Who Says it Can’t Happen Here?

Who says it cannot happen here? Who wants to give up enough freedom that we’re certain to find out? This our liberty, the assaults upon it, our defenses, the historical brutality of authoritarian govt… this is not a game, the United States is not a TV show.

From the comments on this article, which I shared in my last post, from the American Clarion, regarding our God-given right to keep and bear arms, the 2nd Amendment, the primary reason it ought not be infringed, and the utter lack of authority the federal government has to interfere with this right, Publius Huldah (the article’s author) had this reply to a commenter:

Liberals can’t think. Once one understands this, one sees that liberals never pose a challenge on intellectual grounds.

James Madison, in the 2nd half of Federalist Paper No. 46, speaks of the armed citizens (farmers, shopkeepers, blacksmiths, teachers, clerks, etc – i.e., the Militia) defending themselves from an overreaching federal government. If the federal government is using only slingshots, then the Militia needs only slingshots.

If the federal government is using fully automatic weapons and hollow points; then the Militia needs fully automatic weapons and hollow points.

If the federal government has fully automatic weapons and hollow points, but the people have nothing because the federal government has disarmed them, then democide is on its way. You can count on it.

We must not forget (although the liberals probably never knew this) that the leading cause of death in the 20th Century was….. civil governments murdering their own People. They did this by the hundreds and hundreds of millions.

That last bit sort of struck me in the chest, and reminded me of some research I found some months back. To expand on her point, I posted the following reply to hers, all this I share here because I find it especially instructive:

Here is a 1993 essay entitled “How Many Did Communist Regimes Murder?” by Rudolph J. Rummel, out of the University of Hawaii. “Democide” is defined there as non-war murder by government. The statistics are mind-blowing, and they are NOT JUST NUMBERS. I found no correlation to the armed status of these peoples, but it goes to Publius’ last point. It is stunning the level of ignorance to the inherent barbarity of an ideology, variants of which are openly championed today, when its dangers were seemingly self-evident some short 20 years ago. And in light of the unmistakable parallels to today, with respect to the pathways to these democides, it is more than questionable the intelligence of those who would ever seek to disarm themselves in lieu of govt. “security”.

Few would deny any longer that communism–Marxism-Leninism and its variants–meant in practice bloody terrorism, deadly purges, lethal gulags and forced labor, fatal deportations, man-made famines, extrajudicial executions and show trials, and genocide. It is also widely known that as a result millions of innocent people have been murdered in cold blood. Yet there has been virtually no concentrated statistical work on what this total might be.

Mr. Rummel estimates in this essay, numbers since revised upward, a midrange (conservative) total of 110 million murders by communist democide from 1900-1987, and at the higher end estimates 260 Million Murders. By comparison, there were 38 million battle-dead in all wars (int’l & domestic) of the same period. The Soviet Union alone (midrange) murdered 62 million, and China (PRC) 35 million.

How can we understand all this killing by communists? It is the marriage of an absolutist ideology with the absolute power. Communists believed that they knew the truth, absolutely. They believed that they knew through Marxism what would bring about the greatest human welfare and happiness. And they believed that power, the dictatorship of the proletariat, must be used to tear down the old feudal or capitalist order and rebuild society and culture to realize this utopia. Nothing must stand in the way of its achievement. Government–the Communist Party–was thus above any law. All institutions, cultural norms, traditions, and sentiments were expendable. And the people were as though lumber and bricks, to be used in building the new world.

Constructing this utopia was seen as though a war on poverty, exploitation, imperialism, and inequality. And for the greater good, as in a real war, people are killed. And thus this war for the communist utopia had its necessary enemy casualties, the clergy, bourgeoisie, capitalists, wreckers, counterrevolutionaries, rightists, tyrants, rich, landlords, and noncombatants that unfortunately got caught in the battle.

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Please visit the above thread for more informative commentary. And note that P.H. also has this article up on her site now, here, with more discussion.

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