Fox News’ sick grotesquerie: The insane right-wing Holocaust meme is so much worse than Ben Carson
Ben Carson's offensive comments about the Holocaust are part of the larger "just world" theory of conservatives.
Topics: Ben Carson, Editor's Picks, Elections 2016, Fox News, Gun Control, Holocaust, News, Politics News
Apparently, Ben Carson didn’t think blaming the victims of the Oregon shooting was going low enough, so he doubled down, reaching for what may be the most repulsive victim-blaming possible: Arguing that the Holocaust wouldn’t have happened if Jewish victims had offered armed resistance. Carson had defended a lax approach to gun control in his book, A More Perfect Union, by arguing that Hitler had forcibly disarmed “German citizens,” and Wolf Blitzer asked him about it on CNN on Thursday. “I think the likelihood of Hitler being able to accomplish his goals would have been greatly diminished if the people had been armed,” Carson happily replied. “There’s a reason these dictatorial people take the guns first.”
Over the weekend, Carson—who is clearly incapable of ever acknowledging, must less owning, that he can be wrong—doubled down. “It’s not hyperbole at all,” Carson said of his comments on Sunday’s Face the Nation. “Whether it’s on our doorstep or whether it’s 50 years away, it’s still a concern and it’s something that we must guard against.”
While Carson is careful not to blame Jews directly for the Holocaust, these comments verge on being a form of Holocaust denialism, feeding, as they do, of anti-Semitic myths that Holocaust victims just passively allowed the Nazis to round them up and kill them. This myth is, unsurprisingly, false. As Jacob Bacharach of the New Republic and Valerie Strauss of the Washington Post explain, Jews did resist the Nazis, frequently and with vehemence. In reality, the Nazis loosened regulations on gun ownership, though maintaining a ban on gun ownership for Jewish Germans. But the actual armed uprisings that happened, such as the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, disprove the theory that armed citizen resistance can overcome the mighty power of the state. “In reality, only about 20 Germans were killed, while some 13,000 Jews were massacred,” Alex Seitz-Wald wrote in Salon in 2013. “The remaining 50,000 who survived were promptly sent off to concentration camps.”
But despite the ahistorical nature of these claims, Carson has his supporters on the right. Keith Ablow of Fox News has defended Carson’s argument and David French of the National Review wrote off Carson’s critics as deluded “outrage merchants.” This is the state of the American right, circa 2015, treading very closely to blaming the victims of the Holocaust for not being Rambo, as every conservative apparently believes he’d be under the circumstances.
But should we really be all that surprised? Victim-blaming is standard operating procedure for the right, after all. For every social inequality there is, you can bet there’s going to be a conservative argument for why the people holding the short end of the stick brought it on themselves. Persistent racial inequalities? Don’t blame racism, blame black people themselves for their supposed cultural failings. Women continue to make less than men? It’s not sexism, but women somehow choosing to make less money. Rape epidemic on campuses? Blame is put on victims themselves for drinking, having sex, or dressing immodestly, not on rapists for choosing to rape. People are living in poverty? It’s not income inequality or unemployment, but the fault of poor people themselves for supposedly being lazy.
