While the President dances, innocents mourn their dead, dead at the President's hand.

[patrice]

144. If there were a group of people who had more or less valid justice issues and they were a minority

in a country, with a government different from our own, something more royal or dictatorial, and this group either completely through their own efforts, or with somekind of external assistance, got the idea that the solution to their troubles was armed violence, even though just simply on the numbers alone there is absolutely no way armed violence was going to get them what they want and most likely would result in all of their deaths, if there were such a group, established at least for a few generations, becoming a better and better market for assault weapons, but never achieving a numeric size that would result in success for them and yet promoting themselves in their own regions and elsewhere by potential or actual violence and if you were the government of this country in which this is going on, a government of not only this one minority but also several other different ones beside, some with more, some with less affinity for our troublesome group, what would you as the government do?

Don't give me an answer as a citizen of a constitutional republic with more or less democratic processes in place and functioning, give me an answer in the contexts to which we refer (Pakistan, Afghanistan, Libya elsewhere . . . ). One thing I would do if I were a government in this kind of situation, I'd be going to the country that is selling arms to my trouble group and try to make them stop. Another thing I would do if I were a government in such a situation, I would try to figure out if some of the leaders of my trouble group are people who exploit anyone and everyone for their own agendas. I might be an exploiter myself, but I'd certainly want to know if I'm up against an authentic social movement or some people being lead by another exploiter.

There's still the problem of no matter what the group is and no matter how they are getting their arms and who their leadership is, whether that leadership is authentic or exploitative, in some situations our trouble group can and will be genocided if a certain kind of government chose to do that. Can you see that these kinds of situations can almost be like hostage situations and in many cases, the trouble group/hostages could be a problem, they have become problematic hostages with the threat of genocide hanging over their heads, BECAUSE of American produced and NRA promoted arms flowing into their situation.

If you were the government in charge of this situation, would you just go ahead and genocide the trouble group, pleasing some of your other countrymen, but also making about the same amount of others angry and eventually perhaps even problematic also? Or would you "call the Policemen of the World/the USA", who has longstanding treaties at least in your region if not with your actual country, and are those whom, incidentally, are also responsible for your country's troubles because they may have been selling arms to that trouble group of people who NEVER had a chance of anything but impending genocide anyway.

I don't like that this is the way that things are, MadHound, but it IS the way things are and summarily pretending otherwise, no matter how right that trouble group may be about their issues, does not result in anything but the worst of two more bad things, not only for the trouble group, but for a whole lot of other people who choose more or less directly not to participate in the struggle over those issues in the first place. Could something else happen? Yes, but not by just pretending that certain things are so. People have to be responsible for how change occurs and violence, from Bushmasters and their consequence, drones, interferes with bringing those kinds of change about.