[Peace-discuss] An American hero & the need for the 2nd Amendment

[C. G. Estabrook]

What the Deacons for Defense and Justice did was precisely armed insurrection: 
they challenged the monopoly of violence by the local police, who were 
oppressing their community and allowing others to do so.

The standard definition of a state (government) in modern political thought - 
predominant in philosophy of law and political philosophy since the early 
twentieth century - is a monopoly of violence. (See the famous lecture by Max 
Weber, "Politics as a Vocation," delivered to the Free Students' Movement of 
Munich University during the German Revolution of 1918–19.) When I had my 
sociology students read that lecture, they couldn't imagine any other way of 
thinking.

And armed insurrection, to be justified, must be self-defense (or conceivably 
the defense of an oppressed third party - e.g., the Cuban army in Africa 1975-91 
or the Vietnamese army in Cambodia 1975-89 - both apparently quite justifiable 
armed interventions in "other nations").

The primary purpose of the US Civil War was indeed to end slavery, but not from 
altruism. (The situation of the freed slaves in the South, particularly after 
1877, was often worse than under slavery.)  It was a contest between two 
regional economic elites, agriculturalists and industrialists in the North and 
slave-owners in the South, over who should develop the lands in the West stolen 
from Mexico and the native Americans.  The two elites had competing and 
incompatible methods of exploiting labor - chattel slavery in the South and the 
wage-contract in the North (and the latter could be the harsher).

Hence the central Republican demand for "no extension of slavery" was an 
assertion of the Northern ruling group's claim, as the Southern rulers well 
understood. When the Republicans got control of the federal government, the 
latter withdrew - and were attacked militarily from the North, surely 
unjustifiably, in spite of all the crimes of slavery.

Incidentally, there was a rather interesting element in the Republican party 
after the Civil War that argued that their party to be consistent should be 
devoted to the ending of wage slavery.  --CGE


On 4/26/10 3:35 AM, John W. wrote:
>
> On Sun, Apr 25, 2010 at 5:46 PM, C. G. Estabrook <galliher at illinois.edu
> <mailto:galliher at illinois.edu>> wrote:
>
> Anent some comments of mine about opposing the use of armed force in America
> in 1775 - and even more in 1861 - it was asked if there were any
> circumstances under which I would support armed insurrection. Robert Hicks
> seems to me to provide a noble example:
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/25/us/25hicks.html?ref=obituaries
>
> Yes, "it was asked."  :-) What Robert Hicks and his colleagues did was not
> armed insurrection; it was self-defense.  Or so it seems to me. What if the
> KKK was another nation rather than a domestic terrorist organization? It
> seems curious to me that you would support the Deacons for Defense and
> Justice but would NOT support the War Between the States - assuming that the
> primary purpose of the Civil War was to end the institution of slavery, which
> I believe it was.  That's a point I'm not going to argue.

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