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Posted August 15, 2001
British Guns
Has
somebody hacked into Antiwar.com's computers again? How else to explain
the rant on gun control found in "Emmanuel Goldstein's" 8/13
column ["Defenceless
Britain"]? I'm simply amazed by the logic used in this article.
If it was written tongue-in-cheek, and my American sensibilities fail
to detect the dry British humor (which I hope is the case), then please
ignore this message.
"Simply put, a well-armed citizenry is more off putting to an invading army than any measure, short of a nuclear deterrent."
Never mind that Great Britain has such a deterrent; where is Mr. Goldstein expecting this invasion force to come from, Portugal? Slobodon Milosevic Strikes Back? If the People's Liberation Army is ever running around in Trafalgar Square, I hope Mr. Goldstein is not relying on the legal ownership of a double-barreled shotgun to fix the problem.
In 1996, thirty people in Great Britain died by handgun (Embassies and foreign crime-reporting agencies/FBI Uniform Crime Report, 1995). In April of 1999, 13 people died in Columbine High School in one day. If Mr. Goldstein is willing to let England's citizenry massacre each other with the zeal we Americans have achieved, I hope the collateral damage will be worth the sweat on the brows of the French military generals as they debate the pros and cons of sending the invasion force across the Channel.
"The other point here is that it is remarkably cheap for any government. At a time of severe defence cutbacks and approaching recession, it is amazing that many fiscal conservatives have not seen the extraordinarily low cost of this defence proposal."
In a book published this year, Professors Philip J. Cook and Jens Ludwig estimate that the total annual cost of gun violence in the U.S. is $100,000,000,000 -- one hundred billion dollars (Gun Violence: The Real Costs, Oxford University Press, 2000).
And in case Mr. Goldstein is preparing to assert that Great Britain may one day have to defend its shores from an imperialist EU bent on Oceanic domination, I'll ask him to consider a quote from the 1992 movie "Sneakers," one I'm sure Orwell's Goldstein would agree with wholeheartedly:
"There's a war out there, old friend. A world war. And it's not about who's got the most bullets. It's about who controls the information. What we see and hear, how we work, what we think... it's all about the information!"
~ "Winston Smith"
Emmanuel Goldstein replies:
The British gun crime rate has actually dramatically increased since the last batch of gun control measures. I would suggest that the British aversion to gun crime is cultural rather than law-based. Gun crime was abnormally low in the 1920s when it was as easy to buy a British gun as it was a pound of potatoes. Alas, both of these items are now illegal. I hardly expect the sort of “massacres” that Americans see in such bastions of the Second Amendment as Washington DC or New York City before Guilliani. However, this is not the main point.
Nor is the main point the, let’s say, contested, costing on gun control. John Lott may differ on the costing cited by Mr. "Smith", and I won’t really say much more.
The attack centres on whether a country should be prepared for an invasion, no matter how remote it seems. There are of course two schools of thought here. The first is that human nature has so far advanced, and human society is so intertwined, that war between first world democracies is a distant memory. The other, no doubt barbaric and odiously conservative, view is that human beings will remain human beings regardless of the abundant blessings of technology and the welfare state. As such they are still capable of aggression against weaker states. I would really appreciate it if anyone out there could prove that we had reached a new age of peace and love (at least within the OECD), but until that happy day I will cling to the view that we should seriously think about our own defence.
On that nuclear deterrent that we supposedly possess, the unfortunate fact is that it is dependent on American positioning technology. It means that while we may have the bombs, and even the missiles, we can’t actually get them to the target without Uncle Sam’s OK. So our “deterrent” deters only to the extent that the Americans allow it to. Not exactly the strongest basis of independent action.
Speculation
Tom Ambrose writes in ["Raimondo's Wrong,"] his WorldNetDaily critique of Raimondo's [column of August 8, "Hiroshima Mon Amour"] that "[t]he inescapable conclusion one must then come to is that it was only the harsh probability of total extinction that finally brought the Japanese to their senses. Keeping the emperor sealed the deal, but by no means made surrender acceptable all on its own."
...This ... is speculation. Raimondo argues that Truman never tried to explore other ways of ending the war, in particular, by giving a [non-lethal] demonstration [of the nuclear bomb] or modifying his demand for unconditional surrender. His way was to crush the Japanese utterly. But what would he do, I wonder, if the Japanese, too, had secretly invented a nuclear bomb and used it on the US in retaliation? Should they have nuked us to "end the war" had they been the first to create the bomb?
Back when I was a little kid growing up in the former Soviet Union, I was as scared of Americans as they were scared of us. Why would Americans want to kill us?, I'd wonder while listening to the propaganda. Why are they so evil? ...In truth, we were never enemies; both of our governments were our enemies, though the Soviet state to a much greater degree. War never benefits the people, and among the various destructive government programs, it is the worst enemy of civilization. It was easy to forget this when the whole world was fighting, when half the world embraced various socialist doctrines, and many Americans thought that socialism was inevitable, but Raimondo is correct that such forgetfulness is inexcusable now.
...My own position on the bombing of Japan is as follows: from the point of view of everyday morality, this war should never have occurred, and since it did, it [should] have proceeded according to the doctrine of just war, which precludes unnecessary slaughter and killing of civilians, women and children, even if (especially if) the Japanese didn't care for this lofty notion.
That Raimondo does not care who should have won the war is yet another casualty of America's profound transformation, in part as a result of the Cold War, from a free Republic to an Empire ruled by a vast and autonomous central state. I don't share his chilling wish that the Japanese had conquered America, [and] I found his admission dispiriting; one senses that he has been in the cold for too long. I hope he will forgive me for this speculative piece of advice: Like a cop who got burned out dealing with "private" criminals, Raimondo may need a break from dealing with evil ideas and political crimes.
Propaganda Victim
I was quite surprised learning that so many readers did not understand your "Hiroshima Mon Amour."
I once learned, that Hitler after viewing his own propaganda movie on "The Eternal Jew" (Das Ewige Jude) felt so convinced of the evil of the Jews, that he ordered the Holocausts to begin a few months later. Maybe the American president also fell victim to his own propaganda.
Your views are not extreme. A fine British general wrote something similar shortly after WW2 had ended (Fuller, I do not recall the title right away, but it was a book on history seen from armament technology).
Niggling Point
[Regarding Justin Raimondo's column of August 8, "Harry Truman, War Criminal":]
An interesting debate. One niggling point though. You mention a British, Dutch and French hegemony in SE Asia. The French weren't really players at that time. Those in Vietnam were Vichy, and they allowed Japanese forces to operate in Indochina. I believe the Thais had also come to an agreement with Japan.
Just War
[Regarding Justin Raimondo's column of August 8, "Harry Truman, War Criminal":]
I'm
certainly no expert on the more obscure facts of this matter so I confine
myself to what I do know. From a Christian, Biblical, just
war perspective, there is never any justification for intentionally
targeting noncoms. It is preferable to lose honorably and live as a
subject than to win by any means, as the Yankees have been doing for
the past 136 years. Most of my friends are paleocon/paleolib but I don't
get many to agree with me on this. Keep up the good work.
~ D. Hays, Louisiana, CSA