J.D. still misses historical point
J.D. Martinez loves his country. You can see it in his eyes. J.D. Martinez is a firm believer in the Second Amendment. You can see it in his eyes. J.D. Martinez has very deep, emotional feelings about tyranny, because, as he said yesterday, “As most of you guys know, I’m Cuban-American. Most of my family was run out of Cuba because of a brutal dictator. And it’s terrible.
“My parents still talk about family members that are back in Cuba that I’ll never get to meet,” he said.
“And it sucks.”
This, too, could be seen in his eyes when the Red Sox slugger held a late-afternoon media session in front of the first-base dugout at Fenway Park to discuss an old, unearthed Instagram post in which he used a photo of Adolf Hitler and a widely debunked Hitler quote to make his case against gun control.
The quote in question, attributed to Hitler in 1933, is: “To conquer a nation, first disarm its citizens.” The implication here is that Hitler wouldn’t have come to power had there been an armed citizenry to take him down.
The quote is ahistoric. It trivializes the unfathomable atrocities committed by Hitler and his henchmen. But while nobody is accusing Martinez of being in any way antiSemitic, attaching himself to the quote puts him at odds with history.
And even if Martinez believes the quote to be accurate — as some do — he’s either unwilling or unable to make his case.
Asked why he thought some people would be offended by the image and quote, he said, “Yeah, I understand, but like I said there was no intent to hurt anybody by it. If you read it and you kind of understand it you kind of see, so . . . I can in a sense relate to it. My family, we had to leave our country.
“It was one of those things where I saw the quote, I saw the meme, and it was terrible. Like I said, my (family) came from Cuba,” he said. “And that was another brutal dictator at the time ... when I read that it kind of threw me back. I posted it and that’s one thing, I love my country, I love this country, and I stand by the constitution and I stand by the Second Amendment and it’s something I take pride in and it’s something I’ll back up.
“If anyone reads it, anyone who sees it, that’s not what I meant by it,” he said. “I meant the exact opposite of it if you read and you see it. But I’m here to play baseball. I’m not a politician, I’m not in politics, I’m here to help us win.”
He was asked if, given the sudden fallout regarding an Instagram post from five years ago, he has gone back to read up on the Hitler quote.
“No,” he said. “Like I said, I’m worried about baseball right now.”
And that’s the problem. He doesn’t understand that, while his intentions may have been good, while his love for his country is beyond debate, while he has an absolute right to his political views, while it’s gut-wrenching to listen to him talk about the heartache of not ever having met family members left behind in Cuba, he nonetheless dismisses history — and in doing so opens old wounds — by not distancing himself from the quote about Hitler and the guns.
Martinez could have stood there and said there is accuracy in the quote. There are those who believe in it. But Martinez wouldn’t, or couldn’t, do that either.
“Everyone here has a right to their own political beliefs and everyone has the right to stand by what they believe in, and that’s what makes us American,” Martinez said yesterday. “We’re all not going to agree on the same things. But that’s what makes this country so great.”
Truer words have never been spoken, with one caveat: If you’re going to use history to state your political beliefs, it helps to know what you’re talking about.