Don Kates on arms and genocide

From Don Kates:
PREFACE: The letter from an 80 year old woman that follows forcibly
reminded me of two movies. The first, Schindler’s List, was well done
technically but left me quite cold emotionally. The other The Pianist,
was absolutely terrific and very moving. In watching it I was gripped by
a poignant point: This, the Holocaust, is what happens to a hated
minority which has been disarmed and rendered defenseless.

Which brings me back to Schindler’s List. For purely political reasons
it omitted a crucial historical truth. "According to Mr. Schindler's
wife Maria, when Schindler decided to liberate his Jewish workers, he
handed them all semiautomatic firearms so they could fight the Nazis."
[Quoting William R. Tonso and David B. Kopel, "Gun Bans and 'Schindler's
List'", Independence Institute release, Aug. 24, 1994. See Thomas
Keneally, SCHINDLER'S LIST 346-347.]

One accurate point made in Schindler’s List is what is to some is a
deeply puzzling conundrum: the Holocaust went on even as Germany was in
ultimate danger in 1945 with Russian forces advancing apace from the
East and Allied forces advancing apace from the West. Obviously in this
crisis an infinitely better use of German forces would have been in
defense against the rapidly advancing enemy armies. A leading historian
suggests a simple explanation for why instead the extermination
continued, and even accelerated: the killers "had a vested interest in
[genocide for] killing defenseless civilians seemed to them vastly
preferable to the far more dangerous alternative of serving at the front
where those they faced also carried arms." [Gerhard L. Weinberg, A WORLD
AT ARMS: A GLOBAL HISTORY OF WORLD WAR II 474 (Cambridge, Cambridge U.
Press: 1994).

I am not suggesting that victim firearms possession is a magic shield
against genocide. Even had Jews been armed, the Holocaust would surely
have killed many because they were a numerically small minority on a
continent whose population was overwhelmingly either hostile or
indifferent to them. What victim firearms possession would have done,
however, is mitigate the effects of the Holocaust. See, e.g., Nechama
Tec, DEFIANCE: THE BIELSKI PARTISANS -STORY OF THE LARGEST ARMED RESCUE
OF JEWS BY JEWS IN WORLD WAR II (Oxford, Oxford U. Press: 1993) (armed
Jewish farmers took to the hills and proceeded to save hundreds of Jews
from Polish ghettos).

But the Holocaust is a very misleading example. Many genocides occur in
much better circumstances for the victims – if only that had been armed.
Had the 400,000 Cambodian Chan had guns, could the poorly trained
100,000-strong Khmer Rouge Army have slaughtered 200,000 of them? Had
the Cambodian populace in general had guns, could 100,000 Khmer Rouge
soldiers have slaughtered upwards of 3 million of them? Had the victims
in Rwanda and Burundi had guns, could peasants armed with agricultural
tools have slaughtered 1.1 million of them (even if led by government
officials having guns)? By the same token, could Idi Amin’s less than
30,000 killers have slaughtered over 300,000 victims if a large number
of those victims had had firearms?

The view of the International Society for the Prevention of Genocide is
that "Prompt defensive measures are the most effective means for the
prevention of genocide." To the same effect is the conclusion of Prof.
Kopel and his colleagues Drs. Eisen and Gallant: "Almost without
exception, genocide is preceded by a very careful government program
which disarms the future victims of genocide.... The historical record
is very clear about how very rare it is for genocide to be attempted –
let alone succeed – against an armed populace." [For extended discussion
of these points see David B. Kopel, Paul Gallant & Joanne D. Eisen, "Gun
Ownership and Human Rights", BROWN JOURNAL OF WORLD AFFAIRS
(Winter/Spring 2003, vol. IX, no. 2), Don B. Kates, "‘Democide’ and
Disarmament," 23 SAIS REVIEW 305-309 (2003), Daniel D. Polsby & Don B.
Kates, "Of Holocausts and Gun Control", 75 WASH. U. L. Q. 1237 (1997)
and the genocide discussion on my website Don Kates.com. See also
Sanford Levinson, "The Embarrassing Second Amendment," 99 YALE L. J.
637, 657 (1989) .]
-Don

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Date: Thu, 18 Dec 2003 13:57:08 EST

Letter from an Octogenarian [by David A. Harris, Executive Director,
American Jewish Committee

This year my mother, Nelly Harris, turned eighty. In the course of her
life, she never spoke out publicly. She felt she didn't have the
academic or professional qualifications to do so, but now she says she
can no longer sit quietly. It's worth listening to her words:

My only credentials are my life experience - frst as a refugee from
Soviet Russia, later as a refugee from Nazi-occupied France, and,
eventually, at the age of 18, as a new arrival to America, who went
right to work and hasn't stopped. An unknown elderly woman may not be
given the time of day in our youth-oriented and celebrity-obsessed
society, but I owe it to myself and my three grandchildren to at least
try. My conscience demands no less.

I'm worried about the resurgence of global anti-Semitism and the ho-hum
reaction it has elicited from many who should know better. I was too
young in Moscow, where I was born in 1923, to understand the gale-force
winds of anti-Semitism that propelled my parents to get us out while
they could in 1929 and resettle in Paris. But I recall as if it were
yesterday the advent of Nazism in Germany in 1933, the introduction of
the Nuremberg Laws in 1935, Kristallnacht in 1938, and the invasion of
France in 1940.

I discovered that a seemingly quiet, comfortable, and secure life can be
turned upside down almost overnight. I learned what it is to become a
refugee, to experience unbridled fear, and to be enveloped by
uncertainty about tomorrow. I saw how people I knew were prepared to
abandon me the moment they realized the risk involved in being
associated with a Jew.

I heard with my own ears the cries of "Death to the Jews" from Nazis and
their Vichy collaborators in France. I felt the horror of my brother's
arrest by the Vichy regime and planned deportation to the death camps;
he was miraculously saved, but his girlfriend was not as lucky. I found
out that my dear cousin, Mila Racine, two years older than me, had
joined the Organisation juive de combat, the French Jewish resistance
movement. She transported Jewish children to the French-Swiss border
until she was arrested in October 1943 and sent to Ravensbrück. From
there, she was transferred to Mauthausen and was killed five weeks
before the war's end.

I experienced the world's lack of sympathy as my family rushed from one
consulate to another in the south of France begging for entry visas to
somewhere, anyywhere, just so long as it was far away from our
nightmare. Of course, had Israel existed at the time, I can only wonder
how many Jews with nowhere to go might have been saved.

In the end, my parents and I were among the lucky ones. Eventually,
after traveling to Spain and Portugal, we crossed the Atlantic and
arrived in New York a month before Pearl Harbor. (My brother arrived
separately.) Incidentally, perhaps it is people like us-those who found
refuge from political and religious persecution-who can truly savor what
America stands for. The sight, through tears of happiness, of the Statue
of Liberty as our ship entered New York Harbor in November 1941 is
something I'll never forget. I know the U.S. has its imperfections, but,
believe me, it is unlike any other country in the world.

I was eighteen and went to work immediately. So did my brother. We
barely spoke English, but it didn't matter. Our family needed the
income, and my parents were in worse shape than my brother and me. We
had no outside help, nor did we expect any. As it was, we had received
the biggest gift we could have prayed for-our very lives-thanks to
American visas. By comparison, the rest was a piece of cake.

In the postwar years, anti-Semitism in America existed, but it certainly
wasn't life-threatening, nor was it particularly fashionable. As Jews,
we encountered, at worst, small impediments in our own lives. While we
heard about anti-Semitic barriers in certain elite neighborhoods, clubs,
and corporate suites, that world was so far from us that it didn't
really register.

The one thing I regret is that, in the 1950s and 1960s, my friends, all
with backgrounds pretty similar to my own, and I were so busy trying to
integrate into America that most of us didn't pay enough attention to
instilling a serious Jewish identity in our children. In our immigrant
milieu, our Jewish identity was pretty much taken for granted; no one
really disowned it, though some played it down. In any case, it usually
took a back seat to embracing an American identity. I'm sure there are
many explanations for this, not least that we had paid a high price in
Europe for our Jewish identity. Moreover, I suppose we weren't all that
eager to stand out as being different in our adopted country. After all,
this was the time of the "melting pot" theory of America. Even so, in
hindsight I realize how much we deprived our children of, though, given
my son's chosen career path, maybe I'm being too hard on myself or, more
probably, miracles do happen.

Now, in the waning years of my life, I smell something troubling, and it
frightens me. Jews seem to be fair game. Whatever the possible reasons,
they don't alter the basic bone-chilling facts. Anti-Semitism may ebb
and flow, but its resilience and ferocity are astonishing. Recent events
remind us that it doesn't take much of a pretext-Israel, Iraq, 9/11,
currency fluctuations, Arab stagnation, Muslim resentment, you name it-
for anti-Semitism to surface in one form or another. I shouldn't be at
all surprised, yet, even after eight decades, I confess I can't for the
life of me understand the concept of demonizing entire groups. Of
course, I've heard the explanations, but, deep down, I still don't get
it. I suppose I have at least as much reason as the next person to hate,
having been uprooted twice, but I find I'm not capable of doing so.

Or maybe my surprise stems from the fact that each generation clings to
the belief that history moves forward, and that life will be better for
our children than it was for us. And there's no question of the
remarkable progress that's been achieved. The life circumstances of my
son and grandchildren have been infinitely better than mine, but the
story can't be allowed to end there. The increasingly long list of
attacks against Jewish and Israeli targets in the last couple of years
is by now depressingly familiar, or is it? I meet some Jews in New York
who just don't seem willing, for a variety of reasons, to acknowledge
the situation. Maybe either they're too self-absorbed, or they minimize
the potency of anti-Semitism, or they're too convinced of their own
safety, or they don't feel a visceral connection to fellow Jews around
the world, or they're detached from Israel, or they principally blame
Israel for the current problems, or they think that Jewish organizations
are exaggerating the situation, or whatever.

While the 1 930s were most assuredly another era, I saw Jews in Paris
watch the events of that decade unfold and believe, until the very last
minute, that somehow they were immune. Some chose not to lend credence
to the eyewitness

reports of Jewish refugees from Germany and Austria who streamed into
France, including my future husband. Others decided that, by dint of
their wealth, social standing, or connections, they were above the fray.
And still others were too busy criticizing fellow Jews for bringing this
on themselves.

Let me be clear. I'm not suggesting that we're witnessing a replay of
the 1930s. In fact, I'm not sure it's useful to spend too much time
comparing situations; they're very different. For starters, today's
anti-Semitism isn't government policy in any country with a significant
Jewish population-far from it. [DBK note: virulent anti-semitism is the
policy of almost all Arab and/or Middle Eastern Muslim governments. But,
though they once had enormous Jewish populations, in 1947-50 they
murdered or drove 400,000+ Jews who had lived there for 2000 years out.
Israel took them in. So it is correct to describe these as being w/o
substantial Jewish populations.]

And that's not the only difference. Nonetheless, I've learned a few
things along the journey of life. First, Jews can never afford
complacency. Second, sometimes people mean what they say. When Hitler
began ranting and raving about the Jews, he wasn't taken very seriously,
was he? When Islamic radicals call for the killing of Jews wherever they
may live or Israel's total destruction, they shouldn't be underestimated
or dismissed out of hand. [DBK note: until the Oslo accords the charter
of Yasser Arafat’s "Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) called for
"driving the Jews into the sea." That was dropped, but PLO leaders and
spokesmen have repeatedly emphasized that it was only a token traded for
the advantages the PLO obtained at Oslo, and that "driving the Jews into
the sea." remains the PLO objective. Other Palestinian and Muslim
activist groups have never even pretended to drop that objective.
Recently Al Qaeda has called for extermination of all Jews in the world.]

Third, things can get better. I've seen astonishing progress with my own
eyes. Look, for example, at the establishment of the state of Israel,
American support for Israel and the Jewish people, the Israeli peace
treaties with Egypt and Jordan, the disappearance of the USSR, the onset
of French-German friendship, and the Jewish success story in America.
But life has also taught me that things can get worse. Our ability to
imagine must go in both directions. A firm grasp of history may not be
the be-all and end-all, but it does offer valuable lesson.

And fourth, freedom is a precious gift. It must be defended. Heaven
forbid, we should ever take our freedom for granted. I never thought I
would live to see the day when "Death to the Jews" was again heard, as
it has been in Europe, the Muslim world, and even North America, much
less read the unsettling cover story in New York magazine (December 15)
entitled "The New Face of Anti-Semitism." I am eighty and my future is
largely behind me, notwithstanding someone's foolish claim that "life
begins at eighty." But my three grandchildren have their lives ahead of
them. Looking around today, I can't help but worry about the kind of
world that awaits them. Maybe, at the end of the day, I'm no different
than every grandmother in every generation. Still, I can only hope
they'll hold their heads up high as Americans and as Jews and never stop
fighting for-and dreaming about-better times to come.

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