If we don’t learn from history, we’re bound to repeat it. Words I find myself regularly thinking of. So with that in mind, I wanted to share two famous quotes that are permanently housed in my head.
“Under no pretext should arms and ammunition be surrendered; any attempt to disarm the workers must be frustrated, by force if necessary,” Karl Marx said in his Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League.
"You won’t get gun control by disarming law-abiding citizens,” Reagan in a 1983 speech.
Marx was a militant revolutionary, naturally, he wanted his side well armed. So did Mao(“Power is born from the barrel of a gun”), Hitler and the rest of them.
The opposition they wanted disarmed and hauled off to labor camps. Did you think Marx would allow reactionaries he wanted to rob of their businesses, houses, personal property to own guns? So, he was only 50% pro-gun LOL.
I wouldnt quote Marx and Reagan so close to each other. Reagan wanted to protect the law-abiding citizens, Marx wanted to attack and destroy the very fabric of society.
This forum is public so it’s nice to post quotes by those we might admire, and those our counterparts on the other side of the aisle might admire.
I’d say Karl was more than 50% pro-gun. Something I read recently implied he felt owning a gun was closer to an inalienable right rather than anything else. Sparked me to order a book about him so I could see if there was any truth to that.
Marx’s idea was not the same as Reagan’s idea. Perhaps “pro-gun” speeches looked familiar, but the meaning was different.
The time when Marx wrote his words was the time he wanted proletariat (working class) to be armed and have necessary tools in his revolution against the bourgeoisie, he hated.
Marx knew that firearms were a way to get power, but his followers realized this worked the other way as well - firearms were a thread to their own power.
Reagan told the words that all of us had been telling all the time. This was not about fighting against other class, other people. It was about keeping the rights of defending ourselves.
[…] you won’t get gun control by disarming law-abiding citizens. There’s only one way to get real gun control: Disarm the thugs and the criminals, lock them up, and if you don’t actually throw away the key, at least lose it for a long time […]
