This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.
Frederick Douglass
1857
[Very appropriate for gun rights activists. But what is even more interesting to me is where I found it. I found it in an anti-freedom blog post. I read it and it just didn’t seem right. So I looked it up and found what you see above. The anti-freedom person used this one:
Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them.
What a difference the context makes! As always, they have to lie and obfuscate in their attempts to win. To be fair he did supply a more complete one in the comments when called on it. But initially he stripped out the lines that make our point better than his.–Joe]
Armed and Safe hit on that when they first posted it. The CSGV blog is notorious for committing “reasoned discourse” by ‘moderating’ comments and using selectively cited quotes and information.
Hey. Kind of like every other anti-gun blog.
“Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them.”
Both of the “Two Americas” could use that line while pointing fingers at their political opposition. It’s just that the words will have different meanings depending on who’s using them.
We could rewrite it for the left quite easily, as a statement of opportunity for them; “Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found the exact measure of taxation and social engineering which may be readily administered to them.”
Since we’re taught from childhood to avoid confrontation and instead to appeal to authority for solutions to our problems, we’ve been primed for more social engineering. “Justice” becomes another way of saying “proper allocation of resources”. The word “wrong” can mean anything from “fighting” to “corporate dominance” to “exploitation of the lower classes” to “conspicuous consumption” to a “high carbon footprint” et al. Thank you, public education.
Conservatives know what the words mean, in that they mean exactly what they meant when used in the Declaration of Independence and other founding documents. When push comes to shove, the fact that truth be on our side is of little use or consolation.