Do you even read your own posts? In two separate threads you delivered essentially the same rant about the US being a police state and gun owners supporting police states. You wrote it, you own it, quit playing at not understanding my point.
Here’s something I’d like to share for every left-winger who thinks that guns are solely the domain of right-wing fascists:
Want to know who wrote that? Abbie Hoffman, in Steal This Book. He sounds like a downright fascist right-wing lunatic, I tell you.
Life is just full of surprises.
A significant shipment of German arms was brought in on the Asgard in July, 1914 but thereafter few if any German arms were acquired IIRC.
That the TSA were rude to me was a minor issue in another thread and irrelevant in this one so I fail to see why you insist in this. Maybe you are bitter because, residing outside the USA I have the option of staying away from the TSA which Americans do not.
It is a fact though that the rights of Americans are being trampled by this Administration and I do not see any of those gun owners objecting or fighting for them. In fact, if the government would ask for their help in rounding up “anti-american liberal traitors” I am sure many would be more than willing to denounce and round up their neighbors.
So I find the notion that a citizenry armed with handguns is going to save anyone’s liberties. More likely the opposite.
There’s the third time with the same rant. Sorry TSA mussed your undies and hurt your feelings.
Just to nitpick…Daniel Morgan. Henry Morgan commanded a MASH unit in Korea.
Thought that was Henry Blake?
To nitpick your nitpick: Harry Morgan was the name of the actor who commanded the 4077th on TV.
Henry Morgan is most famously the guy who sacked Puerto Bello and Panama.
Probably not in the slightest. Most Germans didn’t have their doors kicked down. Those that did were not victims of a sudden decision to kick doors down; their civil rights were taken away a bit at a time, largely with the support of the majority.
Oh that again. Are you also going to mention the Urban Legend that Hitler’s first act was to forbid private citizens to own weapons?
If you read up a bit on the history of the 3rd Reich, Hitler came to power legally, and then passed two laws shortly after another: the enabling law and the Reichstags fire law.
Together, both suspended basic civil rights and forbade other opposition parties. The reason given was the dire state of the nation (with open fighting between Hitlers brown shirts and the red shirt communists in the street, plus the economic crisis and the blame on the inability of the established democratic instituions to solve this - a strong man was needed). I leave it to you to compare how many civil rights were suspended by the patriot act with similar reasoning of defending against some enemy.
The rights of Jews were taken away gradually, and everybody got used to the restrictions. By the time of the Reichskristallnacht in 1939, when both offical SS and SA and heated citizens (manipulated by the agitators from the party) started the looting and destruction, even if the Jews had still owned guns, that wouldn’t have stopped a wild mob with official backing. A crowd of 50 or 100 people, drunk on emotion, being stopped by a guy with pistol of 6 shots? They would’ve stormed him and ripped him apart alive. Or called for help from the army with a machine gun.
Of course, the problem with that in regard to the OP is that is close to proving a negative: how do you find examples of a government that didn’t go despotical because they considered the cost of armed resistance by the population too high? And how many of these potential-despotic government simply took the sly route by suspending civil liberties one by one, inventing a terrible enemy against which the population has to unite in the interest of saving the nation, having opposition disappear and be called unpatriotic, …
There seems to be the notion that one day the government will wake up and declare “Today we will abolish democracy and erect a dictatorship” and the citizens will wave their guns and say “not with us buster, over our dead bodys!” and instead of saying “Happy to oblige, we’ll send some tanks” the govt. will back down and say “Uh sorry, nevermind, we reconsidered.”
That the subtle approach and the division of the population into good and bad groups, all busy watching each other instead of the govt., or that emergency measure power grabs (like the Patriot Act or the AUMF) pass unnoticed and with little resistance, all work to erode democracy silently, seems to go beyond the knowledge of the pro-gun advocates.
The IRA wasn’t fighting against the 3rd Reich, though. Although the British could be considered an occuping force in North Ireland, and although they got harsher and suspended laws and rights they shouldn’t have, they never reached the level or attitude of the Nazis. If the resistance is hiding in a city, and the despotic government wants to wipe out the resistance, it can bomb the city and destroy it., or lay siege and starve it.(Optionally they can evacuate the loyal citizens, if they can be easily told apart).
Are the citizens with guns just a small rebel group, or do they have the support of the population as a whole because everybody is against the govt.? Many of the sucessful rebel groups and guerillas in hisotry were against armed intruders - of course most of the population wants to get rid of them. But if most of the population is in favour of the measures the own govt. takes, the rebels may be seen as unpatriotic or lunatics (as the people living in the forests preparing for survival are viewed today). They may be blamed for the bad circumstances because of their rebel activities.
If everybody knows that for each dead soldier, 100 people of the next village will be shot, for each act of sabotage a whole town will be razed (and if you know that the soldiers will comply with the order), then the rebels won’t have much of a support. If you can live a comfortable live as long as you keep your head down and don’t talk about certain things, most people will prefer that to opposition.
Even Gandhi knew and said that his non-violent opposition worked against the British Empire because of a free press, a democratic system and a part of the English population who was sympathetic to his non-violent crusade, but that it would never have worked against the Nazis. (He also suspended his campaign during WWII, because he didn’t want ot use the weakness as the British were fighting other problems). (The fact that the Empire was costing money to secure and getting less in return also helped his cause).
As to this, the effectiveness of resistance movements against the Third Reich has been extremely overstated at times. Most occupied countries had no militarily effective resistance at all, and few troops were tied down as a result of resistance movements. Where resistance fighters did take action in numbers they were usually massacred by professional troops.
Resistance movements that had an effect were generally those supported by the Allied powers and in many cases were actually organized and led by Allied advisors.
Clearly, an armed and resistant populace can be an enabler for a more powerful resistance after foreign powers become interested in seeing the downfall of the despot. But that’s not the only way to do it, either. Gandhi, after all, also quite dramatically achieved the goals of his resistance.
Without that foreign aid, though, I would suspect that Gandhi’s resistance would prove the more effective at displacing a despotic government. A local, armed populace doesn’t seem like it would be ultimately effective if in isolation.
Gandhi’s form of resistance only works against an oppressor that has some sort of conscience or cares about world opinion. Pol Pot, Stalin, Mao, or Hitler would have liquidated Gandhi and his followers and giggled happily at how their lack of resistance made things that much easier.
I don’t know how relevant discussion of the Nazi regime is, and whether Germans could have resisted the Nazis. Having guns isn’t enough; you have to have a populace that wants to resist the government. Did the Germans want to resist the Nazis? Not wanting to get into a *Hitler’s Willing Executioners *debate (and I haven’t read the book anyhow), but I strongly suspect that even if every German had owned a gun in 1939 they wouldn’t have risen up against the Nazis.
Contrast the Danes, who strictly through non-cooperation thwarted the Nazis’ Jewish policy in Denmark. Apparently only around 100 Danish Jews perished in the Holocaust, the lowest rate of any occupied European nation.
I guess my point is an unarmed but non-cooperative populace is better than an armed populace which is sympathetic with the aims of the government. Ergo, speculation about what the Germans might have done with a large stock of private arms is irrelevant.
I don’t know that he thought this. Gandhi (in)famously wrote that the Jews should practice non-violent resistance against the Nazis, eliciting the famous open letter from Martin Buber criticizing Gandhi’s point of view. But this was pre-1939; I don’t know what Gandhi’s views during the war were.
Liquidate? We’re talking about Hitler and Stalin, not Blowfeld.
In any event, I wonder how easy it would be to liquidate six million people who decided to show up and hold a sit-in in Pariser Platz is in front of the Brandenburg Gate?
I think it’s a uniquely American viewpoint that guns by themselves win or lose battles or preserve or destroy freedom. I would submit that the accountants and file clerks of Hitler’s and Stalin’s regimes were far more dangerous than any jackbooted stormtrooper. A government, despotic or not, can only run if people choose to be a part of it.
As Mao pointed out, “all power springs from the end of a gun.” Your file clerks are harmless unless there are men with guns who carry out their directives.
Read the article. Bellesisle was never accused of plaigiarism. The controversy around his book is of a different nature.