Hmmm...seems to me I read this book before...
Lemme tells ya'll a little bedtime story...
Once upon a time, a long time ago, in a Magical Utopia called National Socialist Germany, where the trains ran on time, and people were happy, peppy, and bursting with love, there was a group of people whom the democratically-elected Government decided to demonize and make scapegoats for all the evils of society. Those folks happened to be of a particular religious background and ethnicity, a lot of them were wealthy and successful and owned businesses, and the government decided that, for whatever reason, they were to be singled out for removal from society.
Bear in mind, that this happened in arguably THE most intellectual, intelligent, highly cultured society in the world.
And there were folks there that said "That could NEVER happen here...". They'd smirk, roll their eyes, make comments about how crazy SOME people were for saying ridiculous things like that... Even while it was, indeed, happening, right before their eyes.
And people said nothing, went about their business as if nothing out of the ordinary was going on. They were too busy trying to make a living, trying not to attract the attention of the government, and some of them just plain didn't care.
First, the government passed laws making the ownership and possession of firearms "with military capability and not required for "hunting" and "sporting" purposes" a crime...and they further directed that the particular group of people whom they were demonizing were a "danger to the community". These are THEIR words, not mine.
This had the immediate - and intentional - effect of making neighbor turn on neighbor, and neighbor turn IN neighbor. People who had lived side-by-side peaceably for years, watching each others' children play and grow up together, suddenly were telling the local authorities - "Officer Friendly", the neighborhood cop - about how Mr. Goldberg or Mr. Manstein had an "illegal weapon" or "illegal radio". And then Mr. Goldberg or Mr. Manstein and his family disappeared one day and were never heard from again.
Then, when that wasn't enough, the friendly government - the same government that would NEVER hurt its own people - "in the name of public safety", decided to point out businesses owned by that particular group of people and called for public boycotts, and even promoted violence towards those businesses, to shut them down. They used local political agitators and "community organizers" to facilitate these acts of domestic terrorism against citizens - once again, all in the name of Public Safety.
Ahh, yes...It was a wonderful place, that Magical Socialist Utopia, run by a narcissistic little egomaniac with a funny mustache. All went well until people far away across the ocean started noticing what was going on. They got away with this for twelve years, before a large number of people crossed that ocean, and set about the business of methodically ripping that system apart and forcibly stopping the perpetrators.
Here's the single point, though - and it's stark, glaring, and absolutely amazing to me that more people don't bring it up immediately:
If every single Jewish family had access to the "assault rifles" of the day - MP40s, MP18s, MP28s, Mauser Rifles, etc., and the WILL to use them for the defense of themselves and their families, the Holocaust really WOULD be a figment of someones imagination, instead of the reality of government-sponsored murder of millions of human beings.
Sometime later, in reference to that OTHER Magical Wonderful, Totally Fair and Equal Socialist Utopia called Communist Russia, another victim of that ideology by the name of Alexander Solzhenitsyn said it best, in "The Gulag Archipelago":
“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?... The Organs of State 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!
If...if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”