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Old 05-10-2014, 02:47 PM
 
Location: Maryland about 20 miles NW of DC
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Ralph_Kirk View Post
The Chinese also had the Cultural Revolution. Can't use them as an example of anything. Chinese culture is too different.

The Chinese people are human beings and with a little study all too understandable. Don't fall into the trap Inscrewatble Chinaman myth and the yellow peril.
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Old 05-10-2014, 06:53 PM
 
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Larry Caldwell View Post
You place far too much reliance on our dysfunctional congress. Julius Caesar was able to bring down the Roman Republic because the Senate was dysfunctional. The US congress went two biennia without passing a federal budget because of partisan infighting and has threatened twice to bring down the government. Just wait until there is a crisis that can't be fixed. People will turn to any guarantee of stability, even if it is a military dictatorship. Congress will go along like the sheep they are.

It has all happened before.
How can you say I'm placing reliance on Congress when I said " Congress and the media failed to echo their [the generals] misgivings, they subsided?"

My point is that the military does rely on Congress as they should as well as the president as they should.

Remember that another major difference between the US and most other countries is that the US actually has functionally relevant state governments, each of which is perfectly capable of maintaining order within its own borders. A collapse of even the federal government will not require the DoD to take control of the states in the name of "keeping order."

The only way the US military is going to act within the borders of the US without orders from the president and the compliance of Congress is if Congress and all the state governments are totally dysfunctional and some major nationwide threat is looming.
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Old 05-10-2014, 06:58 PM
 
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Quote:
Originally Posted by NJ Brazen_3133 View Post
How did those Arab Spring Rebels get their guns? Is gun ownership a common right in those middle eastern countries?

Can we actually go back even before the advent of the cartridge? What was going on during the American Revolution and Colonial periods? How common was gun ownership then? Did the rebels supply their own arms and ammo or did the French give those to us.

How about the Middle Ages and before? Did the peasants and serfs all have war hammer, battle axes, spears, and crossbows tucked away somewhere?
I mentioned earlier that there was the historical coincidence that America was being colonized just as the personal firearm became practical. The fact that America was a frontier allowed looser personal weapons ownership that was allowed even then in Europe, which had long been fully policed by the government and fully owned by the elite.

Even where in Europe the laws permitted liberal personal weapons ownership, the inarguable need for personal weapons was centuries past for them, unlike America at the time where even protection from wild animals was still a quite valid rationale all the way into the 20th century.
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Old 05-10-2014, 07:05 PM
 
28,574 posts, read 18,586,360 times
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Originally Posted by mwruckman View Post
The military and its leaders then destroyed the Roman "Republic" from within although it found the corpse of the Republic a shield to hide behind.
Except that's not how it happened in any way relevant to the US.

In the waning Roman Republic, you did not have "the military and its leaders," you had "Leading politicians and their armies." The Roman army was not operating as its own political party.

It was as though the Republican Party and the Democrat Party each gained control of half of DoD.
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Old 05-10-2014, 07:09 PM
 
28,574 posts, read 18,586,360 times
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Originally Posted by mwruckman View Post
The Chinese people are human beings and with a little study all too understandable. Don't fall into the trap Inscrewatble Chinaman myth and the yellow peril.
Don't fall into the trap of believing everyone thinks alike. That trap leads people to believe "they should think like me, and if they don't it's because they are evil."

What makes the Chinese "inscrutable" to the West is that Westerners are chained to Greek epistemological rules. Westerners determine "truth" by the same standards the ancient Greeks did. But "truth" is merely a matter of philosophical rules, and the Chinese operate by a different set of rules to determine "truth."

So do, for that matter, Middle Easterners and Pacific Islanders. So it's entirely possible for Westerners, Chinese, and Middle Easterners to look at the same physical event and take from it a different set of "truths"...and each will be right by his own rules of epistemology.
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Old 05-10-2014, 08:21 PM
 
Location: Old Mother Idaho
29,176 posts, read 22,170,981 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by tijlover View Post
Having just finished reading of the atrocities/horrors under Mao, the Japanese, as well as Pol Pot, and others, how many of these sadistic historical leaders might never have made history books had the citizenry been better armed?

As I try to wade through the horrors of these readings, I stop myself a number of times, thinking this question.

It's hard to imagine some sadistic leader arising in Switzerland or even the U.S., with a better armed citizenry.

Would any of these leaders have still seized power, even with guns pointed at them?

What do you think?
I agree with the earlier comment; the Pathet Lao WERE the armed citizenry.

The Chinese were all armed to the teeth when the Japanese invaded China.

The weakness China had was the nation had no central government. The Chinese Empire, which had lasted 3,000 years as a central government, ended with the death of the Dowager Empress, the last Emperor's grandmother.
She assumed the throne until the Emperor, who was only 4 years old, became an adult. For the next 20 years, she systematically dismantled the Chinese bureaucracy, the single institution that bound all the Chinese empire together, and a system that had been developed over 1,000 years of refinement.

As a result, China became a collection of individual territories that were all controlled by local warlords. As long as a warlord could hold his territory, he ruled. This made China very nationally weak and easily conquered, one territory at a time.
By the time of the Japanese invasion, efforts to re-unite China under a central government had begun, resulting in a civil war. Mao was the leader of the Communists, one of the national political groups, and Chang Kai Chek, was the leader of the other national group. Both had been fighting each other for several years in ever-shifting battles.

The Japanese were the only coherent, disciplined military group in China when they invaded. The Japanese army was completely modern, and was directed by a tightly unified military command structure.

None of the competing Chinese armies had any of that. Mao never fought the Japanese. He moved his entire army to the north and waited out the war. Chang and assorted warlords did fight the Japanese, and the Japanese crushed all their armies, which had no modern weaponry, no central command, and much less troop discipline.
After the war, Chang and his nationalist army were very weak, and Mao's Communists were rested, ready to fight, and intact. That's how China became Communist. Mao won in less than a year.

The Japanese were a totally militaristic culture for many decades before WWII. They had been preparing for a large war ever since the Russians went to war with them in 1904 and lost. Their citizenry was never as armed as China's, but they had an Emperor, a strong central government, and a citizenry who was always prepared to serve as soldiers when called. Their military had plenty of modern weaponry and plenty of soldiers to train them.

Why did the Japanese become militaristic? Because, like the Chinese, Japan suffered for centuries under warlords. Until the first Japanese emperor who was able to defeat the warlords, there was no central Japanese government. And like China, the Japanese emperors all crafted bureaucracies that made central government efficient and directed.

The Swiss are the most militaristic nation in Europe. The Swiss are the European equivalents of Afghanistan's tribes; they were trampled for a thousand years by armies who used the Swiss passes through the barrier of the Alps, and they became an armed citizenry just as the modern Afghanis are; it's their tribal territory, and they will not allow any other nation to occupy them. Switzerland is a very small nation in comparisons to it's neighbors, so neutrality is it's only means of survival politically. But if approached militarily, the Swiss are one big armed tribe.

They are not alone. The Finns are just the same. So are the Swedes.

One man's sadism is another man's control. A better word is terror, the core of sadism. Terror is the most ancient of weapons and the most ancient of territorial control methods. The greater the fear terror generates, the easier it is to control masses of people in all ways. Terror prevents strong opposition, causes those who are bravest to flee, and causes submission as the best way to stay alive.

It does not require a big military to conquer a nation. All it takes is a very tightly disciplined force that combines politicians and soldiers. The trick is not an armed citizenry; it is a strong political entity.

That entity may be a single leader, such as a dictator or king, a small group of leaders who share the same objectives, or can be a large group of citizens who share the same objectives.

National rule under any entity has to be coherent, practical and essentially benevolent to last for very long.

Terror can conquer a nation, but it cannot control it for very long. A single leader can be indifferent to those he rules, but he will be stronger if he acts benevolently in some fashion to them. The same is true with any rulership conducted by a group.
Of them all, democracy, which is nothing more than a very large group, is the most difficult to maintain and preserve, as it requires a perpetual delicate balance that must serve every citizen to some degree while allowing citizen representatives to rule.

The Greeks were never able to progress democracy past a city state. A city and it's surrounding support area. Every Greek citizen of any city state had to participate continually in their political process to make it work. If they quit going to the frequent meetings, the state fell apart. Falling apart meant they would all become slaves to the city state who moved in and conquered them.

The Romans did much better for much longer with a republic, the form of democracy that allows representatives. The Romans figured out that they all had to be represented so the average guy could go farm, or conduct trade or whatever without needing to be constantly in a city, always tied up in voting for something someone else wanted or needed. A republic allowed all it's citizens to remain free and go enslave Greeks if they wanted.

2,000 years ago, everyone was armed with something most of the time. Humanity has made the daily carrying of a weapon optional since then in most of the world.
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Old 05-10-2014, 09:46 PM
 
3,633 posts, read 6,141,438 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Adhom View Post
I know you're trying to make a point about gun rights. However, how would a well armed citizenry in this country do against Abrams tanks or Apache attack helicopters?
I like that meme showing a beer-bellied guy in a wife-beater t-shirt holding an assault rifle and daring the government to come take his guns, juxtaposed with a photo of tanks, helicopters, and infantry.

I really have absolutely nothing against citizens owning guns (I used to own one myself that I used for target shooting), but the paranoia gets old. I really feel sorry for anyone who spends so much of their life worrying about the government coming after their weapons cache. That is not freedom, that is imprisonment in a make-believe world of your own imagination.
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Old 05-11-2014, 05:24 AM
 
Location: Victoria TX
42,579 posts, read 86,618,735 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Ralph_Kirk View Post
You point to the political likelihood that there would not be a "brutal despot" in the presidency without there already being a Congress that will support him (and that doesn't necessarily mean they are of the same political party).

We can look at US involvement in both Iraq wars as well as continuing US involvement in Afghanistan. One might even look back to the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, of which the Iraq War Resolution was merely a repeat occurrence.

With the Congress on board, there is a danger of overall military compliance. Interestingly, in the case of the Iraq War, the Army and the Military Intelligence Community initially resisted to the degree that their strict ethics permitted...but when Congress and the media failed to echo their misgivings, they subsided--"saluted and got into line." Generals expect to outlast any given president, but a president with Congress on his side is hard to resist.

But if Congress is not on the side of the president, there is something to remember: Military office derives its authority from Congress, not from the Executive. Every commissioned officer position is authorized by Congress, although individual positions are filled by the Executive. Don't let the "Commander in Chief" stuff fool you--the full generals are well aware of their dual obligations and are nearly as much politicians as they are military commanders, but they are politicians whose party is red, white, and blue, not simply red or blue. They intend to survive regardless which party is in the Executive, and that means hearing the president with one ear, but hearing the tempo of Congress with the other.
However, none of the above sheds any light on the potential efficacy of the presently-organized citizens militia to resist the US Armed Forces and Civilian Police, should they remain loyal to a set of tyrannical edicts that don't square with the Constitution. My point was that a rag-tag bunch, even a hundred million of them, wearing NRA lapel pins but otherwise undisciplined with no training or knowledge of military science and tactics and no chain of command wouldn't last five minutes against the Loyal Unconstitutional Regulars.

And that's basically what a Well-Armed Citizenry amounts to.
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Old 05-11-2014, 08:02 AM
 
28,574 posts, read 18,586,360 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by jtur88 View Post
However, none of the above sheds any light on the potential efficacy of the presently-organized citizens militia to resist the US Armed Forces and Civilian Police, should they remain loyal to a set of tyrannical edicts that don't square with the Constitution. My point was that a rag-tag bunch, even a hundred million of them, wearing NRA lapel pins but otherwise undisciplined with no training or knowledge of military science and tactics and no chain of command wouldn't last five minutes against the Loyal Unconstitutional Regulars.

And that's basically what a Well-Armed Citizenry amounts to.
Who defines "constitutional?" If we're talking about a situation in which the federal executive and legislature as well as the state executives and legislatures are all on the same page--and as said, they were all elected by like-minded constituents--the people defining "constitutional" will be the people authorized by the Constitution to define "constitutional." There simply won't be a significant rebel force.
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Old 05-11-2014, 09:28 AM
 
31,387 posts, read 36,916,116 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Ralph_Kirk View Post
Actually, there weren't. There wasn't, for example, television. Nor was it shown happening right on main streets as opposed to dark alleys and woods.
Lynchings weren't done in dark alley's or at night and they were widely attended, photographed and published.

"Newspapers in every region of the country provided graphic coverage of lynchings, especially those that occurred in their area. "When discussing a lynching in their particular area," notes Wright (1990) in a study of racial violence in Kentucky, "local newspapers gave all of the grisly details and, significantly, would often point out that the lynching was not the first one that had happened in their area" (p. 5). Major newspapers or metropolitan dailies sometimes described lynchings that occurred outside their geographical area. For example, the February 2, 1893 issue of The New York Times, under the headline "ANOTHER NEGRO BURNED," described the grisly details of the lynching of Henry Smith in Paris, Texas. Readers learned that Smith was placed on a 10 feet-high scaffold and was tortured for 50 minutes by red-hot irons thrust against his body, after which he was set on fire and transformed from a human being to charred human remains."
The Press and Lynchings of African Americans

Quote:
And that only counted against the backdrop of the Holocaust.
Better to be obstinate with facts than mulish with fiction.
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