From: Tim Starr (timstarr@netcom.com)
Date: Wed Sep 17 1997 - 20:34:34 MDT
I can name 3 examples in which people successfully defended themselves against
genocide with small arms: the Israeli War of Independence, 1948; the overthrow
of the Hutus by the Ruwandan Patriotic Front in 1994; & the reversal of the
gains made by the Bosnian Serbs in the Balkan War, again in the early 1990s -
can't recall exactly which year.
In Palestine in 1948, the Israelis were up against a pal of Himmler's who'd
been appointed Mufti of Palestine by the British who was about to attack them
with tens of thousands of Arab troops in a campaign to totally exterminate the
Jews from Palestine. Thanks to shipments of Czech small arms, under orders
from Stalin, David Ben-Gurion was able to launch a pre-emptive strike that
bought him the time to build up the strength the Israelis needed in order to
survive.
In Ruwanda, after President Habayarimana was killed in a plane crash that was
blamed on a Tutsi missile (but may have actually been shot down by a Hutu
attack), the two Hutu-government controlled paramilitary forces launched a
campaign to exterminate the Tutsis, enlising the support of much of the Hutu
civilian populace. After mass-murdering 500,000 people in 100 DAYS, they
were stopped when the Hutu government was overthrown by the Tutsi rebels, the
Ruwandan Patriotic Front, which had been receiving arms from outside the
country. Needless to say, the Tutsis were not legally allowed to carry guns,
& most of them were murdered with machetes.
In the Balkan War, the Bosnian Moslems were fighting a losing battle until they
got arms & advisers from Iran, at which point they not only stopped the Bosnian
Serb's onslaught of "ethnic cleansing," in which gang rape & torture were the
chosen instruments of terrorizing the Moslems into retreat, but actually
recaptured some lost ground. Then, all of a sudden, the Bosnian Serbs started
saying: "What's that? NATO & the UN want us to make peace? What a good idea!
Why didn't we think of that sooner?"
By way of contrast, every single major genocide this century has been of a
victim group which has been previously disarmed by law. Jews for the Preserva-
tion of Firearms Ownership has published a book documenting this, called
"Lethal Laws."
"If guns are outlawed, only the government will have guns. Only the police,
the secret police, the military, the hired servants of our rulers. Only the
government--and a few outlaws. I intend to be among the outlaws."
--Edward Abbey (1927-1989), _Abbey's Road,_ p.39_(Plume, 1979)
Tim Starr - Renaissance Now! Think Universally, Act Selfishly
Assistant Editor: Freedom Network News, the newsletter of The International
Society for Individual Liberty (ISIL), http://www.isil.org/
Personal home page: http://www.creative.net/~star/timstarr.htm
Liberty is the Best Policy - timstarr@netcom.com
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