Today marks the 75th anniversary of Kristallnacht.
No, I didn’t remember that one all by myself. One of our readers sent the following email:
Dear Dymphna,
This [donation] is for the 3 monthly drive. It is in honor of Kristallnacht, which opened my parents’ eyes to the real danger in Germany.
You are doing the same but many will not listen.
Thank you both.
Warmest regards and sending prayers for health and safety…
As much as I wanted to, I wasn’t sure I’d be well enough to post on this silver anniversary of Kristallnacht, but his email determined me to try. Oh my, those abandoned, half-finished essays littering my desktop…
By coincidence, Fjordman had emailed a link (to an article on the likelihood of our crumbling President to use an endless series of Executive Orders to rule by Diktat for the rest of his reign). On the sidebar of the page Fj sent was a mention of the memorial essay below. The title says it all , and speaks volumes about the relentless fascist ‘progressive’ push against gun owners – one which continues today in America, driven by the spiritual descendants of those German confiscators in the fourth decade of the 20th century.
The emphases below are mine.
What made the Nazi Holocaust possible? Gun control
[…] The Night of the Broken Glass, the Nazi pogrom against Germany’s Jews [occurred] on Nov. 9-10, 1938. Historians have documented most everything about it except what made it so easy to attack the defenseless Jews without fear of resistance. Their guns were registered and thus easily confiscated.
To illustrate, turn the clock back further and focus on just one victim, a renowned German athlete.
Alfred Flatow won first place in gymnastics at the 1896 Olympics. In 1932, he dutifully registered three handguns, as required by a decree of the liberal Weimar Republic. The decree also provided that in times of unrest, the guns could be confiscated. The government gullibly neglected to consider that only law-abiding citizens would register, while political extremists and criminals would not. However, it did warn that the gun-registration records must be carefully stored so they would not fall into the hands of extremists.
The ultimate extremist group, led by Adolf Hitler, seized power just a year later, in 1933. The Nazis immediately used the firearms-registration records to identify, disarm and attack “enemies of the state,” a euphemism for Social Democrats and other political opponents of all types. Police conducted search-and-seizure operations for guns and “subversive” literature in Jewish communities and working-class neighborhoods.
Jews were increasingly deprived of more and more rights of citizenship in the coming years. The Gestapo cautioned the police that it would endanger public safety to issue gun permits to Jews. Hitler faked a show of tolerance for the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, but Flatow refused to attend the reunion there of former champions. He was Jewish and would not endorse the farce.
By fall of 1938, the Nazis were ratcheting up measures to expropriate the assets of Jews. To ensure that they had no means of resistance, the Jews were ordered to surrender their firearms.
Flatow walked into a Berlin police station to comply with the command and was arrested on the spot, as were other Jews standing in line. The arrest report confirmed that his pistols were duly registered…
…which was obviously how the police knew he had them. While no law prohibited a Jew from owning guns, the report recited the Nazi mantra: “Jews in possession of weapons are a danger to the German people.” Despite his compliance, Flatow was turned over to the Gestapo.This scenario took place all over Germany — firearms were confiscated from all Jews registered as gun owners. As this was occurring, a wholly irrelevant event provided just the excuse needed to launch a violent attack on the Jewish community: A Polish teenager who was Jewish shot a German diplomat in Paris. The stage was set to instigate Kristallnacht, a carefully orchestrated Nazi onslaught against the entire Jewish community in Germany that horrified the world and even the German public.
[…]
Kristallnacht has been called “the day the Holocaust began.” Flatow’s footsteps can be followed to see why. He would be required to wear the Star of David. In 1942, he was deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp, where he starved to death.
One wonders what thoughts may have occurred to Flatow in his last days. Perhaps memories of the Olympics and of a better Germany flashed before his eyes. Did he have second thoughts about whether he should have registered his guns in 1932? …
[…]
Alfred Flatow was in his early 70s when he was starved to extinction by the Nazis. I doubt he was actually doing anything that resembled “thinking” by then. Who does when they’ve wasted away to nothing in the midst of endless physical and spiritual squalor?
I often think of our Canadian friend and his parents’ wise – if terrified – decision to escape Germany. No doubt they left much behind, enriching the Nazis. So many others refused to believe “it could happen here” – certainly not in a bastion of Western culture which had given us Bach and Beethoven and, ironically, cutting-edge Christian theology. A people who refuse adamantly to ever face their dark side – present-day Norway sadly comes to mind – is forced to scapegoat its own or to project onto singular others in order to silence them. Norway’s recognition of Hamas – Hamas! – is sad proof of its totalitarian fevers. Such cowardice is driven by fear and ends in the small cruelties innocent people endure there even now.
Seventy-five years on, not one European country has learned this lesson yet. Even in Germany, they remain terrified, refusing, for example to permit any DNA studies which may touch on race. In bending over backwards to avoid the mortal sin of racism, the purported anti-racists become contorted and obsessed with the possible occasions of racialism sins which they somehow see lurking everywhere. The lovers of collectivism suffer from the perversion of scrupulosity. Any spiritual director could tell them the cure for their misery, but like the other sufferers of this disorder they haven’t the characterological sturdiness required to simply let go, to surrender.
Nor are there any Churchills on our horizon now. Even if there were any great leaders extant, would they be repudiated in the end as Sir Winston was? Simply put, we are all-too-often driven by fear and laziness; we do not want reminders of our peril. A recent example was the non-response to the Center for Security Policy’s warnings about EMPs. People’s eyes glaze over –the state of Maine being a singular and heartening exception.
There are rare moments, say that brief period of the American Revolution’s hard years, where fear and laziness are occluded by bright and shining courage. However, we may not be able to generate and sustain enough of such moments to get by in the future. Millenial and pardigm-shifting Change is arriving a bit behind schedule, but it surely will be here as much as we would wish otherwise. I’ve heard more than one person say they are old and will be glad to miss the cataclsym, not thinking how that makes those left behind feel, the ones who will have to figure out how to get by.
Have we been gutted already, mostly content to avoid peering too hard into the murk? Do we hesitate or do we simply try to fit in, unnoticed, desiring only not-to-be-disturbed? Do we tell ourselves that this desire not to be worried is a love of Peace?
We – me writing this and you reading it – have had the good fortune to survive the murderous 20th century. Because we will not look at history, we think our existence-by-consumption is the norm. Even as we eat the seed corn and hang out the “Do Not Disturb” sign we insist that our times are usual.
Only the sentinels, our gun-owners, are willing to discuss a contrary future.
The reality of gun control in Germany was slightly more complex. Guns were outright banned in 1919. Then they were licensed in 1928.
The Nazis did not disarm the people. They disarmed Jews in 1938, at a point when the Germans and Jews were defacto at war. In 1938 you have Munich and the Sudetenland, so Germany is essentially on a war footing. The internal Jewish population was at this time hostile (if only because the Germans had picked them as the enemy, of course)
Here’s the wiki covering the rulings in Nazi Germany.
The 1938 German Weapons Act
The 1938 German Weapons Act, the precursor of the current weapons law, superseded the 1928 law. As under the 1928 law, citizens were required to have a permit to carry a firearm and a separate permit to acquire a firearm. Furthermore, the law restricted ownership of firearms to “…persons whose trustworthiness is not in question and who can show a need for a (gun) permit.” But under the new law:
Gun restriction laws applied only to handguns, not to long guns or ammunition. The 1938 revisions completely deregulated the acquisition and transfer of rifles and shotguns, as was the possession of ammunition.”[4]
The legal age at which guns could be purchased was lowered from 20 to 18.[5]
Permits were valid for three years, rather than one year.[5]
The groups of people who were exempt from the acquisition permit requirement expanded. Holders of annual hunting permits, government workers, and NSDAP members were no longer subject to gun ownership restrictions. Prior to the 1938 law, only officials of the central government, the states, and employees of the German Reichsbahn Railways were exempted.[4]
Jews were forbidden from the manufacturing or dealing of firearms and ammunition.[4]
Under both the 1928 and 1938 acts, gun manufacturers and dealers were required to maintain records with information about who purchased guns and the guns’ serial numbers. These records were to be delivered to a police authority for inspection at the end of each year.
On November 11, 1938, the Minister of the Interior, Wilhelm Frick, promulgated Regulations Against Jews’ Possession of Weapons. This regulation effectively deprived all Jews living in those locations of the right to possess firearms or other weapons.[6][7]
This suggests to me that banning possession among a targeted minority is a precursor to a pogrom.
Disarming the majority population? That’s a precursor or signal that the disarmed national population are slaves like in 1919. It’s a different kettle of fish really.
Please link these statements to an online source. I did find this wiki:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_politics_in_Germany
If that is where all your information originates, please say so.
This is WTMI…Way Too Much Information. People can’t take it all in.As a result they wander away from it.
Instead of numbers in brackets, which indicate further links,please provide the link.
Less is more.
It’s from wiki. The gun laws in Germany became more permissive under the Nazis but at the same time Jewish possession was outright banned.
The Gun Control debate in the US is targeted at the majority white population. It’s not directed at any minority per se.
Yes that was the link btw. I looked into the gun rights laws in Nazi Germany about 15 years ago and it does not look like the current crop of gun grabbers. Instead it looks like the outright ban in Germany in 1919. Confiscation of weapons for a defeated nation.
It’s not WTMI it simply states what Nazi gun laws actually were.
There was no general ban.
There was infact a significant increase in fairearms possession encouraged by the Nazis.
There was a targeted ban aimed at Jews.
That’s your opinion, re your wordage.
The post makes it quite clear the ban in the 1930s targeted Jews. Your almost-400 words from wiki without a link don’t clarify what was already clear to begin with.
You omitted the nature of the gun regulations that existed in Germany post ww1 and at the end of the 1920s. Total ban, followed by limited re legalization, followed by Nazi laws that expanded rights for the majority while restricting them for a specific minority
You may not have been aware of this, if you were the omission ought to be noted in comments. That’s all.
“They disarmed Jews in 1938, at a point when the Germans and Jews were defacto at war.”
Putting it that way makes it sound like the “clashes” between Copts and jihadis in Egypt.
By 1938 it was quite clear that the Germans were on a collision course with the rest of Europe and with their own Jewish minority.
Most Jewish people with a lick of sense, both in Gemany and the world must have understood that Germany was on a war
footing with them.
In the American context gun control is aimed at rural and suburban whites, based on a rationale that disarming them will drive down “urban” crime committed by minority nerdowells. The gun control advocates are Bloomberg, Feinstein, Boxer, Emanuel types, legislating away majority rights as punishment for crimes committed by clearly identified minority perps.
It’s a tragic inversion of the Nazi abuses.
No. That is not what is happening.
You’re right about some of the leftists, but they’ve been trying to get rid of guns since Brady was shot during the Reagan presidency. Ain’t going no where no matter how they try to stir things up.
Emmanuel wanted to ease back on Chicago’s draconian gun control because of the murderous crime rate among blacks, who kill mostly one another – including innocent bystanders – with stolen illegal weapons.
Lots of blacks own legal weapons. It’s NOT a race thing except in the Democrat machine-controlled high-crime slums. Like those in Detroit, St. Louis, Atlanta, etc.
We have a large group of gun owners, black and white, in our county. Those people hunt for food, and kill predators like coyotes which cause problems for farmers. Some have taken to walking in the woods armed since they’re encountering more unfriendly wildlife.
I’d love to have chickens but I can’t afford a chicken coop where they’d be safe from snakes, possums, bobcats, coyotes, small bears, etc.
In sum, white folks aren’t being targeted, but gun owners are and they well know it. In their fear to control their second amendment rights, they have no problem with sometimes trampling on others’ first amendment, free speech rights. They lose my support when they get dissenters fired for holding a nuanced opinion re the ‘balance’ of rights.
OTOH, gun owners are spooked by the collectivists who want everyone under their control…for our own good, of course.
I beg to differ.
Municipalities and metropolitan areas that ban guns are heavily black. Given the rate of felony convictions among blacks (1 in 3 have been through prison) there is a god chance that any black with a pistol or other firearm is breaking the law through mere possession.
Current gun grabbing is quite clearly aimed at the mythological rightist white middle age “gun nut” of yore.
Emanuel is a gun grabber.
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2013/apr/09/rahm-emanuel/mayor-rahm-emanuel-says-chicago-takes-more-guns-st/
He boasts about confiscations.
He wants to ban guns in neighboring states so they can’t get into Chicago.
You are badly misinformed about Rahm. Badly misinformed.
It was the legislature I had in mind, not the mayor:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_laws_in_Illinois#Local_laws
On July 9, 2013, Illinois enacted the Firearm Concealed Carry Act, which set up a permitting system for the concealed carry of firearms. Another provision of this law is state preemption for “the regulation, licensing, possession, and registration of handguns and ammunition for a handgun, and the transportation of any firearm and ammunition”. This invalidated Chicago’s requirements for gun registration and for an additional permit for the possession of firearms.
Important clarification. The mayor is in conflict with the rest of the population.
Rahm would like nothing better than to ban guns statewide and ban them in Indiana and other surrounding states.
The same thing is happening in South Africa.
Machette sales are up however.
That’s a shame. A machete won’t stop a bullet. Best thing is mastering martial arts in order to disarm the invaders, thugs.
Try this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krav_Maga
Like the Jews in Hungary back then, the white South Africans need to learn this method.
”A machete won’t stop a bullet”…but bare hands will?
no, of course not. That wasn’t my point. White South Africans are in danger. The more they can do to protect themselves and their families, the better off they’ll be. Krav Maga worked for Hungarians and also for the early settlers of Palestine.
You are using a reductio ad absurdum to dismiss a valid tactic. Obviously an AR-15 rules, but one defends with what one has. Thus a machete and being VERY proficient in Krav Maga are two ways to protect one’s family.
They should have staged a bid for a separatist state and fought.
They face extinction now. I’d sell them Detroit and North St Louis.
Problem is whites from there can’t get a visa to the states.
Apologies, I wasn’t clear.
It isn’t the white minority group responsible for the increased purchase of cutting/slashing implements.
They are, however, being disarmed.
I am not certain what the implication of this is.
It’s a prelude to a massacre.
Rather interesting to note that the whites in SA are arming up like never before, gun bans be damned, they are simply ignoring them.
A committee in the Florida legislature had a bill on ending the “stand your ground law”. It failed this week. And the police chief in Sanford FL, where the Trayvon Martin debacle happened, the police chief has said he’s NOT disarming the neighborhood watch volunteers. What he didn’t say is that to do so would kill those watch organizations and the crime rate would quickly explode. The police need the volunteers and they know it.
No state has gun ownership without having owners qualify. And chronic carelessness with weapons will bring down your fellow gun-owners on your back. They’ll turn you in if you’re an endangerment.
I can understand the positives of gun ownership, but I can’t imagine what London, England and other culturally/third world enriched places would be like with no gun control, they’d probably be akin to inner city America, if not worse because not only would you have the low criminals murdering eachother, but the many potential terrorists and extremists being able to get their hands on guns would be a huge risk for larger scale terrorist attacks, rather than some Nigerian Jihadist brutally cutting down Lee Rigby on the street with a machete. As horrible as that is, a gun will obviously do a lot more harm(this isn’t a problem in the US currently, but I’d say Europe has way more Muslim extremists than America).
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m pretty sure most guns used in murders in America are originally legally bought, then stolen by criminals or sold by the owners to criminals. While it’s still possible in Europe to get one, obviously, it’s a lot harder since very few people have access to them legally.
I don’t even know what Canada’s gun laws are(where I’m from), I always assumed they were strict but there’s a lot of shootings in the immigrant/non-European areas of major cities. Maybe most of them come up from the huge border with the US.
Anyway, that’s just my opinion. I know they prevent tyranny, would’ve prevented the Nazis, the Soviets, but today I don’t think that’s as relevant of a point. Also, no one in gun owning countries(the US and Switzerland I suppose) has used their guns to force a referendum on potential country changing decisions like immigration, haven’t overthrown governments who welcome foreign invasion into their own countries, and haven’t stopped media censorship and bias, so I don’t care anyway. The tyrants are already here.
The presence of third worlders in US and European cities necessitates gun restrictions in those municipalities.
It also necessitates a firearms black market among the historical population beefed up with hi tech surveillance and defensive architecture.
Gun ownership and gun policy differs, obviously, from country to country. Here’s a good site with a range of information:
http://www.gunpolicy.org/
Not sure how OT this is, but I’d like to tell it.
About thirty years ago, I worked with a Hungarian Jew called Tom. He’d been due to swim for his country at the 1940 Olympics. His father brought him to the UK, but Tom’s mother wouldn’t leave, and was murdered by the fascists in 1945.
Tom meanwhile trained as a parachutist, and his name was anglicised in case of capture, but he injured his back in a landing, and went into army intelligence. After the war, he interrogated captured Nazis for possible prosecution, which he said gave him some satisfaction.
I daresay Tom’s no longer with us, and he might not like Britain now, but I wish him happy landings.
My opinion is, the possession of guns is not in itself a barrier to either tyrannical government, or to gang rule of the streets. Most governments have enough well-trained commandos, special forces, and SWAT teams, that it is literally suicide to oppose the government through violence. Add to that, once you impose rule strictly through the possession of weapons, individual rights are not protected in the least. Once you have the open possession of weapons by gangs, the productive individual has no chance to defend himself, as the shiftless, out-of-work gang member has full time to organize and terrorize his neighborhood, while the productive individual is pretty much limited to grabbing his gun when needed. That is not a very effective strategy when confronted by a gang involved full-time in crime and protection of their territory.
I travel to Chicago a lot, and what is noteworthy is not the absence of guns among law-abiding people, but the absence of any idea that the ownership of guns, in a regulated situation, might actually enhance people’s security.
In point of fact, the reason leftists are so rabidly against gun ownership is that gun ownership represents the philosophy that one has a certain right and responsibility to support and defend yourself. Leftists work towards the state of being where the government is the only means of support, defense, or even the dissemination of information. The individual who owns a gun and is willing to defend himself is resistant to the idea there should be a source of power or wealth other than the government.
The only way that the private ownership of guns will enhance individual liberty and security is through a partnership with a just and well-organized government. The government issues gun carrying permits based on the past lawful behavior of the individual, and rigorously enforces the searching and arresting of individuals illegally carrying arms. This tips the balance of power to the productive individual, and promotes a free and secure environment.
The gun owner does NOT have the right to brandish a gun, except in direct self-defense. Gun control advocates, to the extent they will civilly discuss the idea at all, seem to feel that a license to carry a concealed weapon implies the right to use the gun as one wishes.
To restate my idea, gun ownership is NOT a protection against a tyrannical government, but is part of a mechanism to assure a free, productive, and independent citizenry who look to themselves, rather than the government, as being responsible for their lives.
You forget that there are millions of veterans who will not go quietly into the night my friend, and God help the folks who try to take on veterans who take the Constitution very very seriously.
The veterans can be a very positive force for freedom. Veterans generally take an intense interest in the political process, and can be a strong influence to maintain both freedom and security.
However, should the political process deteriorate to the point of actual confiscation of firearms, veterans will not be able to stop the process by violent resistance. The organized government will always win, and the battle will have been decisively lost should that point ever arise.
“The only way that the private ownership of guns will enhance individual liberty and security is through a partnership with a just and well-organized government. The government issues gun carrying permits based on the past lawful behavior of the individual, …”
The government issues nothing to you. The government grants nothing to you. A free born man does not need to plead past lawful behavior to the government for the exercise of his God given rights.
Peace always comes through conflict and the first step is exercising your right to say “no”. Any government or force that demonizes or silences its citizens is exercising illegitimate power. We can only hope the Silver Anniversary lessons sink in.
“I’ve heard more than one person say they are old and will be glad to miss the cataclysm, not thinking how that makes those left behind feel, the ones who will have to figure out how to get by.” This quote from the article is a stinging boomer rebuke.
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“The Gun Control debate in the US is targeted at the majority white population. It’s not directed at any minority per se.”
the truth is that the so-called “majority white population” is now and has been for about 25 years a legally disadvantaged minority. As a group, its voting power has been disintegrated through redistricting to guarantee African American (and now Hispanic, too) representation. Affirmative action is Jim Crow in negative. The utter collapse of U.S. and most “majority white” nations’ borders to immigration ensures the actual minority status of the people and culture that built everything we know, rely upon, and that every other group and culture yearns for today. Disarming the white population is essential to ensure that the quasi-legal usurpation isn’t met with any effective revolt. It is not a pretty picture for the future. Politicians (particularly Demonrats) have had it figured out for a while–they are amorally surfing a demographic wave that will ultimately crush them. But what a ride they’re having in the meantime at everyone else’s expense.
A total of 91 Jews were killed during Kristallnacht. If Jews had tried to put up armed resistance the death toll would have been in the tens of thousands if not higher, and probably would have created even greater sympathy for Nazi Germany among French and British conservatives. The majority of German and Austrian Jews living in the German Reich in November 1938 were able to successfully emigrate before Sept 3, 1939. ( If the US had been willing to take more German Jews, even more could have been saved). The moral – a weak despised minority is better off trying to find powerful allies rather than engage in heroic but suicidal resistance. A lesson the Jews learned at Masada back in 73AD. A lesson even the Holocaust bears out – Jews have far more world influence today relative to Germany then they did in 1933. The Jewish people paid a terrible price in terms of lives lost, but they certainly won the war, and Germany unquestionably lost.
I am not a holocaust denier, so don’t take my statement wrong:
If I were Jewish, I would not call losing upwards of 6 million of my fellow Jewish compatriots to unmitigated murder ‘winning’ the war. Jews, as a whole, were victims of WWII that escaped near-eradication in Europe. A few years later, when Israel was ‘re’ founded, the Jews regained much. The ones left alive that is. Just sayin.
No one is immune to world war. The war was fought almost entirely where most of Europe’s Jews lived (the old pale) and it was fought to displace and replace them.