I'm invoking it right now, in my own post. I'm going to talk about Nazis. Honest-to-G-d Nazis. Evil personified. I visited the Holocaust Memorial in Boston yesterday. From the New England Holocaust memorial website:
The New England Holocaust Memorial was built to foster memory of and reflection on one of the great tragedies of our time, the Holocaust (Shoah). The effort was begun by a group of survivors of Nazi concentration camps who have found new homes and new lives in the Boston area. Dedicated in October, 1995, over 3000 individuals and organizations from across the community joined in sponsoring the project.
New England Holocaust Memorial
Also from the NE Holocaust Memorial site is the description of the Memorial:
The design utilizes uniquely powerful symbols of the Holocaust. The Memorial features six luminous glass towers, each 54 feet high. The towers are lit internally to gleam at night. They are set on a black granite path, each one over a dark chamber which carries the name of one of the principal Nazi death camps. Smoke rises from charred embers at the bottom of these chambers. Six million numbers are etched in glass in an orderly pattern, suggesting the infamous tattooed numbers and ghostly ledgers of the Nazi bureaucracy. Evocative and rich in metaphor, the six towers recall the six main death camps, the six million Jews who died, or a menorah of memorial candles.Here are the numbers, literally:
Six million numbers
Each tower represents one of the concentration camps:
Evil Incarnate
Evil. Pure, unadulterated evil, perpetuated by man against his fellow man. An entire religion, targeted by a megalomaniac for extinction, herded into cattle cars and led to slaughter.
NEVER. AGAIN.
This is why we have the Second Amendment, folks. Not for hunting. Not for "sporting purposes". Not for any of the bullshit reasons mealymouthed politicians give for "supporting" firearms or gun rights. We have the Second Amendment as the last safeguard against the cattle cars, against the SS, against the stormtroopers that kick in the doors and slaughter our fellow man based on which deity they worship, which end of an egg they break first, or which side of their face is painted black or white.
I have my rifle, as do countless millions of my fellow Americans. The day some authoritarian nutcase comes to power and declares that certain Americans are to be liquidated is the day that rifle will be needed. "Assault weapons aren't made for hunting". Truer words were never spoken. So-called "assault weapons" are made for personal protection: Owning these rifles by the millions is the best insurance we have that the government will not decide to impose genocide upon portions of our society.
As Pastor Martin Niemoeller stated:
Speak Up
When the time comes, the Second Amendment insures that my rifle can do my talking for me.
That is all.
12 comments:
I learned that lesson at age 15 during a visit to the Yad Vashem (the Holocaust museum in Israel - http://yadvashem.org/) some 34 years ago. You cannot visit that place and NOT come away changed. I will simply say that some of the things I saw are burned into my brain so clearly that I can see them to this day in my mind's eye. Like the block of gold that was taken from the teeth of the Nazi's victims, for example.
If you ever make a trip to the Holy Land, you must set a day aside to visit the Yad Vashem... so that we never forget.
Never again.
Godwin's Law doesn't apply when talking about actual Nazis.
There's not much in the world that get me into a red rage faster than having to deal with a Holocaust denier. "Never Again" is right. I may not agree with my neighbor's theology, his politics, or his dietary choices, but the day the government comes around to collect him for any of the above, Mr. Enfield and I are going to insert ourselves into the transaction.
Brother, it won't come from within...and it may have already started on December 17th 2009, whilst the citizens were too distracted by the healthcare debacle to pay attention to Jughead signing away their sovereignty.
Copy and paste this, and read it for yourself...
http://townhall.com/blog/g/0515fd89-0878-4527-bc73-5e9feec1d154
Agreed.
I ain't gettin' in no boxcar...
Regards,
With apologies in advance to my Jewish friends, it always chaps my ass to hear that "6 million people died in the camps." I know you didn't say that, Jay, and Jewish folks usually make clear that they mean 6 million Jews, but a lot of people don't. They were killing a lot more than Jews, friends. It was about subjugating not just an ethnic group, but a nation (well, okay, the Jews are a nation, but you know what I meant).
When the time comes, the Second Amendment insures that my rifle can do my talking for me.
... to make sure that the totalitarian scum don't go home fully staffed, to do it again the next day.
Good posting. You're a poster after my own heart.
Never again. The holocaust deniers are willingly blinded, as they do not want to believe, nor do they want to believe in the terrorists today.
Many of those who support the Second Amendment have no idea it was to protect our individual states from the feds and from other states. Both sides fought the civil war with their militias. Check out my recent post on this.
http://ricks-constitutionofourforefathers.blogspot.com/2009/12/intent-of-second-amendment-was-to.html
Rick
It's the order that things happened that needs to be remembered as well. First, the Nazis banned personal ownership of firearms, in 1934. Then, once the weapons had been turned in, everything else was possible.
Μολὼν λαβέ
To follow up on Tennessee Budd's comment, it's very important to remember that the Jews were not the only victims of the Holocaust:
"Some scholars maintain that the definition of the Holocaust should also include the Nazis' systematic murder of millions of people in other groups, including ethnic Poles, the Romani, Soviet civilians, Soviet prisoners of war, people with disabilities, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, and other political and religious opponents. By this definition, the total number of Holocaust victims would be between 11 million and 17 million people." [from Wikipedia's Holocaust entry, emphasis mine]
As a non-heterosexual, this is something that sticks in my mind, and it does irritate me that it's usually forgotten. While I'm sure Jews were certainly the largest single group of Holocaust victims, they still only made up between 54% and 34% of the total (depending on estimates of the total number of victims). The source of the pink triangle symbol used by gay rights groups today is actually the patch gays were forced to wear in the camps (the equivalent of the yellow Star of David patch the Jews were forced to wear.)
Just as Niemoller's famous quote says, such horrors start by singling out the most unpopular or controversial for persecution first, and expands to others later.
The strongest Holocaust eye opener for me wasn't the Yad Vashem. It was a small book that listed the size of Jewish population in late 1930s, compared to late 1940s for each European country. Dry plain numbers. It was horrifying. I had problems sleeping for weeks after reading it.
This past semester, I studied in Europe.
In Prague, I visited a synagogue that had been converted into a Holocaust memorial. The name of every Czech murdered in the Holocaust was written on the interior walls Seven hundred thousand names. They covered every single wall of every single room in that rather large building from floor to ceiling.
About at month later, I had the opportunity to visit the Mauthausen Concentration Camp in Austria. What I saw there horrified be beyond words.
Now, I am a staunch supporter of the Bill of Rights and the First Amendment, but after seeing those places, if you ask me, every Nazi, neo-Nazi, and anyone else who either praises the actions of Hitler or denies them should be put up against a wall and shot.
Never Again.
Great post Jay. Whether the figure is 6,000,000 Jews or 7,500,000 homosexuals, it is truly planned, publicly recognized (the Poles and local Germans didn't know??) murder.
Looking forward to taking you round Yad Vashem when you visit Israel...
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