George Washington, Tyrant

Yes, yet another installment of the kraken's "debunking gun propaganda in favor of public safety" series. Luckily I am not the only one interested in the truth of these matters, numerous false quotations are challenged here. Now Washington has always been my favorite founding father, he was not the smartest or most educated, nor the best military leader but he was a true gentleman,  committed to his country and quite selflessly serving it. I wrote my senior capstone paper on GW, combing through multiple volumes of his published letters, diaries, speeches, and other writings. You can find the online version here, though not everything is available online unfortunately. To get a good sense of GW the man, you could do worse than J. Ellis' His Excellency: George Washington. Ellis the author has had his own issues with honesty, but only in his personal life as his scholarship and narrative are top notch.

So you can see that whoever made this meme up, taking a fictitious phrase completely anachronistic to GW's contemporaries that so brazenly supports modern gun maniacs and simply slap Washington's name at the bottom with no attribution or citation, really rubbed me the wrong way. Guncite.com's post referenced above provided the actual quotation from GW's First Annual Message to Congress that shows how much liberty was taken in twisting his words:

A free people ought not only to be armed but disciplined; to which end, a uniform and well digested plan is requisite: and their safety and interest require that they should promote such manufactories, as tend to render them independent on others for essential, particularly for military supplies.
 

The further into it you go, the more the unnamed propagandist trails off into fantasyland. Especially when combined with the preceding and following remarks it becomes evident that GW was talking about national defense and plans for the American people, the whole of the people government included, to defend the republic against outsiders not against tyranny from within.

Among the many interesting objects which will engage your attention, that of providing for the common defence will merit particular regard. To be prepared for war, is one of the most effectual means of perserving peace....The proper establishment of the troops, which may be deemed indispensable, will be entitled to mature deliberation. In the arrangements which may be made respecting it, it will be of importance to conciliate the comfortable support of the officers and soldiers with a due regard to economy.
 

Remember who Washington was addressing, Congress, that body established by the new Constitution to control matters of war and peace. The president was commander in chief but the congress declares war, the senate negotiates treaties, the house controls the purse strings and is charged with responsibility for raising and maintaining the armed forces. GW was asking Congress to address problems with the military, not warning them against disarming the people or imploring citizens to become vigilantes. By 1790 he had had enough of that. Especially when you consider that a year after this address Washington led THE LARGEST AMERICAN ARMY TO DATE against rebellious farmers in western Pennsylvania who were resisting the authority of the federal government to place a tax on their whiskey. George Washington, the president, personally led an army against "free people" attempting "to maintain a status of independence from any who might attempt to abuse them... includ[ing] their own government."

Historians may argue over the tactics, or the precedent set by this action but gun maniacs and the propagandists influencing them cannot dispute what George Washington actually did when confronted by free people rebelling against perceived tyranny. All they can do is consign the whiskey rebellion to the memory hole.

To his credit, the guy I got this picture/quote from did not know these facts and when I challenged the veracity of the quote he was upset at being used. He is a good guy whom I have known for many years and was glad to know the truth, but he is also a Texan so guns are in his blood. And that's cool with me, believe what you want but I am happy to know there is at least one person out there who will not stubbornly cling to bullshit just because it confirms what they want to believe. I guess the moral of this story is that if you are desperately looking for support for your positions, i.e. stockpiling weapons to defend yourself against tyranny, do not hang you hat on Washington unless you want to look like an ignorant fool.

James Madison did not say this:

This quotation was popping up more and more before the massacre of schoolchildren in Connecticut. It is false. I checked. In fact I checked a lot of places but you know how the internet can be. It does not matter how much gun maniacs jump up and down, hold their breath, or any other juvenile tactic; James Madison did not say this.

I already took two of these misattributions to task earlier and am utterly tired of trying to play referee between heartless, sociopathic ideologues and the gullible, scared white man-children they prey on. I hate writing about this, but it is a compulsion just as is the knee-jerk defense by gun nuts to possess assault weapons. The truth, that is what interests me. Simply pulling a quote out of thin air and dumping into an extremely touchy debate is not helpful.

Now, the first thing about this picture is that the text is embedded which makes it more difficult to extract and search for. Therefore, someone inclined to believe this quotation without critical examination can just pass it on without a second thought. Someone not so sure would have to take the extra step to type it out. When first searching for the source of this quotation, I found this blog post that contained no citation. From February 2009, the gun nuts were already shitting themselves about the black man coming to take their phallic symbols. Okay, next stop was one of those quotation generator/aggregators, still no source citation. [sidebar, I could not get the homepage of liberty tree.ca to load, therefore I was unable to find out anything else about it] The quotation brings back 1.16 million hits on google, don't worry I don't have the patience to investigate every cut-and-paste job on every chatroom any more than you have the patience to read about them. How about just one. Notice the immediate use of ad hominem, slippery slope, straw man, and red herring fallacies after firing this fabricated quotation.

Finally we come to the James Madison Research Library and Information Center, where things get somewhat tricky. Apparently this thing is brand new, but of course stinks to high hell. The home page contains an attempt to sound academic and respectable... written by wayne lapierre. Just another shill for the nra, an almost transparent con to put the founding fathers' stamp of approval on the out of control gun lobby. Anyway, here's what ol' wayne and friends did to fix the blatant misattribution:

"The Constitution preserves "the advantage of being armed which Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation...(where) the governments are afraid to trust the people with arms." (James Madison of Virginia, The Federalist, No. 46)
"The right of the people to keep and bear...arms shall not be infringed. A well regulated militia, composed of the body of the people, trained to arms, is the best and most natural defense of a free country...." (James Madison, I Annals of Congress 434 [June 8, 1789])
"Americans have the right and advantage of being armed ― unlike the citizens of other countries whose governments are afraid to trust the people with arms." (The Federalist, No. 46 at 243- 244)
"Besides the advantage of being armed, which the Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation.... Notwithstanding the military establishments in the several kingdoms of Europe, which are carried as far as the public resources will bear, the governments are afraid to trust the people with arms." (The Federalist, No. 46)
"It is not certain that with this aid alone [possession of arms], they would not be able to shake off their yokes. But were the people to posses the additional advantages of local governments chosen by themselves, who could collect the national will, and direct the national force; and of officers appointed out of the militia, by these governments and attached both to them and to the militia, it may be affirmed with the greatest assurance, that the throne of every tyranny in Europe would be speedily overturned, in spite of the legions which surround it." (The Federalist, No. 46)
 

 Funny that all but the second entry comes from one essay in the Federalist Papers in which Madison conducts a thought experiment to disprove the contention that a strong federal government will necessarily lead to tyranny (after all, that was the entire purpose of the Federalist Papers, a PR campaign to ratify the contstitution). Indeed, the words do appear in Federalist 46, doctored with ellipses and brackets in the nra's propaganda, but they are there nonetheless. The phrase repeatedly foisted upon the unsuspecting public... does not. Putting quotation marks around something means THE PERSON SAID EXACTLY THAT! Not close to that, not containing similar words to that, EXACTLY AS SPOKEN OR WRITTEN. So, anyone who used this cockamamie meme or quoted the Fourth President to rationalize and defend their fetish for weapons of at least medium destruction is A LIAR. Whether ignorant or not, they are lying.