Ben Carson Point Was on Target

Last week, according to The New York Times, Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson suggested the Holocaust would have been “greatly diminished if German Jews had been armed with guns.”

Actually, after watching the tape of Carson discussing the issue with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, it seems to me that what Carson suggested was that if German and perhaps other European civilians as a whole had not been largely disarmed by Hitler, the Nazis would have likely encountered more armed resistance, and had a harder time slaughtering so many innocents. I think it’s worth noting that that the Times’ dishonest reporting (stating that Carson was suggesting German Jews and not German citizens in general when he referred to “the people”) is probably intended to make his thinking sound more far fetched than it is. After all, as Blitzer says in the interview, the Nazis had a powerful military machine, that they used to “go in and wipe out whole communities,” and it would indeed be far fetched to suggest the Jews alone, as a small segment of the population, could have defeated it. But that is not what Ben Carson said; rather, he seems to have been making the broader point that the Nazis placed major restrictions on gun ownership and by and large disarmed Germany’s civilian population before imposing the “final solution.”

Setting aside this example of The New York Times’ lack of objectivity (the paper of record, which after all buried accounts of the Holocaust on its back pages during World War II), Carson has raised an important point, and it isn’t to blame the victims, G-d forbid.  Rather, it is a point about the necessity to stand up to tyranny and insist upon the right to self-defense.

For the record, here is a transcript of the relevant part of the interview:

Wolf Blitzer: Just to clarify, if there had been no gun control laws in Europe at that time, would 6 million Jews have been slaughtered?

Ben Carson: I think the likelihood of Hitler being able to accomplish his goals would have been greatly diminished if the people had been armed.

Wolf Blitzer: Because they had a powerful military machine as you know, the Nazis.

Ben Carson: I understand that.

Wolf Blitzer: They could have gone in and they simply did go in and wipe out whole communities.

Ben Carson: But you realize there was a reason they took the guns first, right?

Not only did the Nazis impose strict gun control on civilians, they specifically ordered Jews to surrender their firearms several weeks before Kristallnacht, diminishing the Jews’ ability to fight back or do anything to impede the Nazis’ abuse of them and their families.

It’s also true that, in general, Jews who resisted–either by hiding, or organizing to fight – in the forests, in uprisings – did, on average, survive the Holocaust in greater numbers than those who didn’t.

In “The Avengers,” his excellent historical account of the Vilna Ghetto Uprising (which came first in Lithuania, and inspired the more famous Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in Poland) author Rich Cohen documents this part of history. Some brave Jews who resisted the Nazis died horrible deaths, bless their souls. But so did almost all of the Jews who did not resist, bless their souls. And on average, those who resisted, including the leaders of the Vilna Ghetto uprising, survived in greater numbers than those who complied with Nazi orders to cooperate. In his book, assembled from extensive interviews with Holocaust survivors, Cohen documents the terrible struggle these brave young Jewish fighters endured. One of their great challenges was to attain weapons with which to fight the Nazis. These mostly teenage fighters risked their lives every day to buy or steal weapons they hid all over the ghetto.

The point is not to blame anyone who didn’t stand up as an unarmed civilian against a monstrous military machine. Jews–mostly teenagers–who fought these uprisings held out against the Nazis for longer than many governments and entire countries filled with mostly non-Jewish European civilians did, so it’s not that plenty of Jews weren’t tough. But surely the lessons of history include this: when faced with evil and someone who is determined to kill you, it is always better to resist than to cooperate. I believe that is probably what Carson meant by his remarks.

It’s worth noting, too, that Abba Kovner, leader of the Vilna Ghetto Uprising, and eventual founder of the Diaspora Museum in Tel Aviv (he survived!) spoke to Cohen at length about his efforts to mobilize his fellow Jews in the ghetto. Severely malnourished and demoralized, even though they thought they had almost no chance to survive, they fought with tremendous resilience and ingenuity for “Jewish honor.” In other words, even with no real hope of surviving, they kept on fighting, because they believed it was better to resist till their dying breaths than to go quietly. And amazingly, against all odds, some – more than would have if they hadn’t fought – did survive.

The real question is, how many more — Jews and innocent non-Jews, too — would have survived had they all retained their weapons and mobilized to fight?

That we will never know. That’s the question Ben Carson is asking. He should not be condemned or censored for prompting us to think about it.

Carson’s speculation is valid, and perhaps never more important at any time since the Second World War than now, when the world watches passively as Iran’s regime stands at the threshold of attaining nuclear capability.

The necessity to stand up for one’s right to life and liberty is the number one reason to support a strong Israel against international attempts to annihilate and isolate the Jewish State. This is a lesson that, unfortunately, some Jews have failed to learn even post-Holocaust, believing that international acceptance (which is unlikely to ever come) is more important than self-defense and standing up for one’s own people against a mountain of propaganda and hatred.

What Ben Carson is saying is not only about Jews, but about all people and the natural human tendency to be psychologically whipped into submission by tyrants – something our Second Amendment is designed to hedge against.

More to come.

This entry was written by Heather Robinson and posted on October 12, 2015 at 5:41 pm and filed under Blog. permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Keywords: Abba Kovner, Ben Carson, Rich Cohen, Vilna Ghetto Uprising, Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Wolf Blitzer. Post a comment or leave a trackback: Trackback URL. */?>