A Brief History of U.S. Gun Worship
October 14, 2015
A Brief History of U.S. Gun Worship
by Gary Leupp
Practically every nation on the planet has been established through violence. The state itself, as Friedrich Engels explained, emerged as a result of primordial class division. The ruling classes have throughout history maintained their control over their subjects (beginning with the exaction of taxes from them) through the use of armed men at their disposal: their military and police.
Those running the state use the threat if not the constant use of violence to maintain “law and order” on their terms. Witness the north American inner city, where the police are perceived as a kind of armed occupation force.
The country of France as we know it emerged from the conquest of the Gauls by the Franks in the 5th and 6th centuries. England was produced out of the Anglo-Saxon conquests of the Britons at the same time. There is nothing historically unusual about some peoples experiencing invasion, conquest, and displacement, even annihilation in the process of state formation. The rise of European colonialism after Columbus merely made foreign conquest more universal.
The ancient Germanic tribes that conquered Celtic Gaul and Briton relied on bows and arrows, swords and battle-axes. But the establishment of the states that exist in the Americas today depended on a particular tool of violence these warriors never possessed: the gun. The gun was used by European settler-invaders in the New World from the outset to subordinate and terrorize indigenous peoples. It was the premise for colonization.
More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/10/14/a-brief-history-of-u-s-gun-worship/
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