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Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it. - George Santanyana
What happens when self defence is against the law?
What happens when the protectors become the predators?
What happens when Innocents are betrayed?
Imagine that two-thirds of all Americans disappear.
A hundred and seventy million people
or that the countries of Germany, France and Spain are virtually wiped off the
map. A hundred and seventy million people gone.
In the twentieth century that's how many innocents where slaughtered,
tortured,
starved,
mutilated,
worked to death, bayoneted, hanged
annihilated
at the hands of their governments.
They had no means to defend themselves.
Innocents betrayed
Turkey 1915 - 1917 Calculated Genocide
World war one is under way
a new government has taken power over Turkeys scrambling Ottoman empire.
The rulers say they want to rid the country of wrong and lawless ideas
they want to protect national security.
They decide to eliminate the Armenians from Turkey.
Eliminate the Armenians
by killing the Armenians.
In February 1918 Turkeys political leaders and Muslim religious
leaders make a detailed secret plan to annihilate the largely Christian
minority.
To reduce opposition they lie about their intentions.
The rulers proceed step-by-step
the first move
draft as many Armenian men as possible into the Turkish army.
Thousands report for duty.
The Armenian soldiers are then separated from their units and sent to
labour camps
where they are working to death,
starved
or murdered in groups far out of public view.
Not all of the men are gone however.
The next step
confiscate all weapons from Armenian civilians. Finding many guns is
not hard,
Turkey already has a gun control law requiring gun owners to report
themselves to the government.
Then comes the order:
All Armenians must turn in their guns or face severe penalties.
Policemen and soldiers go from house to house ransacking homes and torturing
people to get their guns.
Armenians become so afraid of torture that they buy guns from other Turks just
so they can have something for the soldiers and policemen to take away.
On June 26th 1915 the final stages of the genocide begins.
The government proclamation declares:
All Armenians will be deported to remote camps.
No exceptions.
Armenians have five days to get ready
they may bring only what they can carry.
Armed guards gather the Armenians
mostly women,
children,
the old and the sick into groups of between two hundred and four thousand people to
form convoys.
The guards forced march the Armenians over rough terrain and into the deserts during
the hot summer months.
People drop from exhaustion, are killed by the guards or are simply left to die.
Sometimes the guards shoot or cut to pieces all the Armenians in a convoy.
Fewer than one in ten survive the march
and most of the survivors are butchered in the end.
The death toll is staggering,
as planned.
One-and-a-half million Armenians
men, women
and children
have been in eliminated from the earth.
Three-quarters of the Armenian population of Turkey.
Soviet Union 1929 - 1934 Starvation as a *** Weapon
In the early nineteen thirties
the outside world believes the Soviet Union is a paradise
for workers and peasants
but for millions
that paradise is hell.
In those years the people of Ukraine,
Caspian Basin and the Caucuses
are being deliberately starved to death by their own government.
The groundwork for that cold blooded famine was laid when the Communists came
to power
in nineteen seventeen.
Almost immediately they passed a series of laws
making it nearly impossible for non-party members to own firearms.
They use licensing laws
to tell them exactly who had guns and with that information
they confiscated firearms.
Penalties for possession of weapons
grew more and more harsh.
The Soviet leader Joseph Stalin
fears enemies everywhere
but especially in Ukraine,
the bread basket of Europe.
Ukraine's prosperous farmers crave
independence.
Stalin craves their grain to pay for industrial expansion.
In nineteen twenty nine
Stalin decrees that all farmland, livestock and produce in the Soviet
Union
belong to the state.
Farmers are ordered to surrender their land and livestock
and move to government owned collective farms
but first
to terrify the rest into submission
several million of the most prosperous farmers are sent to forced labour
or killed outright.
These Kulaks as the best farmers are called are demonised and excluded from
society.
Armed government thugs steal their property
sneering: eat, drink and be married
for it all belongs to us.
Next,
Stalin demands extraordinary quotas of grain,
quotas no one could possibly meet,
quotas enforced
by soldiers with guns.
Many farmers rebelled,
resistance is fierce.
But because of ten years of firearms confiscations the helpless people can only fight
back only with farm tools
or sabotage.
The worst is still to come.
In 1932
Stalin takes the ultimate revenge on those who dared oppose him.
Because Stalin controls all food distribution
he can cut off food supplies and starve entire regions
because he controls all travel with internal passports his secret police can
force starving millions to remain
within the devastated lands.
Grain elevators stand full
the grain rots on the ground as Stalin refuses to distribute food.
The powerless people can do nothing to stop their master.
Catastrophe strikes
and lasts for two endless years.
Spies watch for anyone trying to take grain from the fields,
anyone caught hiding food
is executed.
Desperate families revert to cannibalism.
Meanwhile
the New York Times Pulitzer prize winning Moscow correspondent Walter
Duranty
assures the world that there is no famine
and Stalin dupes the world by actually increasing the amount of grain exported
from the Soviet Union.
The United States and the League of Nations embrace and recognize
the prosperous
Soviet Union
from Moscow Times reported Duranty secretly confides the truth
to Western governments
that as many as ten
million defenceless lives
have been wiped out
with politically engineered starvation as the *** weapon
China 1934-1976 Decades of Death
Chinese culture is built on obligation and obedience.
The individual serves the family, society and state.
Law governs the masses
The rulers stand above the law.
The people easily become pawns.
Twentieth-century China is filled with turmoil and war
in the early years nationalists spy with Communists for Political control
by 1935
the nationalist government now in full power prohibits private ownership of arms.
A person can be punished even if he violates the law unintentionally,
but the new laws do not bring peace to the disarmed and obedient citizens of
China.
1942 - 1944
Four million die in famines aggravated by government confiscation of
crops.
1937 - 1949
The Sino-Japanese war
men who refuse to be drafted into the army are tortured
mutilated and killed.
Many uncooperative soldiers are shot or starved to death.
The toll
another four million
and in 1937 there is Nanking
235,000 Japanese troops advance on the city
300,000 Chinese soldiers flee
throwing down their weapons in the path of the oncoming Japanese war machine.
Hundreds of thousands of children,
women, sick and old people are left to the mercy
of a merciless foreign invader.
Lacking any tradition of self defence
and forbidden to own firearms,
the people of Nanking are cornered and helpless.
They are rapped,
buried alive,
burned alive,
used for bayonet practise and forced to watch as their own organs are cut out of them.
Even a visiting Nazi observer is horrified.
More misery is to come.
When the Communists take over in 1949
they impose their own laws to discourage and punish firearms ownership.
The most harmless forms of gun ownership are forbidden.
Yet the Communists themselves are lawless under chairman Mao's drive to
produce an ideal society.
From the agrarian reforms of the nineteen fifties
to the cultural revolution near the end of Mao's rain, men,
women and children
are treated as tools of the government
or as enemies of the state.
During 38 long years
Communist violence and economic experiments wipe out an additional thirty
five million Chinese
and possibly as many as one hundred million.
Chairman Mao said that guns where the ultimate source of all political power.
He controlled all the guns.
Germany 1933 - 1945 The Master Murderers
January 1933
Hitler is elected to power in Germany
because of a gun registration law passed just 5 years earlier he already knows
which Germans owned firearms. Nazi government agents combine primitive
brutality with modern record keeping to conduct mass seizures of weapons from
political opponents.
Violent raids and obedient gun turn-ins also reduce ordinary Germans
to helplessness.
Within months the Nazis have firmly consolidated their power
but this is not enough...
In 1938 they create their own
gun control law.
November 1938
Kristallnacht the night of broken glass
incited by propaganda minister Goebbels
and led by Nazi government agents
Germans commit a nationwide attack against the Jews,
shattering store fronts,
looting property,
burning synagogues, committing ***.
The day after Kristallnacht the Nazis forbid Jews to posses any firearm, club
or sharp edged weapon.
Violators face five years in a concentration camp.
Jews turn in their weapons to the police or the Nazis storm in after them.
Stripped of their power to resist
Germany's Jews
await slaughter,
technology helps the Nazis make savagery efficient.
Census data
and national ID cards tell them exactly who is a Jew.
In a few days of terror between thirty thousand and ninety thousand Jewish men,
mostly community leaders, are arrested and sent to concentration camps. It is
the beginning of the final solution.
With the so-called Jewish problem now being solved,
Hitler can focus on preparing for world war.
All over Europe
men and women can resist the Nazis,
but not in Germany where Hitler is able to find and seize their weapons.
Three million German political opponents are imprisoned in
concentration camps between 1933 and 1945.
More than five million Jews slaughtered.
One million children,
Gypsies, Slavs,
pacifists,
critics,
the disabled.
More than eleven million in total
die in concentration camps.
Nearly twenty one million civilians throughout Europe perish
at Hitler's hands
Cambodia 1975 - 1979 Purifying a Nation through Slaughter
The kingdom of Cambodia has existed for centuries
but after ninety years under French domination
the country is in chaos.
In nineteen seventy five following five years of civil war
the Communist Khmer Rouge seize power.
Led by dictator Pol Pot
they set about
purifying the country.
Communist regimes elsewhere in the world have aimed to establish paradise on earth,
someday.
The Khmer Rouge
want it now.
Their idea of paradise means eliminate
all religious leaders,
monks, nuns,
priests and preachers,
political enemies,
city dwellers,
Vietnamese and members of other
undesirable ethnic groups,
all traces of Western culture or capitalism
all students
and intellectuals,
professionals,
anyone who can speak English or French
or who has more than a seventh grade education,
merely wearing eye glasses marks people for the death squads.
The Khmer Rouge don’t need any new laws,
there will is the law.
But ever since a series of earlier uprisings
Cambodia has had tight restrictions on firearms ownership,
such as laws restricting the number of weapons
and permits so strict
that a firearm owner cant even loan a gun to a family member
Combined with Cambodians poverty and non-violent Buddhist traditions
these laws insure that very few Cambodians own firearms
or are prepared for any form of self defence.
Anyone who fought against the Khmer Rouge and any civilians who owned
firearms are forced to disarm
the moment Pol Pot takes power.
The defenceless people are unaware and unready
for what is to come.
The Khmer Rouge force mass evacuations of the cities,
believing the evacuations will be temporary
Cambodians neither resist
nor take enough food to survive.
The move is not temporary,
the entire population of the country
those who are not slaughtered outright
is herded onto collective farms
to labour without homes, personal possessions or families.
All of Cambodia is turned into a concentration camp
thats brutally administered.
No one can receive mail or phone calls, books or skilled
medical care.
All human relationships are shattered,
the simple act
of saying a kind word to a child is punishable by death.
The methodical evacuation and slaughter fit well with
Pol Pots goal
to reduce Cambodia's population from seven million to about one million
primitive
agricultural workers.
Year-by-year for the next four years the Khmer Rouge *** Cambodians
at a rate eight times higher
than that of Nazi Germany.
More than a quarter of the country's population dies
before Vietnamese troops invade with machine guns, helicopters, gunships and
tanks.
It takes them only a month to put a stop to the madness.
Uganda 1971 - 1979 The Hidden Genocide
In Uganda three hundred thousand undefended people die, yet few
outsiders care. The world turns its eyes away, it is the hidden genocide.
When Idi Amin comes to power in 1971 the world's
political leaders embrace him.
Idi Amin overthrows dictator Milton Obote who had banned political parties, killed
opponents and enacted a socialist agenda.
Obote's government had also passed laws forbidding private citizens to possess
firearms.
Only government officials and other friends could get permission.
Obote had been unpopular, and who could be worse? Surely not big
strapping Idi Amin
A clown who sometimes jumps into swimming pools in his full dress
general's uniform.
But Idi Amin is not merely worse,
he is unspeakable.
He immediately orders the slaughter of all soldiers whose loyalty he doubts.
Sixteen thousand men disappear in the next few months.
Next Idi Amin claims that God has instructed him to throw every Asian out
of the country, 363 00:22:05,630 --> 00:22:08,720 then all the English people must go.
Idi Amin confiscates there businesses and land to give to his wife. Uganda plunges
into chaos.
To prevent resistance Amin makes it illegal for three or more people to be
together if one of them is armed. Firearms are seized at Amin's whim.
Amin personal agents run amok,
they torture and cruelly mutilate their targets, mostly Christians,
rival tribes people
and anyone Amin or his soldiers just happen to dislike.
The dead including an University Vice Chancellor, an Anglican Bishop,
a Supreme Court Justice who dares rule against Amin whims and the minister
of the interior was dismembered alive.
Death squads sometimes make victims lie down in gutters to make their blood
easier to wash away.
Most Ugandans have no arms and no power to resist the killer régime.
The *** of slaughter continues for eight years.
In 1979 Amin's finally overthrown,
Saudi Arabia welcomes him as a guest
and there he lives for decades in peace.
The smiling monster never faces prosecution
for the death of three hundred thousand innocents.
Rwanda 1994 The Hundred Days' Genocide
90% of Rwanda's population belongs to the Hutu tribe
about 9% are Tutsi the tribe's often intermarry
but rivalries have simmered
especially since Belgians colonial rulers in the early twentieth century
gave political authority to the Tutsi
minority.
By 1994 a Hutu regime has been in power, for many years
some Tutsies have threatened rebellion
and the government has responded by calling all Tutsies
rebels.
The government has fuelled a campaign of hate,
preaching violence against Tutsies.
State-controlled radio station's call for the extermination of the Tutsies
and in April
it begins.
The grave is only half full,
one radio station declares
who will help us to fill it.
Thousands of murderers help
in an unspeakable frenzy that lasts one hundred days.
Government troops participate
so do armed Hutu gangs
that have been issued weapons for the purpose.
Weapons are sometimes crude
machetes,
axes,
nail stated clubs and blunt instruments.
Some attackers use firearms
but the helpless Tutsi
and those Hutu who oppose the government
often have nothing more than rocks.
Laws and poverty have kept the victims from getting weapons to defend
themselves.
The minister of defence controls permits for weapons and keeps a registry of
those few people allowed to possess firearms.
The minister of defence is also the chief organizer of the nation wide
killing campaign.
If victims can find or make weapons equal to those of their attackers then
they stand a chance of surviving.
In Kigali province civilians huddled in a Church compound
using rocks,
bows and arrows and a single gun seized from a dead soldier
they hold off attackers for a week.
Eventually they are overwhelmed by troops wielding grenades.
Fifty five hundred die.
In one town
the mayor urges villagers to disarm
saying the police will protect them.
When they refuse
he orders police to shoot them.
The war of rocks against bullets in that town lasts
three-days.
In the end
twenty thousand townspeople are massacred.
Across Rwanda
tens of thousands hide in schools and churches
they are besieged and beaten or shot to death.
To catch people trying to escape the killing
road blocks are set up throughout the country.
Soldiers check national ID cards.
Unarmed defenceless people whose cards identify them as Tutsi
are slaughtered.
Man, woman
and child.
Merely to be who you are is punishable by death.
ANYWHERE ANYTIME Death of the Defenceless
Guatemala 1980's
Targets:
Mayan Indians
''...New models of firearms are dangerous by their nature and should be possessed only by well-known persons.''
''...Only government officials may carry firearms.''
''...All sales of firearms must be reported to the Ministry of Defence.
''...Any kind of sharp-pointed tool or farming instrument is prohibited outside of town.''
Tibet Late 20th Century to???
Targets: Buddhist monks, 1/6 of all Tibetans, the land and culture.
Bangladesh (Pakistan) 1971
Targets: Students, Hindus, Intellectuals.
''Kill three million of them and the rest will eat out of our hands.'' - President Yahya Khan
Sudan Late 20th Century to ???
Targets: Christians, Animists, Rival tribes
Zimbabwe Late 20th Century to ???
Targets: White Farmers, Rival Factions
HATRED + GOVERNMENT + DEFENSELESS CITIZENS = GENOCIDE
But of course these horrors struck other people
far away,
people who are different from us, countries that are different from ours.
Surely
it can't happen here?
United States of America 1776 to tomorrow. It Can't happen here''...?
The United States at its best is a great nation,
yet here too people can become powerless targets. They may suffer simply for being
who they are.
It is the nineteenth century, up to four million Americans are slaves
entirely without rights, a quarter of a million free blacks live among them, many
work to outlaw slavery. A spirit of rebellion grows and among the white majority
fear grows.
Maintaining total control of slaves becomes an obsession.
America's earliest disarmament laws are designed to keep one race and one
race only, helpless.
''No slave may use firearms ever in self-defence. He may hunt with firearms only... with his master's written permission.'' Louisiana law, 1806
''Free Negroes may not carry firearms.'' Law of Florida 1831, Mississippi 1852, Alabama 1866, Louisiana post-Civil war.
Slaves rise in rebellion.
Tension increases
and states pass even more laws to control blacks.
White citizen patrols ''shall enter into all *** houses... and lawfully seize... arms, weapons, and ammunition.'' Florida 1825.
In 1865 the North wins the war between the states, ending
slavery forever. Three years later the 14 amendment extends full
citizenship and equal legal protection
to the former slaves.
That is
the law extends equal protection
in theory.
When states can no longer pass laws like this,
they pass laws like these instead. To keep guns out of the hands of poor
blacks.
Disarmament does not bring peace to safety,
certainly not to blacks.
Between 1880 and 1965 mobs lynch
nearly thirty five hundred black people.
Sometimes for serious crimes, sometimes for mere insults against whites.
So-called respectable citizens *** defenceless men from jails
or from the streets.
They abuse, torture, mutilate and kill there victims.
Yet defensive power sometimes prevails.
In Columbia’s South Carolina
a fourteen-year-old girl stops a lynch mob from seizing a prisoner
by holding the mob at bay with a revolver she doesn't even know how to shoot.
Today
lynchings are a thing of the passed
but some things never change.
''The Gun Control Act of 1968 was passed not to control guns but to control blacks.'' Robert Sherrill, journalist and supporter of gun control.
''Saturday Night Special guns... have their sole purpose to kill and maim...'' Brady Campaign news release.
Purchase a gun from a licensed dealer and even now you must reveal your race.
Another group of people is stripped of its weapons with tragic consequences,
from the first arrival of Europeans on North American shores
relations between whites and natives called Indians
have been uneasy.
As settlers pushed further into Indian lands the situation boils
each side commits
and accuses the other of committing atrocities.
In 1864 US army troops gunned down 150 Cheyenne and
Navajo members at Sand Creek
in Colorado territory.
Most of the dead
are women, children and old people.
Inevitably
the better armed whites overpower the tribes.
Near the end of the century desperate Indians of many tribes adopt a new
religion.
They believe if they perform a certain ritual called the ghost dance the
whites will be magically swept away.
In late 1890
the ghost dance sweeps the reservations of the Lakota Sioux.
Whites fear the Lakota Sioux are planning a war
and try to force the ghost dancers to halt.
Although many Sioux give up their religion
some bands refuse.
The army is called in to transport the ghost dancers out of the territory.
In December 1890
the last band of dancers is pinned at Wounded Knee Creek.
Ordered by the army
they hand over a few dozen rifles.
But believing the whites planned to kill them
young men hide weapons. While the soldiers search the camp a medicine man begins
the ghost dance.
The soldiers think he is giving a signal to attack.
Somewhere in the band of Indians someone discharges a rifle.
The army opens fire.
The battle is over after just ten minutes of heavy fire,
but soldiers pursue the retreating Indians and gun down every one they find.
The bodies of women,
babies and old men are scattered as much as three miles from the battlefield.
When governments fear the people disarmament often follows.
The law may target one group
but other individuals pay the consequences.
World war two President Roosevelt issues an executive order authorizing the war
department to exclude any and all persons
from vast military zones.
The order does not identify any group but everyone understands it means people
of Japanese ancestry.
About 110,000 are rounded up and sent to camps, more than two-thirds
are American citizens.
They have committed no crimes being citizens doesn't protect them.
They are disarmed as enemy aliens.
Ironically
the US government soon recruits young Japanese-American men from these camps
and the young men go on to become part of one of the most highly decorated
infantry regiments to fight in world war two.
Some German and Italian Americans are also taken to camps without being
accused of any crime.
Those imprisoned include American-born children.
Like the Japanese those sent to camps are disarmed.
Some US citizens are even deported to Germany.
When they have defence tools equal to those of attackers, people have the power
to protect themselves. Once powerless
people can fall victim to any aggressor at any time.
October 16th 1991
bright sunny day in Killeen Texas a crowded coffee shop.
Young doctor Susannah Brucia is lunching with her parents she often carries a side arm
for self defence but today she has left the gun in her car in the parking lot
because it is illegal for her to keep the weapon in her purse she's afraid she'll
lose her license to practice if she's caught with it.
Susannah Brucia is about to lose something
much more precious.
A truck crashes through the window.
A man leaps out
and methodically begins shooting customers to death.
Susanna reaches for her purse
then she remembers,
self defence is a hundred feet away
and the police can't come for endless minutes.
Suzanne can only watch
and then scramble desperately through a window as her father and mother are murdered.
Twenty three people die
on a bright sunny noon
at Luby's cafeteria.
On the early morning of August 23rd 2000
the children of John and Stephany Carpenter are alone in rural
California home.
All five Carpenter children know how to shoot but California law requires
that guns be locked away from children.
With her sisters and brothers still in bed
fourteen-year-old Jessica enters the family kitchen
where a half naked stranger awaits her with a pitchfork.
The stranger has barricaded the doors and windows. He has cut off the phone
line. There is nothing to stop him.
Stomping down the hallway
he begins stabbing thirteen-year-old Anna, youngest sister Ashley just nine years
old leaps into the hall and draws the madman away.
Horribly wounded Ashley dies at his legs screaming for her sisters to GO
GO, GO!
The girls all think of the gun
but they can't use it to save Ashley or there little brother.
The three oldest girl's escape
they rush to a neighbour’s house and plead for his rifle but the neighbour says no.
Saying the government would take his gun away.
By the time police arrive
Ashley is dead from 138 pitchfork wounds to her face,
chest and neck.
Seven-year-old son John William also lies dead
stabbed 46 times.
Once people accept being disarmed they become surprisingly easy to control and to kill.
They have surrendered not only their weapons
but their independence
when innocence are rendered so defenceless
the guilty can slaughter all of them with the most ordinary of weapons.
A club,
a knife,
a pitchfork,
or these.
Hijackers Nab Four Planes Using Box cutters
Defenceless Passengers Had No Hope
He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetuate it. - Martin Luther King, Jr.