(no subject)

[ineffabelle]

"There are somewhere around 90,000,000 gun owners in this country. That number is 30 times bigger than the entire Chinese army. Armed civilians here outnumber all “law enforcement” and military personnel by a huge margin. The American people CANNOT be ruled by brute force alone, not by any foreign power, not by any local gang, not by anyone on this planet."
- Larken Rose

Comments

[grandmofhelsing.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately, the American people will fall for propaganda almost every time, rendering brute force irrelevant.

[amp23.livejournal.com]

sadly this. plus while gun owners outnumbers active police and military, i wonder how that ratio changes when you put veterans, retired police, prison guards, rent a cops, and other corporatists/statists into one grouping.

[cweyr.livejournal.com]

>veterans

Are not universally fans of the police state. Too many have spent too much time experiencing it up close. I image the same could be said for a significant number of ex-cops, etc.

[postrodent.livejournal.com]

I was about to say something to that effect -- look at all the wonderful personal freedoms we've been able to maintain with all those guns. :p Would things really have been worse without them?

[jesuisgringoire.livejournal.com]

exactly what I was thinking. though I'm not entirely sure what a hunting rifle is going to do against a helicopter, it's something of a moot point because the user is going to be doing whatever the TV tells them to. I also have to say that as a gay man from Arkansas, I'm not counting on bubba's arsenal to do shit for my quality of life.

I'd be very interested to see someone come up with the number of times throughout history that an armed populace has actually made society more equal, has given a damn about minority rights, etc. about the only thing I'd trust an armed populace to do in the absence of centralized power is to kill minorities a bit and then set up a frat boy dictatorship.

I care drastically more about widely distributed economic infrastructure. the tyrants of the ancient near east came to power through irrigation projects, not superior military force.

just to see...

[jesuisgringoire.livejournal.com]

abolition of slavery: largely a political accident, promoted almost entirely by pacifists, permitted because economic production methods in the dominant region of the country favoured industrial over agricultural serfs

women's rights: likewise precipitated by the industrial revolution, and helped along largely because of fear of the Irish voting block. not a shot fired.

black civil rights: lead by a pacifist immitating a pacifist, I'd say "not a shot fired" but MLK was assassinated, so I guess there were a few.

women's lib: again, entirely the child of economic conditions, firepower had nothing to do with it.

queer rights: only exist in places where the gendered division of labour has been largely put to rest.

---

I guess there was that one time someone used their private handgun against federal tyranny by assassinating Lincoln, (accomplishing nothing whatsoever), but I have yet to hear a peep from death-machine enthusiasts over the Patriot Act, and I'm pretty sure genocidal nutjobs like Andrew Jackson have always been on the NRA's good side.

Re: just to see...

[terry-terrible.livejournal.com]

abolition of slavery: largely a political accident, promoted almost entirely by pacifists, permitted because economic production methods in the dominant region of the country favoured industrial over agricultural serfs

women's rights: likewise precipitated by the industrial revolution, and helped along largely because of fear of the Irish voting block. not a shot fired.

black civil rights: lead by a pacifist immitating a pacifist, I'd say "not a shot fired" but MLK was assassinated, so I guess there were a few.

Are you serious? And damn, those conclusions really reek of materialistic determinism.

Re: just to see...

[jesuisgringoire.livejournal.com]

Are you serious? And damn, those conclusions really reek of materialistic determinism

I'm a former marxist sociology student, it shows sometimes...haha. I promise I'm not a materialist at heart, I just find it more effective than quoting poetry at people during political discussions...or at least it entails less vulnerability.

Re: just to see...

[wolodymyr.livejournal.com]

So, uh, would either of you mind terribly telling me what's wrong with materialistic determinism? I mean, kind of the top 5 hits of What's Wrong With Materialistic Determinism?

Hilariously (probably just to me) I was a Harvard History major. They're kind of a cult of Marxist interpretation over there, saying "Foucault" is a handy way to get yourself egged. So, avoidant as I was of the Kool-Aid of it, I don't know what the objections ARE.

I mean, I can't really fathom what they WOULD BE. Perhaps I got slipped the mickey after all.

Re: just to see...

[jesuisgringoire.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure. I was trying to be accommodating. My religious views wouldn't be particularly out of place in the 17th century so I can't say I'm particularly materialist on a day to day basis, but as a historical methodology I'm not sure I can think of any flaws.

Re: just to see...

[terry-terrible.livejournal.com]

In my view, some materialistic determinism is relevant, but it's another thing to say it's be all and end all to human existence and history. Though I know Marxists and capitalist economic determinists will protest that their theories take in to account dynamic cultural norms, customs, metaphysical beliefs, I see that as almost a disclaimer to the whole theory as it's almost always practiced academia, it almost always (in my readings of it-perhaps I've read bad theorists) turns in an absurd reduction in that history is driven on by the production and exchange of physical goods.

I have mixed feelings about Marx, he's kinda like an intellectual lover who beds you and doesn't call back in the morning. You wanna say they guy is an asshole, but you can't get him out of your head all day.

Okay, I know, weird analogy, but it works for me.

Anyway, I think that Marx asked all the right questions, got some of the answers right but was too blind in his dialectic and materialistic thought to get most of the other questions right. But I still respect him as a giant of intellectual thought though people have perverted his original intent for other means.

I hope I wasn't to harsh with the "are you serious" comment, I read you points over to make sure what you're getting at, so that was unfair. One quibble though:

women's rights: likewise precipitated by the industrial revolution, and helped along largely because of fear of the Irish voting block. not a shot fired.

I wouldn't say so, women were prominent in at least militant/radical labor organizing from the 1890s-1920s (especially IWW), they were on the front lines getting their heads bashed in to and going to jail sometimes. The women's movement for suffrage in Britain was very violent compared to the U.S. Feminists were routinely jailed and sometimes beaten by police. I got to a point that some suffrage activists did start to advocate women to take up rifles to protect themselves and in-act social change.

Same thing goes for the suffragists in the very early American women's movement (which was concurrent and interlaced with the abolitionist. In the 1830s/40s it was considered improper for women to even speak in front of a crowd (political minded women usually gave written texts to be read by male proxies) and abolitionist/suffrage meetings were attacked and broken up by rioters enraged by abolitionists and by the fact that women were being politically active, plus, many women supported John Brown and the issurectionist abolitionists.

black civil rights: lead by a pacifist immitating a pacifist, I'd say "not a shot fired" but MLK was assassinated, so I guess there were a few.

I really don't like the idea that either MLK or Gandhi were pacifists in the sense of the word. They didn't practice violence and they had moral authority for that, but on a pragmatic level a lot of the power they had to enact change was through the implied threat that there would be violence unless the authorities dealt with them. There were radical nationalists in India that Gandhi "restrained" and there were AA freedom movements with policies of violent action or self-defense that MLK also restrained like the black panthers and Stokley Carmichael wing of the SNCC

[zare-k.livejournal.com]

I also have to say that as a gay man from Arkansas, I'm not
counting on bubba's arsenal to do shit for my quality of life.

Bingo. I have zero expectation that my neighbors (for a broad definition of neighbors) will help protect me and my network in any of these scenarios.

[terry-terrible.livejournal.com]

I also have to say that as a gay man from Arkansas, I'm not counting on bubba's arsenal to do shit for my quality of life.

As a trans lesbian living in nevada, I agree with this wholeheartedly.

[firepower.livejournal.com]

More's the pity. Every story of America is about how we're a hairsbreadth from slavering chaos.

Anyone who had an investment in their state beyond utter blank-empty-void-capitalist apathy would find the logic of "I must be granted the right to carry arms by my state so I can defend myself against its agents" circular and baffling - if they existed. We all hate the American state, even we reluctant American statists. In America we like the idea of perpetual oppression and perpetual struggle...and perhaps I am not good enough of an American, but I find ideas of perpetual agreement and perpetual concord far more appealing.

How I would like to live in the good society with you. But this free society (free only with a sword! or a gun!) will have to do for now.

[zare-k.livejournal.com]

The American people CANNOT be ruled by brute force
alone

No, and we don't have to be. Propaganda, fear-mongering, and economic manipulation have shown to be quite sufficient.

[wolodymyr.livejournal.com]

Pretty much everything useful has been said.

Even so, I wanna talk! Thus:
If everyone's armed, then you get the liberty that can be maintained by guns. Which is an isolationist and kind of luddite liberty. It helps secure a kind of freedom that was relevant to the time that kind of freedom was established - which is a while back.

Also: not EVERYONE is armed. I would say it's typically a few people per household. I think the liberty secured by guns is basically an authoritarian liberty - I find patriarchy implicit in it. SURE, you can TELL me that some women or some children will use available weapons to defend themselves against other family members, but these cases will be so rare and extreme that - well, I think they ignore or sidestep how people's brains tend to function, and what the aggregate society made of that functionality will look like.

Finally - the above quote assumes that an invading force will want the citizenry alive. That's a big assumption. Effective ways for killing armed people have been devised.

[sophiaserpentia.livejournal.com]

Survivalists always hang out in helpful-to-find, easily-surroundable compounds in the middle of nowhere. Have they learned nothing? Even a modern army with aerial and satellite surveillance, with CCTV and electronic telecom monitoring, cannot root out an insurgency that has taken root in a large urban sprawl.

[wyndhover.livejournal.com]

Simply false. Ninety million guns (primarily handguns and hunting rifles) spread across three and a half million square miles and wielded by in the vast majority of cases people who are not combat-trained mean squat when opposing an army equipped with tanks, bombers, gunships, a navy, and modern infantry. And that's not even bringing missles into it.

And of course, it's pretty much evident that the American people largely are ruled by force and the threat of force. Gun owner or not, how often have you or someone you know refrained from doing something simply because you knew that the force of government would likely fall upon you if you did? That's plenty of evidence that we can, in fact, be ruled by simple force.

Agreed, though, that mostly we're not. Such is the way of a 'free' society, that they chain our minds instead of our bodies.

[ineffabelle]

Iraq's doing a pretty good job of fucking up our army, and they have much less people and weapons.

[wyndhover.livejournal.com]

You're giving Iraq--which has been successfully ruled by force for many decades--as an example supporting how we can't be ruled by force?

[wolodymyr.livejournal.com]

I think the point is solid in that it is very difficult to rule efficiently by occupation and by force, and there are many other examples, from those involving nations (Vietnam vs. America, Britain vs. its colonies) to those involving single workplaces (slave plantations, factories having labor problems).

Occupiers can be handily impeded by individuals.

On the other hand it's difficult for individuals to do more than impede. You can sabotage, but you can't really build your own shop.

[wyndhover.livejournal.com]

Every totalitarian state in history has shown that occupying a place and ruling it by force can be done, and there are many situations in which it works quite well (from a certain perspective) for quite a long time.

[zachariahskylab.livejournal.com]

I think also the basic human trait of loyalty is being ignored. Sure, an armed populace won't stand up to an army with tanks and planes and bombs. But if the drivers in those tanks have a shared sense of community and respect for those in the crowd, then the army is no longer acting at maximum capacity in terms of functionality.

That is why pacifism is always effective when you least expect it to be. The soldiers along with everyone else see firsthand what the protesters are doing, how they are doing it, and there is an imperceptible shift in loyalty, therefore in power as well. That is why tyranny's tend to collapse after so long. Ruling by fear only works for so long before there's a backlash.

[ineffabelle]

"Every truncheon hit, misguided... the People's Army divided" - Skinny Puppy, Tin Omen