. . . German Firearms Act of 1937
All weapons of every kind in the possession of Jews are forfeit to the Reich without compensation and are to be handed in. This embraces all firearms including starting pistols and all edged weapons.
. . . Gestapo circular
December 12, 1938
The following, from eminent civil liberties attorney Don Kates, is for the edification of those who have forgotten about, or are ignorant about or oblivious to the murders committed by the U.S. Government at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, and Waco, Texas:
Though
genocide has come to mean mass murder, that is not its intended meaning. Its
intended meaning is the attempt to exterminate a group defined by race or
ethnicity. The Holocaust was a highly successful attempt to murder all Jews.
The WWI Armenian genocide was the Ottoman empire's Armenian minority which
succeeded in killing over a million of them; no one knows exactly how many. But
the successful 1960s Indonesian attempt to kill hundreds of thousands of
liberals was a politicide (though it was, as is often the case) mixed w/ a
successful attempt to exterminate the Chinese in Indonesia. They are literally
"the Jews of the Orient" - hated because they work hard and are very
successful.
Could this
happen here? The following is an excerpt from another old column of mine on
mass murder:
Insofar
as opponents of gun ownership ever discuss genocide, they simply dismiss the
problem with the assertion that it is fantastic to think that genocide could
ever occur in the U.S.
As a
"reality check" for people who reflexively dismiss the relevance of
geno-politicide, consider a "thought experiment" for which I am
indebted to Rutgers University Law Professor Robert Cottrol, a historian
who is now professor of legal history at George Washington University: Let us
suppose we could go back to the year 1900 and tell a select group of the most
eminent savants then available that within 50 years a great nation will
exterminate millions of members of a minority group. Having so informed them,
we ask them to predict which nation would engage in that genocide, and which
victim group that nation would murder.
The
peril of myopically ignoring the possibility of geno- politicide is illustrated
by the fact that in 1900 not even the most perspicacious and knowledgeable
observers would have been able to predict the Holocaust. Yes, they might have
listed the Jews as a likely victim group. But other victim groups would have
been ranked as even likelier targets. Moreover, Germany would not even have
figured at all as a likely perpetrator of genocide -- unlike the U.S. which
would have been ranked very high as likely to murder millions of blacks and-or
Indians.
So
much for the idea that anyone today can be confident that genocide will never
happen in the U.S. -- not even 40 or 50 years from now when conditions may be
as different from today's situation as Germany's was in 1940 compared to 1900.
Had
Professor Cottrol and I been asked to guess (based on the world view of a
year-1900 savant) our choices would have been, in descending order of
probability:
1) Perpetrator: Ottoman
Empire; Victim Group: Armenians (which actually happened during WWI)
2) Perpetrator: U.S.
Victim Group: Blacks
3) Perpetrator: U.S.
Victim Group: Indians
4) Perpetrator: Russia
Victim Group: Jews
5) Perpetrator: France
Victim Group: Jews
These
guesses were concurred in by a leading analyst of
geno-politicide,
Professor Ted Robert Gurr (Political Science, University of Maryland). As to
Germany, however, he pointed out that in1900 it was engaged in tremendously brutal,
homicidal suppression of Africans in its African colonies.]
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