FA+
Shop
Important difference.
4 years ago
General
Karno's Rare-Because-He-Never-Has-Time Blather:
So I thought I'd publicly ponder another bit from the argument I was having with my friend, (see the previous journal). He said:
"How many times will we have to listen to your false claim that the Jews in Germany would have been safe if they were all armed to the teeth, despite the fact that the Jews only accounted for less than 1% of the population at the time, not nearly enough to even slow down the holocaust even if every one of them carried a dozen AR-15s at all times."
I've heard this argument before, and it always creeps me out how many so-called progressives seem to believe that Nazis are invincible, so their designated victims should just shut up and get in the cattle-cars without a fuss. Appalling idiocy like this is mostly spouted by soft people who have never been in a real fight, and don't understand how they work.
....Because that is definitely not the case. The Irish Republican Army was considerably less than 1% of Ireland's population, and yet they liberated a whole country from the British. Not because they were brilliant warriors, but with simple persistence: The British COULD go home, the Irish could not (they were already home). So eventually the Brits realized that the IRA would never go away, the situation was unwinnable - so they went home.
I've also run this Solzhenitsyn quote before, but it is appropriate here:
"And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt!"
Pay particular attention to the "...would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport". Because rounding up shocked, scared, unarmed & unresisting civilians for transport to the death camps is great sport, easy and fun. But if even a small percentage of the designated victims fight back, your sport becomes a civil war - and that is a completely different beast. No fun at all!
And there's this quaint notion that some innocents seem to have, where even the resistant victims will politely wait at home, shotguns in their laps, for the Gestapo to show up? That's not how civil war works. An example:
High-status officers and politicians are throwing a party to celebrate their successes. As the party starts to swing, a van from the wine merchant arrives, full of bottles. But the bottles are not full of wine. They're Molotov cocktails.
Shortly, the entire mansion is ablaze. Flaming human torches launch themselves from the upper windows, screaming in agony as they die. The pogrom has lost all it's top planners and commanders in one night.
That's a big part of what got the Brits to leave Ireland. The aristocrats of the High Command wouldn't have cared about some mere foot-soldiers getting killed - but THEY were in danger too, from random acts of IRA terror. Your thinking changes when it's your own personal ass on the line.
Modern example: Ready for resistance, the death squad is heavily armed and armored, riding in armored vehicles. They feel invincible! But as they head out for some good ol'-fashioned ethnic cleansing, their commander gets a video-call from home. Annoyed (he's made it clear to his wife he doesn't like to be called at work), he answers. But it's not his wife on the line: The crying face of his 8-year-old son fills the screen. And the large revolver held to his head. A quiet, unexcited male voice is heard: "Stand down and return to barracks. ANYTHING else leaves them all dead. Your choice".
No, an AR-15 won't stop a tank. That's why the Resistance goes for much softer targets, as depicted above. The President and a handful of the upper-crust politicians and generals can be provided with 24-hour armed security. But all the vast bureaucracy needed for a pogrom to happen? They're right down here in the muck with the rest of us. Their names and addresses easily found.
Wide swaths of the military will resist orders to attack their own people. The remainder will tend to be low-quality humans - cowards who piss themselves and run away when faced with determined resistance. Or even just possible resistance, a lá the Uvalde cops.
So logistically and tactically, it's extremely unlikely that a new Holocaust will happen in the USA. That does not guarantee some ignorant moron won't try to get one rolling, just that it won't work. Not in a nation this well informed and armed.
"How many times will we have to listen to your false claim that the Jews in Germany would have been safe if they were all armed to the teeth, despite the fact that the Jews only accounted for less than 1% of the population at the time, not nearly enough to even slow down the holocaust even if every one of them carried a dozen AR-15s at all times."
I've heard this argument before, and it always creeps me out how many so-called progressives seem to believe that Nazis are invincible, so their designated victims should just shut up and get in the cattle-cars without a fuss. Appalling idiocy like this is mostly spouted by soft people who have never been in a real fight, and don't understand how they work.
....Because that is definitely not the case. The Irish Republican Army was considerably less than 1% of Ireland's population, and yet they liberated a whole country from the British. Not because they were brilliant warriors, but with simple persistence: The British COULD go home, the Irish could not (they were already home). So eventually the Brits realized that the IRA would never go away, the situation was unwinnable - so they went home.
I've also run this Solzhenitsyn quote before, but it is appropriate here:
"And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt!"
Pay particular attention to the "...would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport". Because rounding up shocked, scared, unarmed & unresisting civilians for transport to the death camps is great sport, easy and fun. But if even a small percentage of the designated victims fight back, your sport becomes a civil war - and that is a completely different beast. No fun at all!
And there's this quaint notion that some innocents seem to have, where even the resistant victims will politely wait at home, shotguns in their laps, for the Gestapo to show up? That's not how civil war works. An example:
High-status officers and politicians are throwing a party to celebrate their successes. As the party starts to swing, a van from the wine merchant arrives, full of bottles. But the bottles are not full of wine. They're Molotov cocktails.
Shortly, the entire mansion is ablaze. Flaming human torches launch themselves from the upper windows, screaming in agony as they die. The pogrom has lost all it's top planners and commanders in one night.
That's a big part of what got the Brits to leave Ireland. The aristocrats of the High Command wouldn't have cared about some mere foot-soldiers getting killed - but THEY were in danger too, from random acts of IRA terror. Your thinking changes when it's your own personal ass on the line.
Modern example: Ready for resistance, the death squad is heavily armed and armored, riding in armored vehicles. They feel invincible! But as they head out for some good ol'-fashioned ethnic cleansing, their commander gets a video-call from home. Annoyed (he's made it clear to his wife he doesn't like to be called at work), he answers. But it's not his wife on the line: The crying face of his 8-year-old son fills the screen. And the large revolver held to his head. A quiet, unexcited male voice is heard: "Stand down and return to barracks. ANYTHING else leaves them all dead. Your choice".
No, an AR-15 won't stop a tank. That's why the Resistance goes for much softer targets, as depicted above. The President and a handful of the upper-crust politicians and generals can be provided with 24-hour armed security. But all the vast bureaucracy needed for a pogrom to happen? They're right down here in the muck with the rest of us. Their names and addresses easily found.
Wide swaths of the military will resist orders to attack their own people. The remainder will tend to be low-quality humans - cowards who piss themselves and run away when faced with determined resistance. Or even just possible resistance, a lá the Uvalde cops.
So logistically and tactically, it's extremely unlikely that a new Holocaust will happen in the USA. That does not guarantee some ignorant moron won't try to get one rolling, just that it won't work. Not in a nation this well informed and armed.
Go figure Kjartan.
"But if even a small percentage of the designated victims fight back, your sport becomes a civil war - and that is a completely different beast. No fun at all!"
Gee. Almost as if most of these creeps who want to subjugate people, are pasty wimps who don't last long without their shortcuts and "cheat codes".
"Wide swaths of the military will resist orders to attack their own people."
Not just that. They'd be incensed at their leaders for lying to them, to get them to enslave their own innocent citizens. Defections abound, especially if they bring their weapons and equipment, along with skills and useful intelligence with them.
Seriously, Germany as a country didn't even EXIST until after African Americans finally got the right to VOTE in the US. Expecting that there would be 99-1 fight and therefore no point to resistance is not only ahistorcal, (and fucking insane) but it also goes against even what the NAZI'S thought when they took guns from the German populous to remove the chance of armed resistance to their regime.
Meanwhile Vladimir the Great is trying to reconstruct a sick combination a Tsarist Russia and the Soviet Union under Stalin. I'm pretty sure he and the Duma dumb@$$es are the only ones who really want that to happen.
#1 There has never been a country where the military outnumbered the civilian populace.
#2 There has never been an army where the officers outnumbered the low-ranking soldiers.
I like to remind them of a few things.
1. I don't wear clothing, jewelry or other items that mark me, or my car, or my property, with anything that identifies me as one of your so-called 'targets'. But you wear big red hats, t-shirts, crosses and slather your truck with bumper stickers, or fly giant flags off the back.
You won't know who to shoot at, but your targets will.
2. You don't know where we live, where we work, where we shop, what routes we take, or any of that. Your only chance to see us is pure random and guesswork. Meanwhile, the people you intend to target know exactly where you are going to be, four times a week, from 0900 to 1100. You're all going to be inside a windowless building with easily blocked exits, surrounded by large open spaces of no cover, and fast access to the road. Often with two or more generations of your defective genes concentrated in one spot.
That's when I smile and say, "Before you start planning your killing sprees, keep in mind that your targets are most likely way ahead of you in terms of planning and readiness, and are just waiting for you to fuck around. Because no matter how many guns you have, you can only shoot one at a time? And we only need one gun, and one bullet. And there's a lot more of us, than there are of you."
Your statements paint a picture of someone that only knows the popular caricature of them.
Sorry if I'm being an ass here, but this post just smells like every one of the murderous psychopaths that think their shooting up a mosque or supermarket (and specifically choosing to do so with firearms for their political implications) is going to start "the boogaloo" instead of just being universally condemned by everyone on both sides. Nobody wants there to be any kind of physical fighting; how both sides default to extreme caricature of the other when discussing such civil-war atrocities says it all.
It's just... I see this problem all the time in political discussion where both sides are convinced the other is supportive of authoritarianism in any of its flavors. When in reality both sides are at most tricked into supporting it "just this time because the other side needs to be stopped before they enact authoritarianism of their own flavor", whipped into enough of a fervor to ignore that any law/restriction passed becomes a tool of the other party soon as they're voted in.
The real tool to fight this terrifying rise in authoritarianism is discussion. Discussion that can only be had when emotionally distracting political language is hamstrung by calling out the underlying issue of 'authoritarianism' rather than the divisive and one-sided 'commie' or 'fascist' or whatever... Words that evoke more emotional responses than thoughtful ones.
But here's the thing?
One political party engaged in a Coup on January 6th, 2021. It was planned well in advance, and in great detail. And we're finding out that the only reason it failed, is because the Secret Service deemed it was too dangerous for their charge to go walking to the capitol building with their mob. If he'd been allowed to go, he would have succeeded. And based on past history, all he would have had to do, is hold power for seven days.
Seven days. Just one news cycle. And America would have been his.
That's not the modus operandi of anyone who is even slightly interested in discussion.
See, Karno here is pointing out that if you don't have an equal footing, or at the very least, the ability to reach out and ventilate the cranial space of the assholes who are trying to harm you, then there won't BE any discussion.
AT ALL.
I don't think Karno is afraid that Democrats and liberals are trying to take away guns to enact some sort of wacky "One World Government" nonsense.
I think he understands, intuitively, that Democrats and liberals have been lulled into a false sense of security. That they have an unshakable belief that the rule of law is inviolate and solid, and that they have nothing to worry about.
I think Karno is justifiably afraid that Democrats and liberals are going to blithely skip through the gates of an American Auschwitz, because their cognitive dissonance is just too strong to accept that yes, there is a very significant group of people in America who are sufficiently afraid of change that they are going to kill to prevent those changes.
And as I stated before?
You can't have a discussion about the benefits or negative aspects of those changes with someone who has demonstrated that they no longer have any interest in discussion, and are actively engaged in ending ALL discussion, permanently.
And finally, at the end of the day, what is there to even discuss?
Really? I remember not one of those people was armed. If I recall, one of them had a single handgun, left in their car in a parking lot well away from them.
Seems like a tremendous oversight to me, considering how generally an attempt to violently overthrow a government will usually have quite a few firearms involved...
There's quite clearly plenty to discuss. You've got a very different perspective of the events we both watched unfold, one could say that there's a rather interesting discussion to be had from that stark difference in perception.
We define a coup d'état as the sudden and irregular (i.e., illegal or extra-legal) removal, or displacement, of the executive authority of an independent government. Thus, we include as coups situations in which the initiators leave the incumbent chief executive in a titular position but impose a higher authority (e.g., a military junta or dictator) that is the de facto executive power. Coups are usually, but not always, initiated by a small group of elites within the government. While coups are normally executed by the threat or use of force, they can also result from a societal paralysis generated by massive civil strife. Some coups involve violence; others are bloodless.
The Coup D’etat Project, September 2013, Cline Center for Democracy, University of Illinois at Urbana‐Champaign (pdf warning)
Does that satisfy your concerns as to whether or not this was a coup?
The extreme social unrest seemed much more bipartisan in nature. We had those race riots going on, and I distinctly remember a large push to goad the alt-right into 'doing something' at the time what with how the left was being given a free pass from legal intervention. Most everyone was perfectly happy to stay home and continue relieving that desire for action by just posting memes instead. The later trucker protests kinda showed just how one-sided those protections from prosecution and persecution were...
So that leaves me with the thought that we're still under an ongoing coup. One that's been going on for at least a couple decades now, though the heat has been rising exponentially in the last... decade or so? Fuck, things been steadily getting worse for the middle class long enough that even Carlin had a good schtick about it and he's been dead for a long while.
Gonna be "interesting" to see how the next few years unfold, that much I'm sure we can both agree upon.
What is that misallocated Chinese proverb/curse? "May you live in interesting times."
Yeah. Someone done laid that one on us, bigtime.
That said, it is difficult to argue with someone like Solzhenitsyn, a person who been through the worst Stalin threw at the Russian people.
Not to get too far on a tangent, but I'm guessing you've read the Gulag Archipelago? I'd agree with some that at least the abridged version of that book should be required reading in schools.