There is a direct connection between this:
It’s rather telling that the UN’s American defenders fail to directly address an indisputable fact: U.N. Human Rights Council’s subcommission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights has endorsed a report denying the existence of a human right of self-defense, and the subcommission, pursuant to the report, has declared that all national governments are required by international human rights law to implement various gun control provisions – provisions which, by the UN’s standards, make even the gun control laws of New York City and Washington, DC, into violations of international law because they are insufficiently stringent. (See page 14 of the draft BYU article.)
… and this:
The Somalian model has spread across the planet, from the Congo to chaotic East Timor to Afghanistan, where the Taliban have violently resurfaced, to Iraq. Populations are taken hostage, terrorized, and sacrificed, the spoils of wars by local gangsters. Under various pretexts – religion, ethnicity, makeshift racist or nationalist ideology – commandos contend for power at the point of AK-47s. They fight against unarmed populations; most of their victims are women and children. Terrorism is not the prerogative of Islamists alone: the targeting of civilians has been used by a regular army and by militias under the command of the Kremlin in Chechnya, where the capital city of Grozny was razed to the ground. Where the killers appeal to the Koran, it is still primarily Muslim passersby who suffer. Algeria, Somalia, and Darfur (at least 200,000 dead and millions of refugees in just a few years, with the Sudanese government, protected by China and Russia, acting with impunity) are live laboratories of the abomination of abominations: war against civilians.
The answer to the problem of gangsters terrorising unarmed populations is, and I know there are many who genuinely think that this is a cure worse than the disease (hence all the benign support for this malign UN repression): let the populations be armed.
[sigh]
Brian, there you go again: inserting pragmatic logic into an emotional argument.
Will you never learn?
State institutions seek not only to survive, but to grow. I only wonder whether the people in the UN are conscious of the connection Brian makes.
Guns themselves are not enough, gentlemen. Arms must be tempered with the only thing in the world that can distinguish The Right Thing: “let the populations be armed and able to reason.”
It’s this point on which all conservative admonitions to rational anarchists that they should “move to Somalia” founder: never accounting for the Enlightenment differences between America and a place like that.
There is a hell of a lot more to do than just arming them.
The strange thing is that there are many parts of the developed world where the local populations keep a lot weapons but never suffer any major civil disorder. Most people in Tanzania and (IIRC) north East Uganda keep weapons as a matter of course and these areas have largely escaped the violence that has swept the region.
The real trick with weapons is to make the distribution highly symmetrical throughout the population. If all groups in the society have roughly the same firepower then the cost of initiating violence for any one sub group becomes unacceptably high.
In every case in which mass killings have broken out, the capacity for violence in the general population has been asymmetrical with one sub group, usually an ethnic group, holding a clear superiority in firepower.
Billy Beck,
It’s this point on which all conservative admonitions to rational anarchists that they should “move to Somalia” founder: never accounting for the Enlightenment differences between America and a place like that.
I would argue that the problem in Somalia is the distribution of weapons in the society. Somalia is composed of several ethnic groups, organized into clans which have historic separate social and and economic functions. The violence and starvation in Somalia arose when the historical warrior clans who culturally concentrated on war became involved international crime and smuggling. They began to fight over control of the the countries transportation assets, largely ports and the cities attached to them.
The vast majority of Somali clans who culturally concentrated on agriculture found themselves militarily outclassed and unable to control the transportation nexuses. When drought came they could not get food by trade or aid and they began to starve.
The warriors clans were making a rational decision in order to foster their own immediate well being. They relied on their cultural strengths to obtain valuable resources for their own immediate group. Had the rest of the population been armed enough to make such a strategy to costly, the disaster would have never arose.
Shannon Love’s thesis on Somalia is entirely plausible.
But it doesn’t follow, as Brian seems to suggest, that because an armed population can help to maintain social order and resist bloody chaos, that arming (or further arming) the population once there is a breakdown of order will have the effect of restoring order. In most of the violent anarchies in the world – and the gangster territories in cities in orderly countries, too – there is seldom much to prevent the peaceful population getting arms for defence. It doesn’t seem to do them much good once factionalisation has set in.
I think it’s a bit strong to say the report denies the right to self-defense: it does say that explicitly, but if you read carefully they justify self-defense along other lines.
From the report itself:
“20. Self-defence is a widely recognized, yet legally proscribed, exception to the universal
duty to respect the right to life of others. Self-defence is a basis for exemption from criminal
responsibility that can be raised by any State agent or non-State actor. Self-defence is sometimes
designated as a “right”. There is inadequate legal support for such an interpretation.
Self-defence is more properly characterized as a means of protecting the right to life and, as
such, a basis for avoiding responsibility for violating the rights of another.”
So it’s not a right qua right, but a means of protecting rights according to them.
Here’s the report itself:
http://www.iansa.org/un/documents/salw_hr_report_2006.pdf
Of course their gun control measures are terrible, but they justify it on different grounds, namely proportionality (since firearms are so lethal).
Proportionality?
I don’t want to be just a little bit more alive than my attacker. I want to be 100% alive, and I want him 100% dead. There is a proportionality to that, as well.
– however, it’s a good start.
“of the abomination of abominations: war against civilians”
Arrgh! That’s not an abomination, that’s normal. Wars are fought between people. Occasionally, people decide to pay others to do their fighting for them, and very occasionally, both sides do that, and even more occassionally, both sides actually limit themselves to only fighting each other’s uniformed soldiers.
However, 90% of wars have been, are, and will be fought by regular people who temporarily grab the nearest sharp implement / gun and use it on someone else.
Don’t get me wrong, I prefer our way. And it seems to work better. Separation of concerns, specialisation and all that. But just because we’ve found a more greener cleaner way of killing doesn’t make everyone else an abomination.
War Nerd knows best: http://old.exile.ru/2006-December-01/war_nerd.html
I recently read Anthony Beevor’s Battle for Spain. Early on he describes how the Francoist revolt might have been immediately crushed except that the people (usually the Anarchist trade unions, but a smattering of other non-Communist leftists and moderates) couldn’t get the arms from the regular army. The government didn’t understand the situation and misplayed its hand. It’s seems obvious that the Nationalists could have been defeated – and without any increased influence to the Communists who were just as bad if not worst – if the Spanish people had simply been armed. This small window of opportunity was possibly the only time a truly good consequence of the Spanish Civil War could have been achieved.
Chris Durnell:
At the risk of going off at a tangent……. (I am busy and may not be able to follow this up).
The Socialists (I know they were divided into various factions who enjoyed killing each other – but the various factions were all Reds) were already in control of the Republic – they declared themselves in control before the second round of the 1936 elections (and made the second round a joke). Property was being stolen all over Spain – and any effort to defend property was replied to with deadly force.
In 1936 those who rejected the control by the “people” of the means of production, distribution and exchange had three choices in Spain.
Flee (as some did), be exterminated, or fight.
If fighting means that one is called a “Fascist” indeed fights along side some people who actually called themselves Falangists (Spanish Fascists) – well that is unfortunate.
“But the majority of the people of Spain supported socialism”.
I do not know (it is very hard to know for sure), but if they did – well I do not care.
I am not a great fan of the divine right of the 51%.
Nor can one attack the Nationalists as racialists – as they were no worse on this than the Republicans were (if anything they were less racialist).
Paul Marks:
Do any of your comments actually refer to any point I made? I think you are debating someone else.
Several times you place words in quotes (“Fascist” and “But the majority of the people of Spain supported socialism”) that are not found anywhere in my post. What is the point of refuting quotations that do not exist?
You also make a point of defending the Nationalists that they were not racialists. Yet once again no such remark is made in my post.
If you want to make a point about what someone else is saying about the Spanish Civil War, please do not involve my name in it.
Your comments are only tangentially relevant to one sentence I wrote at the end: that if the Nationalist revolt had been averted, then that would have been the best result of the Spanish Civil War. In other words, better than either a Franco dictatorship or a Stalinist Communist victory. Being better than those two does not imply approval for the policies for the Spanish Republic, but at least some form of constitutional government would have existed and without the murders and purges of either side.
More to the point of the actual post, I was attempting to bring attention to an actual event where an armed populace would have prevented a dictatorship. Are you saying that it was better the Spanish population was not armed so that it could not have defended itself from Franco’s African troops?
Dear Chris.
By putting quote marks round certain words I was NOT claiming that you had used this words – I was dealing with potential replies (by anyone). They are “another thought signs” so that people can tell it is not what Paul Marks is saying
This is a common practice of mine – I apologize if you thought it was directed at you.
As for an armed population preventing dictatorship.
Well the people who went around arming the population wanted a dictatorship – they just varried on what sort of dictatorship it should be.
There were a some real democrats in Spain (people who would have accepted an election defeat, or would have allowed another election if they had won one) but they were not very important.
“Yes, but if people had firearms to start with – rather than having to ask one of the factions for them”.
(Yes I am using quotes again).
Well that brings us back to the polticial opinions of most people – hard to say what they were (lots of factions did their best to rig elections in Spain).
Anyway just having firearms does not mean you will win.
Training and organization are important. Franco was not a great commander, but he was good organizer – and most of his men were trained (not militia). Although the Republicans denounced him for using African troops (Franco did not care – any more than he cared about letting Jews into Spain during World War II, something such good people as F.D.R. were not in the habit of doing).
Franco also had the advantage of the great disunity on the left.
At least the Nationalists did not tend to kill each other.
If the public are armed why should they all be on one side?
Would they not split up into various sides? For example, in California I suspect the population would break along ethnic lines.
Still back to Spain.
Even George Orwell (Eric Blair) admitted that the peasants tended to favour the Nationalists after awhile.
You see the Republican forces (including the citizens from the towns and cities) tended to steal their food and murder them if they resisted.
The Nationalists did not tend to do this.
Still I agree with you in opposing “gun control”.
I just do not think we can count on most people being on the less bad side.
For example, what are most people in Venezuela like?