Demanding Mom’s Praise of Goebbels Likely Ignorance Rather than Malice

Bob Owens at Bearing Arms caught one MDA chapter leader, and volunteer for the Carolyn Maloney campaign, suggesting that Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels was a pretty insightful guy. I would bet money that Alison Martin had no idea who Joseph Goebbels was when she uttered that statement of support, and when she found out, she deleted her Twitter account because it was embarrassing.

That said, the quote in question is one that has been attributed to Goebbels, but I can’t find any evidence that quote is actually his. I don’t believe if her statement was uttered in ignorance that it lets Ms. Martin off the hook — far from it. It shows a dangerous ignorance. The fall of the Weimar Republic and rise of the Nazis is a recent history that describes a country making the slow (and democratic!) descent into the madness of a mass murdering police state. I would also wager that Ms. Martin has never read Orwell. Perhaps she can learn something from another quote from George Santayana:

Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

11 thoughts on “Demanding Mom’s Praise of Goebbels Likely Ignorance Rather than Malice”

  1. Ignorance would be my guess. And would not be atypical.

    Consider how often gun control proponents are ignorant of both the legal status quo, and of the very laws they’re advocating.

    (I remember last year one very opinionated gun controller demanding that congress pass a private sale ban who had no idea who Toomey or Manchin were.)

    And it’s not just gun control. Recall the “we need to treat guns like cars” chestnut and how deep the ignorance of car law is often shown.

  2. Ignorance. Remember that the famous phrase, “The shoulder thing that goes up” was from someone who made their career out of gun laws.

    In order to support more strict laws on guns you have to be ignorant, stupid, evil, or crazy. I’m betting this one is ignorant.

  3. Indeed it is ignorance. But that’s not a pass, that’s the point. I don’t believe Moms Demanding Gun Confiscation are Nazis (not overtly, anyway). But their ignorance of the history, its significance, the role weapons confiscation played in the rise of that horror, is important. It reflects their basic ignorance of the guns they seek to ban. It is another version of the infamous “shoulder thing that goes up.”

    What’s worse, they celebrate that ignorance, and revel in it. They truly don’t want to know.

    The fact that this presumably reasonably well educated idiot had no idea who Josef Goebbels was is terrifying. These folks seek to influence policy regarding the exercise of an enumerated and fundamental right, yet their basic understanding of the world has these sorts of massive holes. And the adoption and endorsement of the “if you’ve got nothing to hide” version of the protection of personal privacy and the 4th amendment is even more terrifying.

    She deserves every bit of mocking we dish out.

  4. As much as I hate to admit it, I find it WAYYYYY to easy to believe that it was ignorance. I know several people with at least a high school education(?) who have no idea who Goebbels was. If this kind of stuff is no longer taught in our schools, we are in serious trouble. On the other hand, if I were to make a statement in that vein, I would at least find out who I was quoting.

  5. I don’t believe they are National Socialists. They are just regular old fashioned Fascist Socialists. I seriously cannot distinguish today’s Democratic platforms from Mussolini’s in the 20’s (when he still had to campaign).

  6. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

    Yeah, and those of us who remember it have to watch as those who don’t repeat the same mistakes over and over.

  7. On the comments page at Bearing Arms, someone made the point that though Nazis were monsters, they exercised intelligence and wisdom to get to where they were, blah blah blah, so they could occasionally spout words of wisdom. While this may be true, it should be a reflex to automatically check any quote attributed to a monster, because there’s a somewhat higher than average, mean, and fourth quartile chance that the quote in question was used justify or even advance monstrous actions.

    But something else occurred to me: does it matter who says the quote? Can’t we decide for ourselves the value of a quote, regardless who says it? Alison A. Martin thinks the quote was “wise words to live by”. What were those words?

    If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.

    Apparently, she wants us to submit to anything that the Government sees fit to inflict on us, because, hey, we shouldn’t have anything to hide, right? Never mind that my journal, heck, even my resume, may have things about me that I don’t want widely known, and I should be free to decide for myself who should and should not see such things, excepting a warrant, based on probable cause, specifically describing what is being searched for.

    So, now that I’ve thought about it, I’ve come to realize that her agreement with that quote is more disturbing than the fact that she doesn’t realize that Mr. Goebbels is evil….

    1. It also brings to mind the question of why she hid her quote by deleting the account. Did she have something to fear?

      Tsk tsk.

  8. This isn’t an associative fallacy – Goebbels saying something that you agree with doesn’t make you as bad as Goebbels – because she believes what was said, not who said it.

    I don’t recall the history I read eons ago about the man, but he was a master at making the horrific seem innocuous. He did it because he knew he could get people to willingly surrender power to the Nazis.

    This is the same angle MDA is going. They want people to be slaves to the state. It’s a progressive thing.

  9. Actually, when informed of the original author of the quote, assuming that it was Goebbels, she doubled down.

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