Yes, It Can Happen Here

In a breathtakingly short time, Germany spiraled from the pinnacle of the world's culture to Auschwitz

Here is an excerpt from a speech Justice Scalia gave on Holocaust Remembrance Day from the book Scalia Speaks: Reflections on Law, Faith and Life Well Lived. The entire speech is here.

The one message I want to convey today is that you will have missed the most frightening aspect of it all, if you do not appreciate that it happened in one of the most educated, most progressive, most cultured countries in the world.

The Germany of the late 1920s and early 1930s was a world leader in most fields of art, science and intellect. Berlin was a center of theater; with the assistance of the famous producer Max Reinhardt, playwrights and composers of the caliber of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill flourished. Berlin had three opera houses, and Germany as a whole no less than eighty. Every middle-sized city had its own orchestra. German poets and writers included Hermann Hesse, Stefan George, Leonhard Frank, Franz Kafka and Thomas Mann, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929. In architecture, Germany was the cutting edge, with Gropius and the Bauhaus school. It boasted painters like Paul Klee and Oskar Schlemmer. Musical composers like Anton Webern, Alban Berg, Arnold Schoenberg, and Paul Hindemith. Conductors like Otto Klemperer, Bruno Walter, Erich Kleiber and Wilhelm Furtwängler. And in science, of course, the Germans were preeminent….

Sometimes I get the argument that the Second Amendment is an outdated relic because we do not need to worry about tyranny in the United States. To those who would say this, I give the example of Germany in 1929, which was arguably at the very pinnacle of Western Civilization. From those heights, the Germans descended to the death camps and total war in a breathtakingly short span of time. It can’t happen here you say? Wake up, pick up the paper, and scan the frontpage pictures of Ivy League students rioting in support of Hamas. Those students are the future leaders of this country. It can happen here.

And just in case it does happen here, we will do well to remember that tyrants absolutely hate armed citizens. I will leave you with the reflections of Ninth Circuit Judge Alex Kozinski, a Romanian-born Jew. Both of Judge Kozinski’s parents were Holocaust survivors. In the case of Silveira v. Lockyer, the Ninth Circuit upheld a California gun control law. In dissent, Judge Kozinski wrote:

All too many of the other great tragedies of history-Stalin's atrocities, the killing fields of Cambodia, the Holocaust, to name but a few-were perpetrated by armed troops against unarmed populations. Many could well have been avoided or mitigated, had the perpetrators known their intended victims were equipped with a rifle and twenty bullets apiece, as the Militia Act required . . .  If a few hundred Jewish fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto could hold off the Wehrmacht for almost a month with only a handful of weapons, six million Jews armed with rifles could not so easily have been herded into cattle cars.