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PeonForHer -> RE: Gun Control is Racist, Sexist & Classist (1/5/2011 3:13:31 PM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: FirmhandKY
I think if the Jews had a few more personal firearms during the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, then the Nazis might have delayed, or thought harder about decimating them.
Interesting point and an example that hit the spot for me. I think I get it, a little bit more now, regarding what gun-supporters are going on about. I watched Polanski's film The Piano for the second time, recently, and I sure did have a truly blood-lusting feeling of 'Yeah, go get the bastards!' when I saw those Warsaw Jews giving back some of what the SS had given them, in the form of gunfire. I'd imagine anyone would think, "Right, now there's some sort of equality of force, here. Now this is more like it'.
But the truth is that, if they'd known that the Ghetto Jews were properly armed with personal weapons, the Germans would have delayed long enough to get armoured cars, more poisoned gas (which they used in the end), or whatever else it would have required to wipe out all but a hundred of the Jews (as they did, after the Ghetto uprising). Maybe the Jews would have bought themselves another week or two. Whatever, it would have still made almost laughable Prof Cottrol's assertion that "Certainly one of the chief guarantees of freedom under any government, no matter how popular and respected, is the right of the citizen to keep and bear arms." If private citizens have sidearms, then the rulers arm their henchmen with machine guns. If private citizens have machine guns, the rulers invest in tanks, helicopters, missiles of all kinds, napalm and poisoned gas. And so on.
There aren't any guarantees of freedom, of course. The best methods of preserving freedom, however, are political and need to happen long before anything like the Warsaw Ghetto experience ever arises. Hundreds of factors are involved, and they're crucial. You can't let it ever be possible for a government to assume absolute power and sweep away democracy. You can't let an economy suffer so badly, and the people's lives become so miserable that they get angry and embittered and look for a target as a cause of their woes. You can't let any given group in society be turned into a scapegoat. You have to counter propaganda. You can't, in short, allow rulers to get too powerful, nor to let them divide and thereby conquer. You need to combine in order to resist - because the ruling group's greatest advantage is that, while it remains a largely united force, it acts against individuals or small groups that don't unite to resist it.
Etcetera, etcetera . . . . Freedom and democracy are eroded by a myriad of underhand tricks - it's those that need to be countered. The thing that comes nearest to being a guarantee of freedom is knowledge of those tricks (the essentials of most of which are very, very old), and how to block them.
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