We’ve documented how Ben Carson is completely wrong about the idea that gun control laws enabled the Nazis and the Holocaust — turns out that unless you were a Jew or another persecuted class in Nazi Germany, gun control didn’t really exist — and how the Media Research Center’s “news” division, CNSNews.com, didn’t see fit to fact-check Carson, instead presenting his false assertions as if they were true.
The MRC is now going one step further by claiming the truth doesn’t actually matter.
In his Oct. 10 NewsBusters post, Jeffrey Lord actually whines about Carson being fact-checked:
Media firestorm to follow – immediately. From the Huffington Post to ABC to Time and more (and more!) the liberal media was out there to dismiss Carson’s comments to Wolf Blitzer’s quite legit question as somehow as wacko as it was inflammatory. Even the Anti-Defamation League jumped in to say that Carson’s remarks were “historically inaccurate and offensive.”
Stop.
One has to wonder, do all these media outlets have anybody working for them who is familiar with history?
Actually, yes, they do — hence all the fact-checking. At no point in his post does Lord refute any of it. Instead, he declares that “In fact, to the question of whether gun-toting Jews could have impeded Hitler the answer was long, long ago answered. And the answer is a decided yes.” And he cites the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, as if that could be retroactive.
In other words? In other words what Dr. Carson is suggesting — specifically that a massively armed Jewish population could have severely hampered Hitler’s Holocaust — is supported by the true story of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. In which a relatively small minority of Jews inside the ghetto, with a minimum amount of, according to the Holocaust Museum, “mostly pistols and explosives” managed to “sufficiently disorient” the Nazis and “suspend further deportations” to the death camps, at least delaying the inevitable. Even more importantly, as word spread of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising it “inspired other uprisings in ghettos (e.g., Bialystok and Minsk) and killing centers (Treblinka and Sobibor).”
One can only imagine the damage that could have been inflicted on Hitler’s thugs as they rose to power in the early 1930’s if the Jewish population had been as well armed as the American populace is today.
Lord’s focus on guns ignores the fact that gun restrictions for Jews in Nazi Germany were far from the only thing that targeted them. Mother Jones reports:
“But guns didn’t play a particularly important part in any event,” says Robert Spitzer, who chairs SUNY-Cortland’s political science department and has extensively researched gun control politics. Gun ownership in Germany after World War I, even among Nazi Party members, was never widespread enough for a serious civilian resistance to the Nazis to have been anything more than a Tarantino revenge fantasy. If Jews had been better armed, Spitzer says, it would only have hastened their demise. Gun policy “wasn’t the defining moment that marked the beginning of the end for Jewish people in Germany. It was because they were persecuted, were deprived of all of their rights, and they were a minority group.”
The truly hilarious thing is that Lord titled his post “Ben Carson, Guns, and the Holocaust: Doesn’t History Matter?” Not to Lord, obviously.