John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY JOE LAURIA IN CONSORTIUM NEWS

 

“Hijacking the Second Amendment”

“The gun lobby has hijacked the Second Amendment, which was intended for citizen militias to provide domestic “security” without a standing army. The amendment is a dangerous relic”

 

Absolutely, it is a relic, if a person interprets it clearly.

But it is deliberately misinterpreted, all the time, and there is no one in authority to correct that misinterpretation.

The ultra-conservative Supreme Court, much resembling a group of Catholic Scholastics from the Middle Ages in their narrow way of looking at matters, certainly will never step in the way of misinterpreting it. Their decisions on most matters are about on a level of enlightenment with the old Dred Scott decision.

As, for example, the decision insanely telling us that “money is free speech,” leaving American politics in the complete service of the wealthy with little room for genuine democratic principles. The voice of the general populace has very little political force in America.

Given the quality of leadership the money principle produces in the Senate, in the House, and in the White House (and, of course, in a court appointed by the White House and approved by the Senate), no wonder no significant progress is ever made in almost anything.

And the Second Amendment has long been rather meaningless because the set of circumstances dictating its creation ceased existing a very long time ago. The idea of private militias had roots in a pre-empire English government that was not fond of spending large amounts of money on standing armies. Elizabeth I, for example, hated spending money on the military. Those ideas were transferred to, and early embraced in, America.

But they became obsolete as America itself, fairly early, turned to empire, as reflected in the thinking of the Monroe Doctrine. The national embrace of violence in a long series of imperial wars and violent activities was no friendly environment for any kind of opposition against guns.

The interpretation of the Second Amendment morphed over time into something it was clearly not designed to be, too, a protection against tyrannical government, perhaps not surprising considering all the wars and imperial conflicts of the government.

Of course, hanging onto that changed meaning, about being against tyrannical government, is today absurd, given the massive armed force that American government now has at its disposal.

It’s almost comic-book stuff to think of gangs of concerned citizens dressed-up in camouflage, armed with with rifles and shotguns or even privately-owned machine-guns, hitting the streets against America’s militarized police forces possessing all kinds of combat gear, armored cars, helicopters, gas grenades, and heavy military-style weapons, to say nothing of the Army, Marines, Air Force, Navy, Special Forces, and National Guard. The results would be entirely predictable. Detroit, 1967.

The fact is that America, as a whole, has been very gun-friendly, and the bending and twisting of the meaning of the Second amendment serves that gun-friendly population. It certainly is not the work of just a formal lobby like the National Rifle Association. There are tens of millions of Americans with gut feelings on the matter of guns. And there is a long history.

I think it dates back to the days of slavery when many plantation owners slept with a gum under the pillow or on a nearby nightstand.

They were afraid of slave revolts, even though there were almost none.

Then we had the gun as friendly tool through the Indian Wars.

And the various imperial wars on the march westward. And efforts to seize parts South too. In all of them, the gun was a friend.

And gun ownership remains popular with the violence of decayed American urban areas generating fears, the same kind of fears that create gated communities and much of suburbia and make driving semi-military, somewhat-menacing-looking vehicles like SUVs popular.

The fear of violence is also to be seen in the undisciplined police in so many places in America, police who kill an average of three Americans a day, and there is very little effort to correct that ugly reality with few police ever charged with anything or even dismissed. The fear of violence is seen in notoriously brutal prisons where hundreds of prisoners mysteriously die every year. And it is seen in the world’s highest rate of incarceration.

It doesn’t help that America is constantly at war, constantly promoting the values of war even at sporting events like football games, constantly recruiting soldiers for the wars, and constantly spending unholy amounts of money on the Pentagon and security services.

The very air that you breathe in the United States is charged with violence.

It isn’t just a “gun lobby” keeping the relic Second Amendment going, keeping it in a state of perpetual widely-accepted misinterpretation.

One could say that the gun-filled, violence-charged American society serves almost as a training and conditioning ground for the rather brutal needs of empire.

On historical aspects of America’s embrace of violence:

https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2018/08/02/john-chuckman-comment-reference-to-americas-current-inability-to-have-intelligent-political-discussion-in-fact-it-is-an-illusion-to-think-things-were-ever-much-different-highlights-of-an-extrem/

 

On reasons America’s government is so totally ineffective about any real domestic needs:

https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2018/07/22/john-chuckman-comment-how-american-politics-really-work-why-there-are-terrible-candidates-and-constant-wars-and-peoples-problems-are-ignored-why-heroes-like-julian-assange-are-persecuted-and-r/

 

John Chuckman

COMMENTS POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN THE GUARDIAN

Well, I’ve always believed that at least a third of Americans are thoroughgoing fascists.

The great American journalist of WWII, William Shirer, author of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, wrote that he believed America was only a short way from going fascist.

And there were many historical bases for saying that.

The American Bund movement, often forgotten today, was a huge quasi-Nazi organization running around the United States in uniforms like Hitler’s Brownshirts.

The Klu Klux Klan, also in its practices much resembling the Brownshirts, had almost a century of history.

American imperialism arose early in the country’s history and with wars like the Spanish-American War, using phony excuses, was little different to Nazi plans for German expansion in Europe.

There was the longstanding treatment of American Indians and Blacks.

In the 1920s, there was a series of massacres of blacks in several places, notably one in Oklahoma where a whole neighborhood of about 300 blacks was murdered, their property stolen, and their bodies buried in mass graves.

Right down to today, American has very large groups of private militias and Aryan Churches.

And just consider, since WWII, America has started many wars, killed millions of innocents in dirty imperial wars from Vietnam to Iraq, and has used dozens of dirty operations to topple governments, including a number of democratic governments. America has also played an important role in the several genuine genocides since WWII. In Indonesia, the State Department actually worked into the night submitting names for the slaughter. The killing fields of Cambodia only took place because America, in its insane war with Vietnam (itself rightly termed a genocide, having slaughtered three million), destabilized a moderate but non-aligned government allowing a ruthless bunch to take over and begin murdering. In Rwanda, America early knew of the horror but deliberately kept it quiet and offered no help. To all of that, we see virtually no opposition inside America.

________________________________

In answer to another reader’s assertion about keeping his guns:

Oh sure, you and a cabinet full of hunting rifles are going to stand up to America’s massive armed forces which are equipped with everything from flamethrowers to tactical nuclear weapons.

And then there’s the massive National Guard, almost equally well equipped and having demonstrated in numerous black ghetto uprisings its readiness to shoot dozens of Americans dead in the streets.

Then there are also America’s massive, militarized police forces that shoot people daily (about a thousand Americans a year) without qualm and mainly without consequences.

We mustn’t forget the Homeland Security organization which recently has been storing arms and ammunition and vehicles at a furious pace largely in secret.

Then there are all America’s belly-crawling Special Forces, thousands of bountifully equipped and well trained murderers, especially skilled at killing in the middle of the night.

And there’s an Air Force which could easily destroy whole neighborhoods or towns with everything from white phosphorus to cluster bombs.

This is supplemented by the Air National Guard.

And today, still further supplemented by America’s large, secret extralegal execution organization using drones and missiles to kill anyone they are ordered to kill.

Yep, you and other like-minded Americans are ready for a last stand with shotguns and hunting rifles.

Your statement is yet one more tired repeat of the utterly out-of-date Second Amendment stuff about opposing tyranny in America.

America has in fact morphed into something not one signatory to its Constitution would even recognize and probably with which most would be horrified. Much of the Constitution they wrote resembles a derelict building creaking in the wind of a ghost town.

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO RUSSIA INSIDER

Ukrainians should be very careful about any training from American police.

American police forces have a well-earned reputation for violence and abuse.

They kill a large number of innocent Americans every year – estimated at 1,000 to 1,500 – far more than any terrorist dreams of. The statistics are not kept, almost certainly to suppress the shameful reality.

Few if any of them ever are dismissed or charged which means implicitly that American authorities accept the behavior.

But as few abroad, happily watching re-runs of American television situation comedies, will know America is a very brutal society in which to live.

Murder and violent crime rates are high. Police are often brutal. Prisons are extremely brutal. America maintains the world’s largest population of its own citizens behind bars. Some of its “super-max” prisons are an affront to human rights and decency. It embraces the death penalty too.

American police are militarized in their equipment, training, and attitudes, and the trend in militarization has only increased greatly in recent years. With all the meaningless colonial wars America has been fighting, there is a huge pool every year of ex-servicemen of course, all trained to kill, who need to be absorbed back into the civilian population, and police work is one of the typical destinations for them.

On top of those horrors, in recent years many American police forces have undergone training from Israeli forces, and surely there is no nation on earth whose record of killing and brutality on a per capita basis exceeds that of Israel.

It is a rather bleak picture in total, and I think any society which uses training or ideas from American police is desperate or lacks basic understanding.