William Diamond's Drum, Part Three: Gandhi with a gun. Resisting the Intolerable Acts. "If you are not prepared to take life, you must often be prepared for lives to be lost in some other way."

Had the Japanese got as far as India, Gandhi's theories of "passive resistance" would have floated down the Ganges River with his bayoneted, beheaded carcass. -- Mike Vanderboegh.

Today, William Diamond's drum again beats the long roll. We do not seek a civil war, but one is being thrust upon us. If we do not now stand, then when will we? We must defy these intolerable acts, whatever their source, and challenge the collectivist revolutionaries to come work their will upon us if they do not like it -- and they most assuredly won't. -- "Can you hear it yet? The Long Roll of William Diamond's Drum," Sipsey Street, 15 February 2013.

The Intolerable Acts -- the new nightmare citizen disarmament laws -- are gradually assuming corporeal form, both in the District of Criminals and various state houses around the country. The long roll of William Diamond's drum is once more heard in the land.

In Part Two of this series I concluded:

When these intolerable acts -- state or federal -- are enacted, we have the duty to defy them in armed civil disobedience. Those who do so should remember 19 April 1775 as a perfect example of what can happen when you defy a tyranny. History may not exactly repeat itself, but we darned well had better be ready to respond if it does.

And for what will we fight? Why the right to be left alone by an oppressive government which seeks -- and has in large measure succeeded -- to overthrow the Founders' Republic. We will fight, in a word, for liberty. H.L. Mencken said it best, I think:

I believe that liberty is the only genuinely valuable thing that men have invented, at least in the field of government, in a thousand years. I believe that it is better to be free than to be not free, even when the former is dangerous and the latter safe. I believe that the finest qualities of man can flourish only in free air – that progress made under the shadow of the policeman's club is false progress, and of no permanent value. I believe that any man who takes the liberty of another into his keeping is bound to become a tyrant, and that any man who yields up his liberty, in however slight the measure, is bound to become a slave. . . .

Liberty in itself, to be sure, cannot bring in the millennium. It cannot abolish the inherent weaknesses of man – an animal but lately escaped from the jungle. It cannot take the place of intelligence, courage, honor. But the free man is at least able to be intelligent, courageous and honorable if the makings are in him. Nothing stands in the way of his highest functioning. He may go as far as nature intended him to go, and maybe a step or two beyond. Free, he may still be dull, timorous and untrustworthy. He may be shiftless and worthless. But it will not be against his will; it will not be in spite of himself. Free, he will be able to make the most of every virtue that is actually in him, and he will live and die under the kind of government that he wants and deserves. -- H.L. Mencken, “Why Liberty?”, Chicago Tribune, January 30, 1927.

We neither want nor deserve this government. It is anathema to the Founders' ideals and to our own natural, inalienable, God-given rights to life, liberty and property. We must and will defy its diktats. But how shall that resistance be carried out?

There are those in the so-called "gun rights movement" who believe that these intolerable acts are, well, tolerable. That just because that they are tyranny wrapped in the cloak of "law" means that we must obey them, or keep our heads down and "resist" them quietly, privately. Some folks I have talked with yearn for a non-violent way to do this. I sympathize with them -- but I do not agree. Perhaps it is because, having been a collectivist in my youth I see the nature of the beast more clearly -- the lies of the tyrants are more obvious, the smiles more clearly insincere, the slippery slope of universal firearm registration more plain to see.

We must peacefully protest while we can, certainly. The political fights are not yet done. But we must not deceive ourselves that these people can be deterred by Gandhian peaceful civil disobedience. Such tactics depend upon two things -- an independent press that is not in the tank for the regime and a regime that is not blindly arrogant and ignorant of its -- and its bureaucrats -- own long-term survival. Neither is true today. What shall we appeal to? "World opinion?" The international elites wouldn't even waste crocodile tears at our utter extinction. We are on our own, folks. Ourselves alone.

Those who point to the Civil Rights movement as a template for our own resistance also overlook the fact that the "non-violence" of the movement was never all that non-violent in toto. Martin Luther King and other "non-violence" advocates were only able to sleep soundly because they were guarded by the armed black militia, The Deacons for Defense and Justice. The federal government did not get aroused to send the FBI aggressively into the South to investigate Klan murders until the prospect of race war -- on the back roads of the South and in the cities of the North -- loomed larger and larger. Without the threat of violence, "non-violence" would never have had a chance.

Gandhi, then, was an historical anomaly. A magnificent one to be sure, but wholly a product of the opportunities provided by, and the weaknesses of, the British Raj. As George Orwell wrote in his "Reflections on Gandhi" (1949):

At about the time when (Gandhi's) autobiography first appeared I remember reading its opening chapters in the ill-printed pages of some Indian newspaper. They made a good impression on me, which Gandhi himself at that time did not. The things that one associated with him - home-spun cloth, "soul forces" and vegetarianism - were unappealing, and his medievalist program was obviously not viable in a backward, starving, over-populated country. It was also apparent that the British were making use of him, or thought they were making use of him. Strictly speaking, as a Nationalist, he was an enemy, but since in every crisis he would exert himself to prevent violence - which, from the British point of view, meant preventing any effective action whatever - he could be regarded as "our man." In private this was sometimes cynically admitted. The attitude of the Indian millionaires was similar. Gandhi called upon them to repent, and naturally they preferred him to the Socialists and Communists who, given the chance, would actually have taken their money away. How reliable such calculations are in the long run is doubtful; as Gandhi himself says, "in the end deceivers deceive only themselves"; but at any rate the gentleness with which he was nearly always handled was due partly to the feeling that he was useful. The British Conservatives only became really angry with him when, as in 1942, he was in effect turning his non-violence against a different conqueror. . .

However, Gandhi's pacifism can be separated to some extent from his other teachings. Its motive was religious, but he claimed also for it that it was a definitive technique, a method, capable of producing desired political results. Gandhi's attitude was not that of most Western pacifists. Satyagraha, first evolved in South Africa, was a sort of non-violent warfare, a way of defeating the enemy without hurting him and without feeling or arousing hatred. It entailed such things as civil disobedience, strikes, lying down in front of railway trains, enduring police charges without running away and without hitting back, and the like. Gandhi objected to "passive resistance" as a translation of Satyagraha: in Gujarati, it seems, the word means "firmness in the truth." In his early days Gandhi served as a stretcher-bearer on the British side in the Boer War, and he was prepared to do the same again in the war of 1914-18. Even after he had completely abjured violence he was honest enough to see that in war it is usually necessary to take sides. He did not - indeed, since his whole political life centred round a struggle for national independence, he could not - take the sterile and dishonest line of pretending that in every war both sides are exactly the same and it makes no difference who wins. Nor did he, like most Western pacifists, specialize in avoiding awkward questions. In relation to the late war, one question that every pacifist had a clear obligation to answer was: "What about the Jews? Are you prepared to see them exterminated? If not, how do you propose to save them without resorting to war?" I must say that I have never heard, from any Western pacifist, an honest answer to this question, though I have heard plenty of evasions, usually of the "you're another" type. But it so happens that Gandhi was asked a somewhat similar question in 1938 and that his answer is on record in Mr. Louis Fischer's Gandhi and Stalin. According to Mr. Fischer, Gandhi's view was that the German Jews ought to commit collective suicide, which "would have aroused the world and the people of Germany to Hitler's violence." After the war he justified himself: the Jews had been killed anyway, and might as well have died significantly. One has the impression that this attitude staggered even so warm an admirer as Mr. Fischer, but Gandhi was merely being honest. If you are not prepared to take life, you must often be prepared for lives to be lost in some other way. When, in 1942, he urged non-violent resistance against a Japanese invasion, he was ready to admit that it might cost several million deaths.

At the same time there is reason to think that Gandhi, who after all was born in 1869, did not understand the nature of totalitarianism and saw everything in terms of his own struggle against the British government. The important point here is not so much that the British treated him forbearingly as that he was always able to command publicity. As can be seen from the phrase quoted above, he believed in "arousing the world," which is only possible if the world gets a chance to hear what you are doing. It is difficult to see how Gandhi's methods could be applied in a country where opponents of the regime disappear in the middle of the night and are never heard of again. Without a free press and the right of assembly, it is impossible not merely to appeal to outside opinion, but to bring a mass movement into being, or even to make your intentions known to your adversary. Is there a Gandhi in Russia at this moment? And if there is, what is he accomplishing? The Russian masses could only practise civil disobedience if the same idea happened to occur to all of them simultaneously, and even then, to judge by the history of the Ukraine famine, it would make no difference. But let it be granted that non-violent resistance can be effective against one's own government, or against an occupying power: even so, how does one put it into practise internationally? Gandhi's various conflicting statements on the late war seem to show that he felt the difficulty of this. Applied to foreign politics, pacifism either stops being pacifist or becomes appeasement. Moreover the assumption, which served Gandhi so well in dealing with individuals, that all human beings are more or less approachable and will respond to a generous gesture, needs to be seriously questioned. It is not necessarily true, for example, when you are dealing with lunatics. Then the question becomes: Who is sane? Was Hitler sane? And is it not possible for one whole culture to be insane by the standards of another? And, so far as one can gauge the feelings of whole nations, is there any apparent connection between a generous deed and a friendly response? Is gratitude a factor in international politics?

No, it is not. Neither will it be for us, now, with our own self-styled "government." Our opponents, it is becoming clearer, wish us dead, or at least silenced. They cloak that essential truth with a bodyguard of lies. They believe, truly believe, that if they win the political argument in a rigged game in which both political parties participate that that will be the end of it -- they will have won and we will have lost. They do not respect us because we do not respect ourselves. Put another way, they do not respect us because they do not fear us as the Founders intended. Yet if we truly have the courage of our convictions and engage in armed civil disobedience, they will certainly come to fear us.

Mencken said, "I believe that any man who takes the liberty of another into his keeping is bound to become a tyrant, and that any man who yields up his liberty, in however slight the measure, is bound to become a slave."

This much I know: If you do not consent to your own enslavement, it is time for armed civil disobedience of these intolerable acts.

I, for one, do NOT consent.

Pacifist horsecrap on KABA; Orwell rebuts: "Despotic governments can stand ‘moral force’ till the cows come home; what they fear is physical force."

George Orwell broadcasting to India on BBC, 1942. Gandhi denounced him as "pro-imperialist," saying that the Indian people could overwhelm the Imperial Japanese Army with "passive resistance" and still win their independence.

Found this link on KABA, entitled Without Firing A Single Shot: Voluntaryist Resistance and Societal Defense by Carl Watner.

Here is an excerpt:

There are many advantages of nonviolent civilian-based defense. For one thing, a nonviolent army is not limited to the physically fit. Children, seniors, people of every age and condition, even the infirm, are capable of refusing to do what they are told to do. For another thing, even though suffering and death are an inevitable part of any social struggle, nonviolent resistance minimizes both the numbers of casualties and the amount of destruction. Another advantage of nonviolent resistance is that there is no such thing as final defeat, so long as a few people exist whose minds and spirit are not bent to the will of the ruler. For example "[a]fter more than forty years the Tibetans continue to resist the Chinese military occupation. ... [I]f the will to resist is maintained ... the defense cannot be defeated."

300,000 dead Chinese demonstrate the efficacy of non-violent resistance during the rape of Nanking, 1937.

This is the reply I left on KABA:

Comment by: Mike Vanderboegh (6/22/2009) This is just so much historical horseshit it cannot be overstated. Collectivists are not deterred by moral suasion -- THEY HAVE NO FRIGGING MORALS and they will kill anybody, ANYBODY, who gets in their way. See George Orwell's comments on pacifism. If the Germans or the Japanese had made it to India, Gandhi would have been food for worms in 24 hours. Collectivism's appetite for those who resist it is insatiable and can only be discouraged by what they fear most-- their own deaths. Anyone who tells you different is selling something.

Japanese are so over-awed by Chinese passive resistance they stage a beheading contest in appreciation. Nanking, 1937.

And here is what I meant by Orwell's comments on pacifism, from The Partisan Review magazine, London, August-September 1942 issue, entitled: ‘Pacifism and the War’

"Children, seniors, people of every age and condition, even the infirm, are capable of refusing to do what they are told to do." Yup, worked out great for these Chinese children. Nanking, 1937.

Pacifism is objectively pro-Fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side you automatically help that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, ‘he that is not with me is against me’. The idea that you can somehow remain aloof from and superior to the struggle, while living on food which British sailors have to risk their lives to bring you, is a bourgeois illusion bred of money and security. Mr Savage remarks that ‘according to this type of reasoning, a German or Japanese pacifist would be “objectively pro-British”.’ But of course he would be! That is why pacifist activities are not permitted in those countries (in both of them the penalty is, or can be, beheading) while both the Germans and the Japanese do all they can to encourage the spread of pacifism in British and American territories. The Germans even run a spurious ‘freedom’ station which serves out pacifist propaganda indistinguishable from that of the P.P.U. They would stimulate pacifism in Russia as well if they could, but in that case they have tougher babies to deal with. In so far as it takes effect at all, pacifist propaganda can only be effective against those countries where a certain amount of freedom of speech is still permitted; in other words it is helpful to totalitarianism.

Comfort Women. Chinese victims of Japanese mass rape. Nonviolent resistance worked out real well for them, too. Nanking, 1937.

I am not interested in pacifism as a ‘moral phenomenon’. If Mr Savage and others imagine that one can somehow ‘overcome’ the German army by lying on one’s back, let them go on imagining it, but let them also wonder occasionally whether this is not an illusion due to security, too much money and a simple ignorance of the way in which things actually happen. As an ex-Indian civil servant, it always makes me shout with laughter to hear, for instance, Gandhi named as an example of the success of non-violence. As long as twenty years ago it was cynically admitted in Anglo-Indian circles that Gandhi was very useful to the British government. So he will be to the Japanese if they get there. Despotic governments can stand ‘moral force’ till the cows come home; what they fear is physical force.

"A nonviolent army is not limited to the physically fit." You can even do it without your head! Nanking, 1937.

Gandhi even wrote a pamphlet in 1942 about how the Indians should greet the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere called HOW TO MEET A JAPANESE INVASION by Mirabehn (his female English secretary) and MK Gandhi, 1942. It laid out the ways Indians could "in good conscience" collaborate with the Imperial Japanese Army.

Had the Japanese got as far as India. Gandhi's theories of "passive resistance" would have floated down the Ganges River with his bayoneted, beheaded carcass.

"If each of us carried a gun . . "

I have received this today from Dan Gifford, who forwards the original op-ed as submitted by British author Richard Munday and the way it appears in the London Times immediately below. As he says:

"You can make your own judgments about the Times' editing decisions. In any case, my good friend and Second Amendment rights authority Don Kates characterizes Munday's writing as "of both great importance and enormous force -- the force of common sense on a subject on which the received wisdom of orthodox American (and British) thought is garbage: The mere fact that such ideas used to be unthinkable in England highlights the importance of this piece," Kates says. At the risk of overt repetition, I would again like to thank my ancestors for leaving Britain 400 years ago.

-Dan Gifford"



Think tank: If each of us carried a gun . . .
. . . we could help to combat terrorism

By Richard Munday

Co-author and editor of Guns & Violence: The Debate Before Lord Cullen

The Sunday Times

December 7, 2008




The firearms massacres that have periodically caused shock and horror around the world have been dwarfed by the Mumbai shootings, in which a handful of gunmen left some 500 people killed or wounded.

For anybody who still believed in it, the Mumbai shootings exposed the myth of “gun control”. India had some of the strictest firearms laws in the world, going back to the Indian Arms Act of 1878, by which Britain had sought to prevent a recurrence of the Indian Mutiny.

The guns used in last week’s Bombay massacre were all “prohibited weapons” under Indian law, just as they are in Britain. In this country we have seen the irrelevance of such bans (handgun crime, for instance, doubled here within five years of the prohibition of legal pistol ownership), but the largely drug-related nature of most extreme violence here has left most of us with a sheltered awareness of the threat. We have not yet faced a determined and broad-based attack.

The Mumbai massacre also exposed the myth that arming the police force guarantees security. Sebastian D’Souza, a picture editor on the Mumbai Mirror who took some of the dramatic pictures of the assault on the Chhatrapati Shivaji railway station, was angered to find India’s armed police taking cover and apparently failing to engage the gunmen.


In Britain we might recall the prolonged failure of armed police to contain the Hungerford killer, whose rampage lasted more than four hours, and who in the end shot himself. In Dunblane, too, it was the killer who ended his own life: even at best, police response is almost always belated when gunmen are on the loose. One might think, too, of the McDonald’s massacre in San Ysidro, California, in 1984, where the Swat team waited for their leader (who was held up in a traffic jam)while 21 unarmed diners were murdered.

Rhetoric about standing firm against terrorists aside, in Britain we have no more legal deterrent to prevent an armed assault than did the people of Mumbai, and individually we would be just as helpless as victims. The Mumbai massacre could happen in London tomorrow; but probably it could not have happened to Londoners 100 years ago.

In January 1909 two such anarchists, lately come from an attempt to blow up the president of France, tried to commit a robbery in north London, armed with automatic pistols. Edwardian Londoners, however, shot back – and the anarchists were pursued through the streets by a spontaneous hue-and-cry. The police, who could not find the key to their own gun cupboard, borrowed at least four pistols from passers-by, while other citizens armed with revolvers and shotguns preferred to use their weapons themselves to bring the assailants down.

Today we are probably more shocked at the idea of so many ordinary Londoners carrying guns in the street than we are at the idea of an armed robbery. But the world of Conan Doyle’s Dr Watson, pocketing his revolver before he walked the London streets, was real. The arming of the populace guaranteed rather than disturbed the peace.

That armed England existed within living memory; but it is now so alien to our expectations that it has become a foreign country. Our image of an armed society is conditioned instead by America: or by what we imagine we know about America. It is a skewed image, because (despite the Second Amendment) until recently in much of the US it has been illegal to bear arms outside the home or workplace; and therefore only people willing to defy the law have carried weapons.

In the past two decades the enactment of “right to carry” legislation in the majority of states, and the issue of permits for the carrying of concealed firearms to citizens of good repute, has brought a radical change. Opponents of the right to bear arms predicted that right to carry would cause blood to flow in the streets, but the reverse has been true: violent crime in America has plummeted.

There are exceptions: Virginia Tech, the site of the 2007 massacre of 32 people, was one local “gun-free zone” that forbade the bearing of arms even to those with a licence to carry.

In Britain we are not yet ready to recall the final liberty of the subject listed by William Blackstone in his Commentaries on the Laws of England as underpinning all others: “The right of having and using arms for self-preservation and defence.” We would still not be ready to do so were the Mumbai massacre to happen in London tomorrow.

“Among the many misdeeds of British rule in India,” Mahatma Gandhi said, “history will look upon the act depriving a whole nation of arms as the blackest.” The Mumbai massacre is a bitter postscript to Gandhi’s comment. D’Souza now laments his own helplessness in the face of the killers: “I only wish I had had a gun rather than a camera.”



MUNDAY'S ORIGINAL SUBMISSION:

It Could Happen Here

By Richard Munday

(Submitted to The Times for consideration - Dan)


The firearms massacres that have periodically caused shock and horror around the world have all been utterly dwarfed by the Bombay shootings, in which a handful of gunmen left some five hundred people killed or wounded. Commentators have been swift to insist that we must all "stand firm" against such outrage; but behind the rhetoric, the pundits have been visibly uncertain how an assault like that in India can be prevented or resisted. The Bombay massacre exposed the myth of a number of our security assumptions.

For anybody who still believed in it, the Bombay shootings exposed the myth of ‘gun control’. India had some of the strictest firearms laws in the world, going back to the Indian Arms Act of 1878, by which Britain had sought to prevent a recurrence of the Indian Mutiny. The guns used in last week’s Bombay massacre were all ‘prohibited weapons’ under Indian law; just as they are in Britain. In this country we have seen the irrelevance of such bans (handgun crime, for instance, doubled here within five years of the prohibition of legal pistol ownership), but the largely drug-related nature of most extreme violence here has left most of us with at best a sheltered awareness of the threat. So far, one has had to be unlucky to be caught like the girls casually machine-gunned outside a Birmingham night club; we have not yet faced a determined and broad-based attack.

The Bombay massacre also exposed the myth that arming the police force guarantees security. Sebastian D’Souza, a picture editor on the Mumbai Mirror who took some of the dramatic pictures of the assault on the Chhatrapati Shivaji railway station, was angered to find India’s armed police taking cover and apparently failing to engage the gunmen. In Britain, we might recall the prolonged failure of armed police to contain the Hungerford killer, whose rampage lasted over four hours, and who in the end shot himself. In Dunblane too, it was the killer who ended his own career: even at best, police response is almost always belated when gunmen are on the loose. One might think, too, of the McDonald’s massacre in San Ysidro, California, in 1984, where the SWAT team waited for their leader (who was held up in a traffic jam) while 21 unarmed diners were executed.

Rhetoric about standing firm against terrorists aside, in Britain we have no more legal deterrent to prevent an armed assault than did the people of Bombay, and individually we would be just as helpless as victims. The Bombay massacre could happen in London tomorrow; but probably it could not have happened to the Londoners of a hundred years ago.

A century ago the challenge of radical Islam to the British Empire was beyond these shores, but we also faced threats at home from Fenian terrorists and assorted ‘anarchists’. Almost exactly one hundred years ago, in January 1909, two such anarchists, lately come from an attempt to blow up the president of France, tried to commit a robbery in north London, armed with automatic pistols. Edwardian Londoners, however, shot back: and the anarchists were pursued through the streets by a spontaneous hue-and-cry. The police (who could not find the key to their own gun cupboard) borrowed at least four pistols from passers-by, whilst other citizens armed with revolvers and shotguns preferred to use their weapons themselves to bring the assailants down.

Today we are probably more shocked at the idea of so many ordinary Londoners carrying guns in the street, than we are at the idea of an armed robbery (we now see more armed robberies every week than our armed Edwardians forebears suffered in a year). But the world of Conan Doyle’s Dr. Watson, pocketing his revolver before he walked the London streets, was real. This was before Britain’s first Firearms Act, and the ownership and carrying of guns was commonplace. We should recall that Britain then was neither politically nor socially more stable than it is today: aside from Irish terrorists and domestic firebombers, it was beset by violent industrial unrest that caused the army to be deployed and strikers killed by the cavalry. Social upheaval did indeed cause panic buying of guns: in Birmingham, one worried man told Austen Chamberlain that he had gone out to buy himself five revolvers, but the gunshop said that whilst they had a hundred in the previous day and fifty left that morning, they were now all sold. Yet for all this, the arming of the populace guaranteed rather than disturbed the peace.

That armed England existed within living memory; but it is now so alien to our expectations that it has become a foreign country. Our image of an armed society is conditioned instead by America: or by what we imagine we know about America. It is a skewed image, because (the vaunted Second Amendment notwithstanding) until recently in much of the US it has been illegal to bear arms outside the home or workplace; and therefore only people willing to defy the law, or social predators, have carried weapons. In the past two decades the enactment of ‘right to carry’ legislation in the majority of states, and the issue of permits for the carrying of concealed firearms to citizens of good repute, has brought a radical change. Opponents of the right to bear arms predicted that ‘right to carry’ would cause blood to flow in the streets, but the reverse has been true: violent crime in America has plummeted.

There are still, of course, exceptions: America’s ‘murder capital’, Washington DC, maintained its gun ban policy until the Supreme Court ruled against it this year. likewise Virginia Tech, site of the 2007 massacre of thirty students, was another local ‘gun free zone’ which forbade the bearing of arms even to those with a licence to carry. That circumstance was rather overlooked in reportage of the tragedy; just as the news media overlooked the contrasting experience of the Appalachian Law School in 2002, where after killing three people a gunman was halted by armed
students: a ‘massacre’ cut short.

In Britain we are not yet ready to recall the final liberty of the subject listed by William Blackstone in his Commentaries on the Laws of England as underpinning all the others: "the right of having and using arms for self-preservation and defence". We would still not be ready to do so, were the Bombay massacre to happen in London tomorrow. Or indeed the next time it happened, for we have become so trusting in the shield of the state, and mistrustful of ourselves.

We might, however, allow ourselves to wonder what would have happened at the Taj Mahal hotel last week, had its clientele been like that of the quiet country hotel once visited by Beatrix Potter in Victorian Yorkshire. In conversation, she discovered that only one of the eight or nine guests was not carrying a revolver.

"Among the many misdeeds of British rule in India", Mahatma Gandhi once reflected, "history will look upon the Act denying a whole nation of arms, as the blackest". The Bombay massacre is a bitter postscript to Gandhi’s comment. Sebastian D’Souza, the newspaper photographer who witnessed the slaughter at the railway station, now laments his own helplessness in the face of the killers: "I only wish I had a gun rather than a camera". There may be many among the hundreds of defenceless victims killed or wounded in Bombay who could fervently have wished likkewise.


=======================================
An earlier Times piece by Richard Munday:


Wouldn’t you feel safer with a gun?

British attitudes are supercilious and misguided

By Richard Munday

Editor and co-author of Guns & Violence: the Debate Before Lord Cullen

The Times

September 8, 2007




Despite the recent spate of shootings on our streets, we pride ourselves on our strict gun laws. Every time an American gunman goes on a killing spree, we shake our heads in righteous disbelief at our poor benighted colonial cousins. Why is it, even after the Virginia Tech massacre, that Americans still resist calls for more gun controls?

The short answer is that “gun controls” do not work: they are indeed generally perverse in their effects. Virginia Tech, where 32 students were shot in April, had a strict gun ban policy and only last year successfully resisted a legal challenge that would have allowed the carrying of licensed defensive weapons on campus. It is with a measure of bitter irony that we recall Thomas Jefferson, founder of the
University of Virginia, recording the words of Cesare Beccaria: “Laws that forbid the carrying of arms . . . disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes . . . Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man.”

One might contrast the Virginia Tech massacre with the assault on Virginia’s Appalachian Law School in 2002, where three lives were lost before a student fetched a pistol from his car and apprehended the gunman.

Virginia Tech reinforced the lesson that gun controls are obeyed only by the law-abiding. New York has “banned” pistols since 1911, and its fellow murder capitals, Washington DC and Chicago, have similar bans. One can draw a map of the US, showing the inverse relationship of the strictness of its gun laws, and levels of violence: all the way down to Vermont, with no gun laws at all, and the lowest level of armed violence (one thirteenth that of Britain).

How worried should we be about gun crime?

Serious gun crime is concentrated in particular parts of England; internationally, the country has a low death rate from guns

Background

America’s disenchantment with “gun control” is based on experience: whereas in the 1960s and 1970s armed crime rose in the face of more restrictive gun laws (in much of the US, it was illegal to possess a firearm away from the home or workplace), over the past 20 years all violent crime has dropped dramatically, in lockstep with the spread of laws allowing the carrying of concealed weapons by law-abiding citizens.

Florida set this trend in 1987, and within five years the states that had followed its example showed an 8 per cent reduction in murders, 7 per cent reduction in aggravated assaults, and 5 per cent reduction in rapes. Today 40 states have such laws, and by 2004 the US Bureau of Justice reported that “firearms-related crime has plummeted”.

In Britain, however, the image of violent America remains unassailably entrenched. Never mind the findings of the International Crime Victims Survey (published by the Home Office in 2003), indicating that we now suffer three times the level of violent crime committed in the United States; never mind the doubling of handgun crime in Britain over the past decade, since we banned pistols outright and confiscated all the legal ones.

We are so self-congratulatory about our officially disarmed society, and so dismissive of colonial rednecks, that we have forgotten that within living memory British citizens could buy any gun – rifle, pistol, or machinegun – without any licence. When Dr Watson walked the streets of London with a revolver in his pocket, he was a perfectly ordinary Victorian or Edwardian. Charlotte Brontë recalled that her curate father fastened his watch and pocketed his pistol every morning when he got dressed; Beatrix Potter remarked on a Yorkshire country hotel where only one of the eight or nine guests was not carrying a revolver; in 1909, policemen in Tottenham borrowed at least four pistols from passers-by (and were joined by other armed citizens) when they set off in pursuit of two anarchists unwise enough to attempt an armed robbery. We now are shocked that so many ordinary people should have been carrying guns in the street; the Edwardians were shocked rather by the idea of an armed robbery.

If armed crime in London in the years before the First World War amounted to less than 2 per cent of that we suffer today, it was not simply because society then was more stable. Edwardian Britain was rocked by a series of massive strikes in which lives were lost and troops deployed, and suffragette incendiaries, anarchist bombers,
Fenians, and the spectre of a revolutionary general strike made Britain then arguably a much more turbulent place than it is today. In that unstable society the impact of the widespread carrying of arms was not inflammatory, it was deterrent of violence.

As late as 1951, self-defence was the justification of three quarters of all applications for pistol licences. And in the years 1946-51 armed robbery, the most significant measure of gun crime, ran at less than two dozen incidents a year in London; today, in our disarmed society, we suffer as many every week.

Gun controls disarm only the law-abiding, and leave predators with a freer hand. Nearly two and a half million people now fall victim to crimes of violence in Britain every year, more than four every minute: crimes that may devastate lives. It is perhaps a privilege of those who have never had to confront violence to disparage the power to resist.

Gary "Y2K" North & the Bundys.

I used to know a militia commander here in Alabama. He was a good fellow, led a large unit and had a solid national reputation. Then he got all caught up in Gary North's (he of "Christian Sharia" beliefs) Y2K profiteering prognostication. Many of us upped our preps for Y2K on the off chance that North was right, but this man took North's gospel to a whole different level. He dumped his wife, took a lover, abandoned his property and militia unit and went to the Gulf of Mexico to live out the end of the world on a sailboat, or so I was told by one of his disgusted volunteers who was left behind on the shore. Rather embarrassing for all concerned when the end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it didn't materialize. Now North has opined about the Bundy situation on the 7th of May: "Weekend Play-Pretend Warriors in Nevada."

But these play-pretend warriors have not studied military tactics, guerrilla tactics, or public relations. They have not done what Jesus recommended. They have not counted the cost of their actions (Luke 14:28-30). If one of these blowhards ever suggests to you that you take up arms against the federal government, cut off all contact with him. You are dealing with a fool who has not read the Constitution carefully.

Uh, huh. North concludes:

Congress placed the militia under federal control in the Militia Act of 1903. It thereby turned the militia over to the United States Army. The President is in charge. The President has not yet commented on these weekend warriors. He is not Andrew Jackson. Jackson would have ordered them taken out over a weekend. That is what being a weekend warrior is really all about: one weekend. Anything beyond that is at the President's discretion. Imitate Gandhi, not David Koresh. Gandhi won.

Yeah, well, North apparently is ignorant of the Deacons for Defense and Justice, but no matter. I'm sure that Obama will be grateful that North has given him a ringing endorsement as commander-in-chief.

As a political idea, we are moving from the "ridicule" stage into the "engagement" stage.

"First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win." -- Mohandas K. Gandhi.

It is one thing to be reviled by the Rachel Madcows of the world, to be lied about by the professional liars of SPLC, ADL and the LaRouchies, to have your life and those of your family threatened by the anonymous collectivists of left and right, to be shunned by people who are supposed to be your "friends" -- all that I have actually been through before in the 90s. But to be denounced by a former president of the United States of the caliber of Billy Jeff Clinton -- the master of parsing the meaning of "is" -- well, that is a high honor. It means that we are over Berlin, boys and girls, and Herr Hitler doesn't like it. He doesn't like it one bit.

As Rush Limbaugh observed yesterday:

We are living in their heads rent free.

We scare them, ladies and gentlemen. WE scare them. YOU scare them. Accept the compliment. It is seriously and genuinely offered. We ARE living in their heads rent free.

So don't slack off. Keep up the "We Are Everywhere" campaign. Keep infiltrating the IRS and other government agencies. We have them more than mildly concerned.

They may be, in some quarters at least, scared spitless.

Mike
III-

David Codrea: Indian leopard attack shows anti-human nature of ‘gun control’

“Among the many misdeeds of the British rule in India, history will look upon the Act depriving a whole nation of arms, as the blackest,” Mahatma Gandhi wrote.

Just one of the reasons I don't do Facebook.

Facebook bans Gandhi quote as part of revisionist history purge

LA Times: "Government by crime syndicate." "Let me tell you how important this is, the White House started their morning with a briefing on you."

"You just described my country."

The remarkable public confrontation between the Gandhi-like ascetic Anna Hazare and the government of India — which came to a triumphant end last month with a glass of orange juice and a government promise to create a strong, independent anti-corruption agency — is the latest manifestation of a worldwide explosion of outrage at what historians may someday come to deem humanity's latest form of tyranny: the capture of states by criminal syndicates. Otherwise known as rampant public corruption.

In early 2010, I was asked to make a presentation to a counter-narcotics symposium at the Marshall Center in Germany. In attendance were several hundred high-ranking military and law enforcement officers from around the world. I dutifully explained the opium economy in Afghanistan, which I've had a chance to observe during nearly a decade living and working in Kandahar. But I could not resist inserting two slides at the end of the talk. They depicted the phenomenon that really interests me: the increasingly structured capture of the Afghan government by what amounts to a set of interlocking, vertically integrated criminal networks.

I have watched the phenomenon evolve over the last 10 years. At first, there was a furtive testing of the limits, as Kalashnikov-toting ruffians shook down travelers for "sweets" (as extorted bribes are prudishly called). Over time, the corruption expanded and evolved, and today, Afghanistan is controlled by a structured, mafiaesque system, in which money flows upward via purchase of office, kickbacks or "sweets" in return for permission to extract resources (of which more varieties exist in impoverished Afghanistan than one might think) and protection in case of legal or international scrutiny. Those foolish enough to raise objections are punished. The result is a system that selects for criminality, excluding and marginalizing the very men and women of probity most needed to build a sustainable state.

When I finished my presentation, to my astonishment, the participants rose in a standing ovation. Many came down to the front of the room to talk further. "You just described my country," they chorused.

Yes, well, my country too. Michael Barone called the Obama administration "gangster government" for the bailouts, picking winners and losers with taxpayer dollars like Solyndra based on political dogma, rewarding campaign supporters like the unions with the NLRB decisions they want, you name it. The list could go on and on. Sometimes the Great Eye of Mordor-on-the-Potomac focuses on you for the most trivial of reasons.

Read this story about how a car dealer in Missouri ran afoul of the White House. Neil McCabe writes in Human Events:

Max Motors targeted by ATF, banks and General Motors

Despite the White House harassment, and the loss of financing and insurance arrangements that came in the past, the Butler, Mo., car dealer who will be giving away AK-47’s again starting in October.

“Guess what? We are doing it again! It is the Fourth Annual Great Guns and Gas Give-Away!” said Mark Muller, the owner of Max Motors, whose July 17, 2009 interview with CNN’s Carol Costello about his promotion was great publicity, but brought him unwelcome attention.

Within days of the CNN broadcast, three agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives arrived at the dealership, he said.

“I was not there, they identified themselves and asked who was in-charge, and everybody pointed at each other,” he said.

Undeterred, the agents demanded to see the guns, he said. When it was explained that there were no actual guns, and that the promotion was really for vouchers towards the purchase of an AK-47, the agents did not believe it.

“There was an empty gun box here from a gun dealer in North Carolina, and they took that and demanded to see the gun that came with that box,” he said. The agents also went into storage rooms and took photos.

The next day, Muller received a call from the ATF asking him to come in for a meeting with all of his personal guns, which they insisted they had to authority to order, he said. Muller held his ground and refused to submit to the audit without first going through due process.

“The ATF people were just as nice as can be. They were not mean or hateful—and finally I asked the lady on the phone: Don’t you have something better to do?” he said. He then re-explained that there were vouchers for guns and that no guns were being given away.

“She said: ‘Let me tell you how important this is, the White House started their morning with a briefing on you. We got a call from Washington, D.C. this morning. They wanted you checked out,” he said. (Emphasis supplied, MBV.)

“That’s your big government in action. I’m a guy exercising his constitutional rights and I’m such a threat to security that the White House has to check in on me?” he said.

At the end of his conversation with the ATF agent, she threatened to raid his house to audit his personal firearms, but it never happened, Muller said.

Folks, we may not have the government we deserve, but we certainly have the government we tolerate. And whose fault is that?

A Restatement of First Principles. Part Two: The armed citizenry as the credible deterrent to federal government tyranny.

A couple of days ago, I began this series with A Restatement of First Principles. Part One: What is the purpose of the armed citizenry? I wrote:

In practical terms, the armed citizenry is supposed to:

1. Provide security in life, liberty and property to each citizen in his home from depredation by common criminals;

2. Provide security in life, liberty and property to the community by assisting, when necessary, duly constituted authority in maintaining civil order; and

3. Provide security in life, liberty and property to the states and nation by being the credible countervailing power to would-be tyrannical government.

These three functions are provided for in the concept of a "well-regulated militia," -- which at the time meant well disciplined, well led, well trained, well armed, with weapons of common caliber -- bands of citizen soldiers operating in the common defense of life, liberty and property.

As I wrote then, Tasks One and Two are, even today, largely uncontroversial and even unpolitical (except in the minds of the most demanding hoplophobes, see, for a current example, Law professor dismisses reason for Second Amendment as 'historical trivia'). Task Three, on the other hand, is entirely political, for this was the principal purpose of the Founders in codifying it in the the Second Amendment.

As the quotes cited in Part One from various men of the Founders' generation show, they were suspicious of a standing army and even a "select" militia and counted on the general militia of all able-bodied citizens to restrain the standing army if it was directed for some tyrannical purpose by an American would-be dictator. It is important to remember that these suspicious Founders fully expected a future American Caesar to be elected by a majority of the citizens, using the tools of the demagogue, and representing the "tyranny of the mob." The Founders were as critical of unrestrained democracy as they were Caesarism or monarchy. This is why they crafted a constitutional republic of competing branches and ordered liberty.

The armed citizenry was key to the maintenance of their ideal. And though their concept was, according to the military and political realities of their time, sophisticated, its premise was simple: as long as the people had the means to kill a tyrant, the would-be tyrant would be restrained by that fear even if the rest of the system of checks and balances had failed in allowing his rise. (Ben Franklin's comment at the time of the Constitutional Convention arguments is instructive: "It is good that we have provided for impeachment for the alternative is assassination.")

The Founders also understood the common militia as a countervailing power to local tyranny, and would have celebrated the 1946 Battle of Athens as a perfect example of what they expected from the citizenry. Note that the Battle of Athens was made necessary by the prior complete failure of a corrupt local system to protect the people. The Founders expected that the political process would be exhausted, as indeed they had done, before the people exercised their right to defensive use of arms. The Founders were, first and foremost, cognizant of the moral components of both politics and war.

But we stand now in the opening decades of the 21st Century, following that most ghastly violent 20th, where dictators ruled, genocides flourished and simple resistance by even an armed populace against the ever more powerful tools of the modern state has become more and more difficult, at least as the Founders imagined it given the realities of the late 18th Century.

Does this negate their idea? Certainly not. Nor does it, actually, change their requirement for trained, equipped citizen soldiers -- "well regulated militias" -- familiar with light infantry arms and ready to maintain order as required by Tasks One and Two above. Indeed, the citizen soldier of today must be as ready to muster and maneuver according to need as the Minute Men of old. And they must be as familiar with the entire range of weaponry required by the 21st Century soldier, including the laptop, as was Capt. Parker's company with the Brown Bess or5 Morgan's Rifle Corps with the Kentucky rifle, the knife and the tomahawk.

What has changed is the character of successful modern warfare and how that applies to the credible deterrence of tyranny, and that means applying lessons as old as Sun Tzu but called today by the moniker of Fourth Generation Warfare to the uniquely American realities today. From Wikipedia:

Fourth generation warfare is normally characterized by a violent non-state actor (VNSA) fighting a state. This fighting can be physically done, such as by modern examples Hezbollah or the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). In this realm the VNSA uses all three levels of fourth generation warfare. These are the physical (actual combat; it is considered the least important), mental (the will to fight, belief in victory, etc.) and moral (the most important, this includes cultural norms, etc.) levels.

A 4GW enemy has the following characteristics: lacks hierarchal authority, lack of formal structure, (has) patience and flexibility, (Has the) ability to keep a low profile when needed, and small size. A 4GW adversary might use the tactics of an insurgent, terrorist, or guerrilla in order to wage war against a nation's infastructure. Fourth generation warfare takes place on all fronts: economical, political, the media, military, and civilian.

Resistance can also be below the physical level of violence. This is via non-violent means, such as Gandhi’s opposition to the British Empire or Martin Luther King’s marches. Both desired their factions to deescalate the conflict while the state escalates against them, the objective being to target the opponent on the moral and mental levels rather than the physical level. The state is then seen as a bully and loses support.

Another characteristic of fourth generation warfare is that as with third generation warfare, the VNSA’s forces are decentralized. With fourth generation warfare there may even be no single organisation and that smaller groups organize into impromptu alliances to target a bigger threat (that being the state armed forces or another faction). As a result these alliances are weak and if the state’s military leadership is smart enough they can split their enemy and cause them to fight amongst themselves.

Further, says Wikipedia, Fourth generation warfare goals are:

1 .Survival

Now, in the Founder's context, substitute "armed citizenry" for Violent Non-State Actor and delete any use of terror tactics, especially targeted against innocents. Governments think they can afford "collateral damage," the armed citizenry cannot. It is not just our survival that counts, but all of the people, even those who disagree with us but who are not combatants. But survival merely ensures you stay in the fight. It is the second goal that is primary:

2. To convince the enemy’s political decision makers that their goals are either unachievable or too costly for the perceived benefit.

Read that again. I would like to make just one change. My version would read thusly:

2. To convince the enemy’s political decision makers that their goals are either unachievable or too costly for the perceived PERSONAL benefit.

Deterrence before any fight rests on this. Winning the fight after the tyrant begins his campaign of violence against the people cannot happen without it. The tyrant and his political decision makers must understand that they will pay a PERSONAL price for their depredations. If they fail to recognize before the fact then they must, like the Bugger Queens in Ender's Game, be taught by people who recognize that "the enemy's gate is down," and that whatever happens beforehand, the end will be when someone in the resistance comes straight for them, and not waste their efforts on the minions.

The metaphor only goes so far, of course, for we are talking about humans, not bugs. But if our tyrant-wannabes understand the credible threat of the cost up front, they will not go there, unless invited to do so by a belief that we are unready to meet them.

For their part, the Founders must be shaking their heads in dismay at our failure to use political means to restrain this unconstitutional imperial federal government as well as the disuse into which the militia system they gave us has fallen.

Only we can do anything about that, and time is short.

The Battle of Athens 70th Anniversary. August 1st and 2nd, 1946

Click here for the David Codrea JPFO publishing of the 1995's Guns and Ammo article that popularized the event.

And who better to tell the story of why the battle was important than Mike in his own words.

A Restatement of First Principles. Part Two: The armed citizenry as the credible deterrent to federal government 

A couple of days ago, I began this series with A Restatement of First Principles. Part One: What is the purpose of the armed citizenry? I wrote:

In practical terms, the armed citizenry is supposed to:

1. Provide security in life, liberty and property to each citizen in his home from depredation by common criminals;

2. Provide security in life, liberty and property to the community by assisting, when necessary, duly constituted authority in maintaining civil order; and

3. Provide security in life, liberty and property to the states and nation by being the credible countervailing power to would-be tyrannical government.

These three functions are provided for in the concept of a "well-regulated militia," -- which at the time meant well disciplined, well led, well trained, well armed, with weapons of common caliber -- bands of citizen soldiers operating in the common defense of life, liberty and property.

As I wrote then, Tasks One and Two are, even today, largely uncontroversial and even unpolitical (except in the minds of the most demanding hoplophobes, see, for a current example, Law professor dismisses reason for Second Amendment as 'historical trivia'). Task Three, on the other hand, is entirely political, for this was the principal purpose of the Founders in codifying it in the the Second Amendment.

As the quotes cited in Part One from various men of the Founders' generation show, they were suspicious of a standing army and even a "select" militia and counted on the general militia of all able-bodied citizens to restrain the standing army if it was directed for some tyrannical purpose by an American would-be dictator. It is important to remember that these suspicious Founders fully expected a future American Caesar to be elected by a majority of the citizens, using the tools of the demagogue, and representing the "tyranny of the mob." The Founders were as critical of unrestrained democracy as they were Caesarism or monarchy. This is why they crafted a constitutional republic of competing branches and ordered liberty.

The armed citizenry was key to the maintenance of their ideal. And though their concept was, according to the military and political realities of their time, sophisticated, its premise was simple: as long as the people had the means to kill a tyrant, the would-be tyrant would be restrained by that fear even if the rest of the system of checks and balances had failed in allowing his rise. (Ben Franklin's comment at the time of the Constitutional Convention arguments is instructive: "It is good that we have provided for impeachment for the alternative is assassination.")

The Founders also understood the common militia as a countervailing power to local tyranny, and would have celebrated the 1946 Battle of Athens as a perfect example of what they expected from the citizenry. Note that the Battle of Athens was made necessary by the prior complete failure of a corrupt local system to protect the people. The Founders expected that the political process would be exhausted, as indeed they had done, before the people exercised their right to defensive use of arms. The Founders were, first and foremost, cognizant of the moral components of both politics and war.

But we stand now in the opening decades of the 21st Century, following that most ghastly violent 20th, where dictators ruled, genocides flourished and simple resistance by even an armed populace against the ever more powerful tools of the modern state has become more and more difficult, at least as the Founders imagined it given the realities of the late 18th Century.

Does this negate their idea? Certainly not. Nor does it, actually, change their requirement for trained, equipped citizen soldiers -- "well regulated militias" -- familiar with light infantry arms and ready to maintain order as required by Tasks One and Two above. Indeed, the citizen soldier of today must be as ready to muster and maneuver according to need as the Minute Men of old. And they must be as familiar with the entire range of weaponry required by the 21st Century soldier, including the laptop, as was Capt. Parker's company with the Brown Bess or5 Morgan's Rifle Corps with the Kentucky rifle, the knife and the tomahawk.

What has changed is the character of successful modern warfare and how that applies to the credible deterrence of tyranny, and that means applying lessons as old as Sun Tzu but called today by the moniker of Fourth Generation Warfare to the uniquely American realities today. From Wikipedia:

Fourth generation warfare is normally characterized by a violent non-state actor (VNSA) fighting a state. This fighting can be physically done, such as by modern examples Hezbollah or the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). In this realm the VNSA uses all three levels of fourth generation warfare. These are the physical (actual combat; it is considered the least important), mental (the will to fight, belief in victory, etc.) and moral (the most important, this includes cultural norms, etc.) levels.

A 4GW enemy has the following characteristics: lacks hierarchal authority, lack of formal structure, (has) patience and flexibility, (Has the) ability to keep a low profile when needed, and small size. A 4GW adversary might use the tactics of an insurgent, terrorist, or guerrilla in order to wage war against a nation's infastructure. Fourth generation warfare takes place on all fronts: economical, political, the media, military, and civilian.

Resistance can also be below the physical level of violence. This is via non-violent means, such as Gandhi’s opposition to the British Empire or Martin Luther King’s marches. Both desired their factions to deescalate the conflict while the state escalates against them, the objective being to target the opponent on the moral and mental levels rather than the physical level. The state is then seen as a bully and loses support.

Another characteristic of fourth generation warfare is that as with third generation warfare, the VNSA’s forces are decentralized. With fourth generation warfare there may even be no single organisation and that smaller groups organize into impromptu alliances to target a bigger threat (that being the state armed forces or another faction). As a result these alliances are weak and if the state’s military leadership is smart enough they can split their enemy and cause them to fight amongst themselves.

Further, says Wikipedia, Fourth generation warfare goals are:

1 .Survival

Now, in the Founder's context, substitute "armed citizenry" for Violent Non-State Actor and delete any use of terror tactics, especially targeted against innocents. Governments think they can afford "collateral damage," the armed citizenry cannot. It is not just our survival that counts, but all of the people, even those who disagree with us but who are not combatants. But survival merely ensures you stay in the fight. It is the second goal that is primary:

2. To convince the enemy’s political decision makers that their goals are either unachievable or too costly for the perceived benefit.

Read that again. I would like to make just one change. My version would read thusly:

2. To convince the enemy’s political decision makers that their goals are either unachievable or too costly for the perceived PERSONALbenefit.

Deterrence before any fight rests on this. Winning the fight after the tyrant begins his campaign of violence against the people cannot happen without it. The tyrant and his political decision makers must understand that they will pay a PERSONAL price for their depredations. If they fail to recognize before the fact then they must, like the Bugger Queens in Ender's Game, be taught by people who recognize that "the enemy's gate is down," and that whatever happens beforehand, the end will be when someone in the resistance comes straight for them, and not waste their efforts on the minions.

The metaphor only goes so far, of course, for we are talking about humans, not bugs. But if our tyrant-wannabes understand the credible threat of the cost up front, they will not go there, unless invited to do so by a belief that we are unready to meet them.

For their part, the Founders must be shaking their heads in dismay at our failure to use political means to restrain this unconstitutional imperial federal government as well as the disuse into which the militia system they gave us has fallen.

Only we can do anything about that, and time is short.

"This is Bill Buppert. If you are reading this, YOU are the Resistance."

Marshal Petain Does a Deal With Hitler

Bill Buppert once again has a great post at Lew Rockwell, here. It is entitled, "Life in Vichy America." Go to LRC and be sure and follow the links. To get the full meaning of his characterization of America the Vichy, you should get the French documentary, "The Sorrow and the Pity."

Mike
III



"Life in Vichy America."

"You can only have power over people so long as you don't take everything away from them. But when you've robbed a man of everything he's no longer in your power – he's free again." ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Collaboration in a negative connotation is an active or passive surrender to an overarching regime which removes freedom and liberty and replaces it with an ordered command mechanism to modify or influence your behavior. One can consider the British Loyalists in the American colonies to be collaborators and their fates on occasion were quite ghastly. This can happen as a result of foreign occupation or a replacement of statist forces over time through elections, coups and administrative fiat in an increasingly tyrannical government. The state is a remora that needs a host to survive and convincing the host that the relationship is beneficial to both parties is the key to the remora’s survival. If Obamunism provides one salutary service to the nation, it is a televised demonstration project on how gangster government (is that redundant?) thrives in an environment where the rule of force trumps the rule of law. On your own counsel, is your acceptance and compliance voluntary or a submission to staying one step ahead of the jailer?

When the Germans rolled into France in June 1940, the French Third Republic toppled to be replaced by État Français or the French State. Vichy France was established after France surrendered to Germany on 22 June 1940 and Marshall Phillipe Pétain removed the administrative center of France from Paris to Vichy. Southern France remained relatively autonomous from direct German control until 11 March 1942 when the Allies landed in North Africa in 1942. The Vichy government ruled over France until the Allied repatriation of the Free French under de Gaulle in June 1945. This government was acknowledged and legitimized by the US and Canada, among others, until 23 October 1944.

During this entire time a guerilla war raged between the French Resistance and the maquis and the Vichy/German government in France and some of its colonial holdings. The Vichy government was simply the latest installment to provide a stage for the adversaries to engage in real and rhetorical combat. This civil war had its origins in the 1789 Revolution when the people who did not agree to the destruction of the Ancien Régime continued to sow division resulting in tremendous dissent and disruption throughout French history in the nineteenth century. During WWII, the behavior and resistance of these anti-Vichy forces was used as an opportunity to expand the state and was responsible for the post-WWII socialist government after the war.

"Historians distinguish between a state collaboration followed by the regime of Vichy, and "collaborationists," which usually refer to the French citizens eager to collaborate with Nazi Germany and who pushed towards a radicalization of the regime."

The French started taking measures against undesirables such as communists, socialists, Jews, gypsies, homosexuals and other unfortunates who became subject to harassment, imprisonment and death. The French then reactivated and reflagged various existing concentration camps for the government’s latest victims. Stanley Hoffman avers that "an ideologically-motivated cooperation with a Nazi Germany [was] seen as the only bulwark against the spread of Bolshevism in Europe". Of course, one can note that the opposite is happening in America today.

What is fascinating are the dynamics that animated the relatively easy slide of the republican French into a fascist dictatorship channeling the National Socialist agenda into a French variant that had its moments of viciousness that would do the Nazis proud. This brought to the surface centuries-old conflicts that had been brewing and finally spasmed violently in resistance organizations against the Vichy regime’s predations against urban undesirables and rural pockets of refusal, among others.

These sentiments are now starting to manifest themselves in America. There are people for whom desperate economic times are forcing their ideological hand to reexamine support for a state that seems to work against the wealthy and self-employed, among others. We have collectivists versus individualists; rural versus urban; wise users versus green fascists and an entire panoply of opposition forces starting to coalesce and bringing their fights to the surface.


So what does WWII occupied France have to do with modern America? I would suggest we have labored under a Vichy-style occupation since 1865 when a virulent form of government supremacism extinguished states rights in the original Federal system and then the Progressivist virus metastasized under Theodore Roosevelt and the rest is history as the republican vision of a decentralized, localized and minimal government became as anachronistic as the notion of natural rights.

Vichy Propaganda Poster

We are all Vichy French in America today. Your decision is to choose Free American or Vichy French. Your choice is collaboration with a regime that seeks to control your every behavior and rob your children of their inheritance or to stand athwart history and say enough is enough. Collaboration is the willful ability to hold your nose and do what you know is the wrong thing. Collaboration is the desire to look the other way as a large coercive system robs your neighbors’ against their will and you take advantage of the spoils. Pushkin said "[w]hy should cattle have the gifts of freedom? Their heritage from generation to generation is the belled yoke and the lash."

How many folks do you know (especially collectivists) who would voluntarily pay the taxes they do right here and right now if not compelled by the threat of violence? How many folks do full stops instead of rolling stops at stop signs? How many corporations would willingly staff the accountancy and regulatory requirements imposed on them? From the local to the federal level, how many Americans would enforce or comply with the millions of idiotic regulations forced on them?

What if tens of millions of American workers simply followed Gandhi’s teaching and crossed their arms and said no more taxes, jail me instead? Imagine if state governors stood up and said all the Federal Law enforcement elements within their borders had 24 hours to resign or leave the state?

There was no foreign vector that caused this to happen as it did in WWII France yet the amount of discontent, disenfranchisement and disgust on the part of Americans matches much of what inspired the resistance organizations. Depressingly, one of the reasons the French Resistance was such a tough nut to crack throughout the war was that before the Nazi occupation, they had been hunted as Communists by the pre-1940 French regime and had a very robust cellular organization structure. Many Americans today increasingly look at the machinations in DC and view it as occupation behavior. Yet why did so many Frenchmen collaborate with the Nazi and Vichy regimes? They did it because any other behavior demanded a moral stand or courage they did not possess. We all have to take a measure of the degree of moral cowardice we are willing to live with.

Of course, this is the story of humanity. How did the Bolsheviks maintain their stranglehold over tens of millions? How do we maintain the fascinating fiction just celebrated on Memorial Day that American foreign wars since 1898 have secured our freedom? Was Spain that strong a threat? Did WWI stop the Bolshevik victory in Russia? Did WWII guarantee a free and democratic Russia? All of these can be argued into the wee hours but one observation remains unassailable: war abroad robs and strangles freedom and liberty at home. Case in point: the United Kingdom now is the most visible and truest testament to Orwell’s vision in 1984.




I think the desire to collaborate takes on many guises to include state education systems, mass media and war. For example, I just had the misfortune of visiting the National World War I Museum at Liberty Memorial in Kansas City, MO. It is truly a memorial to liberty to note its passing and death but the authors of the title probably did not see the irony. I have a tremendous interest in military history but age and further research has proved to me that most wars not fought on your own soil tend to rob the invading nations of their own freedoms and liberties at home over time. Woodrow Wilson’s campaign slogan in 1916 was "He Kept Us Out of War." That appears to have been less than true. Look at the fate of empires in WWI. Millions of deaths to include one out of three French lads under thirty slaughtered during a four year stalemate and tens of millions of maimed and killed for…more war in WWII. It was sickening to wander through the facility to witness a gallery glorifying the savaging of young lives and the enslavement of the world afterwards as the communist experiment found its footing and raced to see how many citizens could be robbed, jailed, maimed and killed while America raced to make the world safe for big government and soft socialism. Wilson managed to strangle whatever remnant of American independence and freedom remained which Lincoln may have accidentally overlooked. We see the ravages of Wilson’s brownshirts in the American Protective League and the germination of the slow but accelerating crawl to define Americans by national identity instead of the localist roots of village, state and region. This, of course, paved the way for the patriotic gore we see today of American flags emblazoned on every conceivable surface to celebrate war on the world and our own enslavement.

The next ten years in America will be pivotal and I believe the country will dissolve into independent nation states in what is now these united States. Take the scales from your eyes and read the real history of America. This is not a country that progresses through government but in spite of it. The change starts at the bottom with the individual. The three percent who will resist and work for liberty and freedom changed the prospects of liberty in America during the last half of the 18th century. Ask yourself: what is the price of my refusal to obey? More importantly, how dear will the price be for your children if you simply stand by and watch?

This is Bill Buppert. If you are reading this, you are the Resistance.

"The strength and power of despotism consists wholly in the fear of resistance" ~ Thomas Paine

I can't decide whether to title this "Clueless in Eugene" or "Zombies in Space."

A scintillating example of brilliant left-collectivist analysis.

A snippet:

When the right wing thinks of change they think of armed insurrection because they own all of the guns. When you own a hammer every problem looks like a nail. All of these wannabe weekend warriors have bought a dozen weapons and tons of ammunition and it is just sitting there doing nothing. They like to get dressed in Camo and play soldier on the weekend to show off their nifty weapons, and a 50 caliber isn't too good for rabbits. but wouldn't it be fun to go out and shoot some liberals or gays or minorities?

Of course most of the volunteer army and the rest of the military is conservative and they also think that force is the answer to many of the world's problems. But the difference is these soldiers have seen the real horror of a real shooting war and would never want that to happen at home. Besides they have all sworn allegiance to their Commander in Chief.

Not only is this guy going to end up as so much cannibal food, but I find myself rooting for the cannibals.

When liberals turn hungry.

LATER: Since some people seem to be having problems with the link, here is the entire essay:

Rant: Solutions Pt.1 Insurrection or Democracy?

Written by Altruist Eugene, OR

Now that my Father is in his sunset years he likes to watch nothing but Westerns. Westerns are always pretty simplistic and easy to understand. Justice is often found when the guy in the white hat shoots the bad guy in the black hat. The Tea Party with its arm chair quarterback critiques and simplistic solutions sound attractive. Unfortunately as H. L. Mencken said, "For every complex problem there is a-solution-that is simple neat and wrong".

Sometimes like in High Noon, the entire town abandons Gary Cooper and he is left all alone to defend justice. We have a new sheriff in town and he has lots of problems to solve and it would be nice if all the townspeople would pull together to help him, but most of the time it seems like half the country is working for the bad guys.

There were often "Lynching Parties" when the loudmouths in town stirred up the town drunks and decided to take the law in their own hands. The good guy would always defend the rule of law. Sometimes the mob would catch an actual horse thief but more often than not they hung an innocent person. Whenever mob rule took over they were wrong because they broke the law. It is always better to leave the law to the courts, to find out who the real bad guys are.

When our founding fathers formed this nation they tried to eliminate the need for mob rule by putting in place the means to bring about meaningful change. The Law came to town if you will.

In 2008 the people used their constitutionally mandated rights and voted for change. The losers of that election never got behind the new sheriff. These poor losers are the ones that are still resisting any change, and now they are calling for his lynching.

Some members of the Tea Party are calling for "Second Amendment Remedies" if they
lose again at the ballot box. The leaders are the loudmouths that are inciting the excitable and impressionable to abandon law and return to mob rule.

Over time the leaders of this great nation could see the endless bloody coups and military takeovers that occurred all over the rest of the world. We had our own bloody civil war and it was so horrendous that our leaders vowed to never allow that to happen again. They insured that would not happen here by having civilian control of the military and by having the military take an oath to support the Commander in Chief. But the major way that our founders insured that the nation would not be torn apart is by allowing change to happen at the ballot box.

In almost every election the losers vow to work with the winners and cooperate for the good of the country. After this past election that did not happen. The Republicans acted like spoiled schoolboys who if they lost, would take their ball and go home. They decided that politics was war, and that if they lost on the battlefield that they would continue a guerilla war. Never before at least in my memory has the opposition been so adversarial.

Their very effective propaganda machine which took the country to an unnecessary and illegal war, shifted to attack our president and the Democratic party. Instead of compromising and helping solve the countries problems, the Republicans decided that they would do everything they could to make Obama and the nation fail. They abused little known procedural rules to force a supermajority vote to get anything done, and did everything they could to bring our country to a stop. If they couldn't have things their way they would make it impossible for anyone else to play the game.

When the right wing thinks of change they think of armed insurrection because they own all of the guns. When you own a hammer every problem looks like a nail. All of these wannabe weekend warriors have bought a dozen weapons and tons of ammunition and it is just sitting there doing nothing. They like to get dressed in Camo and play soldier on the weekend to show off their nifty weapons, and a 50 caliber isn't too good for rabbits. but wouldn't it be fun to go out and shoot some liberals or gays or minorities?

Of course most of the volunteer army and the rest of the military is conservative and they also think that force is the answer to many of the world's problems. But the difference is these soldiers have seen the real horror of a real shooting war and would never want that to happen at home. Besides they have all sworn allegiance to their Commander in Chief.

When the left thinks of change they think of collective bargaining and using the non violent protests of the majority of the people, to overcome the totalitarian authoritarianism of the minority.

The right has the American revolution as inspiration but unfortunately there are thousands of other examples where violent revolution resulted in more violence, genocide, and oppression. Few revolutions result in Democracies. The strong men who lead the revolution generally turn into dictators. What makes the United States different than hundreds of other nations that suffer one revolution after another, is the Constitution. The Constitution protects the rights of the minority and provides for a mechanism for change without violence.

When the left thinks of change they also have historical success stories they can look to for inspiration. They have Gandhi who brought about the end of British colonialism in India and Pakistan through non violence. They have the example of Mandela who ended Apartheid and the formation of Africa through non violence, they have the example of Lech Walesa and the freedom of Poland through non violence, they have the example of Mother Jones and the suffragettes that allowed women equality through non violence, there is the example of Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, and many others who won civil rights victories and ended segregation through non violence.

Why is it that the left relies on the majority: Democracy, Majority Rule, Non Violence, and Collective bargaining to make life better for all, but the Right relies on the use of force by the minority to make life worse for the majority so a few can live in luxury?

There is no possible way that a bunch of weekend warriors can take on the most powerful military in the world, no matter how many weapons they acquire. That is just plain crazy talk, and it should not be encouraged or tolerated. The most they can hope to do is blow some people up, as Timothy McVeigh and his co conspirators did in Oklahoma City.

Let me be clear. This is not just some western on TV where conflicts are settled with a gun fight at high noon. If Americans take up arms with the intent of overthrowing the government, they are not patriots, they are not modern revolutionaries. They are terrorists, and they will be treated as terrorists.

A recent Washington Post report indicated that there are 1,271 government entities and 1,931 private companies engaged in intelligence-gathering work. If you are hoarding weapons and advocating the overthrow of the government, how many of them do you think are reading your posts and listening to your phone right now?

Most of the members of the Tea Party are rational and good people but some on the extreme right are just plain crazy and only need a little encouragement to harm others. Those who encourage "Second Amendment Remedies" are legitimizing the real right wing Whackoes, and they are enabling unstable armed and dangerous elements to take the law in their own hands and blow up government buildings and harm innocent civilians. They are encouraging domestic terrorism and the return to mob rule.

I applaud the Tea party for energizing people who were unwilling to participate in the political process before. If they are successful and they do "Take their Country Back" , what happens then? Do they have any solutions to the nation's many problems?

This is the first in a series exploring solutions. The first step is to realize that in this country, the majority rules.