Crackpot psychiatrist Dr. Keith Ablow has added World War II Jews to the list of people he has psychoanalyzed without benefit of examination. Fortunately for Ablow's politics, his conclusions neatly dovetail with his support for Dr. Ben Carson and Carson's latest offensive statements about gun control and the Nazis.
Carson’s latest asininity is a suggestion that the Holocaust at least partly succeeded because of gun control: “I think the likelihood of Hitler being able to accomplish his goals would have been greatly diminished if the people had been armed,” Carson told CNN's Wolf Blitzer. Not surprisingly the Anti-Defamation League objected.
“Ben Carson has a right to his views on gun control, but the notion that Hitler’s gun-control policy contributed to the Holocaust is historically inaccurate,” said Jonathan Greenblatt, National Director of the organization. “The small number of personal firearms available to Germany’s Jews in 1938 could in no way have stopped the totalitarian power of the Nazi German state.”
Jacob Bacharach, in The New Republic, further demolishes Carson’s theory (h/t Media Matters).
But psychiatrist, Fox News contributor and member of its “Medical A-Team,” Ben Carson donor and all-around nut job Keith Ablow, a Jew, claims he knows better. In a FoxNews.com editorial, he wrote:
The mindset that Jews surrendered with their guns is far more important than the hardware they turned over: They surrendered the demonstrated intention, at all costs, to resist being deprived of liberty. If Jews in Germany had more actively resisted the Nazi party or the Nazi regime and had diagnosed it as a malignant and deadly cancer from the start, there would, indeed, have been a chance for the people of that country and the world to be moved to action by their bold refusal to be enslaved.
This is crazy. As Huffington Post notes:
In reality, many Jews and other groups targeted by the Holocaust resisted Nazi brutality. It took the Nazis a month to completely subdue Jewish fighters during the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto uprising. They then leveled the ghetto, killing its inhabitants or deporting them to death camps.
Thousands of Jews were also active members of national underground movements to resist Nazi rule in Poland, France, Italy, Yugoslavia, Greece and Slovakia.
Even assuming European Jewish communities had been capable of mounting a greater defense against the Nazis as they were being ghettoized and taken in cattle cars to death camps, it is not at all clear that would have “moved” the world to come to their rescue.
But Ablow’s cray cray gets even cray crayier:
The wisest answer to a government that insists its citizens disarm is, “Over my dead body.” It would seem to be the end of any discussion and the beginning of active, heroic resistance. Because it is very hard to imagine that disempowering citizens by having them render themselves defenseless can lead to anything good. It is very likely a sign that the culture has fallen ill and that an epidemic of enslavement of one kind or another is on the horizon.
Carson has been making an ass of himself all week. First, he created a stir by saying that if he had been at the Umpqua Community College shooting, he would have gone all Clint Eastwood: “I would not just stand there and let him shoot me. I would say, 'Hey, guys, everybody attack him! He may shoot me but he can’t get us all!'” Then, it turned out that when “Clint” was actually under the gun, he merely suggested the gunman set his sights on someone else and then let other people chase him down the street. That is, if Carson was telling the truth when he claimed to have had a gun pointed at him. And despite all that, real experts say that attacking a mass shooter should be done only as a last resort.
But Fox News and even Rupert Murdoch have stood behind Carson and each of his dumps, like circus lackeys cleaning up after elephants.
(H/T reader Eric J.)
Carson caricature by DonkeyHotey.