The Right to Rebellion

The sequence of violent armed attacks against innocent victims, above all children, that have occurred in the U.S. has opened up a debate in that country over the constitutional right of its citizens to have and carry guns.

President Obama, declaring that “these tragedies must end,” tried legally changing the famous right.

In an excellent article, journalist Benoit Bréville evaluated in Le Monde Diplomatique what to him seemed to be the historical roots of the constitutional right. He concluded that it began in order to ensure the right to rebellion against oppressive governments and showed his support of the president’s unsuccessful intervention.

Perhaps it should not be overlooked that the march to the Pacific and the nation’s assumed Manifest Destiny were supported by guns. These inspired glorified cinematographic productions, which help to understand how the directors’ abuse of guns inverted or killed the original legislators’ intention in the collective memory.

It’s interesting to remember that the president’s power of veto regarding the proposal, while moderate, has not been used in such cases. For example, after the attack against the Twin Towers, the government authorized espionage on citizens without a judicial mandate, the Guantánamo prison for presumed offenders, a war without approval and even, if what they say is true, extrajudicial executive orders.

Bréville’s well-founded and timely critique may relate to a fundamental factor, as stated by Eisenhower in his speech before leaving office, which was on having governed a military-industrial complex that he failed to master.

Though Eisenhower’s words were a farewell to presidency, they were also what brought freedom to Europe in the Second World War. They dealt with an area formerly known as the Third World, where tremendous belief in the market demanded, obtained and exercised the capacity to create arms. With this capacity came brutal massacres, while outfitting emerging powers to make them stronger. Ironically, Europe’s borders demonstrate reasons for alarm that worsen every day. Syria is one such example whose situation has developed domestically and consequentially already shows signs of a weapons of mass destruction program in use. Several countries possess weapons because the knowledge and know-how to circulate them is not subject to legal limits.

Naturally, the extended right of rebellion against a despotic government, allegedly a constitutional American right, does not need to manifest because the right to rebellion is not necessarily legally legitimate, but rather appeals to a presupposed conception of the world and of life that leads to forgetting the law in force.

This analysis is informed by John Locke’s words, which go forgotten in Europe: “But if a long train of abuses, prevarications and artifices, all tending the same way, make the design visible to the people, and they cannot but feel what they lie under, and see whither they are going; it is not to be wondered, that they should then rise themselves, and endeavor to put the rule into such hands which may secure to them the ends for government was at first erected …”

The text makes no reference to the tranquility that those gentle, traditional customs will inspire.