One of the hardest things about living in a police state is watching other people be crushed by state power and feeling unable to do a thing about it.
We read Pastor Neimoeller’s famous lines as a warning to ourselves. But really, there’s not much chance of heeding the warning in a way that changes anything — except perhaps for the worse.
If the police state is as ruthless (and as popular among the citizens) as Hitler’s, speaking out is only likely to get the speaker rounded up along with all the other “enemies of the state.”
There are exceptions. But they’re rare and usually involve extenuating circumstances.
If the police state is like ours — “kinder and gentler” (e.g. more worried about public image or still bound to a few dying freedom traditions) — we’re “allowed” to stand there and shout our lungs out, mostly unmolested — though preferably in a designated, barbed-wire enclosed “free speech zone” where no politician will be discommoded by our unimportant proletarian opinions. We might as well be shouting into a black hole. Or so it seems.
The question is: What is the responsibility of a resident of a police state? If speaking out doesn’t help … then what?
I know: Our first responsibility is to ourselves and our families. We didn’t create the police state. What government does isn’t our responsibility (except to whatever extent we support its actions). Yet we’re people of conscience. We can’t watch others be crushed without feeling a stab of their agony. We know, as others are crushed, that the crushing machinery gathers momentum and will roll toward our own lives. We know that not only we, but the ideals that sustain civilization, are being crushed. And that matters to us. Matters vitally, painfully, heartbreakingly. No matter what else we do, we can’t stand by and watch that happen without feeling an obligation — or at least a passionate longing — to do our all to stop it.
I don’t care how many hotshots take a perfectly reasonable “me first” attitude to freedom. I don’t even care how many times people like me advocate shrugging, withdrawal of consent, or various other forms of resistance, creative disregard, or personal freedom-building. Don’t get me wrong; those things matter. We need to do our damnest to live free, aside from the police state. Still, when the crushing machinery rolls, we all suffer.
And we feel the need to do something effective to stop it. Something aside from or in addition to creating our own personal freedom.
But how? What? And why does it keep rolling on so inexorably when so many are speaking out?
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To avoid going crazy trying to cover the thousands of government outrages — from TSA groping to secret laws to business-destroying regulations to wholesale data-snooping to unjust wars to “detentions” without charges — I’m going to use as an example one category of police-statism: police abuses against individuals.
Can those be ended? Or drastically reduced, with swift, condign penalties laid against the malefactors? Can we, above all, render police thuggery culturally unacceptable? If mere speaking out doesn’t do the job … what then?
One reason to select police abuses as an example is that they’re so widespread — and growing. And so well documented in these days of a camera in every pocket.
Another is that they’re so horrible, so blatant, sometimes so deadly, that they wrench the heart of anybody this side of The Grinch.
Another is that, since they’re often local matters, they ought — in theory — to be fairly easy to stop.
Another is that thousands of people are speaking out against them. We’ve got great writer/researchers like Radley Balko, multitudes of crusading legal aid groups, CopWatch, and iPhone apps for instantly uploading and protecting videos of abuses. We’ve got unique organizations like Oath Keepers trying to instill consciences in the abusers and awareness in the public and the “protect and serve” profession. They’re joined by other individuals and organizations battling the related horrors of the drug war and asset forfeiture.
If there are any credible voices speaking out in favor of cops killing innocents in their homes, cops smashing people’s video cameras and phones, cops obliterating family pets, cops wrestling people to the ground and arresting them for dancing, and cops getting mere slaps on the wrists for the most egregious crimes, I’ve never heard them.
Oh, sure, in the wake of some horror, the local police chief always “conducts an investigation” and finds that his officers were “following proper procedure.” Sure, the police union always defends the scummiest of its members. Sure, the local taxpayers may fork over for millions in settlement money to make individual claims go away. Sure, propaganized minions “support their local police.” Sure, fools believe every one of these horrors is just “another isolated incident.” Sure, millions of “brand-holes” are too busy running up their credit cards to notice or care what’s going on outside their narcissistic little bubbles.
None of those are what you’d call credible voices.
Do you hear a single knowledgeable, thoughtful, humane voice arguing that six a.m. door kicking, wrong-house raids, puppycide, or military-style raids for paperwork violations are good, wholesome activities that belong in a free society? No, you do not. How could you? Every person of conscience stands against such things.
Then with so much indignation roused against them, police abuses against individuals ought to be among the easiest police state activities to halt. Even if you acknowledge such (admittedly big) factors as the federal government paying, equipping, training, and otherwise encouraging local cops to be thugs, in theory outraged local people (supported by a howling Internet) ought to have a relatively easy time putting a stop to such local outrages.
But despite the outcry, the abuses don’t stop. They don’t even slow down. Instead, we now see SWAT-style raids used to enforce housing code violations and catch student-loan scofflaws. We see polite objectors being charged with the catch-alls of disorderly conduct, obstruction of justice, or resisting arrest — and less polite objectors killed on the spot. We see tasers — once billed as “non-lethal” alternatives to firearms — being used as “compliance tools” against old ladies, grade-school children, diabetics, epileptics, and handicapped teenagers. We see people who photograph cops being threatened with long prison sentences. We’re told the horrendous lie that “freedom” requires absolute, forelock-tugging, dirt-scuffing, unquestioning obedience to Authoritah — and we’d better believe it OR ELSE.
You know all that, of course.
And it pains your conscience, doesn’t it? It makes you want to scream in frustration. Makes you want to take the law into your own hands and end the abuses by any means necessary. Makes you wonder if the entire country hasn’t lost its mind — and makes you sure that the entire “justice system” has well and truly lost its collective marbles — or perhaps isn’t intended to be a “justice” system at all.
No matter how loudly you yell, how many times you show up to support a victim in court, how many letters you write to editors, how many times you speak at public forums, how many times you do exactly what Martin Niemoeller mourned that he didn’t do … things just get worse.
And if something so local, so personal, seems impossible to halt, then how do ordinary We the People end ever-more-distant, more secretive, more deeply entrenched and institutionalized horrors perpetrated by a government that aims to rule us at all cost?
So we come back to the question: What’s the responsibility of a resident of a police state? If mere speaking out doesn’t change anything, what does? And how do we do it?
More to come …
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The term “brand-holes” comes to you courtesy of Jake MacGregor.
Becoming less tied to the system. I think that is our responsibility in a police state. You can protect your family and self, you have less to lose if they crack down on dissent. But mostly you need less from them.
Having food storage, alt power sources, alt water supply, etc you better provide for your family and they have less control over you. You don’t have to eat that GMO food because you’re growing your own food. (GMO if you want) You don’t have to drink fluoride because you have the choice of water sources. You don’t have to take a dead end, soul sucking job to make ends meet because you don’t have massive debt and need less to live well on.
When you are self-reliant, you also put less tax money into their hands. Less tax money, the less they can afford to do. At least at the local level. (my city has cut back on its SWAT team usage and decided not to replace the K-9 unit when the dog “retires” because it costs too much.)
Speaking out for a self reliant person means they have less ways to divert you. Most people can’t speak out because they are working 60 hours a week to stay on top of their credit card payments and don’t have time to show up at mid-day police review board hearings.
Trying to do good when you can, so not supporting the system. If someone hits your vechicle with their vechicle and it’s “mandatory” to make a report to the police, don’t do it. Instead, just try and work with their insurance company.
Driving some distance away to get your booze, if your town’s liquor store is city-owned.
If you have the chance vote “not guilty” if you are a juror. Especially if there is no victim.
I myself struggle with this quite a bit. I say that punishment (what they call “justice”) doesn’t help the victim, but I really don’t know if I could not report someone if they assaulted me or even worse assaulted or murdered a member of my family.
If I was on a jury, would I stick to my principles and vote not guilty, knowing that other jurors may get mad at me for prolonging the deliberation process or even worse, I may face mental or physical retaliation from a police officer or someone else because I did actually vote “not guilty”? These are tough questions and I really don’t have an answer.
In many areas, at the local level, you vote still counts. Often a city or county election is decided by just a handful of votes. Vote out the politicians that provide cover for corrupt LEOs. Vote for local pols that work for their constitutants, not the federal or state government etc. Go to the meetings, make your voice heard. Lead the demonstrations. Refuse to be hemmed in by barbed wire and thugs. Ghandi led one of the largest countries in the world to freedom. It can be done here.
The problem with “Freedom” here and the encroaching police state is very few are actually willing to do anything about it. It is either opt out and try to hide or cry about how bad it is and how someone should do something. Being and identified member of a political party won’t help much, to easy to denigrate and marginalize a registered party.
First thing is every encounter with police or officialdom needs to be recorded, hopefully from more than one angle. If you see someone recording a police encounter, start recording too. If you go to a demonstration or public meeting coordinate with others to go and record. Don’t be up in their face and provocative, but don’t hide all of the cameras either. Next is always publish those recording, the bad and the good. Make sure the community knows the good things that occur not just the bad. We live in the information age, get the information out to your neighbors!
Are you willing to risk your job, your way of life and you comfort to work for freedom? Are you willing to risk your families lifestyle and comfort? It is easy to say we are willing to go to jail or die for freedom, but few are willing to see their family starve or be denied medical care or education for that same freedom.
There is NO responsibility to a police state. The person or institutional entity (organization or government) that has no respect for me or my rights neither deserves nor has the right to demand respect from me.
I go out of my way to give and show respect to everyone, but once that trust is broken, all bets are off.
A police state — and *especially* one that grew out of a supposedly free birthright! — has no claims on any of its “citizens”. It may rule by intimidation, fear, and obedience, but it cannot expect anything good in return, and whatever it does get in retaliation, it deserves.
Thanks for this blog; I wondered if or when you might address this subject.
“There is NO responsibility to a police state.”
Pat nailed it! Our sacred duty is to undermine it not be responsible to it. When they tell us they will have to cut fire, police and particularly teaching jobs, if we don’t pay up, instruct them to cut away. In fact demand more and deeper cuts. At the same time fight for more gun and property, and self-defense rights. Undermine the club of rule enforcement at all times. Destroy the enforcement apparatus and Obama becomes the Mayor of DC with a big Jet.
Excellent post with outstanding points. If we can’t stop the escalation of very local police abuse, what can we stop?
Coincidentally, today’s War Street Journal has an article about new police tech: handheld iris scanners and facial recognition software. Developed for the wars, now to be deployed against citizens.
To add insult to injury, it’s an iPhone app! So if you use your iPhone to video a cop, you risk a beatdown, after which he uses an iPhone to put your pulped face into a database.
There may not be one answer to this question. Just as there are many kinds of freedom outlaws, there may be more than one set of responsibilities for free people in a police state, and more than one set of constructive, appropriate actions.
All cops aren’t evil, no more than any other group-possibly the way to go is for honest/decent cops to work within the system. Maybe this is wishful thinking on my part, but it is at least one of many possibilities.
The number of video recorders-and how easily and quickly video can be posted on the internet- has to have some effect on how police do things..or am I just fooling myself?
Some years ago, I knew one of the local cops(of a very small town) and they were sort of internally policed-the older officers themselves would have a long, sit-down talk with newbies,and any officer that had an attitude. They knew the value of keeping the respect and trust of the local folks. Maybe that’s now a thing of the past..
the sad parts are when people like massad ayoob disagree with all your points and will brand you a “cop hater” for your opinion
police and government intimidation is on the rise and will continue to do so…
I’m reminded of a scene in Terry Pratchett’s Night Watch, where the hero of the story put old ladies to work manning the barricade, knowing that the soldiers trying to break through said barricade were the sons, grandsons, and nephews of those ladies. Most bullies can deal with violence, but things change when faced with a scolding from their own grandma!
There’s a semi-retired sherriff who lives just down the road from my land. He knows I bake the fudgiest old-fashioned brownies in the state, and when he had a bad encounter with the local flora, I directed him to a plant that relieved the burning. He doesn’t scare me, but an out-of-town cop might.
I know I had a point when I started this, but I’m at work right now and I lost it :p
Perhaps not all cops are evil; maybe the evil-doing 95% make the rest look bad, but It’s Not Personal; It’s Institutional
Well said…even the “good” ones must sooner or later come to realize that they serve the beast…and at least look the other way…
OT – can Kent or Claire enlighten us unschooled ones as to how to post a link in comments? TIA
1) Claire, ballsy and excellent as usual
2) i have so ‘arrived’ with Claire using my phrase 🙂 … think i’ll trademark it and license it out to big name brands like Nike, Starbucks, Lenox China, Rolex, et al
anyone? anyone? Bueller?
never mind ………
Hi “-S”:
It’s clunky, but you simply use HTML markup directly in the text input box in which you create your comment. That is, if you wanted to write the text “Backwoods Home Magazine” wrapped in a link that took you to http://www.backwoodshome.com, you would write the following in your comment:
<a href=”http://www.backwoodshome.com”>Backwoods Home Magazine</a>
and it would come out looking like this:
Backwoods Home Magazine
Hope that helps! 🙂
Claire, thank you for another winner. Amplified.
My comment is actually on the (excellent) Niemoller reference; I simply wanted to point out that another highly appropriate example for how a lot of us are feeling is a reference from Solzhenitsyn:
“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?… The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If…if…We didn’t love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation…. We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”
_______________________
As to that quote, which is so commonly associated with Solzhenitsyn: can I enlist the help of this readership in validating or debunking it? I had figured it was either from The Gulag Archipelago or One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, but I cannot seem to find it in quick searches of those texts (using “how we burned in the camps” as my search term); nor have I been able yet to find any confirmable source reference, using that search, on a few randomly selected quote sites. I did seem to find one somewhat arbitrary attempt to reference it to a specific source (here), but the online text of that speech (ostensibly here) does not contain the above search term, or even the word “burned”.
Whether or not the quote does belong to Solzhenitsyn does not matter, for those of us it speaks to: its content is ultimately more important than its source. But one does like to get his sources right, especially a source that would lend credibility to the content, and I came up empty here while trying to validate it. Any help from the crowd here would be much appreciated.
Of statistical interest: a Google search using the term “how we burned in the camps”–as a selfcontained phrase–returned over sixty thousand results, and even adding “Solzhenitsyn” returned just under fifty thousand.
Hi Keven,
Thanks! It does help.
I still propose shunning. Especially in a small town-type area, imagine just how impossible that could make their lives. It could also work on a larger scale, now that I consider it. Your small town .gov getting a bit uppity? I wonder how long they’d hold up if people refused to do things like sell any of the employees gasoline? Or groceries? Sure, they could go further afield for their supplies, but the message would be unmistakeable.
And just think, what if they sent out property tax bills and everyone just ignored them. I wonder if they’d try to take the whole town?
“Let me see your papers”, and “Just following orders” were phrases we heard about other countries and other times- Now we see it here.
One thing I have been doing (perhaps stupidly) is engaging local ‘enforcers’ in discussions, and also on-line. I commented several times at Massad Ayoob Backwoods Blog regarding the murder of Jose Guerena- But Mr Ayoob sides with the storm troopers ‘just doing their job’, ‘just following procedure’ as they kill and kidnap citizens. Every suspect must submit or die, in his weltanschau. Anyone who dares question the tactics is no longer viewed as a citizen/his employer, but rather as a “cop hater”. So they create their mental barriers, to allow them to do what they do, to continue to pay their mortgage, to continue to ‘follow orders’.
I now understand how the colonists felt when the Redcoats demanded obedience.
It’s like watching the gate guards at Auschwitz go to work. You talk to them about what they’re doing, and they are so keen on ‘just following orders’ that they have lost sight of civilization.
When reason doesn’t work, when the ballot box and the courts accelerate the tyranny, when tyranny advances if you continue playing by ‘their rules’… Then what? What did the colonists do? They left for a new land.
And when tyranny tried to ensnare them there- What did they do? And where did all the prominent Torries go, during and after the ‘troubles’?
“Sic Semper Tyrannis” is the Virginia State motto.
In the end, tyranny is about raw naked force.
Most of the signers of the Declaration were captured, killed, or bankrupt.
So the bottom line then, is that Liberty is about putting an end to raw naked force of tyranny.
..Slavery
..Liberty
or Death
Avoiding trouble only works if trouble leaves you and your family alone. But tyranny is the thing that does not leave you alone, it demands your subservience. Obey or be punished. Lightbulbs or poisonous mercury. No coal, no oil, no nukes, no jobs. Tax or death. Only the state can decide which businesses are allowed, what media may report, which children get scholarships, which special friends get favors and kickbacks.
Do we let our children be enslaved in debt? Do we let our heritage be robbed from them? Do we let our civilization be consumed by locust? Do we watch and do nothing but type and whine about it? Do we apologize to our children, for what we have enabled through inaction?
Do what you must, because you can do no other.
“So we come back to the question: What’s the responsibility of a resident of a police state? If mere speaking out doesn’t change anything, what does? And how do we do it?”-Claire
We have been here before.
What did the colonists do?
Complain, petition, seek redress- for years, in every way possible. They tried avoidance, and not participating. But tyranny is intrusive, and it damaged all their lives, and ate out their substance.
And then, finally, they defended themselves against the aggressors who demanded obedience.
After many years of widespread conflict and suffering, the Torries were eventually purged, and their storm troopers too. Washington crossed the Delaware to kill one large group of mercenaries in their beds, on Christmas morning, as they slept.
That’s what happens when people start to say no to tyranny: Tyranny masses forces and comes to your village to take you guns, your property, your business, and your children’s future. And at some point- People say no. Some guy stands in front of a tank, or something. Or they gather guns and powder, and then stand on the village green- Just to say “Oh Hell No!”.
Saying “Oh Hell No!” invariably leads to ‘crossing the Delaware’ or ‘crossing the Rubicon’. That’s what comes next, when they won’t stop pushing, and we the people say “Oh Hell No!”.
They won’t stop pushing.
There’s going to be fight.
Let’s win it.
WRSA
Beans, Bullets, Bandaids, Brains, Balls, Buddies.
PT. Plan contingencies. Read Sun Tzu and your bible. Kiss your children good night when you tuck them in. We’ve been here before.
“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover they can vote themselves largess from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising them the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world’s greatest civilizations has been 200 years. These nations have progressed through this sequence:
from bondage to spiritual faith;
from spiritual faith to great courage;
from courage to liberty;
from liberty to abundance;
from abundance to selfishness;
from selfishness to apathy;
from apathy to dependence;
from dependency back again into bondage.”
-Alexander Tytler, 1770
“But what do we mean by the American Revolution? Do we mean the American war? The Revolution was effected before the war commenced. The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people; a change in their religious sentiments, of their duties and obligations…This radical change in the principles, opinions, sentiments, and affections of the people was the real American Revolution.”
– John Adams
“Whenever the legislators endeavor to take away and destroy the property of the people, or to reduce them to slavery under arbitrary power, they put themselves into a state of war with the people, who are thereupon absolved from any further obedience.”
– John Locke
“Man is free at the moment he wishes to be.”
– Voltaire
“You have Rights antecedent to all earthly governments; Rights that cannot he repealed or restrained by human laws; Rights derived from the Great Legislator of the universe.”
– John Adams
“Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst. Nations and peoples who forget this basic truth have always paid for it with their lives and freedoms.”
– Robert Heinlein
“Those who hammer their guns into plows, will plow for those who do not.”
– Thomas Jefferson
“No weapon in the arsenals of the world is so formidable as the will and moral courage of free men and women.”
– Ronald Reagan
“First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win.”
– Mahatma Ghandi
“Those who trade liberty for Security have neither”
– John Adams
“An armed man is a citizen. An unarmed man is a subject.”
– unknown
“Men occasionally stumble over truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.”
– Winston Churchill
“The world is a dangerous place to live; not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don’t do anything about it.”
– Albert Einstein
“He who does not punish evil, commands it to be done.”
– Leonardo da Vinci
“Stand upright, speak thy thoughts, declare the truth thou hast, that all may share; Be bold, proclaim it everywhere: They only live who dare.”
– Voltaire
“If your children ever find out how lame you really are, they’re gonna murder you in your sleep.”
– Frank Zappa
“Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.”
– Ronald Reagan
“All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent.”
– Thomas Jefferson
“Never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was legal.”
– Martin Luther King Jr.
“One has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that ‘an unjust law is no law at all.”
– Martin Luther King Jr.
“All laws which are repugnant to the Constitution are null and void.”
– SCOTUS Chief Justice John Marshall, Marbury v. Madison, 1803
“It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong.”
– Voltaire
“If you love wealth more than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, depart from us in peace. We ask not your counsel nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you. May your chains rest lightly upon you and may posterity forget that you were ever our countrymen.”
– John Adams
“If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my children may have peace.”
– Thomas Paine
“We are not to expect to be translated from despotism to liberty in a featherbed.”
– Thomas Jefferson
“If you can’t hit them with the first 6 shots, what makes you think the next 6 are gonna be any different ?”
– Jeff Cooper
Sorry Claire. I’m as disappointed and frustrated as every other moral person. And I figured out that tyranny never surrenders willingly. So to resist will invariably lead to crossing the Delaware, in our time or our children’s time. Jefferson, Adams, and Solzheneitzen figured it out too. Alexander Tytler wrote about the roughly 200 year cycle.
We don’t have to like it. But we cannot ignore it.
Like being raped while watching others being raped. Something must be done.
=-=-=-
Frodo: I wish the ring had never come to me. I wish none of this had happened.
Gandalf: So do all who live to see such times, but that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.
Speaking of quotes, I like this one.
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“How pale is the art of sorcerers, witches, and conjurors when compared with that of the government’s Treasury Department!” – Ludwig von Mises
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Wow…good stuff people…beautiful…
Sofa:
I think you need a few more quotes, and your posts are not long enough.
There is only one way, everyone here instinctively knows what that way is. And I warrant everyone here knows that many of us will never die of old age. But better to fall standing then live crawling.
“If you had fought like men, you would not now be hanging like dogs.”
Annie Bonnie – Pirate
Simply put, people have gone far too soft, and if a good portion of society doesn’t grow a pair, we’re screwed. Where I currently live is exactly the type of place where 60 years ago people would have no hesitation to take care of problems such as a bullying sherrif or a meddling federal agent looking to poke his nose in the shine business. But over the years country homes got replaced by suburbs and the people here seem to get more and more pathetic every year…Corruption and abuses are more rampant than ever yet the only “problems” residents will take care of are potholes and making sure the school won’t make little Aiden have to play dodgeball.
This is happening on a national level right now…and people who “care about our freedoms” aren’t activists (not beyond merely holding up signs anyway), they’re just voting Repubican and hoping it goes away. I don’t care how tough they talk…someone who is afraid to put up some grafitti wouldn’t have what it takes to put up a fight when the gestapo comes to pick him up. People who don’t have the stomach to scoff at “the way things are supposed to be” aren’t ever going to change things for themselves.
sofa,
ignore the sarcasm. Long posts in support of liberty is no vice.
A coarseness has overtaken our society. From video games to movies, from the glorification of war to the thugs on the local police force, it’s a general decline in civilization that we’re seeing. Gangsta rap personifies it.
As much as we are repelled by the outrages of out of control police, we are drawn to the latest Quentin Tarantino ode to death.
Western society is in the death throes of self-destruction. I don’t remember which Roman historian said it, but Pliny comes to mind, that he would sit out his old age on the mountain side and enjoy watching the world go to hell.
@ sofa ““Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst. Nations and peoples who forget this basic truth have always paid for it with their lives and freedoms.”
– Robert Heinlein
Unfortunately, the people who now hold the levers of power have learned the utility of violence all too well. In addition, they have modified the rules of our political life so that we have no viable way of removing them while still working within the system. The Courts are rigged, the election process and the vote counting is rigged, and the MSM is controled. Fiat money, fractional reserve banking, legal tender laws, and grant of special corporate rights, all work to prevent us from fair economic change. Cultural mores have erroded to the point that public shame or shunning is barely noticed.
On the other hand, digital technology is now making information more freely available than ever and is undermining the century-long brainwashing of public schools. Young people all over the world are discovering Thomas Jefferson, Spooner and Mises. We are many and they are few — and we are increasing faster than they are. Education may still be the key, at least if we have enough time.
There will be some level of violence. Will be? Already is. Ask Mr. Guerena’s widow. And we the People did not start it. The question is, will the dissolution of the current system be as peaceful (relatively) as that of the USSR, or will it be more like the War of Southern Secession?
No one knows, and it is too early to predict, but the prudent person prepares for the worst while hoping for the best.
Kevin writes:
“As to that quote, which is so commonly associated with Solzhenitsyn: can I enlist the help of this readership in validating or debunking it?”
It’s from The Gulag Archipelago. The first time I read the book it was in PB form – divided into three volumes – the referenced quote was early on in the first volume.
“What’s the responsibility of a resident of a police state?”
Metaphorically… to kick at the darkness til it bleeds daylight!
(with apologies to Bruce Cockburn)
The problem is the #3 message above from Matt.
Somehow he is convinced that voting will get us out of the mess that voting got us into.
What’s that saying about doing the same stupid thing over and over….
Thank you kindly, Plug Nickel Outfit. Validated.
I mark it as footnote 5 on p. 13 (numbering internal to the reproduced book, not the electronic file container) of the PDF volume I have, in the very first “Arrest” chapter. Right there, plain as day.
I would have doubtless caught this once The Gulag Archipelago came up in my reading queue (it’s next, incidentally, and I’ll probably start it before the end of the week), but I very much appreciate the note here. I’m always happy to acknowledge something that I missed right under my nose.
I now wonder if something may have been amiss with the search utility I used the first time. Using this different machine and document viewer, the full search took me right there, poof!
Yet another reminder to pay attention, confirm, and to allow for others to do the same. 🙂
[…] Interesting series… […]
Anything you do that keeps them from controlling who you are is a victory.