“A common language of resistance . . .”

Beyond the Internet and Talk Radio: A Call for Creating New Committees of Correspondence

“A common language of resistance . . .”

Colonial rebellions throughout the modern world have been acts of shared political imagination. Unless unhappy people develop the capacity to trust other unhappy people, protest remains a local affair easily silenced by traditional authority. Usually, however, a moment arrives when large numbers of men and women realize for the first time that they enjoy the support of strangers, ordinary people much like themselves who happen to live in distant places and whom under normal circumstances they would never meet. It is an intoxicating discovery. A common language of resistance suddenly opens to those who are most vulnerable to painful retribution the possibility of creating a new community. As the conviction of solidarity grows, parochial issues and aspirations merge imperceptibly with a compelling national agenda which only a short time before may have been the dream of only a few. For many Americans colonists this moment occurred late in the spring of 1774. -- T.H. Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence, Oxford University Press, 2004, p.1.
Folks,

I ran across this as part of my reading in the economic basis of the Revolution, searching as always for clues to our own Restoration of that Revolution. (Another book that a cursory examination promises much from is Smugglers and Patriots: Boston Merchants and the Advent of the American Revolution by John W. Tyler. Thank the Lord for the Birmingham Public Library.)

The Breen observation enunciates a fundamental truth about movements such as ours. Before we can be successful, we must overcome the isolation we all initially feel. I have personally experienced how the Internet has broken through that isolation for many people. But the fact of the matter is that we must develop ways of continuing to communicate if the new regime denies us talk radio and the Internet.

We need new Committees of Correspondence in every town, county and city. We must develop NOW alternate communication paths so that the regime cannot win simply by pulling this plug, or flipping that switch. The first thing that occurs to me is ham radio networks. The second thing that occurs to me is how little I really know about radio communications in its entirety. And we mustn't restrict ourselves to simply radio. We need a lot of "out-of-the-box" thinking here.

The Soviet Union was laid low by “samizdat” – leaflets that attacked the lies of the regime and which were produced by individuals in one town and laboriously distributed by hand to another. The Soviets had been safe when they controlled all the printing presses. However, when they needed to modernize their offices along Western lines, they began using Xerox machines. Machines that stood unguarded in offices overnight. A good argument can be made that it was the Xerox machine that destroyed the old Soviet order.

We must find the modern day equivalent of the Xerox machine/samizdat networks. And we must recreate the modern equivalent of the Committee of Correspondence, only it must be a system that will able to get and receive the word on multiple bandwidths by multiple means.

So let this be a call to all of those out there who have been doing a lot more thinking along these lines than I have. What shall we do when AM radio and the Internet are denied us by an increasingly tyrannical regime? What is to be done?

Whatever solution we craft, it must be one that allows us to speak “a common language of resistance.” It must be a system that enables us to organize, to fight for and to win the restoration of the Founders’ republic.