The ORIGINAL gathering place for a merry band of Three Percenters. (As denounced by Bill Clinton on CNN!)
Tuesday, September 30, 2014
After Oklahoma Beheading and ISIS Threats, Arkansas Firing Range Becomes First To Exclude Muslims
Priceless. And speaking of communists. . .
So, I'm walking down the aisle at the thrift store yesterday and what do I see but a double-extra-large example of this tee shirt, brand new:
Looking at the price tag and roughly calculating the tag-color discount-of-the-day plus my old fart's percentage, I saw that it was less than a buck, I had to have it, so I carried it up to the register, pleased as punch. The line was long and I was short on time to go pick up Rosey, but no matter. While I waited, I held it out in front of me, fully displaying the iconic image, looking at it and smiling. Some clueless young bearded slacker was behind me in the line and commented, "Wow. I like the tee shirt." "Yeah," I enthusiastically replied, "it'll make a GREAT target the next time I go to the gun range. Images of commie murderers always make the best aiming points." You should have seen his face. Priceless.
Man Who Defends His Life In No-Knock Raid Now Faces Death Penalty
"I’ve said it before and I’ll keep pressing on the issue. My home is my castle, and I don’t care what judge has signed what piece of paper. If you come at my home, especially in the middle of the night, you’re going to get shot, cop or not. I won’t differentiate because I cannot trust uniforms and announcements. Criminal gangs have now taken to wearing uniforms and making announcements."
"My home is my castle. It doesn’t belong to you, and it doesn’t belong to the state. If you are law enforcement and want to come in my home, call and make an appointment. Got it? If that isn’t good enough for you, if you think there is evidence of something or other you want to see, then put good detectives on the job (like you did at one time in history), watch for me to leave, detain me, and then take me back to the home and let me use my key to the front door. Or get a locksmith. In other words, use your brains to gather evidence. Otherwise, I don’t care if you lose that evidence. I only care about my safety, and the safety of victims like Mr. Guy."
Monday, September 29, 2014
Praxis: 25mm boxes -- what experiences have you had with long term storage using them?
I've never used these Bushmaster 25mm ammo boxes for long-term storage and I'm wondering how many uses folks have found for these air-tight, water-tight containers?
Here, a fellow using them for panniers on his bike.
Here, a post discusses the use of 25mm M791 Ammo Boxes as Flashlight Storage.
They are, it seems to me, heavier than metal ammo cans of similar volume. Still, does anyone have experience using them tactically, or for long-term storage?
Sunday, September 28, 2014
Mind your head. Practitioners of the religion of peace help make the case for open carry.
Breitbart reports "Oklahoma Beheader Linked to Al Qaeda Leader Awlaki, Boston Bomber's Mosque."
You know, if many more of these beheadings take place, open carry advocates are going to be welcomed with open arms.
"'Patriots' are ready to defend their right to keep guns"
Mark Pitcavage, ADL's "militia expert."
Fear of the federal government’s interference with Second Amendment rights and suspicion that elected officials are ignoring the “will of the people” have provoked a resurgence of self-described patriots across the country who say they are preparing to defend themselves and their rights.
Saturday, September 27, 2014
Timing is everything.
Changed Senate rule eases way for Holder successor
Democratic changes to the filibuster last year should give President Obama's attorney general pick a gliding path through the Senate in the lame-duck session. Last November, Democratic Majority Leader Harry Reid changed Senate rules so that nominations for Cabinet positions and most judicial posts needed only 51 votes, instead of the 60 that had been required. That means the person President Obama nominates to succeed Attorney General Eric Holder will not face a potential Republican filibuster.
I've got a better idea. Why don't we just quit taxing the things to death and take the profit motive out of the smugglers' hands?
Former ATF Agent: Empower Police To Nab Terrorists Cigarette Smuggling.
Since 2006, the tax rate on NYC cigarettes has gone up 190 percent — consumers now pay $4.35 to New York and $1.50 to NYC per pack, which often cost more than $12. Consumers in nearby states, such as Virginia and Delaware on the other hand, pay closer to between $5 and $8 a pack. “When there’s such a disparity, it increases criminal activity,” Mariano said. “I know that for a fact.” Smugglers can sell a pack for $8 in New York — well below the market price — and still profit at $3 a pack, Mariano explained. The high profits, combined with the ease of smuggling and “ridiculous” tobacco smuggling laws that amount to what he calls a slap on the wrist, has led all sorts of criminals to use cigarettes as currency.
Friday, September 26, 2014
Mind your head. Well, we didn't have to wait long for that. More inter-faith outreach from the religion of peace.
Woman beheaded at Oklahoma workplace
While questioning the suspect's co-workers, investigators learned he had recently started trying to convert several employees to Islam, Lewis said. Moore police have asked the FBI to aid in the investigation and look into the man's background because of the nature of the attack, Lewis said.Johnson and the suspect were hospitalized and in stable condition Friday, Lewis said.Lewis said he does not yet know what charges will be filed, adding that police are waiting until the man is conscious to arrest him.
Suggested reading.
After one of my many presentations following my return from Rwanda, a Canadian Forces padre asked me how, after all I had seen and experienced, I could still believe in God. I answered that I know there is a God because in Rwanda I shook hands with the devil. I have seen him, I have smelled him and I have touched him. I know the devil exists, and therefore I know there is a God. -- Lieutenant-General Roméo Antonius Dallaire, Canadian commeander of the ill-fated UN peacekeeping mission in Rwanda, writing in Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda.
I am not a multi-culturalist, nor am I a moral relativist. I am a professed, if somewhat flawed, Christian. However, it struck me the other day in all the denunciations of the unrestrained violence being done in the name of the Muslim religion that some of the folks doing the denouncing had an imperfect understanding of their own religion's dark and bloody history. As a remedy to that, I would like to suggest a quick read of William Manchester's slim volume A World Lit Only by Fire: The Medieval Mind and the Renaissance.
Here is a pdf of the book available online.
Religions are sets of beliefs as practiced by man. That I am a believing Christian does not cause me to ignore the fact that professed Christians before me acted wholly contrary to the teaching of Christ. Sin is sin, murder is murder, rape is rape, evil is evil, regardless of which banner the Devil's disciples of the moment may fly. The fact also is that in the recent centuries, godless collectivism as practiced by governments of various stripes made murder on an industrial scale that dwarfs in size at least anything done over all of time in the name of God.
Still, Manchester reminds us that the Christian religion was perverted by men to do very anti-Christian evils in its name. And in some quarters it still is. Such knowledge should engender humility, and caution, for those of us who may be tempted to let our anger at evil suck us in to acting like the evil-doers we profess to fight.
Shalom.
As several post cards and email well-wishes I have received remind me, Rosh Hashanah is being celebrated in 2014 from sundown on Wednesday, September 24, to nightfall on today on September 26. I would particularly like to thank CY from Brooklyn for the card wishing me and those I love "a year of peace, health and happiness." The card came to me yesterday at a particular low point and I was touched and renewed by its simple sincerity. Thanks, CY and Shalom to you and yours too.
Why Holder Quit
The backstory of how Obama lost his ‘heat shield.’
There’s also at least one high-profile long-shot on the informal list being circulated inside Obama’s camp: former Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, who left Washington in 2013 to take over the massive University of California system, according to one Democrat with close ties to the White House.
See also: Clearest Sign Yet the GOP Will Take the Senate: Eric Holder to Resign
Thursday, September 25, 2014
You gotta be kidding. Some people never learn. Romney channels Adlai Stevenson.
Dead elephant party zombies stalk the earth, seeking amnesiacs who will vote for them.
Byron York writes that "Romney 2016 is for real." It would seem that Romney is channeling the ghost of Adlai Stevenson.
Stevenson was defeated in a landslide by Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower in the 1952 presidential election. In 1956 he was again the Democratic presidential nominee against Eisenhower, but was defeated in an even bigger landslide. He sought the Democratic presidential nomination for a third time in the election of 1960, but was defeated by Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts.
‘Everytown’ marks political debut by endorsing safe candidates
The Colorado endorsements all go to Democrats. As do those for Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, Minnesota (Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party), Nevada, New York, Oregon and Pennsylvania.
The other thing that’s immediately apparent is they are all Democrats, they are all “progressives,” and for the most part, they are either incumbents or in “safe” races. What’s also evident, particularly in governor races, is the Republicans have not fielded unabashedly “pro-gun” contestants in two out of Everytown’s three. So while gun owners in Connecticut may go with Tom Foley over Dannell Malloy, their main object is to get Malloy out. Ditto, in Colorado, where John Hickenlooper challenger Bob Beuaprez got a tepid 79 percent rating from the National Rifle Association. Perhaps that’s enough to induce gun owners to hold their noses and vote Republican, but it’s hardly the fire-in-the-belly inspiration needed to assure a championship game victory.
From Herschel Smith: Conspiracy Theories And Ideological Purity Among Preppers And Patriots
Herschel says, "Mike is nicer than I am." You could get arguments on that proposition from any number of people, including the Attorney General of the United States. ;-)
Wednesday, September 24, 2014
"We are building peace from within, and for that, you need disarmament."
Venezuela's Maduro launches civilian disarmament plan
Opposition activists have accused the Venezuelan government of hypocrisy. They allege that officials have armed "colectivos", pro-government groups which have clashed with anti-government protesters during demonstrations, while paying lip service to the disarmament plan. On Sunday Mr Maduro said his government "continued to pursue the dream, the utopia of a Venezuela in peace", and promised to build "peace with love, justice and a will to work".
Enter the conflicted dragon. Misadventure by military miscalculation? It appears that Chinese "command and control" isn't all that it should be.
Aren't they all? Aspiring tyrants, I mean. More along the lines of "Green is the new Red."
Robert Kennedy Jr., Aspiring Tyrant. He’d like to charge the Kochs with treason and send climate-change dissenters to jail.
The United States government, Kennedy lamented in an interview with Climate Depot, is not permitted by law to “punish” or to imprison those who disagree with him — and this, he proposed, is a problem of existential proportions. Were he to have his way, Kennedy admitted, he would cheer the prosecution of a host of “treasonous” figures — among them a number of unspecified “politicians”; those bêtes noires of the global Left, Kansas’s own Koch Brothers; “the oil industry and the Republican echo chamber”; and, for good measure, anybody else whose estimation of the threat posed by fossil fuels has provoked them into “selling out the public trust.” Those who contend that global warming “does not exist,” Kennedy claimed, are guilty of “a criminal offense — and they ought to be serving time for it.”
Tuesday, September 23, 2014
Been a rough last couple of days.
I'll have more later. I'm trying to finish the third part of my series on where to draw the line.
Obviously they all became career criminals out of deep-seated resentment of their parents for having given them such ridiculous, hard-to-spell names.
Edvis Miquem Galloway, Savon Khalif Hardaway, and Kalmeaice Kawanna Williams
3 Suspects Try to Rob Gun Seller With His Own [Unloaded] Gun, but End Up Getting Held at Gunpoint, Arrested
Brother Pratt puts his finger on the central truth of citizen disarmament.
Democrats Push Gun Control Because 'They're Afraid Of Getting Shot And They Ought To Be!'
"They clearly want to exercise power that, in their judgment, would cause enough push-back to stop them from doing what they're doing," Pratt said. "And I just said in a nice way that they're afraid of getting shot and they ought to be! That's what the Second Amendment is all about. They ought to be afraid of an armed people so that they don't get into a situation where they would actually provoke violence."
Amen, Brother Pratt.
Tribal warfare. Another anecdote of a collapsing civilization.
Thieves allegedly rob six victims in name of Michael Brown
A quote from the novel Malevil comes to mind:
Suddenly I realized something. What we were in the process of doing in Malevil, and quickly, very quickly now, since speed was the precondition of our survival now, was learning the art of war. The evidence was blindingly obvious. There was no longer any state to guard us. There was no order but our guns. And not only our guns, but our wiles. We, who at Easter, not so long ago, had no other concern but to win the Malejac local elections, were now in the process of inculcating in ourselves, one by one, the implacable laws of primitive warrior tribes.
Monday, September 22, 2014
Chinese Student Spies Overwhelm US
"In military affairs, quantity has a quality all its own." -- Clausewitz.
Intelligence agencies around the world typically regard China’s approach to spying as sloppy and unprofessional. While many other countries focus on stealth and finesse for espionage, China’s focus is on mass numbers. While regarded as unprofessional, China’s approach has also been extremely effective. The challenge posed by China comes down to a simple fact: it has too many spies for foreign intelligence agencies to keep track of.
The Days of Elijah. "These are the days of great trials -- Of famine and darkness and sword."
From Allen West comes this remarkable video of Marines at Camp Pendleton singing Days of Elijah in a worship service. West comments:
Oh boy, this here video is surely going to send the head chucklehead of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, Mikey Weinstein, into a apoplectic state of frothing hysteria. And you can imagine that the leadership of the Wisconsin-based Freedom from Religion Foundation is running about gnashing their teeth and tearing at their clothes. This video taken at Camp Pendleton shows U.S. Marines at a Christian worship service singing the upbeat Christian song, “Days of Elijah.” And as you will see, they are very enthusiastic about the song.
Here are the lyrics.
The lyrics explained here: The Story Behind Days of Elijah
Confident the regime will protect her, Lerner is arrogant and unapologetic.
And she wants you to feel sorry for her. Poor, poor, pitiful her.
Sunday, September 21, 2014
National Political Secret Police Find It Tough. Poor Babies. What's so tough about being SPLC's sock puppets?
Top-level turnover makes it harder for DHS to stay on top of evolving threats
The departures are a result of what employees widely describe as a dysfunctional work environment, abysmal morale, and the lure of private security companies paying top dollar that have proliferated in Washington since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The department’s terrorism intelligence arm, for example, has cycled through six directors during the Obama administration, decimating morale and contributing to months-long delays in releasing intelligence reports, according to interviews and government reports.
What's so tough about being SPLC's sock puppets?
Look out Elmer, they're coming for you, too. Courtesy of the great Oleg Volk
Regarding the latest push to ban "sniper rifles," Oleg Volk had already predicted it:
Saturday, September 20, 2014
Collectivist CT Gun Grabbers Endorse Malloy
Like this is a big surprise. Endorsing the power of the state to disarm and attack your fellow citizens.
“We stand for liberty and individual rights. They stand for taking our liberty one chunk at a time,” Wilson said. “These are the people the framers of the Constitution had in mind when they wrote the Constitution.”
No, these are the people the Founders had in mind when the Sons of Liberty went around tarring and feathering Tories.
The stupid bastards really are puzzled. Well, all I can say, is God bless Larry Pratt and GOA.
But, but, if you wish it, it just has to happen, right? Whatever Happened to Gun Control?
It certainly didn’t look like things would turn out this way. In the days after the shootings, almost everyone involved in the gun debate anticipated big changes. The National Rifle Association’s Wayne LaPierre may have blustered publicly against gun control, but as The New York Times later reported, the NRA’s top lobbyists were negotiating with the White House and Senate Democrats on background-check legislation under the assumption that it was inevitable. . . But persistent misinformation and agitation by far-right members of Congress and gun groups even more rigid than the NRA slowly doomed the effort. Republicans who said they’d support background-check legislation started to waver, often citing bogus fears of a national gun registry that the bill explicitly forbade. The NRA began feeling the heat from groups like Gun Owners of America, which urged a no-compromise approach, and its lobbyists dropped out of the negotiations. By the time the bill reached the Senate floor, everybody knew it wouldn’t pass. And with no bipartisan Senate bill on his desk, House Speaker John Boehner was free to never talk about reform again.
Friday, September 19, 2014
Thursday, September 18, 2014
Where to draw the line? Part Two. "When someone publicly announces his appetite for your liberty, property and life, you should believe him -- and act accordingly."
Judah walked among his brothers and fellow rebels and spoke to them of the thing for which they fought; “Oh my fellow soldiers, no other time remains more opportune than the present for courage and contempt of dangers; for if you now fight manfully, you may recover your liberty, which, as it is a thing of itself agreeable to all men, so it proves to be to us much more desirable, by its affording us the liberty of worshiping G-d.“Since therefore you are in such circumstances at present, you must either recover that liberty, and so regain a happy and blessed way of living, which is that according to our laws, and the customs of our country, or to submit to the most opprobrious sufferings; nor will any seed of your nation remain if you be beat in this battle. Fight therefore manfully; and suppose that you must die, though you do not fight; but believe, that besides such glorious rewards as those of the liberty of your country, of your laws, of your religion, you shall then obtain everlasting glory.“Prepare yourselves, therefore, and put yourselves into such an agreeable posture, that you may be ready to fight with the enemy as soon as it is day tomorrow morning.”
As I reposted last night, I asked this question six and a half years ago: "Where to draw the line?" This repost was motivated by some recent headlines and some from the distant past that I ran across in the past couple of days. If I could sum up the lessons of these disparate stories, it would be with a line that I have used many times over the years: "When someone publicly announces his appetite for your liberty, your property and your life, you should believe him -- and act accordingly."
That sentiment distills down into one sentence my essay from way back in 1999, What I Have Learned From the Twentieth Century.
I was reminded of that when David Codrea shared this link from the Rabbinical Council of America with me, entitled "2014 Resolution: Gun Violence in America," which declares that "the RCA favors restricting Americans’ easy access to weapons and ammunition and encourages all to desist from recreational activities that desensitize participants to killing, weaponry, and violence."
One wonders what Judah Maccabee would say to this resolution. Or this mother:
In a time when anti-Semitism is on the rise and European Jews are removing the Mezuzahs from their doors so that they can't be so easily identified by the new combination of Jihadi beheaders and Hitler's great grandchildren who want them dead, such disarmament advocacy is plainly suicidal. Again, I say, when someone publicly announces his appetite for your liberty, property and life, you should believe him -- and act accordingly.
A faithful reader recently drew my attention to a New York Times article from the 21 March 1933 edition. Unfortunately the NYT charges for access to its archives on-line and frankly I don't have the money to subscribe, so I put off reading it until I could get down to the Birmingham Public Library and view it on microfilm. In this case, though, my poverty paid off. For if I merely got the article alone, I would not have read the news of the day that accompanied it. And therein was the most important lesson.
The initial article of interest can be found on Page Ten of that day's NYT and it is entitled "Nazis Hunt Arms In Einstein Home."
Albert Einstein in 1933.
Berlin, March 20 -- Charging that Professor Albert Einstein had a huge quantity of arms and ammunition stored in his secluded home in Caputh, the National Socialists sent Brown Shirt men and policemen to search it today, but the nearest thing to arms they found was a bread knife.Professor Einstein's home, which for the present is empty, the professor being on his way back to Europe from the United States, was surrounded on all sides and one of the most perfect raids of recent German history was carried out. The outcome was a disappointment to those who have always regarded Professor Einstein's pacificst utterances as a mere pose.The elimination of Jews from responsible positions goes on . . .
Einstein's summer home in Caputh, circa 1929. The Nazis raided it for arms and found a bread knife.
Now this is a fascinating anecdote, to be sure. But to get to page ten, you have to scroll past the first nine pages of that day's edition and it was on the front page above the fold that other stories provided the background and the context of the smaller story -- and demonstrated the larger lesson.
The lead story was provided by the Times' Berlin correspondent, Guido Enderis. (Enderis, it should be noted, has been criticized by historians as being excessively pro-Nazi.)
REICHSTAG MEETING TODAY IS PREPARED TO GIVE HITLER FULL CONTROL AS DICTATORBerlin, March 20 -- It was announced tonight, on the eve of the convocation of the new Reichstag, that the Hitler government would ask it for dictatorial powers lasting until April 1, 1937, or until the replacement of the present Legislature by another.By the terms of the draft of an empowering act sent to the Reichstag tonight, that body is to be excluded from legislation unless the Cabinet invites its cooperation and the government is to have the right to promulgate laws and decrees outside the channels prescribed by the Constitution even if they conflict with its provisions. . .
The Reichstag Fire had happened on the night of the 27th of February and the regime made maximum use of the panic occasioned by it.
What this meant in practical terms was made plain by an accompanying story, also on Page One:
NAZIS TO PUT BAVARIAN FOES IN CONCENTRATION CAMP; 'REPUBLICAN ARMY' LEADERS TO BE HELD WITH REDSMunich, March 20 -- Chief of Police Himmler of Munich today informed newspaper men here that the first of several concentration camps will be established near this city soon for the detention of thousands of Communists, Marxists and leaders of the Reichbanner organization.He explained that in the long run it would be impossible to hold in jail those who would be arrested and to release them would only mean renewed agitation. Such measures as were planned, he added, must be carried out without any petty scruples.He also announced that the Socialist press in Bavaria would remain suppressed until April 4.In the process of putting Bavaria under the control of the government at Berlin there has been a sweeping campaign against all the leaders of the Left parties and reports have indicated that the arrests have run into thousands. In particular the new authorities undertook to break up the Reichsbanner, the army formed by the republican elements as an offset to the monarchists and the Nazi brown shirts. This organization has been ordered dissolved throughout Germany.The problem of keeping the vast number of political prisoners led Dr. Wilhelm Frick, Minister of the Interior, to announce recently that they would be put in concentration camps and kept at hard labor.
Heinrich Himmler in 1933.
In the same issue was a first-person account of the atrocities being carried out by the Nazis against Jews by the novelist Lion Feuchtwanger.
TERROR IN GERMANY AMAZES NOVELISTLION FEUCHTWANGER FEARS CIVIL WAR IF VIOLENCE IS CONTINUED IN REICHSAYS REGIME HOLDS BACKAuthor Believes World Will Never Know How Many Jews and Others Have Been SlainBODIES FOUND EVERY DAYRed Cross Workers Are Prevented, He Declares, From Aiding Those Injured In Attacks.Bern, Switzerland, March 20 -- Immediately before I left America, and shortly before the German elections, I told my anxious friends abroad that any idea of pogroms in Germany was unthinkable. President Von Hindenburg's name and the solid foundations of German culture were pledges against such occurrences.During my journey across the Atlantic we received disturbing wireless reports regarding acts of violence against the Jews. These seemed incomprehensible, but in Paris I met the first refugees from Germany. The stories they related were dreadful. The told of some things compared to which the reports of the atrocities during the war paled.I found it hard to believe these accounts, although I knew that the people who told them were trustworthy in every respect. In no way were they radical. They were democrats and members of the Catholic Centre parties -- pacifists who all their lives had worked in favor of political mediation and negotiation and men who hated all forms of exaggeration.However, they declared they had seen, with their own eyes, how attempts had been made to throw people out of underground trains in motion simply because they looked like Jews. They had seen people pulled from motor cars and beaten -- women and young folk too -- because they were thought to be Jewish.These refugees had also heard despairing stories of women whose husbands and sons had been dragged out of bed and inhumanly beaten and about whom nothing more had been heard or seen. . .
Lion Feuchtwanger, 1933.
Feuchtwanger's account is long and filled with the very real atrocities which were happening at the time, but it was these concluding paragraphs that struck me most forcefully:
I assume that the storm troopers alone are responsible for all they have done -- that must surely be so. It is certain that President von Hindenburg has no idea of the outrages. Probably Chancellor Hitler, too, has had nothing to do with these things personally. And Minister Goering can scarcely be suspected of complicity.The gravity of the situation lies in the fact that the government clearly no longer possesses any authority over its so-called police organization.The unfortunate thing is that these people have taken the former wild speeches of Hitler too literally. They were promised that when the revolution began the golden age would set in at once. Now they want the heads which they had been promised they would see rolling on the ground. They want lampposts decorated with dead bodies. The reult is pogroms such as Germany as not seen since the Jewish persecutions of the fourteenth century.I greatly pray that the government may succeed in calling a halt before the ill treatment, the torture, the slaughter of the thousands of Socialists, Catholics and Jews lead to a civil war such as the world has never seen.
I had to read that over three times before I was fully convinced that Feuchtwanger wasn't writing it tongue in cheek. No, he really believed that these atrocities represented a government out of control rather than one fully in control of what its minions were doing. I suppose he was trying to convince himself more than the audience he was writing for. Yet the "civil war" that Feuchtwanger prophesied was made impossible because by the time he wrote this for the Times, the Reichsbanner, the militia formations pledged to defend the Weimar Constitution, were already in jail and headed for concentration camps, dead or in hiding.
Of course we now know that von Hindenburg, in whom Feuchtwanger put so much confidence, knew exactly what was going on. Although ailing, von Hindenburg wouldn't die until August of 1934. Yet the novelist certainly shouldn't have had any illusions about Hitler's intentions after reading Main Kampf. And as we see from the article quoting Himmler above, one had only to read the newspapers of the day to see which way the wind was blowing. Yet Feuchtwanger clung to his illusions because he desperately needed to. Such thoroughgoing evil was frankly beyond his knowledge and experience. And the Nazis had just begun. It would take twelve years and tens of millions of dead before they danced the executioner's jig themselves.
YET WE KNOW WITH PERFECT HISTORICAL HINDSIGHT THAT SUCH THINGS ARE POSSIBLE WITH ANY REGIME, INCLUDING THE ONE WHICH CURRENTLY RULES OVER US IN CONTRAVENTION OF THE CONSTITUTION AND EVERY UNDERSTANDING THAT THE FOUNDERS HAD OF HOW THE GOVERNMENT THEY CRAFTED WAS SUPPOSED TO WORK.
No, we don't have the excuse of Feuchtwanger's wishful thinking. And so, we must ask ourselves the same question that the Reichsbanner men waited too long to answer -- Where do we draw the line? I'll try to answer that in Part Three. But remember, when someone publicly announces his appetite for your liberty, property and life, you should believe him -- and act accordingly.
Wednesday, September 17, 2014
Where to draw the line?
Over six and a half years ago, I wrote this piece drawing on the German experience and asking the question "Where to draw the line?" I subtitled it, "More along the line of grim thinking inspired by government misconduct in the Olofson case." I present it here because the question is still pointedly relevant, as another post that I plan for tomorrow will further demonstrate.
When the 23rd Regiment was finally back in Boston after the ordeal of April 19, adjutant Frederick Mackenzie wrote in his diary, "I believe the fact is, that General Gage was not only much deceived with respect to the quantity of military stores said to be collected at Concord, but had no conception the rebels would have opposed the King's troops in the manner they did." -- General John Galvin, The Minutemen, Pergamon-Brasseys, 1989, page 244.
Where to draw the line?
"America is at that awkward stage. It's too late to work within the system, but too early to shoot the bastards." - Claire Wolfe, 101 Things to Do 'Til the Revolution
Libertarian Wolfe made her famous observation above in the mid-nineties. Now here we are more than ten years later, even more isolated and politically disenfranchised, and we must ask the question: how far do we have to go to get past "awkward?"
History never exactly repeats itself and thus is an imperfect guide. Studying history "we see through a glass, darkly." Still, there are patterns in history that deserve our close attention, so we may better understand how to act in the present and to enable us to better predict the future. Through history, we understand that no idea, bad or good, ever truly dies. We are also shown that people, being human, repeat the mistakes of their ancestors, over and over again. Indeed, there is no one blinder than a historical amnesiac.
Flag of the Reichsbanner, the German military organization sworn to defend the Weimar Republic.
So when we consider the question suggested by Claire Wolfe, that is, when are we past the awkward stage and into the day of "shooting the bastards," we must consult history for examples to guide us. I offer firstly a lesson in waiting too long from William Sheridan Allen's outstanding study, The Nazi Seizure of Power: The Experience of a Single German Town (Franklin Watts/Grolier, 1984):
And yet, one has to ask the question, what happened to those who had sworn resistance? What happened to the Reichsbanner, which had repeatedly asserted, in the years before Hitler came to power, that when the expected Nazi coup came they would be able to defend the Republic? In Northeim, at least, the Republic was destroyed without a single blow struck in its defense. The Reichsbanner, with all its plans for instant mobilization, had its members struck down one by one, its leaders imprisoned, beaten, hounded from their jobs and their homes without any resistance from the organization as a whole.
Perhaps the basic reason for this was that there was no Nazi coup d'etat. Instead there was a series of quasi-legal actions over a period of at least six months, no one of which by itself constituted a revolution, but the sum of which transformed Germany from a republic to a dictatorship. The problem was where to draw the line. But by the time that line could be clearly drawn, the revolution was a fait accompli, the potential organs of resistance had been individually smashed, and organized resistance was no longer possible. In short, the splendid organization was to no avail; in the actual course of events it was every man for himself. (Allen, p. 191)
The Reichsbanner parades past the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, 1929.
Even after reading Allen's work, I have often wondered why the German opposition just laid down without a fight. Back in the nineties, I was talking to Aaron Zelman of Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership, and one of us (I recall it was him, he thinks it was me) made this observation: "If every Jewish and anti-Nazi family in Germany had possessed a Mauser rifle, 20 rounds of 7.92mm ball and the will to use it, Adolf Hitler would have been an obscure footnote to the history of the Weimar Republic."
True enough, whoever said it. But as Grant Hammond observed about Colonel John Boyd's seminal theories of warfare:
"There is another trinity in Boyd’s strategic catechism as well. It is a concern for what he lumps together as moral-mental-physical aspects of opponents. Most definitions of war define them as contests in physical violence. Boyd sees them mainly as moral struggles won as much by mental as physical prowess. But he sees the complex—moral-mental-physical—as a single entity, a synthesis that can be broken down analytically but must be understood as a composite whole. It matches another Trinitarian composite, that of people first, ideas second and things third. This happens to be the opposite of the way most militaries approach problem solving by focusing on technology, platforms and weaponry first, ideas about their employment second and people—who are largely interchangeable and ultimately, are expendable—third. This way of thinking has little utility in Boyd’s Way and in fact, may be the seed of many a defeat." (Source: Grant T. Hammond, The Essential Boyd).
Many Americans, especially us small "r" republicans, take heart when we recall that the American citizenry possesses more small arms than most of the world's armies put together. And as Clausewitz observed, in military affairs quantity DOES have a quality all its own (just ask any Korean War veteran about his first experience with a Chinese human wave assault).
Still, as Napoleon insisted, "The moral is to the physical as three is to one." We cannot be protected by our possession of a hundred million rifles if we lack the will use them. Iraq was an armed society, yet the Saddam dictatorship had little trouble tyrannizing that country for decades. And it cannot be doubted that there are many American gunowners who would, at the first command of an American tyranny, turn in their weapons simply because they are "law-abiding" people who "don't want any trouble" -- simply because, in fact, they have forgotten what it is to be free. They have grown used to doing what the government tells them to do. And perhaps that was the problem with the Weimar republicans:
The Northeimer Reichsbanner itself was ready to fight in 1933. All it needed was an order from Berlin. Had it been given, Northeimer's Reichsbanner members would have carried out the tested plan they had worked on so long -- to obtain and distribute weapons and to crush the Nazis. But (the local Reichsbanner) would not act on its own. The leaders felt that single acts would come to grief, would possibly compromise the chance when it finally did come, and would, in any event, be a betrayal of discipline. They felt that their only hope was in common action, all together, all over the Reich. Hadn't (their national leaders) said that only a counterattack should be made? So they waited and prayed for the order to come, but it never did. And while they waited the Nazis began tracking them down, one by one. (Allen, p. 191)
The Germans, wholly indoctrinated in obeying orders, were incapable of acting without them. Because their would-be tyrants represented "the government" and cloaked their wolfish actions in "legal" sheepskin, because their own "leaders" could not or would not give the order, they all ended up in a concentration camp -- leaders and followers -- without ever having struck a blow. I am again reminded of Boyd's "moral-mental-physical" dynamic by this observation of Allen's:
"This situation, where even heroism was denied the men of the democratic Left, came about in no small measure because of the failure of the Social Democrats to understand the nature of Nazism. Just as their basic premise in the years before Hitler came to power was the erroneous assumption that the Nazis were essentially Putschists who could not possibly attract a mass following, so their basic premise after Hitler came to power was the equally erroneous assumption that his would be a government similar to the others of the Weimar period." (Ibid, p. 192)
Because of their inability to see the enemy for what he really was (and if ever there was an enemy who delighted in shouting his intentions to the rafters it was Hitler) they went straight from the "awkward stage" to the concentration camps without ever firing a shot.
Die Garde der Republik marching song of the Reichsbanner.
Thinking and Acting before Feeling
Now, contrast the behavior of the Germans to that of our Founding Fathers. This is best illustrated by reading Gordon S. Wood's The Creation of the American Republic, 1776 - 1787:
In the American Revolution, Wood wrote, "there was none of the legendary tyranny of history that had so often driven desperate people into rebellion. The Americans were not an oppressed people; they had no crushing imperial shackles to throw off. In fact, the Americans knew they were probably freer and less burdened with cumbersome feudal and hierarchical restraints than any part of mankind in the eighteenth century. To its victims, the Tories, the Revolution was truly incomprehensible. Never in history, said Daniel Leonard, had there been so much rebellion with so 'little real cause.' . . . The objective social reality scarcely seemed capable of explaining a revolution . . .
As early as 1775 Edmund Burke had noted in the House of Commons that the colonists' intensive study of law and politics had made them acutely inquisitive and sensitive about their liberties. Where the people of other countries had invoked principles only after they had endured 'an actual grievance,' the Americans, said Burke, were anticipating their grievances and resorting to principles even before they actually suffered. 'They augur misgovernment at a distance and snuff the approach of tyranny in every tainted breeze.' The crucial question in the colonists' minds, wrote John Dickerson in 1768, was 'not, what evil HAS ACTUALLY ATTENDED particular measures -- but what evil, in the nature of things, IS LIKELY TO ATTEND them.' Because 'nations, in general, are not apt to THINK until they FEEL, . . .therefore nations in general have lost their liberty.' But not the Americans, as the Abbe Raynal observed. They were "an 'enlightened people' who knew their rights and the limits of power and who, unlike any people before them, aimed to think before they felt."
(Source: Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787, UNC Press, 1969, pp. 3-5)
The Founders were people who believed in "preserving the spirit of resistance." To take Abbe Raynal's words to their conclusion, the Founders aimed to think AND act before they felt. Unlike the Germans, their "awkward stage" ended at Lexington green, and ultimately led to liberty.
In the light of recent events such as the Olofson case, it seems plain that our own "awkward stage" may be perilously close to drawing to an end. There are those who still insist that such unconstitutional outrages perpetrated under color of law deserve nothing more than verbal condemnation or further attempts at legal redress in a "justice" system rigged against us (as if these thugs pay attention to the law anyway). Used to inaction and afraid of even voicing the threat of justifiable self-defense, these timid souls, these "summer soldiers and sunshine patriots," would have us wait for true tyranny before acting.
This was not the way of the Founders. They understood that tyranny is best strangled in its unholy infancy, before it becomes a raging beast. They understood the threat, they prepared to meet it and, in the end, they defeated it. The Germans of the 1930s did not, and they were devoured.
I say we would do well to emulate the Founders rather than the Germans, to think and ACT before we feel, when it will be too late. This is important not only for those Americans who wish to remain free, but for those on the other side who unthinkingly seek to rob us of our freedoms and for those in the middle who (ignoring the Law of Unintended Consequences) sit idly by, content to watch the destruction of the American republic on television while thinking it has nothing to do with, and can have no effect upon, them.
If we small "r" republicans do nothing else, we should let the rogue elements of our own government know that in addition to outnumbering them, we still preserve the spirit of resistance, despite have been marginalized politically by the two major parties. Perhaps, if everyone understands that, the Redcoats (now wearing black raid gear) will not once again blunder and unknowingly march out from Boston into an unexpected but perfectly predictable butchery contest.
By our words, our preparations, our training and our actions we, the armed citizenry of the Republic of the United States of America, still have the opportunity to convince them of our unyielding determination to remain free. It may be our last best hope to preserve uninterrupted both our God-given liberties and the domestic peace we have come to love too much. While it is better to be "awkward" than to be dead, it is better still to die fighting than to be enslaved without a fight.
Just ask the Germans of the Weimar Republic.
So THINK and ACT before you FEEL. The Founders did.
Taking this morning to reassess.
Folks, I'll be honest. It's been a struggle lately. I am faced with some tough resource choices in my plans for Colorado and Connecticut, the black dog has returned and is perched upon my chest and I continue to struggle with my health. I'm taking the morning off (at least) to do some serious thinking about my responsibilities -- and my duties -- to you, my family and the larger struggle. Keep me in your prayers.
Tuesday, September 16, 2014
Herschel Smith on "The Worst Gun Bill Ever."
Well, there are many bad gun laws, and it’s hard to pick out the worst one. But it’s seems true that the recent surrender on the assault weapons ban by the anti-gunners is a misdirect. It isn’t what they’re really interested in. This is what they really want.
The only way we can truly be safe and prevent further gun violence is to ban civilian ownership of all guns. That means everything. No pistols, no revolvers, no semiautomatic or automatic rifles. No bolt action. No breaking actions or falling blocks. Nothing. This is the only thing that we can possibly do to keep our children safe from both mass murder and common street violence.Unfortunately, right now we can’t. The political will is there, but the institutions are not. Honestly, this is a good thing. If we passed a law tomorrow banning all firearms, we would have massive noncompliance. What we need to do is establish the regulatory and informational institutions first. This is how we do it. The very first thing we need is national registry. We need to know where the guns are, and who has them.
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