>It's hard to see how a document prepared by slave-owners, merchants,
>bankers, lawyers and the like could be "revolutionary bourgeois".
Reading it, it's hard to imagine that it is anything other than revolutionary, and popular in character. It's major literary influence, I think, was John Locke, that theorist of the English revolution. A fine document it is too.
Particularly interesting is the great complaint against the British - that they armed Indian savages against the colonists. This was true, as it happened, but I think an enlightened democratic nation would have had those passages struck out.
In message <B03898593BC0D011A5B50060973D0F5CD6BF1E at rlm- exch1.rlmnet.com>, Carl Remick <cremick at rlmnet.com> writes
In reply to Doug's
>> You want the state to have
>> a monopoly
>> over arms?
>
>Yes. The notion that an armed citizenry could present any kind of
>meaningful opposition to the Pentagon running amok (*domestically,* that
>is) is ludicrous.
Well, clearly on the basis of adolescent fantasies over Adolf Hitler's birthday, then I guess not.
But here in the 'United' Kingdom, there is a very real debate about the rights of Irish republicans to keep their arms. The British government and its paramilitary police force the Royal Ulster Constabulary are very keen that the Irish nationalists should give up their guns. Of course no parallel surrender of arms on the part of the RUC is likely.
The British army in occupation of Northern Ireland has used its guns to repress the Irish nationalists. The IRA's refusal to surrender their arms is wise. The government's monopoly of violence only ever served the interests of the Unionist establishment in Ireland.
I'm surprised that American radicals should fail to understand the importance of the right to bear arms. Didn't the black panthers struggle to maintain this very right? And wasn't their challenge to the state's monopoly over violence the most radical thing they did?
The real relation between the right to bear arms and insurrection is this: American citizens were allowed to bear arms because their identification with the American dream disarmed them ideologically. If Americans are physically disarmed, that will only further subordinate their independence to the capitalist state. The lesson of gun control is this: 'we are too stupid and selfish to be trusted, but you policemen should take control for us'. That is a formula that leads to shootings like those in New York. A shame that the Panther's were beaten, or that shooting could have been prevented.
-- Jim heartfield