Good effort, bad history
Old Martinez IG post off course with Hitler
Welcome, Red Sox slugger J.D. Martinez, to the ever-expanding list of professional athletes whose social-media posts have been dug up, dusted off and placed on a pedestal for a fresh round of public examination.
The problem this time is that we aren’t wringing our hands over decaying tweets from silly, uninformed teenagers who just happen to have ripened into big league baseball players.
This time it’s an old Instagram post from a grown-up J.D. Martinez that uses Adolf Hitler to make a point about the evils of gun control. He posted it on Jan. 10, 2013. He was 25 years old, and soon to begin his third major league season. It began making the rounds on Twitter on Sunday night, an old post with a fresh coat of paint and millions of new eyes.
The Instagram post includes a photo of Hitler with this quote, purportedly from Hitler in 1933: “To conquer a nation, First disarm it’s (sic) citizens.”
Martinez added his own commentary to the post: “This is why I always stay strapped! #thetruth”
In another Martinez post, from Nov. 6, 2012, Election Day, a quote appears in black type over a power blue background: “Obama will grab the early lead Tuesday, until the Republicans get off from work.”
What Martinez is saying here, one supposes, is that it’s the Republicans who do all the heavy lifting in this country, whereas the Democrats don’t.
No problem with that one, unless you want to go the dog-whistle route and seek out deeper meanings. But he was expressing a snarky political opinion. Fine.
The Hitler image is not so easily explained. I doubt Martinez intended anything malicious or requires an official statement from the Red Sox, even though one was offered by club president Sam Kennedy. We should also take into account that Martinez is a Cuban-American whose family left home to get out from under Fidel Castro’s tyrannical thumb.
The problem is that Martinez fell into the trap of using Hitler and Nazism in such a way as to minimize the atrocities committed in the 1930s and ’40s.
By almost all accounts, Hitler never uttered the words that were attributed to him in the Instagram post. He did, in the 1940s, make a comment that “the most foolish mistake we could possibly make would be to permit the conquered eastern peoples to have arms.”
Hitler was referring to parts of Eastern Europe and Russia that he had already conquered, not to 1933 Germany. Applying the quote to 1933 suggests that Hitler and his thugs never would have come to power if only German citizens, Jews especially, had been able to use their guns to wipe out all the Nazis.
Crippled by economic chaos and a stunning loss of identity following World War I, Germans were left wanting for someone they believed could guide them out of the abyss. Along came Hitler, and millions of Germans were attracted to his message. They were not under gunpoint when they cheered Hitler at all those rallies.
There’s even a term that applies to the reckless appropriation of Hitler’s name to wage an argument or make a case about something. It’s called Godwin’s law, and it was created by Mike Godwin, an author, attorney and senior fellow at R Street Institute, a public-policy think tank in Washington. Godwin’s law holds that “if you mention Adolf Hitler or Nazis within a discussion thread, you’ve automatically ended whatever discussion you were taking part in.”
In other words, you lose when you cavalierly toss Hitler and the Nazis into a general discussion. Martinez, who apparently likes to carry a gun (“This is why I always stay strapped!”), attempts to compare his plight to what happened when a murderous psychopath came to power in 1930s Germany and set the stage for World War II, which included the Holocaust, which resulted in the extermination of millions of Jews.
“The rhetoric of invoking Hitler is indefensible because it trivializes what he and the Nazis did,” Godwin said yesterday. “It’s historically inaccurate to state that Hitler wanted to take people’s guns away. If anything, he wanted all citizens to have guns, except Jews.
“The Nazi gun control argument is a myth. It’s wrong. It’s not true. It’s so not true that it has its own Wikipedia entry.”
Here’s the statement Sox president Kennedy sent me: “We spoke with J.D. and he explained he was expressing his view on a political issue. Players have the right to express their own political and social views (within MLB’s socialmedia guidelines). We work with our players regularly to reinforce that their social-media interactions can be interpreted in ways that are unintended.”
Agreed. J.D. Martinez was expressing political views. We should all defend his right to do so.
But even though it was five years ago, Martinez ended the discussion as soon as he reached for a photo of Hitler.