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"To Shake Their Guns in the Tyrant's Face"
I blogged earlier on history prof Robert Churchill's new book on the origins of the militia movement of the 1990s. Here's the U of Michigan Press description page.
I've had time to read it, and it is excellent! He has no agenda, is simply out to write accurate history. Got into private archives, interviewed people, obtained government records. I can't sum up 300+ pages in a blog post, but a few high points are:
1) This was by no means an isolated or novel event. Throughout the history of this nation, people have responded to excessive use of government force by forming voluntary quasi-military organizations. It's almost an unconscious reflex for Americans. The critical events here were Ruby Ridge and Waco.
2) We've had various "red scares" and "brown scares" (as in brownshirt, i.e., of the right). We had a now forgotten brown scare during WWII, and a red scare thereafter (whose leaders learned from how the brown scare had worked), and then during the 1990s another brown scare directed at private militia groups. It was as inaccurate and exaggerated as the earlier scares.
3) The American Revolution left two legacies -- national building and liberty. By the 90s, the latter had almost been forgotten. The bicentennial of the Constitution was a BIG event, special commission headed by the Chief Justice, parades in DC, etc., etc. The bicentennial of the Bill of Rights passed unnoticed. Independence and nation building were seen as the legacy of the Revolution, individual liberty pushed to the side.
4) I'm flattered that he says the work on the origins of the Second Amendment, undertaken by David Caplan, Steve Halbrook, David E. Young and I, played a major role in returning liberty into the popular consciousness. It returned via the gun movement, which in the 80s and 90s began going into originalism, and which spread out from the law reviews into the popular mind. He recounts hearing two truckers on their CB radios discussing George Mason's thoughts, something that would have been beyond belief a decade earlier.
Amazon listing is right here.
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Gonna put it on my Amazon list right now, thanks for the tip.
One nit -- brownshirts were/are of "the left" also (after all, they were the thugs of National S-o-c-i-a-l-i-s-m), it was just convenient propaganda by the reds to call right wing. Unfortunately the left has basically been successful in perpetuating N_a_z_i_s_m and f_a_s_c_i_s_m as rightwing phenomena ever since...
Eric
> He recounts hearing two truckers on their CB radios discussing George Mason's thoughts, something that would have been beyond belief a decade earlier.
Levinson makes roughly the same observation in the intro to "The Embarrassing Second Amendment".
However, I think that what's actually happening is something different - namely an academic becoming aware that the rabble actually know quite a lot. Like 20-30 year-olds discovering that Dad isn't an idiot, this isn't an event in the world, but a rite of passage.
That said, each generation of rabble does get introduced from new sources.
Thank you Andy, that line pretty much pissed me off too. The intelligentsia listen to the rabble and find they are not dullards and they immediately assume either, it is a brand new phenomenom, or that they were the genesis of it and it is still brand new.
I truly dislike so called educated people who think they took all the knowledge and didn't leave any for anybody else.
It would further shock them to find how many people have formulated the same philosophies, beliefs, and outlooks as Bastiat, Locke, and others without ever having heard of them or read a word written by any of them.
Did I mention I truly dislike people with that much hubris?
Actually, their attitude doesn't much bother me. If they didn't underestimate the rubes, it would be a lot more work to con them....
Just finished reading it this weekend,it is a great book.
>>brownshirts were/are of "the left" also
Which would shock the hell out of many who lived through the NS Zeiten in Germany, regardless what side they were on. This is an American rightwing canard and article of faith for some, but it's completely delusional and nobody in Germany would agree with this.
"...(after all, they were the thugs of National S-o-c-i-a-l-i-s-m), it was just convenient propaganda by the reds to call right wing."
...Not after the Night of Long Knives, when the most rabble-rousing "populist" Nazi, Ernst Röhm, was purged. Röhm advocated replacing the Junker dominated Reichswehr with his Sturmabteilung (SA).
The SA were, it is true, largely of the working class. The SS, which rose in ascendancy after the Röhm purge, was much more decidedly professional middle class in character. Any form of bastardized "sozialismus" within the Nazi movement died with Röhm.
To insist otherwise is ahistorical and is the most deluded bit of revisionism I've ever heard, but alas, all to common.
JJR seems to think that purging the working class brownshirts tells us that the Nazis were not leftists. He's wrong.
The left is about economic control by govt. Nazis did it through "corporatism", not unlike Peron, another leftist.
Yes, the Nazi's duds were considerably more stylish than standard leftist fare (Mao jackets anyone), but on matters of substance, Nazis were left.
And no, invading Russia doesn't suggest otherwise. Leftists often squabble - see China and the USSR.
Sorry to twist this comment thread away from arguments about European occurences related to the Nazis, but being one of the Second Amendment scholars mentioned along with David Hardy in Churchill's new book, I think discussing what is still going on in this country relative to what the militia clause of the Second Amendment relates to is important to mention here.
After Heller, those supporting gun control have not changed their minds one iota about what the Second Amendment means. I have heard them time and again state that the Second Amendment is ambiguous with many stating that the Heller case was wrongly decided.
Professor Churchill has been a breath of fresh air in the historical community. In one of his papers, he repeatedly corrected arguments from Professor Cornell, who was director of the gun control advocating Joyce Foundation funded Second Amendment Research Center at Ohio State. This does not mean that I agree with Prof. Churchill on every point. In fact, I have not yet read this book. However, it is a good sign that there will finally be some serious historical research by disinterested professional historians into Second Amendment history.
So far, most historical research into the Second Amendment was conducted by those in the legal field. The exception to this on the gun control supporting side were historians funded by the Joyce Foundation in the past (for example, those funded for the Chicago-Kent Law Review one sided Symposium on the Second Amendment). Among rights supporters, the exceptions include Clayton Cramer, also mentioned by Professor Churchill in his new book, and myself, neither of whom are historians by profession.
The professional historians' amicus brief supporting Washington DC in the Heller case is literally a disgrace historically. It is hard to even imagine that professional historians can get away with so many entirely erroneous statements. I have been involved in documenting historical errors in the historians' amicus brief because I believe it is important to clearly understand their errors in order to counteract them in the future. Understanding their errors can also help prove to those who are undecided on this issue that they not rely on information from such biased sources. The fact is that the entire gun control advocating community relies on the professional historians' off-track and erroneous history to support their understanding of the Second Amendment.
I urge rights supporters and those interested in understanding the Founders' militia related bill of rights language to study the rewriting of American history undertaken in the professional historians' Heller amicus brief and the numerous errors it contains. So far, I have a twenty part series at On Second Opinion blog disassembling their arguments and correcting a large number of their errors. There will probably be about five more posts relating to their brief coming in the next couple of weeks.
Of course Nazi's were right-wight, from Stalin's perspective.
As I wrote in the comments to the immediately preceding post of yours, "You are a fine person for all the hard fighting you have been doing for the Second Amendment for all these years."
Again, thank you for all your hard work.
Contrary to the apparent general consensus on much of the internet, there are a few of us out here in California who are aware of and are grateful for the work being done in service of the Second Amendment, including and especially yours.
Looking forward to having you back on your feet again soon.