The Politics Of Gene Wolfe

Cliff Judge · 18 Mar 2009, 18:56 · from 2009-March.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: transentient at gmail.com (Cliff Judge)
Date: Wed, 18 Mar 2009 13:56:40 -0500
Subject: (urth) The Politics Of Gene Wolfe
In-Reply-To: <11930.72.171.0.143.1237286160.squirrel at brunians.org>
References: <W447681238525221237244914@webmail21>
	<8FBE9D02-8F3F-4F3E-921C-B35C257F9E0A at io.com>
	<2605.67.142.130.41.1237261735.squirrel at brunians.org>
	<BLU120-W152537BAF5B236D272D62186980 at phx.gbl>
	<1556.67.142.130.39.1237266391.squirrel at brunians.org>
	<B2156387-2C0B-41C8-A692-569C229615F0 at butcherbaker.org>
	<49BF4515.6080806 at io.com>
	<03FEB8E1-A5CB-4C35-B788-FF0B30DD9AD3 at goosemoon.org>
	<49BF7768.6000407 at io.com>
	<11930.72.171.0.143.1237286160.squirrel at brunians.org>
Message-ID: <b5bac3560903181156o77d628fcj901118b7ab166b65 at mail.gmail.com>

I'm going to chime in late, well after the thread has outlived its
usefulness, and share that I believe the Amendment was intended to keep arms
among the citizenry to enable guerilla warfare against a tyrannical domestic
government, or a foreign one.

I find that the argument that "the government has far better weapons
therefore it is moot" is automatic and rhetorical. I wish people who raised
that argument would be honest that they make an assumption that the only
possible scenario is one where the erstwhile evil government has total
control of all of its armed forces.

But more than anything I dislike the gun ownership movement in the US for
maintaining that the Amendment actual provides the right to keep and bear
arms for personal defense of self and home against individual crime. If you
own weapons, and the lives of your family are threatened, by all means shoot
first and live with the legal and moral consequences. But do not insist that
you have the inherent right to own a gun to protect yourself against home
invasions. This is not provided for by the Amendment.

On Tue, Mar 17, 2009 at 5:36 AM, <brunians at brunians.org> wrote:

> This is a good opportunity to start the discussion that I have been
> wanting to have.
>
> A prominent feature of Wolfe's politics, which appears time and time again
> in his stories is his strong approval of the 2nd Amendment of the United
> States constitution, which recognizes the inherent right of the people to
> keep and bear arms, and his strong disapproval of the disarmement of the
> citizenry.
>
> Wolfe's readers are a diverse, and an international bunch, and I for one
> am curious to hear the views of the various literate and intelligent
> readers who frequent this list upon this subject, here in the early 21st
> century, some 90 years into the international disarm-the-citizens campaign
> that began after WWI.
>
>
>
>
> .
>
>
> > Allan Anderson wrote:
> >> What do you mean about the militias? I'm not sure I get that.
> >
> > The entire "a government should be afraid of its people" idea, where the
> > people should be armed and ready to take back control of their country
> > when the government oversteps its bounds and becomes a burden more than
> > a benefit.
> > Our current militia movement takes justification in the @nd Amendment to
> > the US constitution as statements of the founding fathers like Thomas
> > Jefferson:
> >      * I hold it, that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good
> > thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.
> >            o Letter to James Madison (January 30, 1787); referring to
> > Shays' Rebellion Lipscomb & Bergh ed. 6:65
> >
> >      * God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a
> > rebellion.... What country before ever existed a century and half
> > without a rebellion? And what country can preserve its liberties if
> > their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve
> > the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them
> > right as to facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost
> > in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to
> > time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.
> > Letter to William Stevens Smith (November 13, 1787), quoted in Padover's
> > Jefferson On Democracy
> >
> > --
> > Jeff Wilson - jwilson at io.com
> > < http://www.io.com/~jwilson <http://www.io.com/%7Ejwilson> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Urth Mailing List
> > To post, write urth at urth.net
> > Subscription/information: http://www.urth.net
> >
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Urth Mailing List
> To post, write urth at urth.net
> Subscription/information: http://www.urth.net
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.urth.net/pipermail/urth-urth.net/attachments/20090318/b100282e/attachment.htm>

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net