Thinking Through Resistance

Warsaw Uprising

From Jewish Week, comes Guns and the Holocaust:

The idea that Jews or any of the other persecuted groups facing the Third Reich, the most lethal killing machine in human history could have somehow blasted their way out of Germany or German occupied territory with handguns or rifles from their homes is profoundly absurd.

Yes, armed partisan groups that contained Jews were effective in fighting the Nazis. With perhaps as many as a million fighters interspersed in Europe, they were like an additional army and yes, guns made them effective. But for the most part they worked in coordination with the Allies who provided arms and intelligence. Less organized resistance didn’t fare as well.

I think they are vastly understating the effectiveness armed resistance had against the Nazis. To put down the uprising in Warsaw, for instance, the Germans had to bring in crack SS troops, who during that period were not on the front fighting the Americans or the Russians.

But aside from that, Jewish Week is, quite improperly in my view, looking at this through a lens of military effectiveness. I could care less whether individual resistance to a murdering regime makes a huge difference in the overarching military picture. I do care greatly about an individual person’s right to decide if he’s going to die, he’s going to die a free man, and to take at least a few of those bastards out with him. If everyone was imbued with that attitude, what would it take to wage genocide?

I think can speak for many of us when I suggest that no one is going to stuff me into a cattle car alive. So just using a single individual as an example, not examining any greater resistance movement, what kind of resources would it take to get compliance to implement a Nazi-like final solution? You can’t send a few Gestapo agents to knock on the door and haul someone off, because they’ll all end up shot. You can send Stosstruppen to break down the door, and try to take someone by surprise, but now you’re already having to expend more resources, and I’m betting odds a prudent man would still be able to shoot a few members of the raiding party before being killed himself. I suppose they could always just bomb the house, or send a shell into it, but then you have one tank, or one plane, or one artillery piece that’s not serving on the front line. How many tanks, bombs, or artillery pieces would be needed to clear out an entire neighborhood?

I’ve long said, you won’t stop your government from killing you if that’s what it means to do, but you can raise the cost of doing so to an unacceptably high level. It’s not really about winning militarily, so much is it’s about allowing people to maintain their person dignity, and raising the cost of mass murder. That’s what Jewish Week is overlooking.

22 thoughts on “Thinking Through Resistance”

  1. The idea that there is no point in resisting the almighty Government is common amongst liberals. They make the mistake of assuming that because they are cowards others must also be cowards. WRONG. If resistance were truly futile every insurgency throughout history (ours included) would have failed.

  2. “…what would it take to wage genocide?”

    As discussed, if we raise the cost too high, no genocide or creation of a despotic regime is contemplated. The expected resistance of an armed citizenry just makes it prohibitive.

    Even a small contingent of armed Germans might have stopped the Nazis in the early days, or brought attention to the dangers there. Imagine trying to create a “Kristallnacht” while taking fire? We’ll never know because they had been disarmed earlier.

    Those that seek to disarm citizens are not to be trusted. They will be guilty of all innocent blood spilled from all pogroms, ethnic cleansing, concentration camps, forced relocation, or mass starvations. I hold them in utter contempt. They are evil.

  3. Not to mention, if your guerilla movement survives for a prolonged period of time, you can usually get support from some foreign government – and there usually someone who feels they’ll benefit from your government collapsing, whatever your government is.

  4. Arthur Koestler said that if the first 5000 Jews to be arrested had been waiting behind the door with a pistol, there would have been 5000 dead Jews, 5000 dead SS men and that would have been the end of the Holocaust.

  5. Indeed, the article has a lot of very poor history embedded in it. The various partisan movements that did exist tied down rather large numbers of German troops, probably more than the Allies did in the Italian campaign.

  6. As demonstrated in Afghanistan, technology has progressed to the point that small arms and improvised munitions cannot stand in the face of a modern army. That is why our victory there has been so quick and decisive.

  7. As a young boy of nine or ten back in the 1950’s I was watching a war movie in which the German officers told their troops to “take no prisoners.” I asked my father, a veteran of WW2 what exactly that meant. He told me it meant that you got shot if you tried to surrender to the enemy. He also told me that the American troops would receive the same orders not to take prisoners. I asked what the Americans would do when Germans tried to surrender under those circumstances and he replied “we would shoot them.” What really stuck with me though was that he said if you are going to die anyway you should die fighting and try to take some of the enemy with you. I cannot for the life of me understand why anyone would rather be led away in a cattle car instead of dying like a man trying to take some of the enemy with you.

  8. I suppose they could always just bomb the house, or send a shell into it, but then you have one tank, or one plane, or one artillery piece that’s not serving on the front line. How many tanks, bombs, or artillery pieces would be needed to clear out an entire neighborhood?

    As I’ve pointed out to several libtards who want to tell me I can’t fight the US Army: I won’t be fighting the US Army, I’ll be in their neighborhoods at 3 am. If the US Army wants to put a shell into a neighborhood full of government supporters to take me out, the collateral damage alone will make it an acceptable trade.

    1. I’m sure you’ve made a lot of converts with that argument. Because tact is for effeminate lady-men.

  9. The authors of this article are idiots.

    THIS is exactly how this country was founded.

  10. (As a side note, this would seem to be quite a turnaround from your previously and very firmly stated position that if we lose the political battle, you’ll turn in your guns.)

    Here’s my favorite and very relevant quote from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn:

    “And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand? After all, you knew ahead of time that those bluecaps were out at night for no good purpose. And you could be sure ahead of time that you’d be cracking the skull of a cutthroat. Or what about the Black Maria sitting out there on the street with one lonely chauffeur — what if it had been driven off or its tires spiked. The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt!”

    1. I don’t ever recall stating such a thing. But the question of what to do if a non-despotic, Democratic government votes for gun bans is not all that cut and dry, IMHO.

      1. I disagree. If they want to take our guns, my first question would be, what are you planning to do to us that you’re so eager to disarm us first? I don’t care how “non-despotic” they purport to be, removing our means of resistance amounts to an act of war against us. Remember, they work for us; we don’t work for them. They have no right to disarm us, no matter what they claim.

        1. I’m not really going to disagree, if only because the possibility that some people will violently resist might steady the hands of politicians thinking of doing something rash. But I think it’s a safe assumption that many people who support gun control don’t support complete prohibition, nor are they supporting it because they want to stuff people into cattle cars.

          Given that, I don’t think the point at which violent resistance is called for is all that cut and dry.

          1. It really isn’t. Originally, I was going to respond and say that the day the Gov’t bans guns or (*gasp*) repeals the 2nd Amendment for “safety” reasons, then the answer is a healthy dose of rebellion.

            However, revolutions/armed resistance are also a PR campaign. If gun owners just start shooting up cop cars and gov’t buildings, then you literally give ammunition to those in power and their justification for disarming you. When citizens are running away from IEDs, they’re not contemplating the significance of the 2nd Amendment, they just want to make it home okay.

            People naturally listen to those whose power seems legitimate… in a ‘democracy’, that power is the Gov’t. For such a revolution to work, the people would need to be on the side of those who are doing the fighting… at least to the point where the fighters can blend in and avoid capture.

  11. JoefromSidney:

    Does “police safety” count as a reason to disarm the public? That seems to be the most commonly used excuse to deprive us of our rights nowadays. God knows the police don’t want to feel threatened when they are arresting people for legally OCing or beating down peaceful protesters.

  12. What is the difference between a war and a massacre? A massacre is when only one side is armed.

    As potential harm goes, it is much better to be in a war than to be the subject of a massacre.

  13. They are also incorrect to state that the Third Reich was the greatest killing machine in history. Lenin/Stalin and Mao did a much more thorough job, though they were more discrete and focused more on dissidents than on Jews. While I consider the Nazis leftists themselves, I would consider the Soviet and Chicom regimes much more in alignment with liberal principles, which Jewish Week no doubt supports. Funny how selective memory works.

  14. You don’t have to be able to win, you just have to make it expensive enough that they won’t try.

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