Democracy has long been a shibboleth among U.S. officials and many American statists. From the first grade on up, American children are inculcated with the notion that democracy is equivalent to freedom.
Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. Democracy can actually be a grave threat to freedom. That’s notion is demonstrated by the Bill of Rights, which expressly protects the rights of the American people from democracy or majority rule.
Democracy can sometimes become very tyrannical. A good example is the United States, where people can be jailed for the rest of their lives without any criminal charges being brought against them or without being accorded a trial in which they could be found innocent and released.
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Yes, I am fully aware that our American ancestors tried to protect us from that kind of system with the Bill of Rights. It guarantees such procedural protections as the right to a speedy trial and to a trial by jury. It also protects people from cruel and unusual punishments, such as torture.
Why did our American ancestors deem it right to include those types of protections from a democratic government? Because they knew that people who wanted to do those types of things would inevitably be democratically elected to office or employed in governmental positions, including within the military.
What we have to keep in mind is that America has two separate and distinct criminal-justice systems. One is here in the United States and is administered by federal judges. That’s where the Bill of Rights applies.
But the other one is at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and is administered by the Pentagon and the CIA. In this national-security-state judicial system, the Bill of Rights doesn’t apply. That’s why, for example, a man named Abu Zubayudah has been held in Gitmo for 22 years without any criminal charges being filed against him and without being accorded a jury trial. It’s also why he has been tortured and subjected to other cruel and unusual punishments.
The Gitmo system is quite similar to the system that exists in Venezuela, where a presidential election was held this past Sunday. Pre-election polls and exit polls showed that the incumbent socialist president Nicolas Maduro was going down to defeat by a large margin. After the election, the government’s election bureau, which Maduro controls, declared him to be the winner. In Venezuela, Maduro wields dictatorial powers. Like the Pentagon and the CIA, Maduro and his military-intelligence forces and his police forces can arrest people and keep them jailed for as long as they want without a trial. Thus, while Venezuela has all the trappings of democracy, it also has the same type of tyrannical system that the United States has in Cuba.
So, what good is democracy? Actually, it serves only one useful purpose: It enables people to change directions in a country in a major way in an entirely peaceful manner. With dictatorships, if people wish to change directions, they have to resort to violent revolutions, which inevitably are costly in terms of life and property.
But what happens if a majority of people in a society are convinced that an election is fraudulent, which is the most likely the case in Venezuela? They have two options: either accept their plight or resort to a violent revolution.
However, that second alternative poses a problem for the people of Venezuela. Some years ago, the Venezuelan government imposed gun control on the Venezuelan people. They are now disarmed. The only ones who own guns are the police, the military, the intelligence forces, and violent criminals. Therefore, as a practical matter, the Venezuelan people are unable to overthrow their government with a revolution.
Our ancestors here in the United States anticipated such a thing. That’s why they enacted the Second Amendment. They understood that the First Amendment and all the other amendments and the entire U.S. Constitution were worthless if the democratically elected government were to destroy the right to keep and bear arms. That’s because that right guarantees that people will have the means to resort to a violent revolution should the need arise, something that the Venezuelan people do not have owing to the fact that gun control disarmed them.
Is it possible that the American people would ever have to resort to a violent revolution? Of course it’s possible. After all, if the Pentagon and the CIA can establish a Maduro-like judicial system in Cuba, it is entirely possible that they could do the same here in the United States, especially if a national “emergency” provided them with the opportunity to do so. We also shouldn’t forget that the Pentagon and the CIA have a long history of installing and supporting brutal rightwing dictatorships in foreign countries.
But the Second Amendment forces the Pentagon and the CIA to think long and hard before doing so here inside the United States because they know how well-armed the American people are. Thus, the right to keep and bear arms actually helps to deter U.S. officials from becoming too tyrannical.
There is one other lesson that Americans can learn from the Venezuelan experience: Once people permit themselves to be disarmed, a tyrannical regime will never permit them to regain their guns, for obvious reasons. Thus, as U.S. federal judge Alex Kosinski once pointed out, permitting themselves to be disarmed is a mistake that people make only once.
