Welcome back to the Fourth Way podcast. If things are going according to plan, which is kind of hard to foresee like six months out, But if things are going according to plan, then we have just started a season on non violent action. And so if we did, then this will fit in perfectly. If not, consider this just a special episode for April 9. For those of you who don't know April 9, April ninth is the day that Bonhoeffer was assassinated back in 1945.

Year at this time, we did an episode, two episodes actually, on Bonhoeffer related to the book Bonhoeffer the Assassin which was really good, so that was extremely helpful for me because one of the one of the things you're always gonna hear brought up is, well, what about Bonhoeffer? You know, he said he was a pacifist but when push came to shove, he ended up, you know, trying to assassinate Hitler. So we took a look at that and tried to cut through some of what was myth, some of what is just assumption, and kind of looked at all of the evidence and discussed whether it matters if Bonhoeffer even did try to assassinate Hitler. But today, since we're talking about nonviolent action in the world, and since it is April 9, I thought that we would kind of divert our episodes, season just a tad, and kind of go back to the Nazi regime and talk a little bit about how it might have been able to be stopped. This season on nonviolence is really focused on positive action, so what does nonviolence positively do?

Whereas this episode is gonna be slightly different because we're gonna look at the negative. Wood guns have been able to prevent the Holocaust. A while back, I came across a video on YouTube that asked this question, and it really got me to thinking because in The United States, we talk all the time about gun rights and talk about how really the main reason that we have gun rights is because we want to be able to prevent a fascist government, a dictator, from ruling, from ruling over us. And sometimes you'll even hear the claim from conservatives that, you know, there were all sorts of gun control laws in Germany and things, and gun control laws are always going to proceed dictator takeovers and and all kinds of things. So this video that I came across was was from a channel that I I listen to with not frequency, but every once in a while, I'll kind of binge an episode or two.

And I like it because the guy is German and he he does episodes on all sorts of things, but he he's done one on, I think it was Trayvon Martin and and other other issues that are sort of American related. And I like it because while while one could argue that he doesn't know that much about American history, you know, he's not in The United States, so he doesn't understand to a certain degree that we do. At the same time, being able to be outside of a nation can often help you to realize some blind spots. So there's some obvious strengths and weaknesses. And those strengths and weaknesses are going to come into play into this episode because we have a German guy who is talking about whether or not the Holocaust was preventable.

So we could talk all about, you know, the biases and the advantages and disadvantages that could go on here, but I think that this is a pretty big advantage because we oftentimes have a lot of conservatives talking about how gun control was a problem in Nazi Germany and allowed for the rise of Hitler, and therefore we need to be careful about gun control in our country. But if we've got a German guy who knows German history a lot better than we do, probably, then I'm I'm more apt to listen to this person who has an education which is very anti Nazi. I mean, it's even illegal to do some things that we would think are crazy here in The States in regard to freedom of speech and expression. You can't really promote Nazi regime over there in ways that we would be able to say what we want over here in The States. So I really trust this source in knowing more than we know, and not to mention he's able to back it up with other resources and historians and things.

So in this video, he is really going to hit on two main ideas. First, was the Holocaust preventable? And second, are gun rights important to preventing government tyranny? So let's go ahead and jump into the discussion, and I will post a link to the YouTube video in the show notes. So first question, was the Holocaust preventable?

If the Jews had had guns, would the Holocaust have been able to be prevented? The video goes through a brief history of weapons in World War II in Nazi Germany. What's important to note is that weapons in Germany were largely, mostly confiscated due to the treaty in World War I. So it was largely what became the Allied countries who had confiscated weapons from Germany in World War I. However, restrictions were loosened in 1928, and people started to be able to get weapons with a little bit more ease.

Restrictions on weapons loosened, and Hitler came into power in 1933. And at that point, he started to implement that, you know, legislation where political dissidents, convicted homosexuals, and Roma weren't able to have guns. As the anti Semitism sentiment grew in Germany, it was only in 1938 that weapons were fully confiscated from the Jews. So overall, what we see is that there was a loosening of weapon restrictions before Hitler, a little bit before Hitler, and then also after Hitler, and confiscation of Jewish weapons didn't ultimately happen until the war had essentially started. Because we in The United States, know, war started for us in the early 40s, but you have to remember that for Europe, it started in the late 30s.

So the the Jewish weapons were only confiscated right around the beginning of the war. But you know, guns and having guns in your possession are really only a a small part of the picture that we need to take a look at. By the time Hitler was in charge, a majority of Germans are really behind him. Germans are very frustrated at their economic hardship and especially the working poor, the lower middle class, they want a change, and that's usually what we see when we have fascism rise. So they want a change, they want a better life, they're frustrated with their oppression from a harsh treaty, and so a lot of people are behind Hitler.

Even if they don't full on agree with his anti Semitism, they're willing to go along with it early on, and just kind of go with it because they want a better life. And of course, by the time you get to Jews being deported and killed, at that point, it's like frog in boiling water, and they've kind of been acclimated to what's going on in the horror of Hitler, and they're kind of okay with it because they get a better life and you can just turn a blind eye to evil. So you've got a lot of Germans who are essentially behind Hitler, especially by 1938 when the Jewish weapons were confiscated. And the author asks, you know, he says, At what point would the Jews have been able to kill people? At what point would that have been acceptable?

And the author lists a bunch of different events and has a timeline where he's like, Okay, would it have been acceptable here, or here, or here? And you can kinda see how things ramp up over time, and there's really not this clear delineation of where violent force would have been good for the Jews, where the community, the German community or the international community would have said, Oh yeah, that was justified and we support you. And the thing about violence is if you use violence and you don't have clear justification, or even if you do and it can be twisted against you, violence often ends up just making you look bad and causing you to lose support. And that's exactly what we see because there was violence done. When someone did assassinate a leader, there was great retribution, and that's what caused the Knight of Broken Glass, Kristallnacht.

You had the assassination of a leader where somebody in the community said, Hey, that's enough, we've got to do something about this. And you've got this Jew assassinated guy, and what happens? There's this great reprisal, and all of a sudden the floodgates are able to be opened, and you get serious ramifications for violence done. So if the Jews had acted earlier, it would have only caused the society to harden against them because they'd say, Why are they being so violent? And at the same time, when it did get to a point where maybe you could say, Yeah, it's time to do something, it's time that it's clear we'd have the support of the international community.

By that time, Hitler has galvanized the nation, and what you see in The Night of Broken Glass is that Germans either participate in harming Jews directly, or they pretty much let bad stuff happen to their neighbors and turn a blind eye because society was already behind Hitler. So there are a number of things that we can draw from this. What we see is that when violence is done, it tends to excuse and exacerbate violence from the other side. So Hitler was clearly in the wrong, but violence gave him a window to ramp up the violence and to galvanize support even more behind him so that he could be doing terrible things and people turned a blind eye. He might not have been able to get away with that had violence not been done by the Jewish community, or maybe not even the Jewish community, but an individual whom Hitler could demonize as representative of the Jewish community.

A second thing we see is that weapons can't trump a whole society's sentiment and convictions. A lot of Second Amendment people in The United States seem to have this idea that they'll just end up fighting a government, right? Which a government seems like a somewhat small group of people, right? You can imagine like this outside entity that you have to fight. Now, of course, especially if you're fighting the American military, that would be pretty difficult considering all the resources they have and the technology they have.

But it's even worse than that because what you see in Nazi Germany is that people don't end up fighting the governmental army under fascism, they end up being against their neighbors, like the people who are our friends. And you can get lots of testimony. There's a great book called Ordinary Men about basically death squads and how these death squads are just normal people. Behind the Bastards, a podcast also has an interesting podcast based off of a firsthand testimony, a book that this guy wrote where he was in Germany and he interviewed neighbors after the war. And it's just so depressing but fascinating that neighbors could be okay with violence done to their neighbors.

So fascists don't just come to power and kind of take it from this majority of people. By the time they're able to grasp power, they've got the majority of people, of your neighbors, on board with them, or if not fully on board with them, at least willing to turn a blind eye because it's to their benefit. Fascism and dictatorships are often subversive sorts of social events long, long before they ever get to the stage where violence is enacted. That's because tyranny comes in stages, and by the time it rears its head in a manner which would excuse violence, it's usually too late. So what are some of the implications for gun rights today then, here in The United States?

You know, thought about doing an episode or a season or something on the Second Amendment and guns rights, gun rights at some point, but you know, quite honestly, I don't really care too much because I don't think that policies are how society's changed. Societies aren't changed really by that, and we've done an episode on that before. Nevertheless, in this episode, I think it's think it's worthwhile to talk about and to explore some of the ideology here. And again, I will link a bunch of resources in the show notes below because I'm not really concerned enough to go into the Second Amendment, its formation, its interpretation, and all that stuff in great detail, but I can provide you with lots of sources that I found really interesting, helpful on it. So first, one observation that I think we can draw from this is that it seems just as likely that guns present would lead to tyranny as they would to overthrowing it.

Now the assumption is always that the guns are in the hands of the right people because they'll be in my hands, right? And they'll be in the hands of the people just like me. Now, I half joked about the twenty twenty election, which is set to go in like two or three weeks here cause I'm pre recording this, but I have joked about the twenty twenty election and how all the people with guns are basically Republicans. Not all the people obviously, but you know, a lot of the conservatives are the gun people. And after four years of undermining truth, the credibility of anyone else, pandering to the religious and poisoning the well that if President Trump loses the election, then it must have been rigged, I mean, an armed insurrection would be possible, right?

It's kind of weird to think of my group as the fascist group, but I mean, both groups are fascist, but at the moment, with the power of the White House and being able to fashion truth the way that, you know, truth is whatever we want it to be. And again, I know that goes both ways, but we've got the guns and we've got a lot of power right now. And when I say we, I mean the group that I associate with, conservative evangelical Christians. Even though I have a difficult time, I don't identify myself in this way with them. But my group is the group with power at the moment, the group redefining truth, and the group with most of the weapons.

So it's just as likely in my opinion that having weapons would lead to fascism and tyranny as it would protect you from it. And I mean, you do see this in Germany because Hitler starts to get power and that happens as weapons are allowed to come back into Germany, as they're allowed to have more and more weapons, and then when Hitler gets power, he is able to keep those from other people. So, yeah, weapons, the availability of weapons seems just as likely to lead towards fascist takeovers and tyranny than it does to be able to defend against it. The assumption is that the guns are going to be in the hands of the right people. Another thing that you have to consider in The United States at least is that for hundreds of years, we have essentially allowed the Second Amendment to reign supreme.

I guess it really only, with judicial interpretation, really only became a huge, huge thing in the last sixty years or so. But, I mean, we've been a very big gun culture, and we see the last stats I've seen were 2017, but we've got forty thousand people a year who are dying from gun violence, like sixty percent of those are suicide violence, so violence done to oneself, because we know that suicides a lot of times are sort of rash events, opportunistic, and if people have to think about it or sit on it for a bit or try to to come up with ways to kill themselves, sure they can, but when a gun is readily available, it's it's quick and it's easy and it's right there and it's fast, and so a lot of times, people who have to search for other ways end up kind of backing off the ledge, to speak. So how many deaths have we had in our country, Suicide or opportunistic, know, guns are easy to go and kill people with. You can kill people with knives too, but it's easier to stop you and you can't it's harder to get through as many people, and it's more risky, so you're less likely to do it.

So how many deaths have we had in our country over the past few centuries because of the ease of the availability of guns? So we want to prevent the tyranny of government in the future, maybe, which as we've addressed, having guns doesn't really do that for you. And as we're gonna see this season, non violence tends to do a lot better. But even putting that aside, what about the tyranny of freedom? Because freedom, we know, is a tyranny in our country.

We recognize that with a lot of different things and we prohibit or limit many, many things like pollutants, right? For the good of society, we limit pollutants. Now, how many lives are we willing to invest or discard, I guess I should say, in the hopes that one day we will break the mold and do what other societies tend to not be able to do and have our guns rather than create a tyranny and be used by the tyrannical, have weapons that we can use to fight tyranny and maintain our freedom? How many lives are we willing to discard for that over the course of centuries? Because a lot of times, the way that this is framed is that, you know, freedom loving, non tyrannical people want to keep guns to prevent government from taking control, and they never look at the effectiveness of that, first of all, but then second, they don't look at the cost of that.

Now again, I don't really have a dog in the fight, it doesn't matter too much to me in terms of policy. What's at play here is a lot bigger issue of corporate responsibility, societal responsibility, idolization of freedom, those other sorts of things. We've got an American problem, and we see this in this upcoming election where we've had a whole season on consequentialism, and that's really what it boils down to. We've got some idols here, policy is not going to change that, that's a heart issue. My conclusion is that in the end, guns don't make much of a lasting difference, especially not a lasting difference positively.

If anything, they have the ability to support tyranny. Ultimately, what's important is our hearts. Social sentiment is what is vital and that's again what we're gonna see here in this season is that you end up having positive results from non violent action in large part because it includes a lot of people, not just men of fighting age but men, women, children, old people, everything. You a great degree of involvement and are able to get a lot of social sentiment behind things. It's building positive social sentiment.

We see what happens when you can build negative social sentiment like in Nazi Germany, not even guns can prevail against your neighbors if all of your neighbors are against you. So anyway, I encourage you to listen to the video in the show notes and to think a little bit more about the issue. If you really care that much about gun rights and Second Amendment and the history of it in The United States, I've got loads of links for you in the show notes and you should check them out. And just a side note, in case I have any people who want to be really critical of this, the YouTube video that I have here, he's got three arrows. Now, I didn't know what those were until after I wrote the episode, and I was listening to a podcast and they mentioned three arrows, and I was like, Oh, I didn't realize what that was.

But apparently, Antifa uses that now, and I know that if there's a conservative listener, they go to this YouTube video, they'll probably be like, oh, you know, he's a he's a he's for Antifa. But what you need to understand is that back in Nazi Germany, there were the communists, there's the communist party, there's the Nazi party, and there's the Social Democratic party. Well, the three arrows were the Social Democratic party. They were against the Nazis and against the communists, right? They were anti fascist.

They did not want tyranny to reign. So, it's sort of an anachronism to place your negative associations with Antifa here, and I really don't know much about Antifa at all. I hear only bad things from conservatives, so I kind of have this inkling that they're probably not that bad because I just don't trust anything that conservatives say at this point because of their own truth and things that they've just outright lied to me on before. But anyway, I really don't doubt that Antifa has probably got some bad things going on. They use violence and I'm sure that there are issues there.

I don't want you to associate the three arrows thing with Antifa. First of all, this guy is German, he's not even a part of that over here. But also because it has an original meaning and I think that's important to understand in regard to this context. So anyway, that's all for now. So peace, and because I'm a pacifist, when I say it, I mean it.