Guns and the American Revolution do not Apply to Gun Control Debate.
Quite an interesting article. According to the author, there was basically no need for the Founding Fathers to seek independence and Americans are no better than Iranians storming the U.S Embassy after the topple of the Sha.
I read recently (and I must beg for forgiveness because I can’t remember who said it) that Gandhi was who he was and what he accomplished because he was dealing with the polite British Empire. If he tried to pull the same crap on Stalin’s Soviet Union, he’d be shot & buried within 24 hours of his first “non-violence” stunt.
The Belgians would just have cut off a hand and told him to get back to work or he’d be punished.
Someone wrote a counter-factual history where the Germans had won World War II against the British, took over the Raj, and put Ghandi up against a wall. Tactics like his only work if the people who oppose you have a sense of shame.
daddybear makes a great point.
I seem to remember reading that story years ago.
He lost me in all the hyperbole for a little while… then I came around and saw, as usual, Viet Nam (French and US), Iraq, and Afghanistan (Soviet and US) were ignored. Something tells me those might not have been convenient examples for his argument.
Not to mention this ridiculous conflation: “In this I refer to the distorted belief that the second amendment acts as a check against the emergence of a future dictatorship. We therefore sacrifice the lives of thousands of innocent Americans every year to senseless gun violence for the greater good.” To me that sounds like he is saying the Second Amendment demands a blood sacrifice to keep the government in check…
That Stalin and Gandhi line is from William Forstchen’s One Second After, the part where the antagonist whose name I forget is talking to the two police outside of Asheville. It may not originate there, but that’s where I remember reading it.
Martin, thank you so much. I read the book about a month ago…which incidentally is a damn good one.
You see, people get flak all the time for ‘revisionist’ history when it is not written according to what people want it to be. But I tell you, this will become required reading in some college somewhere and no one would be one the wiser.
I dare the author to do the same with every other revolution. Hell, the Storming of the Bastille would be a great example. Why did the French need the arms in that keep anyways? They could’ve just -negotiated- with the monarchy. Why did we Filipinos need the arms anyways? A reasoned discourse could’ve ended all ills with the Spanish and American occupiers. (Any good that did for Dr. Rizal.)
I’ve tried using that line of logic w/ anti-gun proponents who claim we’d never need to use guns against a totalitarian government. I ask how ask successful Ghandi or MLK, both of whom supported gun rights, would have been against the Nazi’s or Stalin, they generally go blank & can’t seem to follow through the thought process of either ending up unknown & in a shallow grave. The world, like history or facts only work their way, show them they’re wrong or there is a different alternative the subject or argument will suddenly change.
Ghandi even (in a roundabout way) mentions that his methods wouldn’t be successful (by our standards). It also points out the fact that he had no idea how important Britain’s free media was to the success of his campaign in India. Had Gobbels been running the media in India, nobody in Britain would have ever heard of it (aside from maybe some planted violent incidents).
From Wikipedia:
In a post-war interview in 1946, he said, “Hitler killed five million Jews. It is the greatest crime of our time. But the Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher’s knife. They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs… It would have aroused the world and the people of Germany… As it is they succumbed anyway in their millions.” Gandhi believed this act of “collective suicide”, in response to the Holocaust, “would have been heroism”.
I’m not too sure how he got to that conclusion, since the Nazis wanted the Jews all dead anyway, and AFAIK, had a pretty good hold on the media, inside and outbound of their territory.
So, whether the Jews died in the gas chambers, or tossed themselves off a cliff, I’m pretty sure no one would know until well after the fact.
Weird.
This is left wing moral relativism at its worst. Moral relativists don’t believe in right and worng, or good and bad, and, that one cannot make moral judgement about other persons/groups/events and say that one is better than another. To them all revolutions, killings, wars, and historal events are on the same moral level. They believe that our founding fathers creating a nation from revoluion that stands for and codifies individual rights, freedom, and equality is not any “better” than the creation of a modern Iran with its oppression and tyranny. They were both born of violence and that’s all that matters. Any other judgement is worng.
This is why they are anti-gun and anti-self defense. They actually see no difference between an assailant raping a woman to death and the woman shooting her rapist. Either way, someone died, and to say one death is “better” than another is a moral judgement that they cannot make.
Moral relativism is the ultimate tolerance for evil by suggesting its wrong to identify it as evil.
Blech. What a disgusting way to go through life. I guess it makes it easier to do whatever you want though.
Blech.
I think that may be a slight bastardization of moral relativism and with a conflation of other factors that make gun control people say the things they say.
At worst I would say moral relativism is there is no objective/universal moral standard. At best I would say moral relativism is not being sure what an objective/universal moral standard is/would be.
Perhaps we are more in agreement than I originally thought… but, I doubt that article represent moral relativism in any respect.
If the Japanese had made it as far as India, Ghandi’s headless, bayoneted corpse would have been floating down the Ganges.
His absurd ravings that the British should submit, and that the Jews should have engaged in mass suicide boggle the mind.
“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?… The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If…if…We didn’t love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation…. We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”
_A. Solzhenitsyn
Armed Jews might not have destroyed the 3rd Reich, but they could have foiled the Final Solution.
I read that years back in an interview with him, something like ‘My non-violent methods worked because I was dealing with a people as basically civilized as the British. If I’d tried it with the Russians or Chinese, I and many others would have disappeared into camps, and many others simply been killed.’
Wish I could find that speech for the exact wording.