23A047 Beware! Voters at Work! by Jim Davies, 11/21/2023

In March 1933, 17 million Germans voted for the National Socialist Party. They did so as good patriotic people, stimulated by the upbeat message of that group: that Germans were strong and honorable and industrious, and entitled to recover the losses imposed upon them by the WW1 victors in the Versailles "treaty".

The Party had grown by leaps and bounds from its formation in a Munich beer hall only a dozen years earlier, and that message resonated with nearly all classes, and it was all true, more or less. It was supplemented by undertones of blame upon those said to have precipitated the loss, notably Jews. This was unjust, because in 1918 the nation was broke, its people were starving and nobody could have kept the war going in the face of mounting numbers of fresh US soldiers. But Jews were the easiest of scapegoats because they were loyal to their race, not just to Germany. So Hitler, the NSDAP leader, heaped the blame on them.

In revenge he arranged first for all firearms to be registered and confiscated, then skilfully removed all rival political parties because those 17 million votes had given him only a plurality. He next deprived Jews of key jobs and of citizenship. By 1939, half of them had taken the hint and emigrated.

After that, Jews were systematically expelled, enslaved and exterminated, all over the fast-growing Reich. As the war ended, the executioners destroyed all the records they could but the generally accepted figure is that about 6 million died in the concentration camps. Other genocides have since been larger, but that is the only large one so far that was done with deliberate, planned intent.

And Hitler helped start WW2, which killed about 7 million Germans.

Voting, therefore, is extremely dangerous.

In January 2006, anti-Jewish residents of Gaza voted for leaders and chose a party called Hamas, which advocated violence against the surrounding Israeli State. In the 17 years since then Hamas obtained and fired rockets at Jewish civilians at random; Gaza has been repeatedly raided to clean them out but they reconstituted themselves with the aid of an extensive network of tunnels in which to hide. On October 7th, 2,500 of them broke out of Gaza and deliberately murdered about 1,400 Jewish civilians. Next day, Israel declared war on Hamas and the conflict continues. Its final death toll is yet unknown.

About one million in Gaza were too young (or unborn) to vote in 2006 so carry no responsibilty for it, and some 330,0o0 of them are children under 13, so carry even less. Further, a third of those who did vote, voted against Hamas. Yet despite close targeting by Israeli bombers to minimize "collateral damage," some of these are dying.

Voting, therefore, is extremely dangerous.

"But, but... very many public elections are held, and you've selected only two examples, which turned out badly!"

Quite true. But at the time of voting, nobody knew that. Any election can be lethal, because no candidate keeps his promises. Why should he? - there is no contract and no accounting, between the silver-tongued speaker and the foolishly trusting voters. Recall: Vlad Zelensky won the last Ukrainian election by a landslide, on a platform that promised peace.

On top of all that, consider this conclusion of Joseph Stalin, one of history's bloodiest mass-murderers. He was in a good position to know. And so is 8% Joe Biden.

Communism, which I thought had died stone-cold dead in 1990, still pushes its nose up in college classes, so I'm told - especially those on Economics, where Marxism is the norm. Incredible. For a reality check, spend a few minutes watching Dr Marian Tupy in this video - he's now a Fellow at the Cato Institute but grew up in the Czech Socialist Republic and knows at first hand what it's like.

STOP PRESS: Libertarian elected! As if to contradict this Edition of the ZGBlog, on November 19th Javier Milei was elected President of Argentina. I didn't think that could be done, and still think politics is not the best way to bring about a free society. But like his erstwhile rival did (but truly) I wish him the best of luck. See the recent FEE article about him, and watch him interviewed by Tucker Carlson.