A Win For The Good Guys

The Battle of Athens Tennessee

We are assured by The Powers That Be that the personal possession of weapons in general, or firearms in particular, is of no benefit to the populace as a whole, and is in fact a detriment. Although one is naturally suspicious of a narrative propagated by said PTB that benefits the PTB, it's good to try to find some hard data. Thus we turn our attention to a post world war two event familiar to many of you, called either The Battle of Athens, Tennessee, or the McMinn CountyWar.

Left leaning Wikipedia article here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Athens_%281946%29

and here is an article by the Abbeville Institute:

https://www.abbevilleinstitute.org/the-battle-of-athens-tennessee/

There was much corruption in the county . Prostitution and moon shining were rampant since the miscreants would financially support the sheriff, one Pat Mansfield, or in other words bribe him. The sheriff and deputies would treat the local populace, and anyone passing through, as their ATMs, arresting people for public drunkenness whether or not they were guilty, ticketing drivers who did not break traffic laws, etc. The situation had gotten much worse during the World War 2 years. As related in the Abbeville Institute article, Bill White and others describe what they found upon returning home. The following paragraph is from that article:

“It was a big surprise,” said Bill. He was home, and “everything, everything, everything you’ve been told you’re supposed to be fighting for wasn’t there.” There were “liquor houses, whorehouses, gambling joints all over the county,” protected by “a bunch of thugs wearing guns and badges.” One GI plainly stated that “it was a dictatorship down here,” that the “elections” were nothing short of a farce. As another veteran said, “It wasn’t really a town anymore. It was a jail.” Another GI deplored the deputies, who “were nothing but a lot of swaggering, strutting, storm-troopers, drunk most of the time, beating up our citizens for the slightest reason.” Yet another observed that “if you were on the right team, why, you could get away with almost anything. If you were on the wrong team, you couldn’t get away with anything.” This should all sound all too familiar for us today. When Cantrell announced that he was returning to Athens to “run” for Sheriff, Mansfield his handpicked successor to the State Senate seat, the GIs knew that now was the time to take action. Despite having been warned to stay away from the polls and to not even consider running for office, the veterans began organizing. As one of the soldiers put it, “We just got plain tired of being pushed around by a bunch of thugs.”

The short version of the story is that the voting situation was so corrupt that there was in effect no voting, and all officials were simply members of the political machine. Local citizens contacted the Justice Department for help, who decided that there was a problem, but no help was forthcoming. When World War 2 ended veterans returned home and, finding the situation even worse than it had always been, they decided to form their own political party and run their own candidates. The voting was as corrupt as always, with the ballots being counted in the jail, where it was determined who would count the ballots.

The GIs armed themselves with personal weapons, WW2 souvenirs, and even broke into a National Guard armory and borrowed their weapons. (They were cleaned and returned the next day, but much of the borrowed ammunition was used up.) The correct results of the election were obtained after an all night gun battle, which included the use of dynamite, with the veterans party winning the battle and the election, after the ballot boxes were rescued from the jail. The veterans were much more adept at tactics than the thugs who had been hired as deputies, so by morning the deputies fled the jail, allowing the ballots to be properly counted.

"Today, we need a nation of Minutemen, citizens who are not only prepared to take arms, but citizens who regard the preservation of freedom as the basic purpose of their daily life and who are willing to consciously work and sacrifice for that freedom." ~ John F. Kennedy

The veterans took a terrible chance as they could have gone to prison. Fortunately, no one was killed in the battle. One may wonder why this did not happen before the end of world war two, why did not the local people do it earlier? Much of the plunge into darkness only occurred during the war years, but even the veterans needed a spark plug of a leader, which they had in Marine Corps WW2 veteran Bill White.

Read either or both of the articles linked for many more details.

"The totalitarian states can do great things, but there is one thing they cannot do: they cannot give the factory-worker a rifle and tell him to take it home and keep it in his bedroom. That rifle hanging on the wall of the working-class flat or labourer's cottage, is the symbol of democracy. It is our job to see that it stays there." - George Orwell

We need this story as a reminder that corruption and tyranny (and it was a tyranny in McMinn County) can descend upon us, and that there may not be any legal recourse. Of the four “boxes” of the Bill of Rights, the ballot box, the jury box, the soap box and the cartridge box, the first three may simply be removed since they are not physical objects. The arms owned by the citizens are real and physical and cannot be willed into nonexistence.

Some of my related thoughts:

"The right of a citizen to keep and bear arms has justly been considered the palladium of the liberties of the republic, since it offers a strong moral check against the usurpation and arbitrary power of the rulers, and will generally, even if these are successful in the first instance, enable the people to resist and triumph over them." - Supreme Court Justice, Joseph Story, 1833

"The notion that you can somehow defeat violence by submitting to it is simply a flight from fact. As I have said, it is only possible to people who have money and guns between themselves and reality." - George Orwell, 1941

Stay Brave, Stay Free