Re: [Pen-l] Obama remarks

["Sean Andrews" <cultstud76@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, Apr 16, 2008 at 8:40 PM, David B. Shemano <dshemano@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Serious question regarding the Obama remarks regarding guns and religion.  I think it is hard to dispute that there is a general right/left dispute over gun ownership, but why?  Is there something in Marxism that speaks to gun ownership?  Is there a relevance of gun ownership to economic class?  I really have a hard time conceptualizing why there is such a strong correlation between opposition to gun ownership and other left-wing views.
>
>  David Shemano
>

Do you really believe that there is a strong correlation (especially
in the USA) between "the Left" and "something in Marxism?"  I think
you've been reading Bill Krystal's version of reality a bit too long.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/04/14/lieberman-good-question-t_n_96647.html?page=6

I'm not sure who should find this kind of red baiting more insulting
and disorienting:  the so-called leftists who have to read it in their
so-called liberal rag or people who are actually Marxists and have to
put up with what passes for "the Left" in this country.

As for gun control, it is probably better to ask why people on the
right who defend the second amendment on the grounds that it could
help in the case of the government overstepping its bounds are so
quick to condemn other people who do this in other countries--and,
recently, so slow to actually take up arms to "defend the
constitution," as it so obviously has been needed in recent years?
Not to say that they SHOULD, but if they were being consistent, the
average defender of gun ownership on these grounds would thereby be
supportive of revolutionary violence in general?  On the other hand,
what kind of archaic movement believes that allowing the government to
have a gun registry would be bad, but seems to have little qualm with
allowing the EXECUTIVE unrestricted access to all your other personal
data, allowing them to snoop willy nilly through every phone call,
e-mail, or credit transaction, just as easily creating the information
database that could be cross-referenced to create such a registry in
practice?  I mean if they were serious about this constitution thing,
they'd call for general defense of privacy, less of a state run
military, and the actual distribution of those moronic "terrorist
hunting permits" I see on people's bumpers.  Instead, they seem
content to have Washington types put on some camo once every 4-6 years
and act like they know how to kill a duck (or at least shoot old men
in the face.)

As for "Marxism" on gun control, it would seem that they'd be for it
under certain circumstances: controlling the guns that are used to
force people to submit to the power of the (capitalist) state.  This,
of course, has nothing to do with contemporary gun control, which is
generally about trying to prevent things like what happened in
Virginia a year ago today.  Not much explicitly about that kind of
"gun control" you mean in the "Marxists.org" archive, but the few
mentions of the word "gun" that actually have any significance are
more along the lines I mention above--especially in relation to
African anti-colonial and US labor rights movements.  Obviously these
would be bad examples for the average gun owner on the "right"
because, in general, they would likely find these uses of guns fairly
benign if not correct.

From the "Strategy and Tactics of the African National Congress:"

"South Africa was conquered by force and is today ruled by force. At
moments when white autocracy feels itself threatened, it does not
hesitate to use the gun. When the gun is not in use, legal and
administrative terror, fear, social and economic pressures,
complacency and confusion generated by propaganda and 'education', are
the devices brought into play in an attempt to harness the people's
opposition. Behind these devices hovers force. Whether in reserve or
in actual employment, force is ever present and this has been so since
the white man came to Africa."

From Walter Rodney's "How Europe Underdeveloped Africa:"

Ch. 4: "It has already been indicated that in the 15th century
European technology was not totally superior to that of other parts of
the world. There were certain specific features which were highly
advantageous to Europe-such as shipping and (to a lesser extent)
guns..."

"Before the 19th century, Europe was incapable of penetrating the
African continent, because the balance of force at their disposal was
inadequate. But the same technological changes which created the need
to penetrate Africa also created the power to conquer Africa. The
firearms of the imperialist epoch marked a qualitative leap forward.
Breech-loading rifles and machine guns were a far cry from the
smooth-bored muzzle loaders and flintlocks of the previous era.
European imperialists in Africa boasted that what counted was the fact
that they had the Maxim machine gun and Africans did not."

"In the Portuguese territories, the origins of the black colonial
police and army also went back into the 'pre-colonial' trade period.
Around the forts of Luanda and Benguela in Angola and LourenÃo Marques
and Beira in Mozambique, there grew up communities of Africans,
mulattoes and even Indians who helped 'pacify' large areas for the
Portuguese after the Berlin Conference. Traders in Mozambique and in
the rest of East, West and Central Africa who had experience with
Europeans previous to colonialism were the ones to provide porters to
carry the heavy machine guns, cannons and the support equipment; they
were the ones who provided the would-be European colonialist with the
information and military intelligence that facilitated conquest; and
they were the interpreters who were the voice of the Europeans on
African soil."

Ch. 5 "Trading companies made huge fortunes on relatively small
investments in those parts of Africa where peasant cash-crop farming
was widespread. The companies did not have to spend a penny to grow
the agricultural raw materials. The African peasant went in for
cash-crop farming for many reasons. A minority eagerly took up the
opportunity to continue to acquire European goods, which they had
become accustomed to during the pre-colonial period. Many others in
every section of the continent took to earning cash because they had
to pay various taxes in money or because they were forced to work.
Good examples of Africans literally being forced to grow cash crops by
gun and whip were to be found in Tanganyika under German rule, in
Portuguese colonies, and in French Equatorial Africa and the French
Sudan in the 1930s."

"It was only after European firearms reached a certain stage of
effectiveness in the 19th century that it became possible for whites
to colonise and dominate the whole world. Similarly, the invention of
a massive array of new instruments of destruction in the metropoles
was both a psychological and a practical disincentive to colonised
peoples seeking to regain power and independence. It will readily be
recalled that a basic prop to colonialism in Africa and elsewhere was
the 'gun-boat policy', which was resorted to every time that the local
police and armed forces seemed incapable of maintaining the
metropolitan law and the colonial order of affairs. From the viewpoint
of the colonised, the strengthening of the military apparatus of the
European powers through colonial exploitation was doubly detrimental.
Not only did it increase the overall technological gap between
metropole and colony, but it immeasurably widened the gap in the most
sensitive area, which had to do with concepts such as power and
independence."

And finally,

"In the capitalist struggle to keep off the challenge of Socialism as
a competing mode of production and way of life, Africa played at least
two key roles â one being to provide for the capitalist militarists,
and the other being to provide a wide range of raw materials essential
for modern armament industries. The most vital of these raw materials
were uranium and other radioactive substances for atomic and later
nuclear weapons, including the hydrogen bomb. Almost rivalling uranium
in importance were certain rare minerals (like lithium from Rhodesia)
needed for the special steels that went into new aircraft rockets,
tanks, guns, bombs, etc.

Colonial powers already had small military establishments in each
colony, and right up to the end of the colonial era, it was considered
necessary to strengthen those. For instance, in the 1955 French budget
there was a special vote of six billion francs (16.8 million dollars)
for the improvement of military installations in the colonies, and
notably for strategic bases in Dakar and Djibouti. Some time
previously, the Belgians had completed a huge air base near Kamina in
the Congo."

In the old US of A, there are some entertaining (and informative)
discussions about the use of guns from the Autobiography of Mother
Jones:

Ch II: "The years preceding 1886 had witnessed strikes of the lake
seamen, of dock laborers and street railway workers. These strikes had
been brutally suppressed by policemen's clubs and by hired gunmen. [.
. . .] The employers used the cry of anarchism to kill the movement. A
person who believed in an eight-hour working day was, they said, an
enemy to his country, a traitor, an anarchist. The foundations of
government were being gnawed away by the anarchist rats. Feeling was
bitter. The city was divided into two angry camps. The working people
on one side hungry, cold, jobless, fighting gunmen and police clubs
with bare hands. On the other side the employers, knowing neither
hunger nor cold, supported by the newspapers, by the police, by all
the power of the great state itself."

Ch V: [on a victory won by non-violent strike in Arnot, PA] "Those
were the days before the extensive use of gun men, of military, of
jails, of police clubs. There had been no bloodshed. There had been no
riots. And the victory was due to the army of women with their mops
and brooms."

Ch XVII: {Victory in West Vriginia} "Here the miners had been peons
for years, kept in slavery by the guns of the coal company, and by the
system of paying in scrip so that a miner never had any money should
he wish to leave the district. He was cheated of his wages when his
coal was weighed, cheated in the company store where he was forced to
purchase his food, charged an exorbitant rent for his kennel in which
he lived and bred, docked for school tax and burial tax and physician
and for "protection," which meant the gunmen who shot him back into
the mines if he rebelled or so much as murmured against his outrageous
exploitation. No one was allowed in the Cabin Creek district without
explaining his reason for being there to the gunmen who patrolled the
roads, all of which belonged to the coal company. The miners finally
struck â it was a strike of desperation.

The strike of Cabin Creek spread to Paint Creek, where the operators
decided to throw their fate in with the operators of Cabin Creek
Immediately all civil and constitutional rights were suspended. The
miners were told to quit their houses, and told at the point of a gun.
They established a tent colony in Holly Grove and Mossey. But they
were not safe here from the assaults of the gunmen, recruited in the
big cities from the bums and criminals

[. . . .]

I traveled up and down the Creek, holding meetings, rousing the tired
spirits of the miners. I got three thousand armed miners to march over
the hills secretly to Charleston, where we read a declaration of war
to Governor Glasscock who, scared as a rabbit, met us on the steps of
the state house. We gave him just twenty-four hours to get rid of the
gunmen, promising him that hell would break loose if he didn't. He
did. He sent the state militia in, who at least were responsible to
society and not to the operators alone.

[. . . .]

One day a group of men came down to Elksdale from Red Warrior Camp to
ask me to come up there and speak to them. Thirty-six men came down in
their shirt sleeves. They brought a mule and a buggy for me to drive
in with a little miner's lad for a driver. I was to drive in the creek
bed as that was the only public road and I could be arrested for
trespass if I took any other. The men took the shorter and easier way
along the C. and O. tracks which paralleled the creek a little way
above it.

Suddenly as we were bumping along I heard a wild scream. I looked up
at the tracks along which the miners were walking. I saw the men
running, screaming as they went. I heard the whistle of bullets. I
jumped out of the buggy and started to run up to the track. One of the
boys screamed, "God! God! Mother, don't come. They'll kill ..."

"Stand still," I called. "Stand where you are. I'm coming!"

When I climbed up onto the tracks I saw the boys huddled together, and
around a little bend of the tracks, a machine gun and a group of
gunmen.

"Oh Mother, don't come," they cried. "'let them kill us; not you!"

"I'm coming and no one is going to get killed," said I.

I walked up to the gunmen and put my hand over the muzzle of the gun.
Then I just looked at those gunmen, very quiet, and said nothing. I
nodded my head for the miners to pass.

"Take your hands off that gun, you hellcat !" yelled a fellow called
Mayfield, crouching like a tiger to spring at me.

I kept my hand on the muzzle of the gun. "Sir," said I, "my class goes
into the mines. They bring out the metal that makes this gun. This is
my gun! My class melts the minerals in furnaces and roll the steel.
They dig the coal that feeds furnaces. My class is not fighting you,
not you. They are fighting with bare fists and empty stomachs the men
who rob them and deprive their children of childhood. It is the
hard-earned pay of the working class that your pay comes from. They
aren't fighting you."

Several of the gunmen dropped their eyes but one fellow, this
Mayfield, said, "I don't care a damn! I'm going to kill every one of
them and you, too!"

I looked him full in the face. "Young man, said I, "I want to tell you
that if you shoot one bullet out of this gun at those men, if you
touch one of my white hairs, that creek will run with blood, and yours
will be the first to crimson it. I do not want to hear the screams of
these men nor to see the tears, nor feel the heartache of wives and
little children. These boys have no guns! Let them pass!"

"So our blood is going to crimson the creek is it!" snarled this Mayfield.

I pointed to the high hills. "Up there in the mountain I have five
hundred miners. They are marching armed to the meeting I am going to
address. If you start the shooting, they will finish the game."

And some more where that came from...thanks for asking, that was an
interesting exercise.

s

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