My mistake then. If Jews had had guns, then everyone else would have had a wider array of guns.
Given two outcomes, both in which the Holocaust happened but one in which there were fewer silent nighttime abductions and more shoot-outs and dead Nazis, I am willing to hypothesize that a strong majority of Jews would choose the second outcome. Also, past a certain critical threshold of armed Jewery, it becomes impractical to persecute them, either with Stormtroopers or volunteer similarly-armed anti-Semites.
This is just me, of course, but I think that there is moral value in being able to ensure that if you are outnumbered ten to one and the majority of society comes for you, to ensure that ten will be down to nine or fewer before you are gone. It is a bloodthirsty calculus, but when you start doing the things that justify private citizens shooting at you, you’re pretty much part of the problem.
I’m not meaning to be facetious, but can the preferred outcome really be the one where no less people suffer, but more die? My gut instinct is to reject this emphatically. Yet, on a personal level, I can certainly see me taking as many of ‘them’ with me as I can, but that’s just the thing; while on a personal level, morality is always very clear cut when push comes to shove – everybody else is wrong, especially if they’re trying to kill me and those I hold dear --, and while it’s also very easy to point out the morally wrong side in the holocaust, that won’t be the case in general, I think. So this all still seems to amount to one thing: more bloodshed.
Am I really understanding you correctly here? I hope not, because it sounds an awful goddamned lot like you are saying that it’s better that just the Jews die rather than the Jews and some Storm Troopers too. That is just plain fucked up. However many of those fucking SA, SS, and other bloody-handed assholes were killed in the war, it wasn’t enough.
There’s also the fact that a local force has shorter supply lines, and isn’t going to give up and go away; they live there too. And they tend to have far more local support.
I’d expect majority support for a dictatorship. And it would probably be a religious dictatorship as much or more than a militaristic one; our first dictator will probably be elected, not take over in a coup. And I expect that the great majority of gun owners would be on the side of the dictatorship, and more likely to use their guns to kill “traitors” and unbelievers than anyone aligned with the government.
And if this country does degenerate into a dictatorship, people like you will be the ones helping hunt down “reds” like me. Convinced that you are defending “freedom” even as you murder dissenters.
As pointed out, in that case we don’t need guns to defend ourselves from it, do we ?
That’s because you live in a fantasy land where the only truth is your childish and preposterous stereotype of all gun owners as rednecks and neoconservative Christian fanatics. :rolleyes:
Sorry. I just can’t see the killing of people as a good thing in and of itself. If the killing prevents the suffering/death of others, then yes, there’s a possible justification. But the situation as had been stipulated was that the holocaust happened one way or the other. So, if that labels me morally inferior in your eyes, well I guess I’ll just have to find a way to deal.
Since the Nazis were targeting other groups and waging aggressive war, every life that could be impacted by the Nazis must be weighed. Jews killing Nazis in the process of being exterminated remove resources the Nazis would use to kill others. The question above is not just “Do just the Jews die, or do Jews and Nazis die?” It’s “Do Jews, Nazis, and a lot of people stopping the Nazis die, or do Jews, Nazis, and fewer people stopping the Nazis die?”
Guys, guys.
Have we forgotten that Hitler was democratically elected? That Jews were unpopular among the deutsche lumpenprole at the time to the same extent that, I dunno, Greens are here in the heartland (damn them. Educated, urban, smarter than me)? Erich Fromm states that, in sorting Blue Max winners in WWI by religious group against their numbers in the general population, Jews were the most disproportionately represented group – not that all that patriotism or military experience did them that much good in the long run.
What the ugly truth comes down to is that I rely on the damned gov’ts advantage in weaponry to save me from the more patriotic-minded of my neighbors, like FinnAgain and even fellow Gulf War veterans like ExTank and Scumpup (K-Trp in the house? Suffa, bitch!). I don’t care what the next menace to “our way of life” is – pagans, gays, people that eat peanut butter and sardine sandwiches. It’ll be a God-fearing, flag-saluting, lawn-mowing regular guy or gal who rats them out and and gets them loaded on the cattle-cars.
Oh, and S.P.? I’m a Fort Benning graduate from a gun-owning family, who went to school with gun-owners, worked beside them in warehouses and auto plants, live among them in east central Illinois. In my experience, D.T.'s “childish and preposterous stereotype of all gun owners as rednecks and neoconservative Christian fanatics” is pretty damned close to the way it is. But that’s east of Seattle – YMMV.
I think the second amendment prohibition on infringement of the right to self-protection and common defense has less to do with ensuring the ability of the people to reclaim a free state from a government overtaken by a tyrant and is aimed more at preventing any would-be tyrants from assuming they can disregard the will of the people.
Disarming a population is a good first step towards rendering their opinion irrelevant.
Upon re-reading the thread more closely, I seem to have confused Scumpup and FoisGrasIsEvil in my earlier post. My apologies to both gentlemen for the hasty misattribution.
Yes, because without the government, I might, erm… apply my socially liberal views to grant you legislated equality if you were gay so that you might marry or, um… my libertarian leanings might force me to vote for a repeal of victimless crimes or… well, surely you need the government’s protection to safeguard you from something about me. I’m scary.
Or maybe your reflexive “2nd amendment supporters are scary!” junk has blinded you to reality?
Either that or the government needs to protect you from me.
Boogah boo!
Simply untrue. The french resistance helped make D Day possible, and carried out numerous successful acts of sabotage, among other things The Warsaw ghetto uprising saw the camp out of German control for a month, and in the end the camp itself was no longer functional. Further, the WGU provided the morale boost that the Poles needed for the Warsaw Uprising, which in turn tied up the attentions of Nazi soldiers for a significant amount of time and forced them to fight a campaign which removed the city as a viable staging point in the future.
It isn’t at all hard to see what might have happened if more people were armed and resisted the Nazis at each point. The important part you’re missing is that an insurrection does not have to totally defeat the occupying army in order to be successful, they simply need to make it immensely costly for the occupying force to maintain control.
While ignoring Vichy French and Kapo Jews…
And no, it makes no difference if the occupiers are from “without” or are “others” by virtue of their being Un-American, or what have you. You are drawing a distinction without a difference.
You’ve conveniently shifted the goalposts. A coup that is carried out which doesn’t have the support of the people and which purges the army of all but those who are ‘loyal’ is on shaky ground because people might fight back. So you specifically have crafted your example to exclude that.
So if you’ve allowed the only possible scenario as one where the army and a bunch of people support the dictatorship, then yeah, the army and a bunch of people will support the dictatorship. But If America did fall to a military coup, it would be a small coterie of conspirators who siezed power via military means.
You’re right, FinnAgain, and I apologize. All I know about the likes of you and yours is what I read in the New York Times Book Review… and the Straight Dope. Damn those reflexes.
So, let me get this straight:
You need a government with superior weaponry to protect you and your way of life from your gun-toting, apple-pie-eating, flag-saluting, lawn-mowing, Bible-thumpin’ muthafucka neighbors…
…who will rat you out to the very same government for some reason, the one you were just looking to for protection from those neighbors, and this government will then put you on a cattle car headed for a concentration camp.
:rolleyes:
Did you quote the wrong post? Because if you didn’t, that is the most muddle-headed post I’ve ever read from anyone not named ralph.
Well, maybe not that muddle-headed, but you appear to have added a whole new idea- one not actually present in anything he said- and argued with that one by mistake.
FTR, I’m not a Gulf War veteran. My time in uniform was over a decade earlier. Also, FTR, I won’t stand by and see anybody “loaded on the cattle-cars.” I detest commies and their fellow travellers to the depths of my soul, it’s true…they’ve racked up a body count that makes Hitler look like an enthusiastic amateur…but I won’t stand by and watch a government slaughter even of them. They’ve a right to their squalid little lives and their loathesome ideology.
To summarise Charogne’s post:
- Hitler was democratically elected.
- Charogne wants his government to have the advantage in weaponry.
Therefore, just because the government is democratically elected, doesn’t ensure that they aren’t a bunch of pricks who are going to throw you under the bus.
John Keegan writes extensively about how the mythology and propaganda of resistance has inflated our belief in its effectiveness. A closer examination shows that the French resistance, while good for morale, was almost entirely ineffective in almost every case on a national scale capable of affecting the Germans, and that other resistances (notably the Partisans in Russia and Yugoslavia) were largely ineffective as well. Keegan identifies at the moment of D-Day 300 German divisions in existence and fewer than 20 of them had any anti-resistance duties…almost all of those twenty were third-rate or special-purpose formations of dubious military value.
Keegan questions the value of resistance not because he has ideological axes to grind, but because he takes a clear-eyed view of how totally dominating organized military force was in 1940-1945.
Either you’re arguing that you know more about tis than Keegan, or I suppose you could be contending that modern technology has reversed this advantage; I’m dubious that cell phones and the Internet (even if a government allowed them to operate) overcome a modern military’s advantages, but do go on.
Let me break it down for the simple minded.
To which I replied:
And then he said:
And I replied:
Really Not All That Bright: In spite of the easy target your username represents, I know you have better reading comprehension skills than that.
So, what’s you angle?
Deliberately obtuse? What?
Actually, Ex-Tank, that’s a really good point, and an inconsistency I ought address. (I’m surprised you could rebut me so effectively with all the Wite-Out on your monitor… but that’s another discussion altogether).
Should the government overthrow all the Constitutional checks on the will of the majority enshrined in the Bill of Rights, I don’t look for you and your inbred confreres to bolt out with musket and hatchet in hand in an elitist revolution to put things right. Like Der Trihs, I don’t see fascism coming to America without a groundswell of popular support from the perpetually disgruntled white working-class (from which I’m sprung).
You see yourself as a potential Minuteman – very well. I see you as a potential Brownshirt, but I’m willing to hear your testimony to the contrary.
At any rate, one thing we seem to agree on is that it’s not the fault of the gun per se – it’s a tool. But for whatever reason, it’s a tool that seems to attract the bottom feeders, whether they be the noble-hearted man-child Airman Doors, or the stunt-double for Francis-in-“Stripes” Scumpup. Can’t speak for you, but I don’t trust either Dudley Do-Right or the poor man’s Wolverine as a guardian for my liberty or safety.