The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising: Armed Jews vs. Nazis

What an odd opinion piece. It seems to suggest that the Jews of Nazi occupied countries were merely missing arms in order to significantly deter the Wehrmacht that was taking on the combined forces of the Soviet, British, and US military.

Yet it doesn't explain why the French people in Nazi occupied countries, who had a larger gun culture, were so (relatively) easily subdued and kept pacified.

If the thesis is correct, it would seem to suggest that the two-state solution might be achieved by simply delivering massive amounts of arms to the Palestinians. But I can't help in reading it that it's an advocacy piece supporting a certain US view towards the right to bear arms, and subject to 'hypothesis myopia', where 'investigators fixate on collecting evidence to support just one hypothesis; neglect to look for evidence against it; and fail to consider other explanations.' (Quoting http://www.nature.com/news/how-scientists-fool-themselves-an... .)

As evidence of one thing I think is odd, I'll note that the quote from the 1967 "International Society for the Prevention of Crime", which concluded "defensive measures are the most effective means for the prevention of genocide" only appears in a handful of web search results, many by the same author as this, and the others from US sources which appear to want minimal gun controls.

That's hardly suggestive of a wide-spread agreement that that view is correct.

I attempted to verify the quote, to learn the context, but found very little even about the organization/meeting. DDG at https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22International+Society+for+the+P... only finds 6 matches, including this WaPo opinion piece. Ditto for Google. Only one is not derived from this opinion piece, that being the author's earlier paper at https://www.saf.org/journal/19/kopel.pdf .

That paper in turn references 'V.V. Stanciu, “Reflections on the Congress for the Prevention of Genocide,” in Yad Vashem Studies on the European Jewish Catastrophe and Resistance, vol. 7, ed., Livia Rothkirchen (Jerusalem, Israel: Yad Vashem, 1968), p. 187'. The only other paper I found which cites that reference is David Caplan, in "Weapons Control Laws: Gateways to Victim Oppression and Genocide", at http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4899-5974-4_1... , which also appears to argue for weak gun controls.

(I verified that the cited source does exist; see http://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/about/institute/studies/issue... . Stanciu appears to have been a French lawyer and criminologist.)

Using a reference from 1967 from what appears to be an obscure source make me think it's a result of quote mining. Is this view an outlier specifically chose to back a predetermined hypothesis? Why reference something that's older than I am - is there really nothing newer?

Given the number of genocides since 1967 (Rwanda, Red Terror in Ethiopia, Cambodian Genocide, 1971 Bangladesh atrocities, and the Nigerian Civil War all seem ways to test that thesis), surely those would provide additional insight the relationship between strong gun control laws and genocide. Could we have prevented the genocide in Rwanda by air-dropping a bunch of arms on those being killed?

Indeed, I found just such a paper when trying to find out more about Stanciu. This paper is "Rethinking Approaches to Prevention under the Responsibility to Protect Agency and Empowerment within Vulnerable Populations" at at http://booksandjournals.brillonline.com/content/journals/10.... .

> The paper considers a number of historical case studies in which targeted groups were able to leverage their own agency, often with assistance from others, to reduce this vulnerability. These include cases that culminated in genocide, namely the experiences of German and Austrian Jews under Nazi rule, and negative cases studies in which a demonstrable risk of mass atrocities was not realised, such as the experiences of Yemenite Jews in the first half of the twentieth century and those of the Bahá’í community in Iran since the 1979 Iranian revolution. These cases suggest that assisting persecuted populations to empower themselves can be an effective way to promote resilience to mass atrocities.

and the author of that piece has done a lot of research on genocide http://ro.uow.edu.au/do/search/?q=author_lname%3A%22Mayersen... .

I think there is a pretty obvious explanation why the Jews in Warsaw fought back but the French mostly didn't. See the first chart on this page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocaust_victims

Most likely an airdrop of arms would have ended the Rwandan genocide sooner - keep in mind that the genocide only ended when armed Tutsis took over the country. This effort was certainly helped by the fact that fleeing Tutsis, formerly hoping to just quietly live their lives and ignore politics, suddenly became willing to take up arms and join the RPF.

There were active resistances in most occupied countries including France. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Resistance

However a big difference between occupied populations and Jews is that Germany for the most part left the occupied population alone. Yes they were still oppressed and in many cases fell into poverty however they weren't hunted down by the SS, gathered and then shipped to concentration camps, ghettos, and later to extermination camps.

As far as Ghettos go then for the most part it was a "Polish" issue, there weren't many Ghettos outside of Poland, while it appears now that the German population knew much more about the treatment of Jews than what previously thought or admitted the German's kept Germany clean, and only had labor and work camps within Germany and for the most part France and other occupied countries which sadly provided much better conditions for the most part which enabled the Germans to dismiss the claims of what was happening in Poland and in the eastern front as Jewish and later Allied propaganda.

And this is a major issue, while French, Polish, Danish, Dutch and other nationalities had resistances they for the most part were fighting for ideals and their personal freedom. A population in risk of genocide has to literally fight for it's life. If Jews the capabilities of supporting a continuous armed resistance the Holocaust could've been avoided (this isn't claiming that the end result would've resulted in less deaths) because it would be much less likely that the Germans could've as easily transported as many Jews at that much of an ease during the final solution.

The final solution was so unthinkable that even the Jews didn't believe it until the news broke out in the final year of the war in Europe, the majority of the Jews were transported from ghettos and work camps and thought that they are just are being put into a new camp, the level of deception that was put into the final solution was truly unbelievable including letting the "red-cross" (still no clear if this was a show or the actual red-cross) visit the Jews in the big Ghettos before transferring them to the death camps to further pacify and calm down the population.

So yes arming at risk populations might make a huge difference in the end even if you only consider that difference to be the way they died rather than the pure numbers, but in modern times it's also an issue. Tribal genocide (which sadly being going since even before colonial times) cannot be just as easily compared to the Holocaust, if you are the population too much you might still get a Genocide in which the original at risk population isn't the victim but now the perpetrator so you end up with constantly fueling an ever shifting conflict.

The implication here is that an armed American population would be able to defeat a tyrannical US government.

This is the same US government that's armed with nuclear weapons, tanks with composite armor, a hacker network that would make Google blush, and populist democratic backing.

Additionally, this is the same US government has killed over 600,000 of its own citizens before for rebelling.

It is the height of sociopathic narcissism to think individuals or small bands of "freedom fighters" would be able to defeat such a system.

Smart people would instead work WITH the system to achieve their objectives, instead of working against it like a buffoon.

Personal firearms should be removed throughout a modern society.

Ben Carson's comments weren't in a void: it's long been an NRA hobbyhorse that the holocaust wouldn't have happened if only the Jews had guns. He's just repeating a long-stated claim.

The problem is that for those events in WWII where such a claim can be tested -- for example, the Ghetto Uprising -- the claim fails miserably. In the Ghetto Uprising, the Nazis lost 300 soldiers and the Jews lost at least 13,000 people, perhaps far more.

I think what we're seeing in this article is an attempt to redefine the metric:

> Nearly every Jew who participated was eventually killed — but they were going to be killed anyway. By choosing to stand and fight, the Warsaw Jews diverted a significant amount of Nazis resources from battlefields elsewhere, thus hastening the Nazi defeat.

So according to the author, Jewish deaths don't really count as a metric because they were "going to be killed anyway". And the metric instead should be about whether "significantly resources were diverted", a highly dubious claim in and of itself. Essentially the uprising would be considered "successful" if it hastened the end of the war, not if the people in the Ghetto were saved.

Whether true or not, the problem with this claim is that it doesn't help the gun lobby's agenda, which is used to justify arming people in the US: that having guns would have prevented the immediate deaths of those with the guns. The whole article reeks of misdirection.