Sometimes, we read about psychopaths who abuse animals before turning to humans. Strangely, most of them go after bunnies, kittens, puppies and other helpless creatures. very few of them seek the challenge of trying to abuse bulls, full-grown large dog breeds or wolverines.
That makes sense: kicking a large, dangerous animal would open up a world of hurt. It’s much safer to abuse species without substantial natural defenses.
What if the bully couldn’t tell a regular bunny from the Monty Python bunny? Either the predation would be abandoned or a disproportionate amount of care and resources would have to be devoted to the quest to victimize the creature. It’s the same with the selection of human victims: genocidal maniacs tend to target those they perceive as weak and inoffensive.
On the other hand, the weak and the inoffensive — humans and well as bunnies — often do nothing in the face of danger and just hope to be overlooked. Humans often assume that struggling “would make it worse” and go along with relocation to a secondary crime scene, with being disarmed, with all the obvious preparations for rape and murder because of false hope, or because they erroneously think that family would suffer more if they resist. In reality, the kind of fiends who would execute innocent people for the resistance of others would as willing to commit murder without an excuse.
Easy victim or a fighter waiting for a chance to draw?
The well-document plight of the European jews during WW2 is an obvious example. All along the path to destruction, these people were hoping for a more reasonable explanation for the events. After all, who in their right mind would have guessed that mass murder based on ethnicity or religion would happen on such a wide scale? And once the victim is stripped to underwear and marched to the nearest ravine, what’s there to do?
Recently, a presidential candidate said that more guns in the hands of Jews would have made a difference. Media outlets aligned with the authoritarian regimes criticised that view as idiotic. You tell me, do you think that encountering hundreds of thousands of armed individuals among the millions who ultimately perished would have made no difference? Would Nazi collaborators have been as eager to go after a people of which one in five or ten would readily shoot them? Could a couple of soldiers with bolt action rifles herd a hundred civilians into a ditch and force them to strip if they had to worry about half-dozen pistols hidden somewhere in that crowd?
A pocket 25ACP isn’t much of a weapon — but a great deal better than nothing. It can be hidden almost anywhere.
The pistol is only a 6.35mm (25ACP), weak and short-ranged…would you still take it seriously as a threat? I thought so. Now imagine being tasked with herding a crowd or civilians to their deaths and having to worry about several of your victims just waiting for a chance to back shoot you.
Pistols are weak. Making sure the foe is dead is prudent and worth an extra shot.
This is how the events should have gone. But they didn’t. Many Jews were too poor to afford any weapon. Even more could but were too law-abiding to get one illegally. Those who did have them legally, like the Olympic champion Alfred Flatow, turned them in when ordered in 1938 and were subsequently murdered. Those who did manage to get armed and organized fared much better.
Americans today aren’t operating under the same handicaps. We can afford guns and training, most of us do not live in states with registration of firearms and, most importantly, we know that our government can and does routinely act criminally. If federal or local governments escalate the degree of repression as they have recently done in Boston and less recently in New Orleans, there’s a greater ability and more ready will to resist. With luck, the lack of resemblance between the American population at large and helpless bunnies just ripe for victimization would dissuade Washington from even trying.
“It can never happen here.” Oh, really? Remember American Indians and the imprisoned Japanese-Americans? We can, based on historic precedents, consider any effort to disarm a group of people or even an individual as intent either to subjugate or to murder after the victim is stripped of defenses. Today, the round-ups are far more likely to go along the political divides than among ethnic or religious lines, but that would be of scant comfort to the victims. Get a weapon. Learn to use it. Be a well-prepared peace-monger.
Whenever some snowflake tells me that we shouldn’t put up resistance but instead “Just give them what they want,” my stock response has been “But what if what they want is my LIFE?”
The wittiest recover first and either say it’s impossible to know so fighting with your assailant could actually frighten him enough to harm you or kill you by accident. But my stance is that threatening me with a weapon is naked aggression, it’s a statement that I must comply or be injured or killed with the weapon exhibited.
It matters very little who wields the weapon, whether a criminal acting in his own interests or that of government employees acting for …well it might be for their own interests or the government’s interests, but it’s certainly unlikely to be MY interests.
Resistance need not be lethal if it makes you squeamish. My college poli-sci instructor, Hans Ulmer, related how as a 12 y/o boy he and his family escaped the Nazis in 1941. A young SS Lieutenant and a Gestapo agent came to for the senior Ulmer who retrieved his coat from the hallway hook, assured his family it would be alright just before drawing a .380 pistol from his coat. He forced both Nazis to disrobe after disarming them then tied them in a rather humiliating position. They quickly gathered their few belongings, crept out the back door to land in Sweden 3 days later. (It wasn’t until 1953 that his mother revealed she had taken a moment to use indelible ink to draw the Star of David on the Gestapo man’s bare buttocks before they left.) Resistance is not futile.
“After all, who in their right mind would have guessed that mass murder based on ethnicity or religion would happen on such a wide scale?”
No guessing was needed. The example of the Armenian genocide was right in front of them.
It’s as you said, most people have too much respect for or fear of the authorities, or such self-defeating memes as respect for law or believing “rights” will protect them. They have been indoctrinated and have a poor connection to reality. Or, the culture they are submerged in disapproves of self defense, and social pressure stops them from acting.
“We can, based on historic precedents, consider any effort to disarm a group of people or even an individual as intent either to subjugate or to murder after the victim is stripped of defenses.”
In short, it is an act of war. The only reasonable response to an act of war, is a hail of bullets.
http://strike-the-root.com/life-without-rights
http://strike-the-root.com/become-dangerous
I have several Jewish acquaintances who are vehemently for banning guns, and when confronted with the evidence that the Jewish community in Europe was caught disarmed at the beginning of the 30s revert back to name calling, accusations of “victim shaming”, etc. They just can’t deal with the reality. I note none of these acquaintances live in Israel, who are busily arming themselves against knife attacks (almost too late too, due to an overly restrictive licensing process).
Peter
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/judaica/ejud_0002_0018_0_17990.html
http://www.holocaust-trc.org/a-global-perspective-on-working-with-holocaust-survivors-and-the-second-generation/survivor-guilt-in-holocaust-survivors-and-their-children/
Pingback: Which would be safer to kick? | Flyover-Press.com
There was a local couple, here in the Twin Cities:
http://chgs.umn.edu/histories/minnesotans/sutin/
Their son wrote a book, which was later turned into a stage play.
I was at the premier.
The book and the play both made it very clear how important firearms were to their survival. The Jewish partisans didn’t defeat the Nazis, but they survived the war, and almost none of the Jews who weren’t hiding in the woods with guns did.
The theater where the premier was held? Posted “no guns”, of course.
“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking…”
My wife and I watched the film “Woman in Gold” this weekend. It was about the legal struggle of a Viennese Jewish woman to get five paintings back from a national museum in Austria after they had been stolen from her family in 1938 by the Nazis. There were numerous flashbacks to her past in Vienna when the Nazis came to power, and the Jews were persecuted and their property stolen.
One point she made clear – the Austrians weren’t victims of the Nazis. The Nazis were welcomed by cheers and adulation, and the persecution of the Jews was done not by jack-booted uniformed thugs, but by everyday citizens.
During one of the scenes I looked at my wife and said, “And people think ‘That can’t happen here.’ ”
The hell it can’t.
Of course the authoritarians would have a problem with it, and call it “victim blaming” in their typical refrain of victimization.
Remember, these are the same anti-gunners who argue that “you don’t need guns to defend you from government”, and when you point out historical cases where government killed people, they reply with “well do you think you can fight tanks, jets, and drones with GUNS?”
They need to believe in the hopelessness of resistance to justify their own complacency in defenselessness.