(05-20-2018, 05:23 PM)Galen Wrote:(05-20-2018, 11:15 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: To the demand "Suffer for my holy greed, you peons", we must prepare to respond as Patrick Henry did to the shakier George III...
"Give me liberty or give me death!"
You do realize that Patrick Henry had an armed populace to back up that demand. Makes you wonder what the real agenda behind gun control really is.
When the 'armed populace' is connected to an authoritarian cause as were the Italian Blackshirts, the KKK in the South, Nazis and Commies in Germany around 1930, or Commie "Action Committees' in Czechoslovakia in 1948, then democracy is either dead or moribund. Firearms are usually servants of authoritarian causes.
I have yet to see of any revolution that resulted in democracy that resulted from an armed uprising against a tyrannical regime. Think for example of the anti-Communist revolutions of 1989 -- the Commies had the guns, and the People didn't. Philippines in 1986? Corazon Aquino became the President-elect when the Army and police turned on Marcos in the wake of mass protests. Greek and Portuguese revolutions against military juntas? Basically the result of dissent within the military. Civil rights struggle in the South? The people whose liberty was compromised had been priced out of owning weapons. Indian independence? The British had the guns and were unwilling to use them to maintain power.
Would that the uprisings of Warsaw against Nazi Germany succeeded!
Even in the American Revolution, there was a dispute between the legitimately-elected colonial legislatures and the British overlords. The colonial legislatures won.
Life without liberty is a monstrous absurdity. Firearms are all too often enforcers of that absurdity.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.