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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 t

by dalke 11y ago

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-and-how-they-can-stop-1.18517 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+Prevention+of+Crime%22&t=ffsb 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 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_18 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/issues/index.asp#!prettyPhoto 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/10.1163/1875984x-00604007 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%22%20author_fname%3A%22Deborah%22&start=0&context=119687 http://ro.uow.edu.au/do/search/?q=author_lname%3A%22Mayersen... .

douche 11y ago
Last week, one of the U.S. presidential candidates made a rather ignorant statement about gun control and the Holocaust. The Warsaw Ghetto revolt is the immediately obvious example to look at. This piece is really an advertisement for the author's upcoming book, and this piece seems pretty obviously cribbed from one of his chapters. It reads less oddly if you read the title of the book, and go look at the description on the Amazon link, and realize that it fits into a philosophical work on the justifiable use of force in the Judeo-Christian tradition.
- yummyfajitas 11y ago
  I was unaware of the potential political implications of this article. I'd probably not have submitted had I known that. I'm not following the election horserace, this was just an interesting historical article that came up in my feed.
  - douche 11y ago
    It's not a bad piece of history writing. It's just going to bring out the gun-control debaters. The Warsaw Jews did pretty well, considering they had less arms and ammunition on hand than you'd find in a rural US WalMart. Victory was not an option - a year later, the considerably larger, better-equipped Warsaw Uprising failed as bloodily, when Soviet forces nearly on the outskirts of the city failed to raise a finger in support.
    - dalke 11y ago
      There are several different styles of history writing. One is to describe what happened. For example, there are histories of battles, and of Krakatoa, and of Newton, which follow more or less a timeline. Another is to identify underlying patterns and trends that help understand what happened, and hopefully can be applied elsewhere. For examples, how did the introduction of light mobile guns by Gustavus Adolphus change the battlefield? Why did the explosion of Krakatoa have a big cultural impact as well as physical one? How are Newton's view on alchemy and biblical research connected to his work on physics? The first is more descriptive, and the second is more predictive. Both are good history. Both are scientific, but call for different sorts of research. Both require extensive literature analysis. The latter requires more work to come up with alternative hypothesis and relevant comparisons, in order to test and disprove hypotheses. This article does both. I think it does best at the descriptive aspects of the event. But it uses a historical model that isn't well tested, but could be tested by looking towards other genocides to see if the model fits. If the model doesn't fit in a more general sense, then in the context of US gun control laws, it's a curiosity at best, and not something that can be used in decision making. It is trying to making that comparison, and not limit itself to the uprising, which is why I regard it as a bad piece of historical writing.

by dalke 11y ago

douche 11y ago

Last week, one of the U.S. presidential candidates made a rather ignorant statement about gun control and the Holocaust. The Warsaw Ghetto revolt is the immediately obvious example to look at. This piece is really an advertisement for the author's upcoming book, and this piece seems pretty obviously cribbed from one of his chapters. It reads less oddly if you read the title of the book, and go look at the description on the Amazon link, and realize that it fits into a philosophical work on the justifiable use of force in the Judeo-Christian tradition.

yummyfajitas 11y ago
I was unaware of the potential political implications of this article. I'd probably not have submitted had I known that. I'm not following the election horserace, this was just an interesting historical article that came up in my feed.
- douche 11y ago
  It's not a bad piece of history writing. It's just going to bring out the gun-control debaters. The Warsaw Jews did pretty well, considering they had less arms and ammunition on hand than you'd find in a rural US WalMart. Victory was not an option - a year later, the considerably larger, better-equipped Warsaw Uprising failed as bloodily, when Soviet forces nearly on the outskirts of the city failed to raise a finger in support.
  - dalke 11y ago
    There are several different styles of history writing. One is to describe what happened. For example, there are histories of battles, and of Krakatoa, and of Newton, which follow more or less a timeline. Another is to identify underlying patterns and trends that help understand what happened, and hopefully can be applied elsewhere. For examples, how did the introduction of light mobile guns by Gustavus Adolphus change the battlefield? Why did the explosion of Krakatoa have a big cultural impact as well as physical one? How are Newton's view on alchemy and biblical research connected to his work on physics? The first is more descriptive, and the second is more predictive. Both are good history. Both are scientific, but call for different sorts of research. Both require extensive literature analysis. The latter requires more work to come up with alternative hypothesis and relevant comparisons, in order to test and disprove hypotheses. This article does both. I think it does best at the descriptive aspects of the event. But it uses a historical model that isn't well tested, but could be tested by looking towards other genocides to see if the model fits. If the model doesn't fit in a more general sense, then in the context of US gun control laws, it's a curiosity at best, and not something that can be used in decision making. It is trying to making that comparison, and not limit itself to the uprising, which is why I regard it as a bad piece of historical writing.