The Jewish Telegraphic Agency reports that Samuel “Joe the Plumber” Wurzelbacher—the American right-wing icon of 2008 McCain-Palin fame and current GOP candidate in the Ohio 9th CD—says that gun control in Nazi Germany was responsible for the Holocaust, as it prevented the Jews from arming themselves and fighting back. No joke. Assertions like this express to a tee the intellectual level of the present-day American right. Seriously, Marine Le Pen & Co are philosopher kings compared to these people. C’est affligeant…
UPDATE: One reads that fanatical settlers in the West Bank burned and vandalized a mosque in the peaceful, law-abiding Palestinian village of Jabaa. I suppose Joe the Plumber and his fans on the American right would agree that if the Jabaa villagers had been armed, those brave settlers would not have dared enter the village to attack their house of worship…
Joe the Plumber is not at all the issue. He will most likely lose to democrat Marcy Kaptur in November. He would almost certainly have defeated the democrat Dennis Kucinich whom Kaptur defeated in the democrat primary.
The issue is the 2nd Amendment, the constitutionally recognized right of individual citizens to keep and bear arms (RKBA).
The framers of the Constitution put it in the Bill if Rights, and put it second. Second only to free speech and free exercise of religion for a reason: to prevent the government from infringing on the basic rights of the people set forth in the Declaration of Independence, enumerated in the Constitution and upheld on June 28th, 2010 by the Supreme Court
(McDonald v. Chicago)
While it is an hypothetical to apply American law to the Nazi era, and to the jewish and other victims of the Holocoast, it is certainly easier to round up and exterminate an unarmed populace, and difficult, if not impossible to do so with an armed, determined citizenry.
One of the most heroic episodes of the Holocaust is the story of the Warsaw Ghetto. What was the first thing the Jews in the ghetto did? They armed themselves, spending all their money, liquidating all their assets, and buying guns sending young children out in the dark of night to buy and smuggle in weapons. They understood the concept of self defense.
When the Nazis closed in, they faced a long fierce battle, and many Nazis were killed. It is a lesson of history that has tragically been forgotten.
But the message is clear: an armed people is a free people.
For most Americans, the 2nd Amendment is the most important because it guarantees all the other rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights. In the US, RKBA is settled law.
We cannot even conceive, even though we weren’t even born yet, of Americans or Brits surrendering to an invading foreign army.
Watching newsreels of the French standing by and doing absolutely nothing as the Nazis marched down the Champs Élysées is inconceivable for an American or a Brit.
Perhaps it is our Anglo-Saxon heritage from which stems our love and defense of liberty and individual freedom.
As Churchill so eloquently put it “we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender”
Joe the Plumber is right. He may not be a philosopher, or a philosopher king, but he does understand liberty and what keeps us a free people.
CCinna: Joe the Plumber is what we in France call a con. He is a nitwit and an ignoramus (and on this, is perfectly in tune with the mainstream of his party; a party that has, intellectually speaking, known better days). On the RKBA, the notion that this supposed right exists so that individuals may be armed to resist eventual tyrannical government or foreign invaders is a contemporary ex post rationalization. Gun ownership in America is cultural. It is a heritage of the Scots-Irish strain in American culture. Americans own guns because they like to hunt, do target practice, or because it makes them feel safe and protected. But the protection here is against criminals who may try to break into their homes, not agents of a hypothetical tyrannical state or soldiers of a foreign army. Historically speaking, when Americans armed themselves to counter a bigger threat – one bigger than individual burglars and thugs –, it was against Injuns or slave uprisings (and here armed citizens tended to use their arms proactively, not defensively). As for the 2nd Amendment, the RKBA was explicitly linked to a “well regulated militia.” This was incontestably the intention of the Founding Fathers – not that it should matter one way or the other what several dozen slave-owning white men two centuries ago intended or not – as Garry Wills has definitively explicated and laid to rest in the 21 September 1995 issue of The New York Review of Books (and in a follow-up exchange in the 16 Nov. 95 issue). And don’t bother bringing up the politically motivated five-to-four DC v. Heller ruling of the Roberts Court, as even conservative legal scholars will admit that the legal reasoning behind this was flawed (just as, e.g., liberal jurists will readily accept that Roe v. Wade was poorly argued). If Joe the Plumber is not a philosopher king, Supreme Court justices are not either.
As for citizens defending themselves against tyranny, this is a pure abstraction for white Americans, who have never known tyranny in their history (and that includes the late colonial era; the 1775-83 war may have been a war of independence but it was also a civil war, as a large portion of the colonial population were loyalists who fought with the King against their fellow Americans; à propos, I distinctly remember the conservative pundit George Will writing some 25-30 years ago that if he had been alive in 1776 he, as a conservative, would have necessarily been a Loyalist). And there is not the slightest chance that Americans will someday decide en masse to defend themselves against their own government, as it is inscribed in the American DNA that the US government is legitimate and that anyone who violently resists it will be arrested and prosecuted – if not killed outright –, end of story.
But if some crazy and totally unforeseen series of circumstances were to occur that would send America down the road to tyranny, that tyranny would be organized by persons who think like yourself and to use against persons who think like me, let there be no mistake about it.
What you say about France reflects a typical American ignorance of this country and its history (and I specify American, not English, as it would be quite rich of the latter to denigrate French behavior in 1940, given that the British army hightailed it across the Channel at Dunkirk rather than engage the Huns in combat). The Germans marched down the Champs-Elysées in June 1940 after a six-week Blitzkrieg during which 120,000 French soldiers were killed. French soldiers fought valiantly but were overwhelmed by an army that was its equal but whose generals were superior. The fall of France in 1940 represented a catastrophic failure of the French military high command and its strategy (and which General de Gaulle, a lonely voice in the wilderness, had been severely criticizing for six years), not of the failure of French soldiers to fight. When the Germans arrived in Paris there was no one to resist them, because all the men of fighting age were on the front or already taken prisoner. Even if French urban households had kept six-shooters at home, it is unlikely that the shopkeepers, grandfathers, and 14 year-old boys of Paris would have tried to use them against the Wehrmacht and to any effect (except to get themselves killed). And if Parisians had been New Yorkers, Washingtonians, or Dallasites, they would have behaved no differently.
As for France today, gun ownership is widespread. The rural population – among whom hunting a major pastime – is armed (with rifles) and always has been. There are no restrictions on the sale or possession of hunting rifles. Pistols and semi-automatic and automatic weapons necessitate a permit (following police inquiry) and membership in the FFT (French NRA) plus letter of recommendation from this, which is precisely the way it should be. And in America too.
Oh yes, on your parallel with the Warsaw Uprising. This is irrelevant to the argument, as no one here is disputing the right of people to resist an occupier.
But when the occupier is a powerful military, one generally needs a military to confront it. Ordinary people with pistols and rifles can’t do the job (and they did not succeed in Warsaw, FYI). And if citizens do decide to resist, pre-occupation gun control laws have no incidence whatever on their ability to procure arms and do so.
On “an armed people [being] a free people” the most armed people in the world today (and yesterday too) are Afghans, Somalis, and Iraqis. So does that make them “a free people”?
A European view (or cliché) on the American perspective: Americans would depict themselves as pioneers building their wooden home and business in a threatening environment (well, the Far West). The gun being the ultimate life insurance against whatsoever. Europeans would consider themselves as “Bürger” (citizens?) living together in small cities behind the guarded town walls — within the city, (individual) guns are a problem, “un malheur est si vite arrivé”; on the top of the wall, guns are a solution, as far as their are used according to the collective will, and not as an individual liberty.
On 1940, thank you for correcting the (unbelievable) view of CCinna. As all French citizens, I can mention my grandfather has been a war prisoner for years in Germany; my other grandfather was one of the organizers of “Chantiers de jeunesse”, that were a kind of non-armed military service the Pétain régime forged to replace the army it was not allowed to have (I simplify, but check); one of my uncles was killed in his plane by a German opponent after having himself shot several German planes down — as far as I remembered, our Airforce shot four enemy planes down for every French plane lost. Also see http://ufacbagnolet.over-blog.com/article-l-aviation-francaise-dans-la-campagne-de-france-en-1940-51219120.html
When the war was already lost (since the 6-8th June), and the Wehrmacht arrived at Paris, the city was declared “ville ouverte” (13th June). It made just no sense to get the city destroyed without any military impact on the enemy.
1940 has been an humiliating defeat, as 1870 had been; and “l’imprévoyance française” is in both cases the basic reason for the failure and the invasion. But in both cases, you can save individual willingness to resist. And our hunting guns 😉
Frédéric, I entirely agree with you here (and thanks for the link on the 1940 air war). The view of American pioneers being armed in a threatening environment is not a cliché. Americans settled the west and south in advance of the authority of the state, not to mention in the absence of agreements or treaties with the indigenous peoples whose lands they were encroaching on, so, yes, they did need guns, both as protection and to conquer. And then there was the institution of slavery, which was based on a system of organized violence and terror not just by the state but also the entire white population. It should also be noted that gun ownership was, of course, not allowed for the slaves or for their descendants in the American South in the century following the Civil War, and if there were ever a people who needed to protect themselves – from a tyrannical (American) state and the majority population – it was southern blacks.
Good point about European “burghers” and gun ownership. When guns are easily obtained in cities, nothing good comes of it. Also a good historical reminder on Paris having been declared an “open city” in June 1940. Had the French army sought to defend Paris, the city would have indeed been destroyed and with much of its population killed, and would still have been conquered in the end. Perhaps CCinna and francophobic American right-wingers wouldn’t have a problem with this. The entire French population – as well as the rest of the civilized world – would not have wanted it, though. Thank God the French “surrendered” in this instance.
“What you say about France reflects a typical American ignorance of this country and its history…”
Arun, Cincinna happens to be French, born and raised there but now living in America. Could you please try making rational arguments, rather than falling back on personal invective and hyperbole?
Parmenio: CCinna has identified herself on this blog as being a “garden variety WASP” whose Congregationalist ancestors rode with Paul Revere’s Minutemen and whose brothers and grandfathers played football (American) in high school and college. This makes her American, not French.
But even if she were French, this would simply show that people can indeed be ignorant about their own country and its history.