The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising: Armed Jews vs. Nazis
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
Yet it doesn't explain why the French people in Nazi occupied countries, who had a larger gun culture, were so (relatively) easily subdued and kept pacified.
If the thesis is correct, it would seem to suggest that the two-state solution might be achieved by simply delivering massive amounts of arms to the Palestinians. But I can't help in reading it that it's an advocacy piece supporting a certain US view towards the right to bear arms, and subject to 'hypothesis myopia', where 'investigators fixate on collecting evidence to support just one hypothesis; neglect to look for evidence against it; and fail to consider other explanations.' (Quoting http://www.nature.com/news/how-scientists-fool-themselves-an... .)
As evidence of one thing I think is odd, I'll note that the quote from the 1967 "International Society for the Prevention of Crime", which concluded "defensive measures are the most effective means for the prevention of genocide" only appears in a handful of web search results, many by the same author as this, and the others from US sources which appear to want minimal gun controls.
That's hardly suggestive of a wide-spread agreement that that view is correct.
I attempted to verify the quote, to learn the context, but found very little even about the organization/meeting. DDG at https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22International+Society+for+the+P... only finds 6 matches, including this WaPo opinion piece. Ditto for Google. Only one is not derived from this opinion piece, that being the author's earlier paper at https://www.saf.org/journal/19/kopel.pdf .
That paper in turn references 'V.V. Stanciu, “Reflections on the Congress for the Prevention of Genocide,” in Yad Vashem Studies on the European Jewish Catastrophe and Resistance, vol. 7, ed., Livia Rothkirchen (Jerusalem, Israel: Yad Vashem, 1968), p. 187'. The only other paper I found which cites that reference is David Caplan, in "Weapons Control Laws: Gateways to Victim Oppression and Genocide", at http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4899-5974-4_1... , which also appears to argue for weak gun controls.
(I verified that the cited source does exist; see http://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/about/institute/studies/issue... . Stanciu appears to have been a French lawyer and criminologist.)
Using a reference from 1967 from what appears to be an obscure source make me think it's a result of quote mining. Is this view an outlier specifically chose to back a predetermined hypothesis? Why reference something that's older than I am - is there really nothing newer?
Given the number of genocides since 1967 (Rwanda, Red Terror in Ethiopia, Cambodian Genocide, 1971 Bangladesh atrocities, and the Nigerian Civil War all seem ways to test that thesis), surely those would provide additional insight the relationship between strong gun control laws and genocide. Could we have prevented the genocide in Rwanda by air-dropping a bunch of arms on those being killed?
Indeed, I found just such a paper when trying to find out more about Stanciu. This paper is "Rethinking Approaches to Prevention under the Responsibility to Protect Agency and Empowerment within Vulnerable Populations" at at http://booksandjournals.brillonline.com/content/journals/10.... .
> The paper considers a number of historical case studies in which targeted groups were able to leverage their own agency, often with assistance from others, to reduce this vulnerability. These include cases that culminated in genocide, namely the experiences of German and Austrian Jews under Nazi rule, and negative cases studies in which a demonstrable risk of mass atrocities was not realised, such as the experiences of Yemenite Jews in the first half of the twentieth century and those of the Bahá’í community in Iran since the 1979 Iranian revolution. These cases suggest that assisting persecuted populations to empower themselves can be an effective way to promote resilience to mass atrocities.
and the author of that piece has done a lot of research on genocide http://ro.uow.edu.au/do/search/?q=author_lname%3A%22Mayersen... .
Most likely an airdrop of arms would have ended the Rwandan genocide sooner - keep in mind that the genocide only ended when armed Tutsis took over the country. This effort was certainly helped by the fact that fleeing Tutsis, formerly hoping to just quietly live their lives and ignore politics, suddenly became willing to take up arms and join the RPF.
If they didn't know, or weren't sure, then your explanation doesn't work. (That's not to say the desire to protect one's human rights, and way of life, isn't enough. One need only look to the Finns in the Winter War for an example of that.)
The information I found (mostly Wikipedia) is incomplete and contradictory. As there is a lot of fraudulent anti-Holocaust, anti-Jew publications on the topic, it is hard for me to get a sense of who knew what when.
Also, the German mass murders includes several million non-Jewish Slavs in Ukraine. If the Holocaust deaths help explain why the Jews in Warsaw fought back the way they did, is the Slavic response any different, and if so, why?
This lack of comparison data, when it seems like it should be both relevant and available, is why I don't regard this piece in the WaPa to be a good historical work.
This piece is really an advertisement for the author's upcoming book, and this piece seems pretty obviously cribbed from one of his chapters. It reads less oddly if you read the title of the book, and go look at the description on the Amazon link, and realize that it fits into a philosophical work on the justifiable use of force in the Judeo-Christian tradition.
I'm not following the election horserace, this was just an interesting historical article that came up in my feed.
The Warsaw Jews did pretty well, considering they had less arms and ammunition on hand than you'd find in a rural US WalMart. Victory was not an option - a year later, the considerably larger, better-equipped Warsaw Uprising failed as bloodily, when Soviet forces nearly on the outskirts of the city failed to raise a finger in support.
Another is to identify underlying patterns and trends that help understand what happened, and hopefully can be applied elsewhere. For examples, how did the introduction of light mobile guns by Gustavus Adolphus change the battlefield? Why did the explosion of Krakatoa have a big cultural impact as well as physical one? How are Newton's view on alchemy and biblical research connected to his work on physics?
The first is more descriptive, and the second is more predictive. Both are good history.
Both are scientific, but call for different sorts of research. Both require extensive literature analysis. The latter requires more work to come up with alternative hypothesis and relevant comparisons, in order to test and disprove hypotheses.
This article does both. I think it does best at the descriptive aspects of the event. But it uses a historical model that isn't well tested, but could be tested by looking towards other genocides to see if the model fits.
If the model doesn't fit in a more general sense, then in the context of US gun control laws, it's a curiosity at best, and not something that can be used in decision making.
It is trying to making that comparison, and not limit itself to the uprising, which is why I regard it as a bad piece of historical writing.
However a big difference between occupied populations and Jews is that Germany for the most part left the occupied population alone. Yes they were still oppressed and in many cases fell into poverty however they weren't hunted down by the SS, gathered and then shipped to concentration camps, ghettos, and later to extermination camps.
As far as Ghettos go then for the most part it was a "Polish" issue, there weren't many Ghettos outside of Poland, while it appears now that the German population knew much more about the treatment of Jews than what previously thought or admitted the German's kept Germany clean, and only had labor and work camps within Germany and for the most part France and other occupied countries which sadly provided much better conditions for the most part which enabled the Germans to dismiss the claims of what was happening in Poland and in the eastern front as Jewish and later Allied propaganda.
And this is a major issue, while French, Polish, Danish, Dutch and other nationalities had resistances they for the most part were fighting for ideals and their personal freedom. A population in risk of genocide has to literally fight for it's life. If Jews the capabilities of supporting a continuous armed resistance the Holocaust could've been avoided (this isn't claiming that the end result would've resulted in less deaths) because it would be much less likely that the Germans could've as easily transported as many Jews at that much of an ease during the final solution.
The final solution was so unthinkable that even the Jews didn't believe it until the news broke out in the final year of the war in Europe, the majority of the Jews were transported from ghettos and work camps and thought that they are just are being put into a new camp, the level of deception that was put into the final solution was truly unbelievable including letting the "red-cross" (still no clear if this was a show or the actual red-cross) visit the Jews in the big Ghettos before transferring them to the death camps to further pacify and calm down the population.
So yes arming at risk populations might make a huge difference in the end even if you only consider that difference to be the way they died rather than the pure numbers, but in modern times it's also an issue. Tribal genocide (which sadly being going since even before colonial times) cannot be just as easily compared to the Holocaust, if you are the population too much you might still get a Genocide in which the original at risk population isn't the victim but now the perpetrator so you end up with constantly fueling an ever shifting conflict.
For example, you say: "even the Jews didn't believe it until the news broke out in the final year of the war in Europe". This uprising took place almost two years before V-E day, which means the Jews in Warsaw were not aware that they were "literally" fighting for their lives. They were instead fighting for their human rights, and their way of life. (We know they were destined for extermination camps, but they didn't; if what you say is correct.)
The author also points out that the deportations were 'ostensibly for resettlement in labor camps, but almost always for extermination' and 'Often, the Judenrat was told that as long as the ghetto worked hard to produce factory goods for the Germans, the ghetto would be allowed to survive.' Thus, how did the Jews of Warsaw know that genocide was planned for them, and not, say, work camps?
If they did not know, then thesis - that weak gun laws can help prevent genocide - is actually a broader one; that weak gun laws can help prevent ghettoization, or that weak gun laws can help prevent mass deportations.
Hence if there is any lesson to be learned, it sounds like the author is arguing for the increased weaponization of the Palestinians, in order to better reach the long agreed upon two state solution.
Another issue is that you added your own qualifier; "Tribal genocide ... cannot be just as easily compared to the Holocaust."
This is a different definition of genocide than the author. Or rather, when the "International Society for the Prevention of Crime", concluded "defensive measures are the most effective means for the prevention of genocide"; did that mean genocide as defined by the Genocide Convention? I think so. While you want to exclude "tribal genocide" from that definition.
In science there is an analysis error called "p-hacking". More specifically, if the correlation across the entire data set is too weak, some people will look at a subset which has a more detectable correlation. (XKCD calls this 'Hey, look at this interesting subgroup analysis'.) The problem is, the method of subsetting should be part of the significance analysis, and by excluding it, the p-value is artificially raised.
By choosing a subset of 'genocide', you weaken the intent of the essay. You say they cannot easily be applied to tribal genocide, which opens up the possibility that the can't be used for other genocides, and especially opens up the possibility that it can't be used in the US political context.
I made it quite clear that arming a population might not have a clear impact on the amount of deaths, but it will have a clear impact on the way they died.
The Polish people didn't "had" to fight, at least not for survival this isn't an attempt to make their fight any less heroic or meaningful but they fought for freedom and ideals rather than not being branded as cattle and led to their deaths.
If more Jews could revolt the final solution might not have happened, not in the way it did anyhow, the Germans could only execute it because they have had very little internal and external resistance in doing so. If there was a much bigger Jewish resistance and there would be revolts in every work camp, ghetto and concentration camp the Germans could possible have had to give up on their plans, the cold and calculated truth of the Holocaust is that the Germans found them selves with too many Jews on their hands where exploiting them began to cost more than what they got in return.
Heck they had to ask the Catholic church to annul the marriages between "pure" Germans and German Jews in mass because that presented them with a real problem of having to disclose and produce death certificates for dead German Jews to their former husbands and wives so they could remarry.
So yes a strong and armed Jewish resistance might have played a big role in the outcome of the Holocaust they didn't had to drive an invading army out, they didn't fight for the freedom of a country or the ideals of the nation they fought for their own survival and making the final solution too costly to execute as well as directly sabotaging it (which is something that the allied forces refuse to do in the form of not bombing train lines and even the incinerators of the death camps) could've resulted in a very different outcome.
And Poland eventually won it's freedom, they did inflict heavy losses on German troops, and eventually they did convince the USSR to leave as well, but as i said it's a completely different conflict.
Your conclusion is a bit tautological - if things were different then they wouldn't have happened the same way.
> the Germans could only execute it because they have had very little internal and external resistance in doing so.
Jews were not the only ones being killed. Everything you say should apply to Ukraine. Quoting Wikipedia:
> The Holocaust in Ukraine took place during the occupation of Ukraine by Nazi Germany.[1] Between 1941 and 1945, approximately 3,000,000 Ukrainian and other non-Jewish victims were killed as part of Nazi extermination policies, along with between 850,000 - 900,000 Jews who lived in the territory of modern Ukraine.[2][3] Original plans of genocide called for the extermination of 65% of the nation's 23.2 million Ukrainians,[4][5] with the remainder of inhabitants to be treated as slaves.[6] Over 2,300,000 Ukrainians were deported to Germany for slave labor.[7] In ten years' time, the plan effectively called for the extermination, expulsion, Germanization or enslavement of most or all Ukrainians. ...
> One of Hitler's ambitions at the start of the war was to exterminate, expel, or enslave most or all Slavs from their native lands so as to make living space for German settlers. ... Total civilian losses during the war and German occupation in Ukraine are estimated at four million, including up to a million Jews who were murdered by the Einsatzgruppen and local Nazi collaborators.
> If there was a much bigger Jewish resistance and there would be revolts in every work camp, ghetto and concentration camp the Germans could possible have had to give up on their plans,
Given that millions of non-Jewish Slavs were also massacred, how much more Jewish resistance would have been needed?
And like I said, if that thesis were true, then it would seem that the best way to achieve the two state solution for Palestine is to ship a huge amount of arms to the Palestinians. If not, what is missing in the comparison?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties_of_Pol...
Approximately six million Polish citizens perished during World War II: about one fifth of the pre-war population. Most were civilian victims of the war crimes and crimes against humanity during the occupation by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.
Half of those were Jews. The other half were other Poles.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katyn_massacre
"The Polish people didn't "had" to fight, at least not for survival"
Both the Germans and the Russians often practices universal punishment and exterminated entire villages for hosting resistance fighters and later on for cooperating with either Russian or German forces.
The 6M death figure which is horrible is also the total death accounts during the war which included Pols that died while serving in the Polish army, Poles that were conscripted to the German army, Poles who were Conscripted to the Soviet Army, Civilians who died in massacres, starvation, and disease.
Poland isn't the only country in which the civilian population encountered such acts, Germany wiped entire villages in Greece for showing the slightest sign of resistance and then wiped the nearest 3 villages as a warning to others.
War crimes always happens, but not every war crime is a Genocide, Poland might actually be a unique case because of how it was split between Stalin and Hitler and because of the animosity the Germans had towards it for "stealing" large parts of the "fatherland" after WW1.
But again it's hard to equate the crimes committed in Poland to Genocide, especially considering that even during the War both the occupied Polish government and the exiled Government continued counting loses of "ethnic" poles, which at the end amounted to about 10% of the pre-war "ethnic" poles population.
But that could've as easily been changed if the war would've dragged longer and once the Germans finished dealing with their "Jewish Problem" they would no longer see the Slavic people as "necessary slave labor".
Wars are shit, WW2 and the Holocaust is probably the shittiest of them all, but if you ask the Poles would they rather be armed and fighting or be the next inline for complementary train tickets you would probably get only a single response and that is we rather fight, there are many ways to die and while we all like idolizing heroic deaths there is almost no one that would rather not fight and die than die in naked in a gas chamber.
These numbers don't really add up and it's the upper bound Polish historians quote. The problem is that there were roughly 3M Jews in Poland before the war and census before and after the war showed ~3,5M population drop in total. So not only 6M seems excessive but 3M seems unlikely given that this would mean that roughly every single Jew died in the result of WWII. 3M/6M figures are never verified, PRL figures.
> but if you ask the Poles would they rather be armed and fighting or be the next inline for complementary train tickets you would probably get only a single response and that is we rather fight
Sure, most of us would rather fight. But this piece isn't about our will or ability to fight. I actually find it offensive that some random dude from across the ocean is using pieces of my history to justify his own agenda. One that has absolutely NOTHING to do with fighting against oppression, aggression or genocide but EVERYTHING to do with interests of gun manufacturers. I find this kind of articles dangerous in how cynical they are in exploiting fears we all have, that a group I'm a part of could be targeted, to push particular agenda. It's disgusting.
And it's certainly not out of the question that a better armed Jewish resistance could have organized transport for a lot of Jews out of Nazi hands.
The problem is that for those events in WWII where such a claim can be tested -- for example, the Ghetto Uprising -- the claim fails miserably. In the Ghetto Uprising, the Nazis lost 300 soldiers and the Jews lost at least 13,000 people, perhaps far more.
I think what we're seeing in this article is an attempt to redefine the metric:
> Nearly every Jew who participated was eventually killed — but they were going to be killed anyway. By choosing to stand and fight, the Warsaw Jews diverted a significant amount of Nazis resources from battlefields elsewhere, thus hastening the Nazi defeat.
So according to the author, Jewish deaths don't really count as a metric because they were "going to be killed anyway". And the metric instead should be about whether "significantly resources were diverted", a highly dubious claim in and of itself. Essentially the uprising would be considered "successful" if it hastened the end of the war, not if the people in the Ghetto were saved.
Whether true or not, the problem with this claim is that it doesn't help the gun lobby's agenda, which is used to justify arming people in the US: that having guns would have prevented the immediate deaths of those with the guns. The whole article reeks of misdirection.
Sometimes these uprisings do actually save the people involved. It wouldn't have saved the Jews, but it did save about half of the Tutsis.
Closer to home, it's also worth reading the book "We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement". tl;dr; violent terrorists were regularly attacking black Americans, American Indians and insufficiently loyal white people, and armed resistance put a big dent in it. (Note that law enforcement generally sided with the terrorists.)
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Hayes_Pond
The whole point is that even without ready access to guns, the Jews were able to fight of a powerful army. The idea here is to extrapolate how things would have went had they been armed to start with:
" There was little “gun culture” among European Jews of the 1930s, so few Jews had the equipment for “reloading” — the home manufacture of ammunition"
"...home manufacture of ammunition is legal everywhere in the United States."
"The Germans suffered over a thousand casualties in the first week of fighting alone. The Germans had to spend more time subduing the Warsaw Ghetto than they did conquering the entire nations of Poland or France."
etc etc
Holding up 2,000 soldiers for a month isn't a big deal in the scheme of millions of soldiers. But when it's done by only 1,000 incredibly poorly armed civilians, it shows what could have been done with more and better armed civilians.
Instead, the Germans decided to deport the Jews. Had they just gone from the start shelled/bombed the ghetto, and set it on fire, they would have lost many fewer soldiers and taken less time.
Also, the Wikipedia page says the backbone of the German troops were '821 Waffen-SS paramilitary soldiers from five SS Panzergrenadier reserve and training battalions and one SS cavalry reserve and training battalion'. These are not the prime troops that would be on the front lines.
That's not to say there was no effect, but I don't think it's reasonable to say "significant".
Also, a complete tally would need to subtract from the 2,000 count the number of German soldiers that were used to maintain the ghetto.
So, you are saying that this statement "the Germans suffered over a thousand casualties in the first week of fighting alone" is false?
First, it bears repeating that the vast majority of Jews killed were Polish, not German. This never really was a matter of not paying attention to the political progress of anti-semitism in your own country, but rather that your crazy neighbors get crazier and crazier and eventually invade your country and turn it upside-down.
The real problem is that the Polish Jews always had to deal with a relatively low-level anti-semitism, and their strategy of being meek and going along always worked well enough for them. They had been doing it for so long that even when the Nazis invaded and changed everything virtually overnight, there was no real widespread movement for resistance until it was much too late. If it had been legal for them to buy and own guns, they wouldn't have bothered, and if they had them, they would have given them up without a peep long before.
I suppose you could say that the even deeper root of the problem is the belief that It Can't Happen Here. The Nazis did indeed try hard to hide the facts of what they were doing, but they were greatly helped by the fact that pretty much nobody really believed that such industrialized mass-murder could happen in a first-world, civilized country. Even with the massive levels of documentation produced, there are plenty of people who still don't believe that it happened.
But the facts on the ground there went on to fuel history in another direction. Jewish shame at how passively they were led to the slaughter in Europe fueled their will to flout British colonial immigration laws in moving to what was then British Palestine, found a nation and an army, desperately build or buy weapons from any possible source, and successfully defend it against all comers over and over again. They were also helped in no small part by Western diplomatic backing, fueled by shame at not having done enough to prevent the Holocaust from happening.
In the end, having the materiel and skills to defend yourself is good, but having the knowledge that you might need to and the will to go through with it is more important. Without that, any armaments you do have will evaporate before they can make a difference, and with it, you can find a way to buy or make some kind of weapons, even if it wouldn't be as good as if you had gotten them beforehand.
While some six million Jews were massacred, there were another five million non-Jewish victims of Nazi mass murders.
Any thesis that depends on the mindset and culture of Jews must necessarily fail to explain the millions of non-Jewish Ukrainians that were murdered.
One interesting what-if? to consider is what might have happened had Roosevelt lived to see the end of the war, and the various treaties and conference (notably the Potsdam Conference), instead of the inexperienced Truman.
One of the better treatments of the final days of WW2, and the tensions between the western Allies and the Soviets over Poland is http://www.amazon.com/The-Last-100-Days-Controversial/dp/081...
If you remember, there was a large conflict between the US and the Soviets for much of the 20th century over exactly these types of claims.
There is amazing/modern/interactive exhibition of 1000 years Jewish history in Poland. Most of it is very positive and peaceful. You are invited!
This is the same US government that's armed with nuclear weapons, tanks with composite armor, a hacker network that would make Google blush, and populist democratic backing.
Additionally, this is the same US government has killed over 600,000 of its own citizens before for rebelling.
It is the height of sociopathic narcissism to think individuals or small bands of "freedom fighters" would be able to defeat such a system.
Smart people would instead work WITH the system to achieve their objectives, instead of working against it like a buffoon.
Personal firearms should be removed throughout a modern society.
Your argument sounds quite a lot like what was being said around the time the US wanted independence from England. What? We're going to fight them? With their army, and their artillery, and their guns, and their funding, and their navy, and all that?
This argument has nothing at all to do with working with or against the system as it currently exists. The argument is about what happens when a system is so completely broken that it is shamelessly murdering a lot of people.
Even the staunchest advocates for guns in the US go out and vote. They participate in the system. It's not a binary choice. You can choose to participate now and hedge your bets for later. Those things are not mutually exclusive.
If you think guerilla warfare doesn't work against superior forces, you haven't paid much attention to, well, anything.
England was similarly distracted. AND on the other side of the freaking world. Fighting the colonies were more time and money than they were worth.
The problem with the gun issue in this country is that the people who vote against gun control are the ones least susceptible to gun violence. I guarantee you that you'll find a lot of support for gun control in housing projects.
Were you implying that the REAL military was defeated in the ME? Or, that they would somehow be unable to put down a guerrilla war?
The problem is that despite repeated demonstrations of the contrary, many people (including people who really, really should know better) believe that wars are only decided on the battlefield. The point of going to war is not to engage in set-piece battles and blow up a hapless opponent like Saddam's outclassed military live on CNN. The point is to complete a number of strategic objectives. If you didn't manage to do that, you lost.
If on top of that, you managed to engineer a power vacuum in a very volatile area, which subsequently created the conditions necessary for the emergence of the most powerful militant group to date, you pretty much scored an own goal. Bonus if your PR plan included saying "mission accomplished".
If there's any one big thing we learned in Iraq, it's how Counter-Insurgency works and how important it is. You can't simply roll in and impose your will on a well-armed populace, no matter how many ships and planes and tanks you have. You will be hit over and over again by snipers and small ambushes that fade away before you can bring your resources to bear. There are no big targets to use your big weapons against, and using them arbitrarily against the civilian population will enrage more people into fighting against you than the number of actual combatants it kills. You can't get any good information from anybody on who the insurgents really are and where they are.
The force that is closest to the population will basically always win in the end, even if they have less resources. The only way for an outside force to successfully counter an insurgency is to make themselves more close to the population than the insurgents. That's how the US won in Anbar late in the war - the insurgents, despite being the same religion and more culturally similar, were so brutal, arbitrary, and disrespectful of local traditions that they were willing to side with Americans from an ocean away to get them out.
The other important part is how the soldiers themselves feel. It makes less of a different when you're an ocean away from home in a very foreign culture, since there's not really any practical way to desert. If they were ever to operate in America against Americans, that could be a very big deal. Soldiers aren't order-following robots; you're going to have to convince them to fire weapons at, and take fire from, their friends and neighbors on the orders of somebody far away to impose something they may not care about or believe in. It's not necessarily impossible, but it makes things a lot harder.
We don't lose in real wars that we care about, such as ones where rebel states cause an existential threat.
Wholesale defeat of tyranny isn't necessary - a deterrent is sufficent. Very few soldiers would follow an order if they knew that it put their family at risk for reprisal.
"In Western Europe, where anti-semitism among the conquered gentile population was less severe [...]"
"But when Poland regained its independence in 1919, thanks to the Versailles Treaty, the nation degenerated into a military dictatorship which encouraged anti-semitism."
These statements are either facile and come from a position of ignorance and show a lack of discernment. Consider that:
* After Poland regained its independence in 1918/19, it had been a democratic republic until the May coup d'etat of 1926 under Marshal Jozef Pilsudski, arguably the most important figure in the creation of the Second Polish Republic and the rebirth of the nation's independence. This de facto dictatorship lasted for less than 10 years. I know that we like to superficially assign without question an absolute superiority to democracy and view dictatorship as an absolute evil, but this depends on the particular characteristics of a given society, its situation, and its present needs as well as the kind of dictatorship we have in mind. Poland had been wiped off the map 123 years prior and divided into three parts by a joint conspiracy between Prussia, Russia, and Austria. It is strongly argued that without a dictatorship that would hold the nation together and guard it from foreign malice and its notoriously bad geopolitical predicament, Poland would have failed to survive as a state. There was a need for stabilization and coordination. Democracy presumes a certain status quo and does not bear chaos in such circumstances very well.
* Under Pilsudski's rule, the situation of ethnic minorities (1/3 of the citizenry) actually improved considerably, though some of these minorities later colluded with the Nazi and Soviet regimes in exterminations of the Polish population. Pilsudski preferred to emphasize loyalty to the state over ethnicity, which was the policy of the National Democrats under Roman Dmowski, Pilsudski's arch-rival (and who purportedly argued that ethnic minorities can add salt to the soup, though too much can ruin or destabilize a society, esp. when they fail to assimilate). In fact, Jews viewed him very favorably and their situation improved greatly especially under Pilsudski-appointed prime minister Kazimierz Bartel. Worth noting is that Pilsudski's own wife was Jewish. So I'm not sure how the author drew the link between dictatorship and anti-semitism. Maybe he was looking for a cheap trope to appeal to to sell his story.
* The Polish variety of anti-Jewish feeling during this period was not racial in character. The "Jewish Question" concerned the problem of who and what Jews were in relation to the Polish nation. To say that Jews were being kept back is not really accurate. The situation was far more complicated. Many Jews who did assimilate were quite successful. However, it is false to assume that all Jews wanted to assimilate in the first place and simply weren't welcome. Many had no such desire and purposefully maintained a separation from gentiles. Many were Zionists. Many had German loyalties. Some had Communist sympathies. During an era of nationalism where the state was rebuilding and trying to survive against the threat of Nazi German and Soviet Russian aggression, unknown or divided loyalties were threatening. Furthermore, much of the resentment towards Jews, where it did exist, was economic in nature. While the aristocracy and the peasantry were about 2/3 Polish, the same proportions did not hold among the burghers where Jews were overrepresented. In other words, Polish-Jewish relations are complicates and require particular care if they are to be understood, not boorish generalizations that you often hear from bigots and the ignorant, no doubt the same people who use phrases such as "Polish concentration camps".
* The greatest number of people honored at Yad Vashem are by far Poles. This is true despite that fact that only in Poland did Germany impose a death penalty that could be extended to the entire family for aiding and hiding Jews.
Other than that, I'm not sure how convincing the main argument seems to be. Gun control, like many polarizing topics, exists in an anti-rational domain that elevates a tool to some transcendental, fantastic order of Manichean symbols: you either have those who equate guns with freedom and those who equate it with evil incarnate. It is my opinion that whether gun training and ownership is not a matter of principle but a matter of contingent factors and pragmatism. For example, since we're on the topic, I believe countries in historically geopolitically risky situation like Poland could benefit from widespread training if not ownership. Switzerland is arguably geopolitically safer place, but it has a trained populace in possession of firearms. The US has a very curious history with fire arms that differs from that of France, which does not mean stricter regulation of the gun market cannot be put in place. However, while gun ownership has been increasing, violence has been decreasing, esp. violence involving guns. There is no single number that can characterize the facts on the ground, but what it goes to show is that much of the "public debate" is merely the projection of preconceived notions, ideology, and emotion. There is barely any reason in it, merely arrogant presumption that the issue is obvious.