Wednesday, July 02, 2008

A Nation of Cowards

A Nation of Cowards

This is a nicely written laymen oriented philosophical treatise on the relationship between gun rights and freedom. The bottom line is pretty easy to understand--the only enforcement of the idea that government exists at the consent of a the governed is an armed populace. If the governed have no actual power to revoke that consent, then it is only a matter of time that the government will rule as it pleases, consent be damned. After 9-11, many liberals seemed to want to compare the 3K deaths to "car accidents", and yet "one shooting is too many, guns need to be banned".

There seems to be a significant dichotomy there, but I think it actually turns out consistent. On one hand a nation ought to "learn to live with" mass murder by terrorists, and at the same time the general public ought to simply hope that some form of public protection or "social justice" can save them from the depredations of criminals. Control of the masses in a Fascist state demands a certain level of docility in order to be effective. Both the arms and maybe more importantly, the basic idea of individual responsibility for protecting ones own life, family and home is critical to the breaking of the spirit, and the populace accepting their position as wards of the state.

While Nazi Fascism was active and promotional of German exceptionalism as a collective, there is no reason that Fascism must always take that approach, and it appears that the current US virus is taking the opposite track since the historical American spirit is far more individual than collective. There seems to be a move to actually destroy any aspects of American exceptionalism along with the move to Fascism and in it's place to make former "Americans" into "citizens of the world", "part of the world community" where any of the "specialness" of America is removed and we stumble along as a "former world power" -- more than mildly ashamed of our history, but ever seeking approval from our European, UN, or Third World "betters".

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