The Rifle on the Wall. Finished it. Overall a pretty good piece, though I have disagreements with a few of this thoughts.
Not on the importance of the 2nd Amendment, but of his seeing all problems as being due to the 'capitalist state'. Seems to totally overlook or avoid the fact that an awful lot of the crap we're dealing with has been influenced by/set up by/profited by the 'liberals' and socialists and communists he seems to think are capable of saving us.
Yet all liberal
gun-control schemes remain blithely indifferent, when not aggressively
dismissive, of these concerns. Somehow, a lot of people have come to imagine
that depreciating versus valuing citizens’ gun rights is a left-right
dichotomy Only in the ridiculous political
discourse of the United States, where Barack Obama is a “marxist" (or any
kind of “leftist” at all) can citizens' right to gun ownership be considered a
purely right-wing demand. The notion that an armed populace should have a
measure of power of resistance to the heavily armed power of the state is, if
anything, a populist principle, and has always been part of the
revolutionary democratic traditions of the left. The notion that disarming the
people in a capitalist state – and one in severe socio-economic crisis, at that
– would be some kind of victory for progressive, democratic forces, something
that might help move us toward an emancipatory transformation of society, derives
from no position on the political left.
To me, anyone who can think that Obama isn't a leftist... big hole in the thinking there. He really is a redistributionist/all power to the state/socialist, from what I can see; so maybe the writer doesn't see him as a REAL leftist?
Anyway, the fact is, as he notes with great upset, the vast majority of "We need to get rid of THESE guns(until we can ban all of them)" people are on the left. And they want us disarmed precisely for the reasons he says they should not: because it holds the promise of people being able to carry out serious "If you won't listen to our words, then you'll listen to this" action. The Soviets wanted the citizen disarmed for the exact same reason(I wonder if they count as bad socialists for that reason?), along with the subject races Hitler spoke of.
Blaming all this on capitalism is dumb; and it creates a set of ideological blinders that can cause real problems.
Sorry, lost my train of thought for a moment; had a "Waitaminnit, here's something I can make!" flash. back to the subject, the piece is well worth reading; see what you think.
2 comments:
Obama isn't a Marxist. He believes we can own stuff, just that the government can tell us every little thing about what when, where, why and how to use it. Gay sex being the exception.
Obama is Third Way. Neither Communist nor Free Market. We've seen his ilk before in the Twentieth Century, in the twenties, thirties and forties. Third Way never really goes away, and its always popular because it says it's making things fair, but it doesn't look like government is really taking anything from people the way Lenin and Mao did.
Third Way, is of course, Fascism.
I'm getting to the point where I see left vs right as a distinction without a difference.
I don't think politics is a one dimensional straight line between left and right
I think its a double cone or a diamond shape
The vertical axis is increasing state violence
the point of absolute state violence is what Lenin, Trotsky Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot etc were approaching
Hitler wasn't far away from them
it bows out in the middle a bit, with disagreements over what areas of life should be coerced at gun point or what people should be caged for -
but the idea that state violence has a role is never questioned
there is also little or no questioning of the idea that the group should decide on what the individual does with his or her own body and private property - and enforce those decisions with violence - in that sense, democracy is a mild form of communism, and was rightly rejected until recently.
it's only when you approach the zero state violence (and total intolerance to any acts of aggression against person and property)point that the very existence of leviathan and rules which grant one person power over another are themselves questioned.
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