WMAY | Feb 5, 2013

By Greg Bishop

So, aside from training for the Lincoln Presidential Half-Marathon, I’m also finishing several big projects and trying to read through Carroll Quigley’s 1300 page book Tragedy & Hope.

Who is Carol Quigley you may ask? Well, he’s only a very influential historian who mentored people like Bill Clinton, that’s all.

In his book, which takes the reader through an incredibly complex and multidimensional and interdisciplinary narrative of world and human history, he addresses weapons and the trends of who controls the weapons, controls the power.

I thought that with the conversation of late surrounding firearms in this country and Americans rights to keep and bear arms, it would be important to point out the true understanding of the elite central planners.

In his book, which you can read online here, Quigley says in the section “The Organization of Power:”

“By the ‘organization of power’ in a society we mean the ways in which obedience and consent or acquiescence)are obtained. The close relationships between levels can be seen from the fact that there are three basic ways to win obedience: by force, by buying consent with wealth, and by persuasion.

“When weapons are cheap to get and so easy to use that almost anyone can use them after a short period of training, armies are generally made up of large masses of amateur soldiers. Such weapons we call “amateur weapons,” and such armies we might call “mass armies of citizen-soldiers.”

So when weapons are readily available the military power lies in the hands of the citizen-soldier. OK.

“[But when] weapons were expensive and required long training in their use. Such weapons we call ‘specialist’ weapons. Periods of specialist weapons are generally periods of small armies of professional soldiers (usually mercenaries). In a period of specialist weapons the minority who have such weapons can usually force the majority who lack them to obey; thus a period of specialist weapons tends to give rise to a period of minority rule and authoritarian government.“

Read the entire article here