| Actually Hitler was a community organizer of sorts. So there's that I guess. |
First, let's set the record straight about Hitler. There is no proof he ever said "To conquer a nation you must first disarm its citizens." He did nothing about gun control until 1938 - well after the Nazis had established total control of the country - when he actually increased gun ownership rights for non-Jewish Germans, which had been severely restricted in the Treaty of Versailles after WWI. Any support Hitler had for disarming people naturally referred to races he was bent on conquering and subjugating - namely the Jews. This notion has led to what I believe are projection fantasies among some of the Right - if only they had been a Jew in the ghetto with a gun, by God, they'd have made the Nazis pay. Well, guess what? You weren't there, you have no idea what it was like, and you're not accounting for the cultural, political, and knowledge differences between Jews under the Reich and gung-ho Americans. It's easy to say you'd fight when you know that the other option is a trip to a gas chamber; Jews had been through ghettos and pogroms before and many thought it would be OK if they could ride it out. How were they to know otherwise? It's not like they had a live Twitter feed from Dachau. Moreover, it took the combined might of the free world five years to bring down the Nazis. Any Jewish resistance would be - and was - met with brutal repression.
This same idea has been extended to slavery in America - if only blacks had guns, there would have been no slavery. Yeah, ok. Reminder: slaves were not people. They had no money. Gun access was generally impossible. That's how the system worked. What slave rebellions did occur were - surprise - brutally repressed. State militias in the South were organized for that very purpose (some have argued this is the actual reason for the Second Amendment - I'm not going to go there). To paraphrase the same Daily Show guest, if there had been a chapter in US history about mass slave uprisings, the next chapter would be called "All the Black People are Dead. Now What?"
Nonetheless these factual inaccuracies haven't slowed down conservative media's Obama is Hitler Parade. I suppose because he is a dictator that everyone knows and associates with pure evil, it's an easy and lazy comparison to make that gins up a lot of unwarranted emotions. To be fair, I remember some liberals comparing W to Hitler. That was stupid too. But now we're talking about planting paranoia in a certain subset of gun owners who believe it's their duty to arm themselves against the tyrannical government and the coming gunpocalypse. And that's dangerous. Here are a few examples, all taken from that "fair and balanced" Fox News:
"The dictators and monsters of the 20th century -- from Stalin to Hitler, from Castro to Pol Pot, from Mao to Assad -- have disarmed their people, and only because some of those people resisted the disarming were all eventually enabled to fight the dictators for freedom." - Andrew Napolitano, January 10
"Under Feinstein's bill, which has been introduced, if the president does it that way, everybody in America who owns one of the guns on the list will be required to go in and give fingerprints, mug shot, be entered into a database. It will be "your papers, please" like Nazi Germany. We're going to register everybody." - Lars Larson, January 9
DOOCY: I think you, like a lot of people, Joshua, are worried that the federal government is going to come after our guns.
BOSTON: It's something we've seen happen time and time again in history, with Stalin. It happened in Cambodia, and then of course the Third Reich. No one saw that coming until it was too late. - Steve Doocy (a KU grad, sigh) and former Marine Joshua Boston, January 7
This is just the tip of the iceberg; examples from other outlets here. It's this line of thinking that leads directly to the horrible conspiracy theory that the Sandy Hook massacre was staged by the government as the beginnings of the Great Gun Grab. The foundations of that lunacy are shaky even by conspiracy theory standards; I'm not a 9/11 Truther, but I'll give that gang an A for effort at least.
What really set me off is that, surprise, Fox has now reversed itself. On January 16 Bob Schieffer on CBS said this about obstacles to passing new gun laws: “Surely passing civil rights legislation, as Lyndon Johnson was able to do, and before that, surely defeating the Nazis was a much more formidable task than taking on the gun lobby.” Which seems like a bit of a mild and indirect analogy compared to what I listed above, but he did use the N-word so it qualifies. And the talking heads on Fox exploded. Host and former Bush press secretary Dana Perino actually said, "“Think of if conservatives had used that language to describe liberals. There would be collective outrage on the front page of the papers and demands for people to resign and apologize.” Actually, it's pretty easy to imagine that scenario, Dana, because your network does it almost every day. And while there has certainly been some outrage on lefty websites, no one else seems to care that much. You all still have your jobs, right?
Unfortunately the gun-grabber tyranny hyperbole has now extended beyond right-wing media and into our elected officials. On January 20 the campaign of Kentucky Senator and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell - the 2nd or 3rd most powerful Republican in DC (depending on what House Majority Leader Eric Cantor is up to that day) sent out an email to supporters full of blatant misinformation about Obama's plans to confiscate your guns. The full text is here; this is how is opens:
Dear Patriot,
You and I are literally surrounded.
The gun-grabbers in the Senate are about to launch an all-out-assault on the Second Amendment. On your rights.
On your freedom.
Just the other night, President Obama urged them to act. And then he went one step further, spelling out the 23 different Executive Orders he will take to get your guns.
My friend, our freedom is under direct assault.
Ugh, ugh, ugh. I detest this use of the word "patriot" that implies only gun lovers are true patriots. To their credit, there's no mention of Hitler. But the idea that Obama and his allies are going to confiscate legally-owned weapons is a baseless claim straight out of Alex Jones-Conspiracy Land. Especially the bit with the Executive Orders. They have been bitching about these before and since they were issued and I have yet to see any criticism that suggests they have actually read them. So please do so and try to figure out which of them means that the man in the White House is coming for your guns. They are a bunch of requests for studies and for agencies to better share information with each other. One of them says the ATF should make its interim head permanent. A government bureaucracy has to fill out an HR form! Scary! McConnell is up for reelection in 2014 so has to rile up his base, but this fear-mongering is irresponsible, especially coming from a high-ranking Senator.
I'll close with a word of advice for conservatives, to make the next four years a bit easier on all of us. Please look up the definitions of the following words: socialism, communism, Marxism, fascism, and tyranny. They do not mean what you think they mean. Then open up a history book. Any one will do, because you seem to get just about all of it wrong.
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