face, akin to saying if only the French had taken the money used for constructing the Maginot Line and instead bought guns and handed them out to every citizen, then the Germans would have been stopped cold. Rather than lengthily and studiously addressing the bullcrap, call it to his face what it is: bullcrap.

  56. 56.

    Omnes Omnibus

    October 10, 2015 at 1:10 am

    @PJ: Dude, you have to give me more than that.

    @Chris: IIRC, Germany could and probably should have walked away from Austria-Hungary’s mess in the Balkans.

  57. 57.

    Librarian

    October 10, 2015 at 1:13 am

    This is just pure projection by the gun nuts of American gun culture onto other countries. It is totally ludicrous to compare the American gun culture to that of Europe. Gun rights and the possession of guns simply do not mean the same thing in Europe as they do here; there, guns do not equal “freedom” and “resistance to tyranny”. Europeans have never had the kind of suspicion of big government that Americans have. A partial exception is England, which used to have the same suspicion of standing armies as Americans once did.

  58. 58.

    NotMax

    October 10, 2015 at 1:14 am

    @efgoldman

    Five zones initially: French, British, American, Russian and international.

  59. 59.

    PJ

    October 10, 2015 at 1:16 am

    @Omnes Omnibus: Dude, it’s 1:12AM on Saturday morning and I am not an encyclopedia – nor am I a historian of 20th c. Europe, I’m a commenter on Balloon Juice. My opinions are just based on shit I’ve picked up in history books (not one of which has bought into the “boo hoo, the French and British were so mean to the Germans and that’s why we had WWII” argument the Germans were formulating as early as 1919); if you have counter-cites, feel free to throw them out there.

  60. 60.

    Omnes Omnibus

    October 10, 2015 at 1:17 am

    @NotMax: It may have been unnecessary, but it was interesting and informative. How is that a problem?

    @Librarian: You are referring to the Carson argument, not the Silverman response, right? Just checking.

  61. 61.

    Chris

    October 10, 2015 at 1:18 am

    @Liberal With Attitude:

    I know the Wolverines! fantasy dies hard, but insurgent guerilla campaigns survive by making the state the hated minority.

    The other thing is I don’t think these people have any understanding of what a guerrilla campaign against a modern military force entails, and what exactly “winning” such a campaign would look like.

    I mean, yeah, sure, the Afghan freedom fighters eventually “won” against the Red Army through attrition (and with a lot of help from foreign powers, another thing our wingnuts pointedly ignore – how many foreign friends could some Aryan Nation militia in Idaho count on?) But “attrition” meant ten years of war during which Afghan society was completely fucking wrecked. Similar story again in Iraq with the U.S. Army. You can “win” these kinds of wars, but by the time the Big Oppressive Military Machine packs up and leaves, it (and you) will have done so much damage you’re basically ruling a disaster area.

  62. 62.

    Chris

    October 10, 2015 at 1:20 am

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    IIRC, Germany could and probably should have walked away from Austria-Hungary’s mess in the Balkans.

    Well… yeah, and again, I’m not saying the krauts are any less responsible for the whole mess, but doesn’t this apply to basically everyone? Shouldn’t the Russians have known enough to let the Serbians handle their own problems, the French have known enough to let the Russians handle their own problems, etc?

  63. 63.

    Adam L Silverman

    October 10, 2015 at 1:24 am

    @efgoldman: sorry bout that. I had two work taskers I had to get done today and then had a family thing. As soon as I got home, I did the post.

  64. 64.

    PJ

    October 10, 2015 at 1:25 am

    It’s also interesting that Carson didn’t make the argument “if the slaves in pre-Civil War America had been armed, they would have been able to throw off their bondage and live freely . . .”

  65. 65.

    Omnes Omnibus

    October 10, 2015 at 1:26 am

    @Chris: Germany walking away would have left it local to the Balkans.

  66. 66.

    Adam L Silverman

    October 10, 2015 at 1:30 am

    @PJ: when you here people (those of us) with PhDs who describe MDs as plumbers and carpenters, not doctors, its MDs like Carson that are the reason…

    I realize I had a very different and very privileged background: two parents with advanced degrees (PhD dad and MS mom), all the advantages, and encouragement to basically turn myself into a type of polymath. And I’m fully cognizant that Dr. Carson has succeeded and was able to actually utilize a very unique and specific talent despite coming from and working his way out of (with assistance) very trying and difficult circumstances. But its pretty clear that either he retains absolutely nothing he’s exposed to outside of his specialty area, never bothered to learn it, or some combination thereof.

  67. 67.

    Chris

    October 10, 2015 at 1:32 am

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    Again, why is that their responsibility in particular? If the standard is “leave it in the Balkans,” then Russia at least could also have chosen not to weigh in and that probably would’ve left it Balkans-only (Austria v. Serbia).

  68. 68.

    Redshift

    October 10, 2015 at 1:34 am

    @PJ:

    It’s also interesting that Carson didn’t make the argument “if the slaves in pre-Civil War America had been armed, they would have been able to throw off their bondage and live freely…”

    I wouldn’t want to bet that he hasn’t said it at some point in the past. I know there are other wingnuts who have.

  69. 69.

    Adam L Silverman

    October 10, 2015 at 1:35 am

    @efgoldman: I have. Some of the better read and more even keeled of the People of the Gun as they call themselves have made it. And there is some historical truth to it, such as slave uprisings in Charleston and other places in the South where the slaves took the arms of their oppressors and used them to advantage – at least temporarily. But here too we must acknowledge the historical reality: there were too few able/willing to rise up, too few who did, and too few to hold out for long. This is the same harsh reality of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Too few, too late, too little to make a difference.

    All of that said, perhaps going out fighting would be better than not. That, however, is a test every person has to face for themselves, they should unfortunately, have to take it.

  70. 70.

    Adam L Silverman

    October 10, 2015 at 1:39 am

    @efgoldman: It wouldn’t be the first time that the truth is stranger than the fiction. This now falls within Cokie Roberts rules that Digby likes to refer to – its out there, so now its got to be accounted for. Or as La Noonan asserted it would now be irresponsible for everyone else not to speculate.

  71. 71.

    PJ

    October 10, 2015 at 1:43 am

    @Adam L Silverman: If a minority population is surrounded by an organized majority significantly larger and more powerful economically and militarily that is intent on their subjugation, and the minority has nowhere to flee to, the odds seem slim that they will be able to maintain their freedom (e.g., the subjugation of native Americans). No doubt there are exceptions outside of Asterix, but history is bleak in this regard.

  72. 72.

    Amir Khalid

    October 10, 2015 at 1:54 am

    @efgoldman:
    I just took a look at that national Enquirer site. There’s also a story claiming that Bill Clinton is not Chelsea’s father, on the dubious basis of a DNA test that doesn’t disprove another man is.

  73. 73.

    Tissue Thin Pseudonym

    October 10, 2015 at 2:16 am

    @Chris:

    If I can go off on a tangent to your tangent – how do you figure Germany was “primarily” responsible for World War One? My understanding is that as far as proximate causes go, it was Serbia and Austria-Hungary, which through the alliance system eventually involved everyone – but that as far as deeper causes go, all of Europe was itching for a fight – including Germany, but basically everyone. (This is stuff remembered from high school history books, so I’m not surprised if it’s off the mark).

    There are two major reasons a disproportionate share of the blame land on Germany’s desk, one external and one internal.

    The external reason is that, by 1914, Austria-Hungary was such a junior partner that if the Germans had told them to cool it, they wouldn’t have had much choice but to do so. It isn’t just that Germany should have walked away from Austria’s mess; it’s that Austria would have had to walk away from it’s desire to crush Serbia if the Germans hadn’t supported them. No one else in the whole mess had that sort of control over another country to provide a firewall. Even Serbia had more freedom of choice (or at least thought they did, which amounts to the same thing) from Russian dictates than the Austrians did. The Germans had to judge that Austrian bellicosity was in their own interests.

    The internal reason is that decision making in Germany was hopelessly split into various pieces that didn’t reference each other. Diplomatically, this meant that when the Kaiser took a vacation in the middle of July, 1914, Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg had to figure out what to do in a vacuum without any way to coordinate with the rest of the important players. At the last minute, Wilhelm II, Bethmann-Hollweg, and Chief of the General Staff von Moltke, all individually came to the conclusion that they would prefer to avoid war, but the silent lines of communication between them meant that Bethmann-Hollweg went ahead and told the Austrians to go big on their demands of Serbia because he thought he didn’t have any other option.

    Farther into the background, the disconnect between the German military and government was profound and destructive. In the wake of German unification, the Reichswehr was determined to establish that it was completely apolitical. By that, they meant not only that the army wouldn’t take sides politically (which was a gross fiction, but let’s set that aside for the moment), but also that the politicians would have no influence over operational issues.

    This turned into an enormous problem that plagued them during both World Wars. The Germans effectively had no one really working on military strategy. They had politicians making decisions about the direction of the country, and they had a General Staff putting together operational plans for a possible war, and there was no interaction between those two processes. Operation was divorced from strategy.

    What that meant in the summer of 1914 is that the General Staff had a plan to go to war with both Russia and France, but no plan to go to war with just one of them. That plan involved invading Belgium, and they had no alternative plan for what to do if the politicians decided that they wanted to go to war with France but not involve Belgium. Worst of all, the politicians hadn’t really realized all of this prior to reaching the point of crisis. All of a sudden, they found their hands tied by the fact that the generals hadn’t given politics any influence over their planning.

    Austria-Hungary had similar problems, exacerbated by the fact that the Hungarians really, really liked the idea of kicking Serbia in the teeth, but had no intention of giving up any of their political privileges to help fight that war.

    The Allies made the decision to go to war, a decision that may have been right or wrong, but involved actually deliberating the issues. Even Russia put some thought into it. The Germans pretty much just careened into the war because they couldn’t think of anything better to do.

  74. 74.

    Adam L Silverman

    October 10, 2015 at 2:17 am

    @PJ: You are absolutely correct. As I said, the examples we have of resistance in these cases never have positive outcomes and only some have fleeting victories.

    This is why our concept of just rebellion asserts that when a minority population is either tyrannized by the majority or when it is terrorized by other groups and the government/majority will not intercede there is a justification for rebellion.

    And on that happy note, I’m to bed.

  75. 75.

    Tissue Thin Pseudonym

    October 10, 2015 at 2:23 am

    @PJ: Part of the problem is that the gun nuts are conflating two very different things when they start bringing up laws that prevented Jews from being armed in Germany with current 2nd Amendment debates. There is an enormous difference between laws that prohibit one portion and only that portion of a population from being armed, and laws that prohibit all parts of the population equally from owning guns.

    I’m in favor of gun control generally, but I’d be vehemently opposed to laws that prohibited an exposed ethnic group from owning guns while allowing the majority to have them. It still wouldn’t have helped the Jews actually save themselves, but I’d still be against it. But the laws in Germany were not a precursor to the Holocaust; they were a part of the Holocaust.

  76. 76.

    NotMax

    October 10, 2015 at 3:22 am

    @Omnes Omnibus

    Not so much here, but it rankles that so much of the media takes such bullcrap seriously and assigns it credence and gravity when it properly should be called out instantly for what it is.

    @efgoldman

    Yup, Berlin – occupied and patrolled by all four major Allied powers simultaneously.

    There were also smaller outlying areas within some of the various Allied controlled zones which were put under the purview of, respectively, Belgium, Luxembourg and Poland.

  77. 77.

    Joe Miller

    October 10, 2015 at 3:52 am

    @Tissue Thin Pseudonym: OUTSTANDING response! Exactly correct in every respect. In my own research I came across the fact that the Germans only paid 2%-5% of the supposedly “crushing” reparations imposed on them. (The U.S. had helped restructure Germany’s debts.) The inflation which wiped out the German middle class in 1923 was the result of inflationary policies initiated by the Imperial government near the end of the war and was exacerbated by German policies in the early Weimar years.

  78. 78.

    boatboy_srq

    October 10, 2015 at 4:04 am

    @PJ: Clemenceau wrote in his memoirs that the Versailles negotiations started out well but went bad very quickly: the US delegation was disinterested in everything except a disarmed Central Powers and their loans to the Allies repaid immediately. Both France and UK argued for smaller reparations from Germany, but without capital of their own with which to pay the US there wasn’t an alternative – and the US wouldn’t budge on the debt. The US’ negotiations both at Versailles in 1918-19 and at Washington in 1922 were extremely blinkered by fiscal considerations and insensitivity to the other players’ positions.

    @PJ: France and UK did squat after 1932 in no small part because an economically resurgent Germany meant reparations payments were assured: UK was still broke from the war and France was still traumatized from the losses and enjoying the last years of its pre-Depression boom; neither was in a position, fiscally or philosophically, to do much, and initially German profitability meant more than German rearming. Add to that the collective Western horror that Bolshevism visited on Europe at the time (the Russian civil war, in which the Allies had unsuccessfully supported the White Russian (Menshevik) faction, had only recently ended) and a resurgent Germany became a bulwark against Soviet expansion and revolution in other states: there was far more sympathy for Germany (in any form) than for Soviet Russia. A healthy rearmed Germany was preferable to a weak Germany vulnerable to Soviet subversion. Fascist Italy was seen in a similar light: productivity and stability were weapons against the radical Left, and diminution of civil liberties were viewed as a temporary and acceptable measure to combat Leninists.

  79. 79.

    Mcc

    October 10, 2015 at 4:42 am

    @Tissue Thin Pseudonym:
    That is a very good analysis of the German response to the end of the Great War. The Army started the “stab in the back” story immediately, and even the Socialist leaders tended to accept it. They refused to admit that they were beaten. That is why FDR insisted on unconditional Surrender in 1945.

    BTW- The Romans also never admitted defeat, which is one of the ways they were able to finally beat the Carthaginians.

  80. 80.

    sm*t cl*de

    October 10, 2015 at 4:51 am

    @Tissue Thin Pseudonym:

    There is an enormous difference between laws that prohibit one portion and only that portion of a population from being armed, and laws that prohibit all parts of the population equally from owning guns.

    Carson seems to be aware of that problem, and alternates between his “Jews should have fought back” argument and an even more dishonest claim that Germans in general would have resisted Hitler’s policies if only they had had access to firearms.

    “I think the likelihood of Hitler being able to accomplish his goals would have been greatly diminished if the people had been armed,” Carson said. “I’m telling you there is a reason these dictatorial people take guns first.”

    Goldhagen is a bullshit artist but for reasons of ancestry I am not sympathetic towards claims that “Germans were opposed to Hitler’s policies of antisemitism and military conquest”.

  81. 81.

    sm*t cl*de

    October 10, 2015 at 5:14 am

    @efgoldman:

    In a bombshell investigation into his medical career, The National ENQUIRER has exclusively learned the now retired doc allegedly butchered one patient’s brain — and EVEN left a sponge in another’s skull!
    .
    According to at least six malpractice lawsuits against Carson obtained by The ENQUIRER, the Republican candidate allegedly rushed patients into surgery, and brandished a scalpel like a meat cleaver!

    Ha! People at Team Bush have another stovepipe for anti-Carson stories!.
    “Orac” at Respectful Insolence is no fan of Carson’s mendacity but is all “meh” on the missed-sponge story, sponges being a responsibility of the whole operating team, not just the surgeon.

    even leaving a sponge in a patient is usually not the surgeon’s fault. It’s usually due to a failure of the system.

    The concerning part is Carson’s insistence that he must have meant to leave a sponge in the patient’s brain, like foam packing (so any subsequent brain damage was the patient’s fault for reacting badly), because the alternative would be that an error occurred in his operating theatre, which is inconceivable. That is at Bush levels of self-image-preserving reality denial

    “it is true that we put a certain type of sponge in to pad things away and sometimes there is a reaction to that sponge and that’s what happened.”

  82. 82.

    boatboy_srq

    October 10, 2015 at 5:19 am

    @sm*t cl*de: Carson is full of it here. And the US response to 9/11 is a shining example of why: after those attacks – engineered by Saudi and Yemeni individuals with funding from wealthy Saudis – virtually every single Muslim has become somehow suspect. If you substitute “Muslim” for “Jew” and “Ahmurrcan” for “German” in 1920s/30s Nazi rhetoric the similarities between those phrases and what the GOTea is spouting today are far more similar than anything the Reichwhinge is insisting Dems/Progs could possibly say. If Carson were at all honest here, and meant what he says about threatened minorities, he’d be advocating for arming US Muslim communities for their own defense: instead he’s using the fearmongering to add to the Xtian paranoia.

  83. 83.

    mai naem mobile

    October 10, 2015 at 5:46 am

    I ‘ve seen 2 cars with Ben Carson bumper stickers in the past two days. One had multiple stickers and it was driven by a young white chick.I’m hoping she was driving her parents car.

    Does anybody think Carson owns a gun himself? I would bet no. I bet he would be running off after he pooped in his pants if he was.confronted by an armed crazy ding dong.

    Does.anybody really think the founding fathers imagined current day America with current gun technology? I don’t think Jefferson ever imagined a crazy young guy going into a school and shooting up a bunch of little kids with an assault weapon.

  84. 84.

    MomSense

    October 10, 2015 at 5:48 am

    This is one of those discussions where I wish I weren’t trying to comment with a phone (computer is kaput) because it is just too cumbersome to write a thoughtful post.

    I have known three women who were part of the resistance, one was a mentor to me until her death 20 years ago. My stepfather was also part of the resistance but his story was different because he was able to assume a new, non Jewish, identity because of family connections and because his piano teacher had celebrated status. My perspective is probably very skewed because all of my stories are from people who were dancers, musicians and artists. I got the impression from them that the people who were resisting were not the kind of people who would have even owned a gun before the Nazis rose to power. The one surviving friend has said many times that the people who we call the gun nuts now remind her of the people who were most supportive of the Final Solution.

  85. 85.

    sm*t cl*de

    October 10, 2015 at 6:03 am

    @boatboy_srq:

    If you substitute “Muslim” for “Jew” and “Ahmurrcan” for “German” in 1920s/30s Nazi rhetoric the similarities between those phrases and what the GOTea is spouting today are far more similar than anything the Reichwhinge is insisting Dems/Progs could possibly say.

    The emerging line from Carson and Trump is that it’s only freaks and obsessives and funny-looking kids who shoot up schools, so if you selectively remove rights from the weirdos then the whole problem goes away. Trump is one step away from calling for a round-up and internment of Aspies.

  86. 86.

    geg6

    October 10, 2015 at 6:57 am

    Late to the discussion (in an area where I have some small expertise, damn it), so I’ll just say that this thread is excellent and a perfect example of why I love the Internet and Balloon Juice. Great job Adam and everyone else who commented.

  87. 87.

    JPL

    October 10, 2015 at 8:29 am

    Adam, Thank you so much for the post. It’s important for Carson, not to understand the facts. He wants to appeal to the ignorant faction in the Republican party.

  88. 88.

    Gvg

    October 10, 2015 at 8:41 am

    i think you are overlooking the American mythology that we ourselves are the armed resistance who are successful. American Revolution against the British is the source of 2nd amendment worship.
    Follow that with the frontier period and the dangers from Indians, and we were started on the habit of thinking guns were nessesary and freedom.
    I happen to think that this mess and problems have changed dramatically but I reLly don’t think you can say there are no examples of successful armed resistance. we are it.
    there are other examples where we don’t fit general historical patterns, like having a revolution that didn’t devolve quickly into tyranny and bloody purges such as the French Revolution. this has meant we misunderstand other countries a lot including being predisposed to expect foreign revolutions to work out better than they turn out to.

  89. 89.

    Fred

    October 10, 2015 at 9:24 am

    But…but… Guns are magic so they coulda’ had some awsum action movie style shootouts to the death in the streets. Or they coulda’ rushed ‘EM like Ben Carson did…er woulda’ if he hadn’t had a cold and wasn’t thinkin’ so hard about presidentin’.

  90. 90.

    Fred

    October 10, 2015 at 9:32 am

    @Gvg: There is one revolution I can think of that I think worked out pretty well for the native populous. Vietnam did OK throwing out the French and the Americans and went on to a stable nation.
    But I’m guessing that exemple isn’t one the flag wavers are likely to bring up.

  91. 91.

    debbie

    October 10, 2015 at 9:35 am

    @geg6:

    Seconded.

    I also think there wouldn’t have been a lot of support for armed resistance because most Jews never thought it would get as bad as it got. It’s human nature not to see just how evil people can be (or talked into being).

  92. 92.

    Chris

    October 10, 2015 at 10:00 am

    @Tissue Thin Pseudonym:

    Thanks for the clarification.

  93. 93.

    MBunge

    October 10, 2015 at 10:03 am

    @Adam L Silverman: Anyone who believes that US military and/or Federal law enforcement professionals will simply accept what would clearly be extra legal orders, doesn’t understand how these professionals conduct themselves.

    That kind of cultural norm, however, can be undone very quickly. Just look at attitudes toward torture in the US, particularly among elites. That was the result of a traumatic event but the same change can happen in less than a generation if you stop enforcing a norm.

    Mike

  94. 94.

    PJ

    October 10, 2015 at 10:27 am

    @MBunge: This is a good point. From what I’ve read on the topic, the decision to implement torture came from Cheney’s office, but there was significant support for it in the CIA (no surprise there). When it came time for the military to conduct interrogations in Afghanistan and, later, Iraq, they looked at what the CIA had been doing and copied it. Because there were no military guidelines on the topic (because it had previously been considered illegal), there were a lot of ad hoc decisions about what was acceptable and what wasn’t, but they all eventually got referred back to the legal justifications that Cheney, Yoo, et al. set forth, which was basically that anything short of death or permanent injury was ok. When the Abu Ghraib photos broke, my recollection from the film Standard Operating Procedure is that the soldiers involved were punished not because they were torturing inmates, but because they were not following orders – they were jailers, not interrogators, and it was the CIA’s job to torture inmates at Abu Ghraib.

  95. 95.

    schrodinger's cat

    October 10, 2015 at 10:35 am

    Thanks for the informative history lesson but why dignify a crazy person’s inane rants?

  96. 96.

    Omnes Omnibus

    October 10, 2015 at 10:39 am

    @schrodinger’s cat: Carson is apparently not the only person putting that analogy out there. It is a common NRA trope.

  97. 97.

    schrodinger's cat

    October 10, 2015 at 10:55 am

    @Omnes Omnibus: I know, but the Republican crazies come up with insane crackpot theories faster than we can debunk them. Honoring them with a response dignifies them. Its a game we are playing on their turf and we cannot win. DougJ’s response of pointing and laughing is better in my opinion. YMMV.

  98. 98.

    Omnes Omnibus

    October 10, 2015 at 11:02 am

    @schrodinger’s cat: I think pointing and laughing is a good approach as well, but what do you do when someone says why are you pointing and laughing at that person? At that point, you need to be able to articulate exactly what is point and laugh worthy.

  99. 99.

    Ruckus

    October 10, 2015 at 11:12 am

    @JPL:
    It’s not just that he wants to appeal to the ignorant part of the party, he IS one of the ignorant parts of the party.

  100. 100.

    300baud

    October 10, 2015 at 11:15 am

    If German Jews could have stopped the Holocaust with handguns, just think what the Red Army could have done if they had been given rifles! Germany wouldn’t have stood a chance. It’s a shame Russia never thought of that.

  101. 101.

    Adam L Silverman

    October 10, 2015 at 11:20 am

    @PJ: Abu Ghraib was a bit more complicated. You had, for all intents and purposes, two different chains of command at Abu Ghraib. The brigadier general who was in charge of it as a prison and of the Soldiers that were assigned there as jailers and a second one on the Intel side. The folks on the Intel side went around in sterile uniforms – no name tapes and no rank insignia. So no one actually knew who they were and what they’re ranks were and it was, from all the reporting, very unclear who they actually worked for and reported to. But it clearly was not the Commanding General on site.

    This would be bad enough and a recipe for disaster, but into that mix got thrown the unit that engaged in the behavior/torture that was caught in the now infamous pictures. Not to rag on the National Guard, especially as a lot of them got repeatedly put through the meat grinder in OIF, but not all National Guard units are alike. In this case you had a National Guard MP unit from West Virginia (this can mean that it has personnel from surrounding states even though the unit is primarily West Virginian). The mission they thought they were going to do, and had been prepped for (the prepped properly for the cultural and regional realities of the Iraqi theater is a discussion for a longer day. Lets just say that at this time it left everything to be desired.) was a standard MP mission – not jail duty. Even among domestic law enforcement in the US these are two entirely different assignments that require different training and skill sets.

    They were diverted prior to entering the theater from their original mission and reassigned to do duty as jail personnel. So right off the bat the lack of properly identifying the right units (or a need for certain types of units) and having them prepped properly and sequenced for deployment rotation struck again (this is a problem with ARFORGEN the Army Force Generation Model. OIF and OEF demonstrated that it has serious issues if it isn’t simply and outright broken, but I doubt it will be fixed. It is also what happens when you decide to fight two wars off the regular appropriations process with a too light uniformed footprint and the belief you can make up the difference with contractors.) The result was the wrong Soldiers doing a mission they weren’t trained to do in a place they hadn’t been properly prepped to deploy too assigned to operate at a base (prison) where the chain of command had been purposefully made ambiguous and the Commanding General had been deliberately cut out of the loop. And then the fun started…

    Also, the UCMJ already prohibited the use of torture because it codifies the Geneva Conventions we’re party to into the laws that Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, and Marines and DOD/Army/Navy/Air Force civilians have to abide by. This is why LTC (ret) West’s actions were not just morally and professionally wrong, but also a UCMJ violation, which led to his early retirement (and yes, that was not an appropriate outcome he should have been prosecuted fully through a court martial). When my team mates and I went through the Continental Redeployment Center (CRC) at Benning to draw our gear and get all the final boxes checked before going to link back up with our BCT in Germany prior to deployment, West was used as the poster boy for what not to do under the Rules of Engagement (ROE) and UCMJ requirements for appropriate code of conduct towards host country nationals and prisoners.

  102. 102.

    Chris

    October 10, 2015 at 11:23 am

    @PJ:

    Huh, interesting. What I’d read was that the move didn’t originally have a ton of support in the intelligence community (although this was DIA not CIA), and that in fact at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere the DIA had to keep sending requests up the chain of command for the soldiers to stop beating the shit out of prisoners, because it was interfering with their (less physical) attempts at interrogation.

    This was early on in the war, though, so I can see the cultural norms having completely changed by now.

  103. 103.

    Lurking Canadian

    October 10, 2015 at 12:02 pm

    @Fred: both examples (American revolution and Vietnam), like Afghanistan have in common that the insurgents were supported by a major power.

    I think the best counter-example to Carson’s bullshit is the US Civil War. Even if you think the South were the good guys, as most gun nuts incorrectly do, there’s no arguing that the Rebs got their asses kicked up one side and down the other.

    By 1865, if there had been any political desire for it, Sherman and Grant could have carried out the genocide of every white person south of the Mason-Dixon Line. No amount of ex-Confederate bushwhackers could have stopped them. That was kind of the intended lesson of Sherman’s March. “You people do not have a country. Sovereign countries do not let the armies of other countries march wherever they like without opposition.”

  104. 104.

    john fremont

    October 10, 2015 at 12:33 pm

    @Redshift: Yeah, why is it that many of the gun absolutists I know will see flying the Confederate flag is really not a big deal and yet know nothing about Nat Turner’s revolt? Here’s someone who took up arms to fight for freedom and most gun rights literature I’ve read has never discussed his revolt.

  105. 105.

    Adam L Silverman

    October 10, 2015 at 5:18 pm

    @efgoldman: I’m amazed things weren’t actually worse as a result. The context isn’t meant to excuse any bad behavior, however when something goes really wrong like this there’s usual one or more really clear reasons why.

  106. 106.

    justawriter

    October 10, 2015 at 6:53 pm

    A possibly useful meme I made for use in any Internet discussions on the subject … http://www.pixmeme.com/ww/userimages/525b41e7-a08b-403f-a2b3-13b6384ef775.png

  107. 107.

    Cheap Jim, formerly Cheap Jim

    October 10, 2015 at 10:13 pm

    You have a real dedication to an acronym, even when most people have given it up. I admire that.

  108. 108.

    PJ

    October 11, 2015 at 10:04 am

    @Adam L Silverman: Thanks very much for the clarification and all of the information you’ve provided.

  109. 109.

    Paul in KY

    October 12, 2015 at 9:05 am

    I liked the comment by one of our esteemed posters in another thread: The Red Army was armed to the teeth & suffered 8 million casualties.

  110. 110.

    Paul in KY

    October 12, 2015 at 9:11 am

    @Adam L Silverman: I see a lot of men that I perceive to be ultra-orthodox (the hair & beanie) walking around with uzis & galils.

  111. 111.

    Paul in KY

    October 12, 2015 at 9:15 am

    @efgoldman: I love Germany so much there should be 2 of them!

  112. 112.

    Paul in KY

    October 12, 2015 at 9:20 am

    @Mcc: The German WW I population had heavily censored papers & never seemed to grasp that they were losing war, until they lost it. That helped with the ‘stabbed in the back’ lie.

  113. 113.

    Paul in KY

    October 12, 2015 at 9:21 am

    @sm*t cl*de: They LOVED Hitler, till about Summer 1942.

  114. 114.

    Paul in KY

    October 12, 2015 at 9:23 am

    @Fred: You could say the Chinese revolution also turned out OK (overthrowing the Manchu dynasty & their mandarin elites).

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