Rather frightening news, via THR, from Yahoo/Agence France-Presse...
Forty-one percent of Britons believe that an event like the Holocaust could happen in the country today, given the depth of intolerance and prejudice, according to a new survey.
Furthermore, 36 percent thought that most people would do nothing about it if it did happen, in a poll released ahead of Holocaust Memorial Day on Saturday.
Well, my guess as to why those figures are what they are, would be the fact that the British have by and large not only been disarmed, but emasculated -- which, really, is a consequence of disarmament, if you think about it. Their government basically tells them, "if somebody breaks in your home, give him what he wants, don't hurt him." And, of course, God help you if you actually do anything to try to defend yourself. And it's only natural that effects of the laws preventing self-defense over there would extend to other threats, such as, for example, yet more crazy fundamentalist Muslims, who the smart money says would be the ones perpetrating this genocide. It's a sad state of affairs over there indeed, but what's really infuriating is this...
"As genocides in Europe, Rwanda and Bosnia have shown, it doesn't take much to turn these negative conditions into something far more calamitous.
"We need to be constantly on our guard against this, which is why we are asking the public to show their support by lighting a candle to commemorate those killed in past genocides."
No, sir, what you need to be doing is your level best to restore the right of self-defense to yourself and your fellow benighted subjects, and arm yourselves... I suppose lighting candles and all that might make you feel good, but it isn't going to do a damned thing to keep yet another genocide from happening. It's one thing to be "aware" that you're about to be beaten to death with a crowbar or something like that, but it's quite another to do something like, say, pull out a gun and shoot the goblin dead where he stands before he makes that first critical swing with the aforementioned crowbar. (I would argue that the firearm option would be a hell of a lot more effective, but I'm just a crazy, warmongering, violent Texan and American, what the hell do I know? /sarcasm) I keep thinking of what Judge Alex Kozinski said in his dissent to the decision denying appeal of Silveria v. Lockyer:
...A revolt by Nat Turner and a few dozen other armed blacks could be put down without much difficulty; one by four million armed blacks would have meant big trouble.
All too many of the other great tragedies of history--Stalin's atrocities, the killing fields of Cambodia, the Holocaust, to name but a few--were perpetrated by armed troops against unarmed populations. Many could well have been avoided or mitigated, had the perpetrators known their intended victims were equipped with a rifle and twenty bullets apiece, as the Militia Act required here. If a few hundred Jewish fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto could hold off the Wehrmacht for almost a month with only a handful of weapons, six million Jews armed with rifles could not so easily have been herded into cattle cars.
My excellent colleagues have forgotten these bitter lessons of history....
Many others have forgotten those lessons as well. The law of unintended consequences cannot be repealed, though, and it looks like some of those consequences might make for yet more killing fields...and streets, too.
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