by R.G. Yoho
Clash Daily Guest Contributor
This past week, Michael Moore wrote a particularly despicable piece in which he equated NRA supporters with the German citizens who lived around the Nazi death camps in World War II.
After Hitler’s death camps were discovered by the Allies, Gen. Dwight Eisenhower wisely brought the press into the facilities in order that they might chronicle, in word and by photograph, the atrocities which took place there, so that nobody in the future could ever plausibly deny those things truly happened.
Eisenhower also ordered his troops to bring the local German citizens to the camps and forced them to see the day-to-day carnage that took place right under their noses, scenes so disturbing that they caused one man and his wife to go home and commit suicide.
Michael Moore’s description of this historical event was certainly accurate and cannot be disputed.
However, Moore later misuses the truth of this historical event in a feat of propaganda that would have made Josef Goebbels proud.
In Moore’s deliberate perversion of historical events, he claims that everybody in America should be forced to see the bullet-riddled bodies of the dead children of Sandy Hook Elementary School. And upon seeing the carnage inflicted upon these children, he contends that the people of America would rise up, ban guns, and abolish the NRA.
And in these times when the media have willingly volunteered their services to act as the propaganda wing of Obama’s White House, perhaps Moore is right.
I first learned about this piece through an Internet posting from one of my friends.
The woman commented on what a well-written and thought-provoking column it was. She was especially enthralled with the historical perspectives Moore listed.
As someone who has repeatedly studied and written two non-fiction books about this time period in American history, I was particularly outraged by Moore’s misuse of the facts.
Perhaps it was a well-written piece, a well-written piece of fiction.
I would challenge his contention that NRA supporters, such as myself, are somehow to blame for the actions of the Sandy Hook shooter.
Moore’s basic premise is both flawed and sick, to draw some kind of moral equivalency between the actions of law-abiding gun owners and the inactions of German citizens who did nothing while the smells of burning human flesh filled their days.
And in another part of the article, Moore claimed that gun owners were like the people who hanged young black children in the segregated South. He also said the Second Amendment was “written by the same white men who thought a Negro was only 3/5 human.”
Well, please allow me to set the record straight for you, Mr. Moore: It was Abraham Lincoln, a Republican, who freed the salves. Your party opposed it. It was the father of Al Gore and your favorite Klansman, Robert C. Byrd, both Democrats, who opposed the Civil Rights Act. Your party opposed it.
And when it comes to the 3/5 compromise written into the Constitution, that provision was placed there by Abolitionists, not slave holders.
It had nothing to do with the worth of black Americans. It had everything to do with how they were counted, in order to prevent the counting of slaves along with free citizens, thereby enabling the slave states to use their superior numbers to maintain the status quo.
If it wasn’t for this provision in the Constitution, the document might never have been ratified, creating a great and wondrous country that would eventually correct this moral injustice.
And if these words should ever be removed from the Constitution, then we will lose a part of our history and a great teaching opportunity to show our young people and the world why we are indeed exceptional among nations.
The NRA is not an evil, faceless organization; it is people, who join other like-minded gun owners in making their voice speak louder than a single individual.
There is no blow-back on any of my guns. The proud and stubborn defense of our Constitutional liberties — and the choice of others to abuse them — cannot be justly equated to those who would allow evil, nearly-unspeakable acts to happen right beside them on a daily basis.
I cannot speak for others. However, I can say that I would have no problem whatsoever with using one of my firearms to stop the actions of anybody who would rape and/or murder a child. And although the taking of that diseased individual’s life would no doubt cause me a lifetime of psychological problems, I would happily live with the results, proud that I’d done my part to stop him.
Therefore, should I ever be presented with the pictures of the dead schoolchildren of Stony Brook, I am sure I would be just as repulsed as I was by the pictures of the Holocaust. However, it would also strengthen my own resolve that I would hang onto my own guns, in order to confront the evil that might someday choose to enter my own home.
People like Michael Moore have much more in common with the neighbors of the death camps than I do. Like Hitler’s propaganda minister, Michael Moore preys on people’s emotions.
Hypocritically, he tries to hold onto his own armed protection. At the same time, Moore wants to render everyday citizens powerless, like the Jews, placing them in the position that armed men could herd them into railroad cars like cattle.
And that is a situation that could never occur in a great nation, protected by a strong and accurate interpretation of the Second Amendment.
Image: Buchenwald Concentration Camp survivor with American troops of the 46th Armored Division, U.S. Ninth Army, Buchenwald, [Thuringia] Germany, May 27, 1945. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of National Archives and Records Administration, College Park; public domain
R.G. Yoho is a writer and author of six books
