The Sword Hunts…Are Dems the 21st Century Samurais?
This Internet is such a wonderful teaching device. Everyday my knowledge expands thanks to things I uncover on my own but even more so from that small band of military brothers who daily drop tidbits into my mailbox. Such is how I first learned of the history of the Sword Hunts, a series of repeated transgressions in Japanese history that served to keep that nation in a state of feudalism until the 19th Century.
The what? The Sword Hunts, a despicable series of mass disarmaments of the people in feudal Japan for precisely the purpose of eliminating them as a threat to tyranny. The most powerful of the Japanese lords knew well that an armed peasantry presented a constant threat in a feudal society where order and good discipline were to be the province of the Samurai or warrior class, who roughly equate to a much more savage version of medieval, European knights. While Teutonic knights, Knights Templars and others of the European knights were frequently indiscriminate in their killing, the Samurai possessed a standing warrant to kill any ordinary Japanese citizen at will for the slightest infraction of rules or show of disrespect. Possession of any weapon of defense was an immediate death warrant.
And kill them they did because, first, they simply could under existing law, and second because it was so easy for that simple reason that the peasants were forbidden to possess arms. To ensure that the people had no means of defense or retaliation, the rulers of Japan conducted periodic Sword Hunts where all weapons were confiscated from all Japanese but those in the nobility and the Samurai classes. The most effective of these Sword Hunts occurred under the dictate of warlord and imperial regent, Toyotomi Hideyoshi in the 16th century. He so thoroughly disarmed the common people of Japan that they remained helpless, kneeling, head-bowing servants of the ruling class until Commodore Matthew Perry sailed into Uraga Harbor near Edo in 1853 and opened up Japanese culture to western democratic concepts.
So why all this Japanese history, you ask? Substitute Gun Grab for Sword Hunt and consider that the tyrannical threats to humanity never really change. There have always been and there will always be those self-anointed patricians among us who think they know better than we do as to how our lives should be ordered. One thing these elitists know full well is that it is much easier to impose their version of social order on the rest of us if they and their enforcers are heavily armed while the masses are not. Toyotomi Hideyoshi knew just as assuredly as did Adolph Hitler, Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong, that you will never break the people to your yoke as long as they possess arms. Each of those leaders disarmed his people and then proceeded to exterminate hundreds of millions of them who refused to submit.
Two things Americans should take away from this history lesson: Never ever trust a politician who says, “Trust me;” and more importantly, never ever let him talk you into surrendering your guns no matter how slickly persuasive he may be. Unless, that is, you want, like those several centuries of Japanese peasants, to kneel beside the road with your foreheads touching the ground in abject obeisance as Barack’s Homeland Security Forces patrol your streets.
Crossposted at American Thinker
Category: Gun Grabbing Fascists
I ran across this the other day.
“The most foolish mistake we could possibly make would be to allow the subject races to possess arms. History shows that all conquerors who have allowed their subject races to carry arms have prepared their own downfall by so doing.”
–Adolf Hitler
Sword-hunting went on in Scotland after the 1715 uprising against the English:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disarming_Act
And that example was probably in the minds of the Founding Fathers when they developed the 2nd Amendment.
Amen. There is someting wrong when people are calling the Constitution outdated and old. Men must govern themselves. There is a sea change coming.
@3 SFC Holland I couldnt agree more. By the way I asked on another thread if you were ever with the 1st Infantry Division back in 04. Not sure if you saw it or not, but you are the spitting image of one of my old NCO’s with the same name.
Poetrooper-well sure there’s that, but Samurai were not supposed to lie and cheat so it’s not an exact analogy.
Just as long as political elite and celebs have their armed guards to protect them from the unwashed fly over country masses that cling to God everything will be fine.
Can we start a whitehouse.gov petition to reduce the amount of security regarding capital hill as a response to these clowns that want to disarm everyone else?
A benevolent despot is the worst sort of tyrant, and the hardest to withstand becaue everything is done with the best of intentions, and by a parent, to whom one must owe obedience. It seems almost monstrous to rebel. — “A Civil Contract”, Georgette Heyer
Ex-PH2-or “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.” C.S. Lewis.
68W58 – It’s my considered opinion, bolstered by all the sheerly stupid things reported by the media over the past 23 years, that the actual effort required to be truly tyrannical is more than any DumDem can handle, embodied in the Current Twit in Charge, a dabbler, a dilettante, and a dink personified.
That does not mean I don’t take these things seriously.
An interesting analogy, but the peasants were also under the honor bound protection of the fudedal lords. Samauri who failed to uphold the code of bushido were disgraced, and many committed ritual suicide rather than be perceived as honorless cowards…. So that’s a major difference right there. 🙂
It’s interesting times we live in, as the ancient Chinese curse would have it.
There are three curses, each with increasing severity:
May you live in interesting times.
May you come to the attention of those in authority.
May you find what you are looking for.
Things are piling up like water behind an ice dam.
10 out of 9 Tyrants ALWAYS prefer unarmed peasants!
Is that so that they can proclaim “it’s open peasant season”?