Until the last 40 years, most families always supplemented their food with hunting. Pre-World War II, there were less than 2 billion people on the planet (today there are 7 billion-plus). Hunting and the wildlife food supply were a normal, regular, habitual part of families’ lives. Disrupting that often meant families went hungry. In fact, after World War I, as part of the Versailles Treaty, Germany was forced to restrict gun ownership for its citizens in case they were arming themselves for more war. Many families, especially the poorer ones, had trouble feeding themselves and it helped lead to their Recession.
In 1938, the Nazis relaxed all these gun laws, especially the right to bear arms, citing individual liberty and pandering to families’ needs for traditional hunting for food. These traditional rights to hunt, to kill and slaughter animals for sport and food, were fundamental to that country’s way of life. You could say they were so fundamental they could be said, in American terms, to be constitutional, inalienable, grandfathered.
However, the party in control then used those rights as leverage to divide the country further. One part of German society was deemed to be unfit to share those traditional, cultural, moral rights. Jews were identified as “dirty” and “having big noses” and had to wear a yellow star badge to identify their so-called race. Once identified as non-Aryan (meaning not real humans), this portion of society quickly saw those Nazi open gun laws being amended to say that non-Aryans could not obtain, make, sell or own “dangerous weapons,” which included guns, shotguns and hunting rifles.
Now, many might say that taking away someone’s traditional gun rights is a small issue, even if only a portion of society — the Jews — felt the impact. Until the nights of Nov. 9 and 10, 1938, when an ATF (Germany equivalent) gun raid was held to confiscate and arrest any Jews and Jewish family members (kids and all) in possession of firearms: Kristallnacht, the turning point in the history of the Third Reich, marking the shift from antisemitic rhetoric and legislation to the violent, aggressive anti-Jewish measures that would culminate with the Holocaust.
America is on the cusp of such division and legislation, judges who swore and gave testimony that Roe v. Wade was precedent under law, and the “law of the land,” have decided to perjure themselves morally and perhaps legally to spin-off protection, traditional and constitutional protection, and to defy the morals and majority of the electorate’s wishes.
Make no mistake here. The legal subject of Roe v. Wade may have been abortion, but the issue, the constitutional issue, was about liberty and equal rights under the Constitution for all Americans.
A woman’s right to choose is her liberty in life, guaranteed by the Constitution, not a political party. In the same way in 1938 that changing Jews’ right to equally bear arms as the rest of the German citizenry could lead to division, terror and mass murder, so too will what seems like as small a subject as abortion lead to a denial of equal rights, equal liberty and the destruction of the fundamentals of our Constitution and decency in America.
Germany’s legal system enabled the Nazi party’s rise to power, enabled the concentration camps, helped re-write legal definitions of Aryan, proportionality Aryan (Mischlinge) and non-Aryan, upheld Nazi-era laws of discrimination of cripples, the mentally ill, Gypsies, homosexuality, out-of-wedlock births — the list is long and tortured. Hitler didn’t do all this himself. The forces behind his power base, those who came out in support of “real Germans” versus others, those enablers and sycophants, numbered in their thousands.
Not all Germans felt that way, but then the Nazi party didn’t need all Germans, just about 40% in their Make-Germany-great-again party who were willing to go to absolute ends. For Germany, the 40% started with authoritarian fixers, judges, politicians, duped common people and rich media backers. It ended with 104,812 U.S. soldiers dying to stop the Nazis in Europe alone. Total dead from the Nazis? It was 40 million to 50 million in Europe alone.
We know there are 40% here in the USA who seem determined to strip liberty from citizens they disagree with, who see many of their fellow citizens as unworthy to be real Americans either by race, creed, color or sexual orientation. This 40% power base uses religious non-scientific beliefs on pregnancy as weapons to whip up impassioned support for the one issue, using it as a Trojan Horse for their real aims of control. Many of their party speak openly of wanting to remove constitutional rights for marriage (interracial and inter-sexual), force identification of “real” Americans for voting rights, restrict poor regions from equal voting access, claim that our Republic should only allow states to set their own laws, not federally, and, never least, claim that Washington is “apart from the real America” all the while using democratic laws and the D.C. power base to further their aims to wrest control from the People for their own ends.
Does all of this sound familiar? History always repeats unless educated people prevent the same errors reoccurring. The Roe v. Wade greater issue is not about pregnancy or abortion, it is about a fight for our Constitution, liberty and individual rights. To fail now to defend the Constitution turns the clock back to 1938, only this time it is our nation’s corruption that could lead us down a very dark path.
Peter Riva, a former resident of Amenia Union, now lives in New Mexico.
Meg Sher, executive director of the David M. Hunt Library in Falls Village.L. Tomaino 
