[Urbane Guerrilla]

Originally Posted by DanaC

. . . It's the emotional place of guns I think I have the most difficulty with.

Mmm. You'd probably have to have been born into, and raised in, a republic to come to that place easily. But not liking genocide is easier.

Originally Posted by DanaC

A few minor points from your response:

I suspect the Native peoples of America might argue with that one *smiles*. And given that the Founding Fathers were drawn primarily from European cultures, they were no doubt already aware of the genocides committed by their forefathers in places like South America. There's also an argument to be made that the slave labour which they and most of their peers made use of was itself the result of a form of genocide.

But no: they had no experience of being the victims of genocide.

The tools to do genocide effectively and deliberately did not then exist, and what really did the execution on the Indians (political correctness is altogether incorrect here, those most intimately involved with the question can tell you, and I refuse to use clumsinesses), while of European origin, was also not under European control to any effectual degree: disease. Nor was it all one way; it looks a lot like there was an exchange of poxes: the great pox for the smallpox.

You'll want an information dictatorship to conceal the genocidal actions and obfuscate the matter in any way possible, to anyone. This wasn't around before the twentieth century on the necessary scale -- and in the twentieth century, the communications technology gave the overwhelming advantage to national-scale entities and operations. The balance has now shifted to private entities, down to a microcosm scale, which works to make classic information dictatorships very much harder to achieve in the last century's manner. It will be harder to conceal genocides in the twenty-first -- and without exception, every genocide in the twentieth was kept secret as long as practicable.

As for slavery being genocide, that argument too is defective as the objective was hardly one of mass slaughter: it was of monetary gain all round, at every link of the chain. Casualties were plenty heavy, and enough to give the whole thing a bad name just by themselves -- but unlike genocides, the fatalities were not the point of the slave trade. They were overhead, the cost of doing that business.

Originally Posted by DanaC

That, I'm afraid, is not true. The genocide in Rwanda was the result of an armed population turning on itself. The power of one group lay in its semi-organised and rallied nature, not that it was armed and its victims unarmed. Most people on both sides had similar access to the kinds of weapons used in that genocide (mainly machetes).

"On itself" only in a nation-state sense, and Africa's also about the biggest region where the whole-nation-state mentality is the weakest. Tutsi and Hutu were peoples not about to cut each other slack on the grounds both were Rwandan. Fair amount of rifles got used as well. Big, wet rocks were in even more abundant supply than machetes and would have been every bit as fatal to use.

Originally Posted by DanaC

Genocide by the state against a subject group within that state may usually have the features you describe, but even then it is far from absolute. And genocide by one nation's forces against another may be made possible by a disparity in the kinds of weapons available to the victim population as opposed to the invaders (as was the case for the Incas).

Per Simkin, Zelman, and Rice, there's really no such thing as private-sector genocide, and they can't find genuine occurrences in their research. Their theory of genocide has a lot to recommend it: Genocide needs three precursors. It needs hatred of one party by another. It needs governmental power, either to lend sinews to the genocidal effort motivated by hatreds or to shield the activities of those carrying the genocide out. It needs the targets disarmed -- or you run out of Einsatzkommandos quickly and fatally on the one hand, or have to fight a full-on civil war on the other. Those contests become considerably more chancy than matters were in Auschwitz, Dachau or Sobibor. As Warsaw Ghetto demonstrated. That was an expensive pogrom for those who initiated it, not so?

Originally Posted by DanaC

Unless your population is not just armed, but armed to the teeth with the most powerful weaponry available being armed is not a protection against genocide.

I cited Warsaw Ghetto already, and really: had every Jew in Europe had a Mauser rifle and 200 rounds ready ammunition, Nazi Germany couldn't have afforded Kristallnacht, let alone all that followed, having satisfactorily disarmed not only the Jews but everyone else under the Weapons Law of 18 March 1938. If you were not, under this law's provisions, military, Party, or officially Party authorized, you went unarmed and keeping anything more potent than a pellet rifle was disallowed. Even the most onerous, draconian "gun control" -- never control, always denial -- gets written in reasonable-sounding language, never in an Andrew Cuomo tone.

Further, I'll cite Israel and all those privately carried arms. That Israeli daily arms carriers have the enthusiastic support of their state is secondary. But somebody around there does want all the Jews dead or, er, trying to swim to Cyprus... Amazing how mad some people get when somebody moves in and makes a big success of a place.

Originally Posted by DanaC

It may - may - be some protection against a state power that turns against its own people. But even then: it is more likely that state has the more powerful weapons and the more organised force. What is more likely to save a population from internal conflict in that scenario is not the presence of weapons in the general population, but the lack of appetite amongst the state's forces for use of deadly force agains their kith and kin (as in the early stages of the Russian Revolution).

Much of this is right -- I'll add some protection beats no protection, simply by clogging planning of oppressions with both delays and imponderables. There are entirely too many governments around which are essentially based on the ruling autocrat being the only individual in the whole country with any rights. This is hardly, may I say, a good or right social order.

Some of it simply betrays an igorance of unconventional warfare, one truism of which is that the guerrilla can use a lesser weapon to gain control of a greater, and turn that greater weapon to his own ends. Organization any outfit can do. The baseline cleverness to manage organization is easily achieved. Success at organization is more variable after that, owing to factors which can be internal, or can be external factors striving to defeat the organization before it becomes dangerous.