~ Alston Chase

I am sick to death of the economically illiterate environmental nonsense peddled in the media in an endless parade of bad thinking disguised as scientific discourse. The Green movement is a collectivist enterprise hell-bent on bending every knee in obeisance to a religious orthodoxy that will cripple the advancement of mankind and create third-world nations where first-world countries used to be, exponentially increasing infant mortality rates and reducing standards of living to make all of us look back on envy at the gold-plated living conditions of medieval serfs. The movement is a nasty brew of National Socialist "blood and soil" (see Anna Bramwells’s books), Marxist bromides and a child-like vision of how the universe works.

Central planning does not work. Larger entities that use force and coercion to make others do the right thing lead to national prison camps disguised as nation-states. Here’s a short quiz for you: grab the nearest envirus and ask him how would he suggest we improve the care and feeding of Mother Earth absent government intervention? He will splutter and get a very blank look in his vapid face as the synapses collapse and fail to function properly.

Use this rule of thumb: cost and benefit analysis will usually determine the economic efficacy of a given course of action. Prices are, among many attributes, the keenest indicator of scarcity or abundance of commodities or services. If recycling is such a great idea, why don’t they pay you to do it? If wind and solar energy are such ideal means to deliver power, why do they require massive subsidy and inevitably, the theft from private owners through eminent domain and other tools of economic oppression?

Speak truth to power because the Greens now have the upper hand. The government-media complex is now fully captive to the entire Green orthodoxy. Excepting shows like Bullshit! on Showtime, none questions the prevailing belief system; it is like a form of national psychosis although I feel the same way about the worship of the State. The environmental agenda is nothing less than a total renunciation of Western civilization and the requisite privileges of clean water, electricity, effective farming and a host of other modern conveniences.

The envirus views nature as a snapshot picture of the world frozen in time and unchanging; a static portraiture of life that possesses no adaptation and dynamism. Infantile views of nature which are most likely a result from having never tread upon it or lived in it. Rarely is the hunter or long-time ruralite seduced by the Disney visions of nature that dance in the heads of the Greens. A perspective further informed by the academic and media professionals whose worldview is shaped by a hive-like collectivist vision of human society in which all individuals are to be subordinated to the whims of what’s good for the herd as directed by omniscient strangers whose fatal conceit is that they are smarter than us so they know what is best for you.

Nature is cruel and dynamic. It is a daily massacre for the lame and the newborn. Vicious spasms of violence red in tooth and claw tempered by turns of weather that can kill and nourish in the same pastoral event. Most importantly, nature is capricious in the most practical sense: the complexity is so immense as to be almost incomprehensible to human cognition. Complexity theory has tried to capture the distillate of what appears to be random phenomenon but is actually a spontaneous order much like economic market forces. Which brings us to the cruelest joke of all on the Greens: they can’t possibly know what they are talking about.

Here’s the rub: there is no question of climate change, the riddle is to what extent man is a culprit. Once a given problem set has three or more variables, it becomes impossible to establish with any certitude correlative or causative connections between A and B and C. The global climate is a complex system far too large to isolate variables and know with pinpoint accuracy what makes it tick or respond to human influences. I don’t deny that humans have an impact on the climate but no one can prove to me what the extent is. No evidence emerges that the ice ages in medieval times were anthropogenic, they were simply within the observed cycle of cooling and warming that one would expect of a planetary ecosystem dependent on solar energy as a driver and engine of weather and life. There is a reason increased sunspot activity is coincident with warming trends. Man is not apart from nature, he is a part of nature. We are part of the infrastructure and no one can even address why carbon dioxide, if a pollutant, nourishes all earthly plant life excepting certain anaerobic moss. The government does not even want to have a discussion since the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recently muzzled one of its in-house climate skeptics.

Stand up to the Greens and call them on their idiocy. Question all their assumptions. Stand athwart their diktats and directives as they attempt to rule you as cattle. They are shutting down coal-fired plants by the dozen and seeking to bankrupt the nation by pursuing green technologies that the market has proven to be a technological & economic dead-end. Curiously, they object strenuously to the purest solar energy of all: nuclear energy which harnesses the power of the sun in a relatively clean fission package. One small ray of hope is the fact that the EPA will strangle and mangle all the emerging green technology. They will get all bureaucratically befuddled as the contesting envirus schisms like bird enthusiasts and wind generator proponents do battle. Pollution activists will discover the immense smog component of mass transit buses and the maintenance infrastructure. Electric car boosters will stand dumb-founded in their garages as the AC outlet fails to deliver power after the coal-fired grid is shut down through rolling brown-outs or blackouts. All done, of course, at taxpayer expense.

Under Obamunism, we have a wild ride ahead of us as the Green Reds at first have a terrific honeymoon with Middle America but soon discover the combination of economic illiteracy, scientific buffoonery and collectivist tyranny make for a lethal cocktail. It would be wonderful if we could just sit on the sidelines and observe the circus but the future of America is in the hazard. Indeed, the collectivists have other plans for us.

"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away."

~ Philip K. Dick

William Buppert [send him mail] and his homeschooled family live in the high desert in the American Southwest. His blog is at hezekiahwyman.com.

The Best of William Buppert

~ James Madison

"But whether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much is certain — that it has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case, it is unfit to exist."

~ Lysander Spooner

Today, 17 September 2009, is Constitution Day. There will be paeans, abundant commentary and church-like observances of the glories of this document in making us the most blessed nation on planet earth. This essay suggests a contrarian thesis. The Constitution is an enabling document for big government. Much like the Wizard of Oz, the man behind the curtain is a fraud. In this case, for all the sanctimonious handwringing and the obsequious idolatry of the parchment, it sealed the fate of our liberties and freedoms and has operated for more than 200 years as a cover for massive expansion of the tools and infrastructure of statist expansion and oppression. Among the many intellectual travels I have undertaken, this is one of the most heart-breaking I have ventured on. I want to acknowledge the compass-bearers who sent me on this journey: Kenneth W. Royce (aka Boston T. Party) and his seminal book, The Hologram of Liberty and Kevin Gutzman’s Politically Incorrect Guide to the Constitution. For most of the political spectrum in America, the document represents their interpretation of how to make this mortal coil paradise. Even in libertarian circles, it is taken as an article of faith the Constitution is a brilliant mechanism to enlarge liberty and keep government at bay. That is a lie.

The document was drafted in the summer of 1787 behind closed doors in tremendous secrecy because if word leaked out of the actual contents and intent, the revolution that had just concluded would have been set ablaze again. They were in a race against time and did everything in their power to ensure that the adoption took place as quickly as possible to avoid reflection and contemplation in the public square that would kill the proposal once the consequences of its agenda became apparent. They were insisting that the states ratify first and then propose amendments later. It was a political coup d’état. It was nothing less than an oligarchical coup to ensure that the moneyed interests, banksters and aristocrats could cement their positions and mimic the United Kingdom from which they had been recently divorced.

The original charter of the drafters was to pen improvements to the existing Articles of Confederation. Instead, they chose to hijack the process and create a document which enslaved the nation. Federalist in the old parlance meant states rights and subsidiarity but the three authors of the fabled Federalist Papers supported everything but that. Their intent and commitment was to create a National government with the ability to make war on its constituent parts if these states failed to submit themselves to the central government.

As Austrian economists have discovered, bigger is not necessarily better. The brilliant and oft-dismissed Articles of Confederation (AoC) and Perpetual Union are a testament to voluntarism and cooperation through persuasion that the Constitution disposed of with its adoption. Penned in 1776 and ratified in 1781, the spirit and context of the Articles live on in the Swiss canton system and are everywhere evident in the marketplace where confederationist sentiments are practiced daily. The confederation’s design divines its mechanism from what an unfettered market does every day: voluntary cooperation, spontaneous information signals and the parts always being smarter than the sum A. confederation according to the Webster’s 1828 dictionary is:

1. The act of confederating; a league; a compact for mutual support; alliance; particularly of princes, nations or states.

I would advise the readership to use the 1828 Webster’s dictionary to accompany any primary source research you may undertake to understand American (& British) letters in the eighteenth century. It is the source for the contemporary lexicon. It is even available online now.

Here is a simple comparison of the two organizing documents:

`

Articles of Confederation

Constitution

Levying taxes

Congress could request states to pay taxes

Congress has right to levy taxes on individuals

Federal courts

No system of federal courts

Court system created to deal with issues between citizens, states

Regulation of trade

No provision to regulate interstate trade

Congress has right to regulate trade between states

Executive

No executive with power. President of U.S. merely presided over Congress

Executive branch headed by President who chooses Cabinet and has checks on power of judiciary and legislature

Amending document

13/13 needed to amend Articles

2/3 of both houses of Congress plus 3/4 of state legislatures or national convention

Representation of states

Each state received 1 vote regardless of size

Upper house (Senate) with 2 votes; lower house (House of Representatives) based on population

Raising an army

Congress could not draft troops, dependent on states to contribute forces

Congress can raise an army to deal with military situations

Interstate commerce

No control of trade between states

Interstate commerce controlled by Congress

Disputes between states

Complicated system of arbitration

Federal court system to handle disputes

Sovereignty

Sovereignty resides in states

Constitution the supreme law of the land

Passing laws

9/13 needed to approve legislation

50%+1 of both houses plus signature of President

Note that the precept of individual taxation was an end-run against state sovereignty from the very beginning. If the Congress does not wish to violate state sovereignty, then they will simply prey on the individuals in the states. It should be obvious that the AoC was not a recipe for government employees from top to bottom to use the office to enrich themselves so a scheme was afoot to precipitate and manufacture dissent over the present configuration of the central government apparatus which for all intents and purposes barely existed. The AoC was intolerable to a narrow panoply of interests and the Federalist Papers appeared between October 1787 and August 1788 to plead the case for a newer form of "Republic" authored by three individuals: James Madison, John Jay, and Alexander Hamilton. The British had sued for peace in 1783 and the AoC were still in effect until 1790. Time was ticking to erect the new government apparatus that would strengthen the central government to eventually mimic the very tyranny which caused British North America to put the English Crown in the hazard. The Anti-Federalists rose up in response and provided what I consider one of the most splendid and eloquent defenses of small government penned in our history.

When the Constitutional Convention convened on 1787, 55 delegates came but 14 later quit as the Convention eventually abused its mandate and scrapped the AoC instead of revising it. The notes and proceedings of the cloistered meeting were to be secret as long as 53 years later when Madison’s edited notes were published in 1840.

The Anti-Federalist Brutus avers in Essay I in October 1787:

"But what is meant is, that the legislature of the United States are vested with the great and uncontroulable powers, of laying and collecting taxes, duties, imposts, and excises; of regulating trade, raising and supporting armies, organizing, arming, and disciplining the militia, instituting courts, and other general powers. And are by this clause invested with the power of making all laws, proper and necessary, for carrying all these into execution; and they may so exercise this power as entirely to annihilate all the state governments, and reduce this country to one single government. And if they may do it, it is pretty certain they will; for it will be found that the power retained by individual states, small as it is, will be a clog upon the wheels of the government of the United States; the latter therefore will be naturally inclined to remove it out of the way. Besides, it is a truth confirmed by the unerring experience of ages, that every man, and every body of men, invested with power, are ever disposed to increase it, and to acquire a superiority over every thing that stands in their way."

The conflict was brewing between the Jeffersonians among the individualists and the Hamiltonian collectivists. The rhetorical lines were drawn and the fate of the nation eventually slid into the camp of the Nationalists.

George Washington wrote to John Jay on 1 August 1786:

"Many are of opinion that Congress have too frequently made use of the suppliant humble tone of requisition, in applications to the States, when they had a right to assume their imperial dignity and command obedience. Be that as it may, requisitions are a perfect nihility, where thirteen sovereign, independent[,] disunited States are in the habit of discussing & refusing compliance with them at their option. Requisitions are actually little better than a jest and a bye word through out the Land. If you tell the Legislatures they have violated the treaty of peace and invaded the prerogatives of the confederacy they will laugh in your face. What then is to be done? Things cannot go on in the same train forever. It is much to be feared, as you observe, that the better kind of people being disgusted with the circumstances will have their minds prepared for any revolution whatever. We are apt to run from one extreme into another. To anticipate & prevent disasterous contingencies would be the part of wisdom & patriotism."

It appears even the much admired Washington was having none of the talk of independence and wanted a firm hand on the yoke of the states to make them obey their masters on high. Washington’s behavior in the Whiskey Rebellion cast away any doubts of the imperious behavior of the central government a mere four year after the adoption of the Constitution.

Patrick Henry gave the firmest defense of the skeptical posture when he questioned the precarious position the Constitution put to the state’s sovereignty on 5 June 1788 at the Virginia Ratifying Convention (the savvy Founding Lawyers ensured that the process of ratification was sped along by bypassing the bicameral house requirements and simply asking the states to conduct ratifying conventions):

"How were the Congressional rights defined when the people of America united by a confederacy to defend their liberties and rights against the tyrannical attempts of Great-Britain? The States were not then contented with implied reservation. No, Mr. Chairman. It was expressly declared in our Confederation that every right was retained by the States respectively, which was not given up to the Government of the United States. But there is no such thing here. You therefore by a natural and unavoidable implication, give up your rights to the General Government. Your own example furnishes an argument against it. If you give up these powers, without a Bill of Rights, you will exhibit the most absurd thing to mankind that ever the world saw — A Government that has abandoned all its powers — The powers of direct taxation, the sword, and the purse. You have disposed of them to Congress, without a Bill of Rights — without check, limitation, or controul. And still you have checks and guards — still you keep barriers — pointed where? Pointed against your weakened, prostrated, enervated State Government! You have a Bill of Rights to defend you against the State Government, which is bereaved of all power; and yet you have none against Congress, though in full and exclusive possession of all power! You arm youselves against the weak and defenceless, and expose yourselves naked to the armed and powerful. Is not this a conduct of unexampled absurdity? What barriers have you to oppose to this most strong energetic Government? To that Government you have nothing to oppose. All your defence is given up. This is a real actual defect. . . "

The Bill of Rights as we know them today were first introduced by James Madison in 1789 in response to the fears the emerging Constitution caused among the free men in these united States. They eventually came into effect on December 15, 1791. The Federalists were desperately opposed to the adoption of the Bill of Rights being insisted upon by Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson and other skeptics of central governance. As Brutus again so cleverly pointed out in the Anti-Federalist papers #84:

" This will appear the more necessary, when it is considered, that not only the Constitution and laws made in pursuance thereof, but all treaties made, under the authority of the United States, are the supreme law of the land, and supersede the Constitutions of all the States. The power to make treaties, is vested in the president, by and with the advice and consent of two-thirds of the senate. I do not find any limitation or restriction to the exercise of this power. The most important article in any Constitution may therefore be repealed, even without a legislative act. Ought not a government, vested with such extensive and indefinite authority, to have been restricted by a declaration of rights? It certainly ought.

So clear a point is this, that I cannot help suspecting that persons who attempt to persuade people that such reservations were less necessary under this Constitution than under those of the States, are wilfully endeavoring to deceive, and to lead you into an absolute state of vassalage (emphasis mine)."

The Bill of Rights nominations from the respective sovereign states originally numbered near 200 and the Founding Lawyers saw fit to include twelve (the two concerning apportionment and Congressional pay failed to pass) after much bickering especially by the most monstrous worthy of the time, Alexander Hamilton. A brilliant mind coupled with all the political knife-fighting skills needed to dominate the proceedings, Hamilton made sure that the tools of oppression and a financial yoke would be decorating our necks in perpetuity. Small solace can be taken in the aftermath of the duel between Hamilton and Burr on 11 July 1804 in that it took him close to a day to die.

Alexander Hamilton tipped his intellectual hand in a speech to the Constitutional Convention concerning the United States Senate, 06/18/1787 (quoted in the notes of Judge Yates):

“All communities divide themselves into the few and the many. The first are the rich and the well-born; the other the mass of the people … turbulent and changing, they seldom judge or determine right. Give therefore to the first class a distinct, permanent share in the Government … Nothing but a permanent body can check the imprudence of democracy.”

I am no fan of democracy as I see it as nothing more than a transformational accommodation to tyranny over time but one can infer from this quote that Hamilton fancied a class of people more equal than others who would have a disproportionate access to the levers of power over the great unwashed. Again, I am suggesting that the Constitution was a document designed from the beginning as a means to rob constituent and subsidiary parts of sovereignty and subject these subordinate elements to a national framework which made their position subservient to the Federal government. The desire of the Federalists was to install a national framework and cement the structure through the machinations of national banking, franking of a currency and debt creation. Keep in mind that all of the nattering on about the Federal Reserve today is a complaint against a Constitutional Frankenstein monster in its fourth iteration since the other attempts at national banks failed. You can guess who picked up the tab.

The Bill of Rights was finally passed on 15 December 1791 but it was much diluted and purposefully weaker and more ambiguous about the central government’s implied and explicit powers.

The Constitution took effect on 4 March 1789 with 11 states under it and two states not submitting ratification. North Carolina did ratify it when a promise of a future Bill of Rights was assured. Rhode Island refused and was the only state to put the Constitution to a popular vote where it failed on 24 March 1788 by an 11—1 margin. They eventually ratified it.

Hamilton now had the ways and means to make real his storied dream: "A national debt, if it is not excessive, will be to us a national blessing." The moneyed interests saw the advantage of monetizing the debt. By assuming the state’s debts at the national government level, a means of controlling commerce and taxation became an implied task of the central government. This may have been the first incident of the debtors from the Revolutionary War convincing their Hamiltonian allies that if they had the national government bear the debt and relieve them of responsibility, this could be used as the means to establish the coveted national bank to start the issuance of government currency not to mention the driver for increased taxation.

All the puzzle pieces had finally locked into place. Royce eloquently explains what has transpired in Hologram of Liberty: "To put a u2018gun’ in the hands of the new national government was the primary object, the great sine qua non, of the Constitution. A comprehensive de jure authority of Congress backed with de facto guns." The Confederation is defeated and the long train of usurpation, centralization and tyranny leaves the station for what has become American history.

Hamilton’s machinations and influence probably single-handedly turned the product of this secret confab into one of the most successful instruments of political oppression before even the creation of the USSR. What makes it even more sublime as a tool of big government is the sophisticated propaganda and hagiographic enterprise which has both spontaneously and through careful planning suborned the public’s skepticism of the nature of the machine erected to control their behavior, which has resulted in an almost religious observance of all things Constitutional. Carefully cultivated over two hundred years, this religious idolatry had certainly fogged the thinking of this writer for most of his adult life. This sleeper has awakened.

Ask yourself this question: have the robed government employees who read the Constitutional tea leaves for the most part defended individual liberty or have they rubber-stamped the exponential growth of power and control of the colossus that sits astride the Potomac?

“Our constitutions purport to be established by ‘the people,’ and, in theory, ‘all the people’ consent to such government as the constitutions authorize. But this consent of ‘the people’ exists only in theory. It has no existence in fact. Government is in reality established by the few; and these few assume the consent of all the rest, without any such consent being actually given.”

~ Lysander Spooner

William Buppert [send him mail] and his homeschooled family live in the high desert in the American Southwest. His blog is at hezekiahwyman.com.

The Best of William Buppert

Since the break-up of these united States, all of California south of San Francisco had become part of the pan-Mexican rump state in Atzlan along with most of the American Southwest. Mexico has splintered into approximately ten separate states with alliances between the various 31 states that comprised Mexico ebbing and flowing on a daily basis. The decriminalization of drug laws in Pacifica and the Free State Alliance significantly weakened the strength of the Mexican drug cartels to finance their activities and the pan-Mexican economy started to flourish after nearly a century of economic and monetary penury.

Pacifica remained in force in the major cities like Portland and Seattle but had lost total control of the countryside in what had formerly been Washington and Oregon. The Dakotas finally allied with the Midwestern Alliance.

The American South had settled into an uneasy alliance with the United States Socialist Republic (USSR) which maintained their capital in the District of Columbia. Maine, Vermont and New Hampshire eventually broke away from the USSR to establish a system of Swiss-style cantons which the USSR battered for the first two years but eventually exhausted their ability to fight once the USSR economy collapsed into a miserable shambles that made Cuba look like 1990s Hong Kong.

Premiere Obama conceded defeat in an indirect fashion after assumption of his lifelong appointment at the circus-like Constitutional Convention in the USSR in 2012. The massive government intervention and adoption of total central planning had predictable results: the world’s first 100% marginal tax rate on the top fifty percent of earners had only surprised the Premiere’s Economic Council but no one else with the results. Tax receipts were down by 80% in the first year and disappeared in the second. Paul Krugman, the chairman of the council, was quoted as saying "[that] greed would be eliminated and a new man would emerge from the bold experiment." The only thing that emerged were the tens of miles of refugees attempting to flee the USSR in the first year after which the borders were sealed and all the government’s guns were trained inward to prevent the citizens from escaping the latest economic nostrum — permanent employment in a government job assigned to you whether you liked it or not.

It is difficult to gauge how bad conditions are in the USSR. Like the Soviet Union during the twentieth century and Cuba afterwards, rumors were rampant. Gulags, reeducation camps, mass disappearances, famine and disease outbreaks were apparently the order of the day. Some of the crueler pundits referred to the Premiere as Kim Jong Obama and Barak Mugabe. Like the former northern part of the Koreas, it remains a rather strong military power but an economic basket case.

Fears of meddling on the part of China, Russia and Middle Eastern states proved to be unfounded as those nations grapple with their own economic and social collapse difficulties. While all manner of economic nonsense like Keynes and Marx were the "wave of the future" in the twentieth century, the twenty-first century is seeing a veritable renaissance in the works of Hayek, von Mises, Rothbard and Bastiat.

"It is almost as if the entire human race has finally awakened from the fever dream of the government supremacists who have inoculated them against freedom for five millennia and opened their eyes to the new possibilities" Mr. Lutrin insists as we gaze out over the huge forested valley outside his home near Sandpoint. He is fit and tanned and still participates in what some would term adrenal sports. He remains a devout Senior Instructor on the Appleseed Trail for the Revolutionary War Veterans Association teaching weekend marksmanship clinics throughout the FSA when he is not globetrotting. We are comfortably seated in a veranda near his workshop. Since retirement he has found lucrative work as a consultant around the world "deprogramming and devolving state industries into private hands" with his new venture firm, The Spooner Group. Asked if he misses being the governor of a state, he merely smirks and claims he would rather work for a living.

"Mr. Lutrin (he insists he not be referred to as governor), five years have passed since the first crisis which set the nation asunder and broke up the most powerful nation on the globe. On reflection, would you have done anything different?"

"No, my only regret is that I was left with a task that should have been done ten or a hundred years before me. I was asked recently who my favorite President was during the twentieth century and the only one I could come up with was Coolidge and possibly Harding. No one else even came close. The rest of the rascals were simply well-dressed pirates. Barry, a close economist friend of mine, claimed there was no such thing as governments, only interests…there is plenty of truth to that."

"…but the bloodshed and misery which followed the wholesale destruction of the former Union when secession spread like wildfire…"

"Hold on, I am not the author of the naked aggression and sheer lunacy that emanated from the Federal government for most of its history after the War Between the States in the 1860s. What happened five years ago was inevitability and just so happened to occur on my watch. I take umbrage at your comparison because you are quite literally insisting that if a man sees a serial killer discharging his duties, I have an obligation to cower instead of cowboy up and stop it. Look, I come from five generations of Westerners who not only earned their living the hard way but tended to be resentful of any authority outside of the family. You could almost surmise that my Celtic blood gave me a predisposition to anti-authoritarianism. There are lines in the sand…"

"So you are justifying the civil war which broke out across the country?"

"I am an old-school libertarian, not a pacifist. I believe in the non-aggression axiom. No man has the right to start a fight but the aggrieved party damn sure has the right to put a stop to any visited upon him. You see, that may be one of the worst pathogens or memes the political class and its apologists has convinced people to believe — that they are utterly incapable of helping themselves unless they surrender their rights to a violent elite. John Wayne said it best if I recall: u2018I won’t be wronged, I won’t be insulted, and I won’t be laid a hand on. I don’t do these things to other people and I expect the same from them.’"

"That is rather simple…"

"I would like you to consider something. Imagine a society in which everyone took that to be the way proper folks behave. But think that there may be people who would ask themselves how they could take advantage of that. I am not talking about the entrepreneur or small business owner, I’m talking about the natural cross-section of humanity in which you have a certain group of folks for whom criminality and even psychopathy is simply the way they are wired or nurtured. Now some of those men would ask themselves how can I minimize risk and maximize gain? Here’s a pop quiz: what is the only group of criminals who have consistently evaded responsibility for their misbehavior, garnered tremendous rewards in money and prestige and, excepting rare instances like Nicolae Ceausescu, die abed fat and happy?

"I don’t…"

"Politicians. Throughout history with rare exceptions, they have been the decadent and greedy agents of death and destruction on humanity. 262 million corpses outside of warfare alone in the twentieth century stacked up as a paean to the Cult of the Politician. Hundreds of millions of humans hoodwinked into thinking that if only they would remit their fates to enlightened strangers, all the roads would be paved with gold and manna from heaven would provide succor for eternity. I think you would have to be a sociopath in the first place to want to rule over others."

"But you were a politician. You were the governor of a state. Isn’t that rather hypocritical?"

"To a certain extent you are right. I compromised with the system and thought the only way to change it would be to wreck it from the inside. I did not enter office with the intention of secession and starting the whole ball of wax. Frankly, once I was in office, I could almost feel the sickness creeping over me. The feeling that maybe I could make a positive difference by punishing my fellow citizens to influence their behavior or using carrots and sticks on them as if they lab rats, as if I had the right to do so in the first place. Shame on me.

I had a constituent come to me one day and he and I had coffee together. Old and weather-beaten rancher who had seen the hard side of seventy years who put salt in his coffee. He was quite articulate and related a story to me. He asked me if I had ever had a difficult family member: alcohol or drug abuse, mentally retarded or a Down’s syndrome child. We both agreed we had. He made a very simple point: he said he would move heaven and earth to help his blood kin but even then a solution may not be available. In the end, no cure for Down’s or the son is not willing to give up his drink. No solution. Yet the politician’s siren song is that a group of disinterested strangers in a far-off castle will cure all these ills if the rancher would simply surrender a sizable portion of his wealth at gunpoint and be sanctioned by tens of thousands of laws he would have to obey on pain of death ultimately. Yet in the end, the politicians always make you worse off."

"Certainly food for thought…"

"Look, we may be entering a new age here hundreds of years before I envisioned it possible. Men and women all over the globe may be waking up to the simple observation that empowering others to engage in violence or the threat of violence over their family and neighbors may be a distinctly unhealthy way to live."

"Thank you, Governor Lutrin…"

"Please, call me Mr. Lutrin."

William Buppert [send him mail] and his homeschooled family live in the high desert in the American Southwest. His blog is at hezekiahwyman.com.

The Best of William Buppert

~ Randolph Bourne

War is the health of the state. Randolph Bourne arrived at this conclusion near the beginning of the 20th century. Smedley Butler later wrote in War is a Racket about the baleful special interest vectors that drive us to war. We hear again and again that we owe our freedoms to the conduct of overseas adventures in other countries whether the wresting of Spanish colonies into our possession or the invasion of Europe during the War to Save Joseph Stalin (1939—45) to the modern era of American armed dominion over the planet. I would suggest these are poor assumptions. The next time someone makes one of these specious claims, simply ask them how the defeat of one totalitarian regime while aiding and abetting another noxious regime made America free? Is the Cold War representative of the halcyon days of American individualism?

Most libertarians agree that the American government is colossal, oppressive and a slayer of freedom and liberty. There are certainly domestic influences and causes for the enormous growth in the statist tilt of American governance and concentration of power. The metamorphosis of an agrarian republic birthed in the violent dismissal of British rule to the Sovietized monstrosity we labor under today is the result of both domestic dynamics and the creation of the national security/garrison state to project power and influence overseas. I would submit that war is the unacknowledged silent partner of the leviathan state.

How does a militarized foreign policy create a less free nation at home? Let’s begin with a conflict most Americans can name but few can even place a date to: World War One. I would recommend Niall Ferguson’s book Pity of War as a signal starting point to rip asunder the veil of historical illiteracy and propaganda that has surrounded that sordid conflict. Woodrow Wilson, one of the worst and most evil Presidents to grace that august den of thieves in the White House, promised in 1916 to never enter the European conflict and promptly started the machinations to steer us into the conflagration and militarize American society. The more you learn about Wilson, the more you see he is the point of origin for so much of our national grief. I have previously mentioned the American Protective League and its un-American activities in stifling, fining and jailing dissidents against Wilson’s war. Wilson also inaugurated the Committee on Public Information which even gave instructions for cartoonists and signed into law the Espionage and Sedition Acts.

Among the many notorious achievements Wilson managed was the Americanization of a fairly decentralized and devolved society. This was the perennial missing link in formalizing the ultimate project of the Hamiltonian ambition: the establishment of a permanent central government for whom the individual states were mere agents and bureaucratic subsidiaries.

State and regional pride in the absence of a national highway system and a fairly localized culture dominated the discourse of the then loosely knit united States. It still took nearly a week or more to travel from coast to coast. The government in DC did not have the consensus or the reach to influence the minor and major muscle movements that each state and its subset elements exercised and therefore the flavors and nuances of the regions retained localized habits and customs. WWI ended that with the unifying message of an America in peril from the German threat to European stability and the need to make the world more like America. In the process, these united States made the same critical error the Confederacy made in the War of Northern Aggression; by centralizing the war effort, any state sovereignty soon was lost to the overweening tendency to dictate top-down command economy nostrums and the resulting loss of subsidiary integrity at the lower echelonments. For the first time in American history, state-originated troops deployed overseas en masse as American-flagged forces in a unified organization representing the "forces of democracy."

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William Buppert [send him mail] and his homeschooled family live in the high desert in the American Southwest.

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For some time, I have been trying to figure out why the nation and we as individuals are in the fix we are in now. Many reasons manifest themselves. We labor under a government of such monstrous reach and epic incompetence that it makes the Soviets now look like a paragon of efficiency and probity. We suffer under a ruling class that has not simply been a gangster government under Obamunism but has been this way since the defeat of the original Constitution in 1865. With each illegitimate war since 1898, the power of the Federal government has increased exponentially. With each manufactured crisis, liberties and freedoms have withered and died. This is simply the latest and greatest improvement in the ongoing process of our overseers to find emerging ways to increase the output of our slavery.

I have alluded before that we live in the country and have occasion to run across orphaned animals. We have horses and chickens and other assorted animals on the Circle A Ranch. My wife happens to be a fantastic gardener and the reincarnation of Dr. Doolittle. We discovered by following the horrid cacophony of rabbit screams three orphaned cottontails, two of which promptly died. My wife is now nursing the survivor and hoping to brighten his life expectancy in this mortal coil. As is her wont, she is an inveterate researcher and proceeded to go on the ‘net and search out advice on care and feeding of a rabbit which is not one of our areas of husbandry expertise. What struck her were the countless admonitions to seek government assistance and report it to wildlife "authorities" or the zoo. I look around and converse with colleagues and associates to find my fellow Americans increasingly frightened or unfamiliar with doing anything without someone’s permission. Whether at work or play, we:

• obey speed limits that have nothing do with safety and simply provide revenue to our rulers
• pay property taxes which inevitably increase the yoke around our necks locally and pay for the intellectual suicide pact call government schooling
• pay extraordinary sales taxes on local and state purchases to subsidize the countless layers of bureaucracy that choke citizen and business productivity everyday
• stop locally at a US Border Patrol checkpoint nearly twenty miles north of the Mexican border to be asked if we are American citizens and a visual check of the interior of our vehicles
• sit idly by while the various levels of government erect observation devices at traffic intersections to increase revenue streams
• receive property tax bills on our real estate which increase in assessment while market prices decrease
• are required to have permission from the US Forest Circus or National Park Service to hunt, play or work on lands expropriated by our betters in government

I have discovered the silver bullet and it is from the University of the Intuitively Obvious: question authority and maintain a skeptical attitude about all facets of government and governance. That’s it…simple. Even those of us who have invested considerable intellectual heavy-lifting in discerning why the government in all its consistent brutality and blood-raged destruction commands such a loyal and slavish quality in men are baffled by the absence of this simple epistemological tool to ask why on a consistent basis from stem to stern. If enough vigilance is maintained at the outset and embryonic stages of so much government mischief, much of the madness could be strangled in its statist cradle through peaceful discourse, non-compliance, shunning and development of innovative strategies to sabotage the government’s machinations. Most government programs start out with promises of nirvana and positive outcomes but the history of man shows that this is essentially iatrogenic and hubristic. The state is a violent actor by necessity to preserve its power and expand it, so inevitably the promises dissolve into a nightmarish brew of incompetence, lethality and baleful societal consequences and we are stuck with the myriad Frankenstein monsters shambling about with the vague promises of eternal goodness and heaven on earth.

One may say that the horse is out of the barn and we are truly stuck with the state of affairs and no amount of reform will fix DC and its loyal minions at this stage of their maturation and dominance and you would be correct. The rub is this: the FEDGOD will fall and it will be in the next 12—24 months and much like the USSR, it will perish of its own internal Marxoid contradictions. Foreign wars, self-induced economic calamity and sheer naked arrogance will force it to fold and dissolve as a ruling elite. This is a window that rarely opens and the opportunities will be tremendous — for both sides. The furloughed politicos will spread their contagion when they flee the ruins of the DC power structure and seek to encourage the usual suspects among government workers and gullible subjects to help resurrect this monstrosity that has been astride our necks like a decomposing albatross. Truth serum will be necessary and that all starts with the kind of skepticism and incredulity that seems to characterize most everything we do except our attitude toward our rulers. Cross-examination is the engine of truth. Question every bit of alleged government authority which emerges from the ashes. This is one reason Thomas Jefferson was agitating for constant revolt for the tree of liberty. Government is a fungal growth that cannot be checked without constantly striking the root and taking whatever measures are necessary to curb its growth.

You won’t find this kind of critical thinking taught in the universities or any facet of the school systems because skepticism and clear thinking will be the end of them and the whole rotting mold growth choking American civilization called government. When was the last time you saw a government sponsored university study which called for the reduction and/or elimination of a statist rule or department? You don’t have to be a philosophy major or graduate to realize that Socratic drilling works. This is simply the process where you repeatedly ask why to a set of explanations until either you are satisfied the meritorious answer has been given or the shoddy intellectual construction is bared for all to see. It bears repeating: the entire artifice of the state is based on the threat or employment of violence to meet its ends, so it is morally illegitimate and reprehensible from the starting blocks. You have the moral high ground because all government for the most part is an elaborate shell game to develop proxy relationships with servant classes who obey at the urging of a lash or worse for the material and power benefit of the ruling class. Wake up, helots!

This is the chance we have. A dozen, fifty or hundreds of resistance and secessionist entities are going to move into the vacuum left by the great sucking abyss of the FEDGOD collapse. Hundreds of laboratories will emerge to test every variant of political collective and ordered enterprise imaginable. I have little hope for the subjects and somnambulant mental zombies that stumble around the cities of the Left Coast and the Northeast (Vermont and New Hampshire excepted) will do anymore other than instantly resurrect facsimiles of DC patterns of rule and other processes of national socialism but between the Marxist coastlines; the life and times of ordinary Americans will take extraordinary turns to develop from scratch freedom-oriented communities and spasms of spontaneous order. People may finally awaken and look at their neighbors and try to do the right thing. They may seek a system that asks, persuades and cooperates instead of bullies, collectivizes and forces through violent means the shape and texture of human relationships. They will be the vanguard of the men and women who finally awaken from the five millennia fever-dream of enabling various strangers the power of life and death over thousands and millions simply because they have surrendered the most basic right of all; leave us the hell alone.

Turn off the television, grab a book(s) and have conversations with family and like-minded friends. Go out and do things. Start a garden, fix your fencing, move to the country and reach out to the community you live in. Open your mind to the possibilities before us. Most of all, question every aspect of your relationship with authority. Does it derive from fear or respect? Does it emanate from first-hand experience or second-hand knowledge? How many times have you truly asked why a certain bureaucratic edict must be followed? More importantly, what is your line in the sand where your servitude stops and your resistance begins? Just say no to big government. Once a man establishes his limitations for tolerance of interference in his life and adopts a resolute stand against the forces buffeting him against his will, the world will change.

If you are still reading this, you are the Resistance.

William Buppert [send him mail] and his homeschooled family live in the high desert in the American Southwest.

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~ Thomas Jefferson

The American government will be soundly defeated if a civil war ever erupts in the continental US. Not only will a single incident have a ripple effect that will spark the awakening of thousands of insurgencies but the violent over-reaction and clumsy attempts at propaganda by the American media complex in the thrall of Mordor on the Potomac will wholly exacerbate the conflicts to levels of mayhem and insurrection that will startle the normal American. There is a huge simmering and angry underbelly to the American polity that the Tea Parties are only a slight indication of. Citizens have had long and growing resentment toward the creeping socialism and incompetent central planning they have labored under for over a century.

Not only will violence be spiked in the Great Wide-Open between the Marxist coastlines but massive tax revolts, burgeoning black markets, Gandhian non-compliance and active shunning of government entities will rear their heads. I think it will take one bold move from the government during the coming bad times of hyperinflation and the employment of government sponsored paramilitary operations against the wrong group to strike the match. The government is much like a swimmer at midnight in a pool of gasoline that lights a match to see where he is going.

All the necessary measures to forestall or prevent this from happening are long past. The central planners will not reduce regulation. They will not cut taxes and spending. They will not respect states rights. They will not contain the unlimited power of the robed government employees. They will not leave the world alone and insist on making war on every corner of the globe with no restraint nor reason. They violate the most basic right that inspired a flag: the Gadsden "Don’t Tread on Me" banner.

Obamunism is a seamless transition from GWB and the Busheviks: the policy differences are hard to discern. These two rulers were simply the logical extension of the Grand Imperial experiment that America embarked on with increasing speed since the regrettable conclusion of the War of Northern Aggression in 1860—65. Whatever history you learned in the government reeducation camps was no less than a sophisticated stream of fabrications and exaggerations to convince the student only larger government has the answer to every problem he faces. It is interesting to note that the year’s top Presidential picks are unswervingly devoted to using the Constitution as toilet paper and made war on some unfortunates in our land or a foreign nation.

A question surfaces: how could the most powerful and technologically sophisticated military force the world has ever seen in recorded history be defeated by a non-peer military competitor who has no navy, air force, artillery, armor or structured ground forces? I defer to Bill Lind for the deeper and more subtle reasons which are legion why America will meet defeat in Fourth Generation Warfare (4GW).

We are presently shifting our main military effort from Iraq to Afghanistan and not because we have declared victory, for the countless numbers of insurgents are alive and well in Iraq, but because the war is lost and we know it. The war in Afghanistan has managed to sap the US armed forces of vital strength in force fatigue and exhaustion, break the back of the British Army (again), strengthen the Taliban to unprecedented levels and move the hands of the clock closer to midnight for a localized (?) nuclear confrontation between Pakistan and India. That is quite an accomplishment in less than a decade. It took almost twice as long to destabilize Europe prior to the First World War to make the world safer for big government, communism and bureaucratized slaughter. We have had a hell of a time pacifying and taming the more "Wild West" sectors of Iraq not to mention the number of insurgencies alive and well in the cities. While one can suppose that most sects of Islam are rather militant and preserve a warrior ethos in the male adherents, the Afghan fighters are a different breed altogether. They are like a modern-day Sparta and they dig fighting. The surge in Afghanistan will meet with the same stunning successes we have experienced in Iraq. The death toll will be higher especially for the indigenous population with the requisite number of women and children maimed and killed by our wonder weapons with widowed men and the fathers of dead sons left to seek their pound of flesh from the invaders. In short, yet another military quagmire will emerge wherever we should fear to tread.

So what does this have to do with the original observation of the present American government losing its grip and losing a conflict with brother Americans on our own soil? We face conditions much different and much worse than our predecessors in terms of national debt, fiscal obligations, cultural fissures, government corruption and the precipice of totalitarian temptation are balanced on. Inevitably, when the aforementioned unpleasantness emerges, the state and federal governments will exhaust law enforcement assets and be forced to rely on military means to quell the disturbances and insurrections that will emerge. Posse Commitatus will be suspended and Northern Command will activate National Guard, Reserve and Active Duty armed forces will be unleashed on the targeted groups and forces that contest the state’s supremacy in the continental united States. They will face the inevitable resistance of a number of their own troops to make war on fellow Americans and the inherent risk of sleepers in the ranks who will maintain a communications link with emerging resistance forces. The government will be fighting a foe that will have a hometown advantage, levels of support & assistance from the mass base in the communities and the military forces will be surprised by the small arms expertise they will encounter the farther west they are deployed in these united States.

The Central Government forces will face a military conundrum: the harder they hit and fight with the inevitable collateral damage the more the mass base will shift support and allegiance to local forces fighting the invaders. In an insurgency, the force ratio numbers are extraordinary: at their peak the post-WWII Irish Republican Army fielded 500 paramilitary "trigger men" against the UK forces numbering close to 42,000.

As the current fight in Iraq and Afghanistan has shown, the force ratios remain incredibly imbalanced and the successful counterinsurgency (COIN) in the history tomes is bookended by dozens of successful insurgencies. Here is a pop quiz: how many Muslim insurgencies have been defeated since the end of WWII? Zero. Neocon chicken-hawks are fond of saying that Pershing’s defeat of the Muslims in the Philippines at the turn of the 20th century was a template for success. If it was so successful, what is causing the ruckus in Mindanao as we speak?

The Central Government forces will face a foe that will run circles around them in the information conflict just as the Middle East antagonists have proven out. Prisoners of War will follow the cues of the Irish Republican Army and organize and stage riots and hunger strikes in the prison system. Supply lines for government forces will constantly be in the hazard. Foreign commentary on the conflict and the recognition of the embattled regions as legitimates nation-states would further complicate matters as Geneva and Hague conventions would be observed in protocol. We have to remember that the USSR recognized the state of Israel before the US did. Stranger things have happened. Read the newspaper debates between Mill and Dickens during the War of Northern Aggression. As I have inferred before, America will look quite a bit different in ten years time.

The hope is that all of this can be avoided and those communities, states and entities that wish to leave in peace from an increasingly belligerent alien entity on the Potomac, may do so. I am saddened for my children by the inevitability of the coming strife but the central planners seem intent on creating a Rising. I am pessimistic and think that the same form of intellectual bankruptcy that informs what passes for government economic policy will be the same kind of impaired thinking that leads to the next calamity in these united States. War is coming home.

“Deputies have spoken about whether dead men would approve of it, and they have spoken whether children yet unborn would approve it, but few have spoken of whether the living approve it.”

~ Michael Collins, Dáil debate, Christmas 1921

William Buppert [send him mail] and his homeschooled family live in the high desert in the American Southwest.

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~ 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.

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

William Buppert [send him mail] and his homeschooled family live in the high desert in the American Southwest.

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~ Mahatma Gandhi

I often get mail from readers inquiring on what to do to advance the cause of secession in their respective locales. So I’d like to discuss a few ideas on how it has worked in the past and how it may work in the future. I would first dispose of the canard that it is traitorous or unpatriotic to consider this. Do you suppose our rulers in DC abide by the rule of law, see the Constitution (I prefer the DI) as a bedrock document and seek to respect the real diversity in America (not the silly race, class & gender motif)? That diversity is the vast gulf in tolerance for levels of government as opposed to governance. Government is the command and control apparatus to manipulate people through coercion and violence. The distinction is that governance can occur in a minarchist or stateless realm because it runs the gamut from forms of external control to the personal controls of one’s own nature and relationship in society. Positive self-governance is the ability not only to do right by yourself but use your self-interest to serve others e.g., a business or voluntary work in a community and do them no harm. You have to ask whether your own philosophical ideas emanate from law or party; from conviction or the desire to get ahead at other people’s expense. You have to pry out the deeper recesses of who you are to divine what your motivations are in your community. If you conclude that in order for you to get ahead in life, you must use the vicious power of government to achieve this, secession may not fit you. The new regime in town will see that your needs are answered…for a while. Until they run out of money or create a state so suffocating that 1984 looks like a resort lifestyle.

The first task is to educate yourself on the ideas that would inspire such radical measures as secession. From whence does your conviction come? In a previous essay, I recommended a number of books on the subject. I would also add Thomas Naylor’s thin tome, Secession, as a great primer on the whole notion. There are a rather small number of books that deal directly with the secession issue. Yet, if we look at the vast number of books published since 1750 which deal with the precursors and history of both the First (1775—83) and Second (1860—65) American Revolutions the books start to increase tremendously which tangentially or directly deal with the notion.

Simply the words Declaration of Independence seem rather descriptive now, don’t they? To wit:

We, therefore, the representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress, assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the name, and by the authority of the good people of these colonies, solemnly publish and declare, that these united colonies are, and of right ought to be free and independent states; that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the state of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as free and independent states, they have full power to levey war, conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce, and to do all other acts and things which independent states may of right do. And for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor.

We were not asking for a Declaration of Dependence wishing to increase the size and weight of the British yoke, we were putting a petition to the world that we would no longer be shackled like draft animals to a system of government that had become overbearing, tyrannical and cruel in the violence it visited on men who wished to be at the helm of their own destinies.

The Constitution was then penned and approved but it left plenty to be desired in a Founding document. Those who actively engage in Constitution worship may want to turn away from the remainder of this paragraph. The Constitutional Convention was a political coup held in secret behind closed doors. The delegates were sent to amend the Articles of Confederation, not abolish them. The resulting document so terrified the Anti-Federalists that they immediately pressed for the Bill of Rights to put the brakes on what they perceived to be a pernicious concentration of power in the central government. Patrick Henry at the time referred to the Federalists as Consolidationists who wished to turn the states into mere administrative departments of the central government. Alexander Hamilton had managed to consign liberty and freedom to the dustbin of history as soon as the ink was drying on the new documents. So a careful consideration of secession should not be restricted to the primary and secondary source documents for the Constitution but all the literature and actions which took place prior to and after its adoption.

I have mentioned before that a mastery of the logic and rhetoric of the Anti-Federalists is powerful medicine in the coming conflicts. They speak eloquently to the decentralist and devolutionist impulses. I especially enjoy the acid-tongued Brutus.

So how does the American central government feel about secession? They like it as long as it is happening to other nations. The US State Department is now the champion of a two-state solution in Israel and Palestine and the American government was not shy about the applause it offered the fifteen states that calved from the moribund USSR a generation ago or calls to free Tibet from Chinese occupation but the American state is not at all thrilled at the prospect of its own partition and break-up in the near future. Yet the US State Department has not shied from its positions on other states’ right to secede:

"The Secretary and other members of the Administration have expressed concern to Chinese officials that the anti-secession law may be counterproductive"…

Imagine if the Soviet Union had collapsed in 1989—91 and these united States insisted that all fifteen of the states that fell away from and seceded from the USSR had to stay or else. Yet the American government insists that Kosovo secede from Yugoslavia proper protected under NATO’s skirts but South Ossetia better not secede from the American-Israeli satellite of Russian Georgia.

Thomas Franck, one of the five international law experts asked by the Canadian government to consider certain issues regarding a hypothesized secession of Quebec, wrote that:

"It cannot seriously be argued today that international law prohibits secession. It cannot seriously be denied that international law permits secession. There is a privilege of secession recognized in international law and the law imposes no duty on any people not to secede. While international law does not foreclose on the possibility of secession, it does provide a framework within which certain secessions are favored or disfavored, depending on the facts. The key is to assess whether or not Kosovo meets the criteria for the legal privilege of secession."

A privilege granted by whom? So it appears our rulers are quite conflicted when it comes to the recognition of secession on the world stage. We need to leverage this schizophrenia.

Remember the golden rule when it comes to successful resistance, rebellion and secession: grievances are exploited whether real or perceived. Every state in the increasingly reluctant Union has their own respective beefs with the central government ranging from taxation to the environment to energy policy. In your state or region, the key to successful monkey-wrenching of the system is to start small and witness to friends, family and neighbors of the injustices and inequities you feel the denizens of Mordor are doing to you and yours where you live. For the Austrians among you, witty explanations of the evils of central planning and the ills of government interference in the economy through taxation and regulation will yield great benefits for the right audience. It is your job to awaken folks from their collectivist fever-dreams.

Taxes too high? US Forest Circus wolf reintroduction programs reducing your elk populations? Local timber industry destroyed due to the EPA? Agricultural subsidies destroying farm yields and family farms through perverse pricing schemes? Helium reserves for WWI dirigibles? Insolvency of the Socialist Security System? The list for agitation and substantive reasons to divorce the DC Mob are too numerous to list and I leave it to your imagination. The point is that the nurturing of grievances is an important step in shaping and influencing the way people think in your community. Essentially, no one knows more about your neighborhood and environs than you and the potentates in DC are in this case the ultimate know-nothings. Leverage this cognitive dissonance to your advantage.

Think about the Gandhian-style non-compliance which occurred at Jarbridge, NV in 2000 when a Federal agency tried to ply their mischief. It apparently got to where Federal employees were denied victuals and lodging in local towns. Good old-fashioned shaming and shunning.

By the way, writing letters to your Feral (sic) Congress-critters to beg for the Ninth and Tenth Amendments of the Bill of Rights (among others) to be recognized is a waste of time. They will not yield the benefits they reap as rulers in their nests in DC. Something happens when they are there for more than a year and you will never get the smell out. They will ignore you or worse. Ignore them.

If you see fit to organize local Committees of Correspondence and Safety as our First American Revolutionary forebears did, modern communication techniques and sousveillance will make it very interesting indeed.

Local action is required for local results. I share with Lew Rockwell an increasing skepticism of any political action having a meritorious result in the causes of freedom and liberty but you must take your own counsel.

Isn’t secession the ultimate vote in a supposed democracy?

"They can jail us. They can shoot us. They can even conscript us. They can use us as cannon fodder in the sod. But — But we have a weapon more powerful than any in the whole arsenal of their British Empire — and that weapon is our refusal. Our refusal to bow to any order but our own, any institution but our own.

Our friends in the Royal Irish Constabulary would like to shut me up. Oh yes, jail me again, shoot me, who knows? And I’d like you to send them a message. If they shut me up, who’ll take my place?"

~ Michael Collins

William Buppert [send him mail] and his homeschooled family live in the high desert in the American Southwest.

William Buppert Archives

~ Benito Mussolini

We are now entering an era where not only is your patriotism questioned but the word traitor is bandied about with abandon by the usual suspects in DC whenever one is disappointed or outraged by the latest usurpation of liberties and freedom from the central government and the Offal Office in the WAFL (War Against Freedom and Liberty) House formerly known as the White House.

Little did we know that in 1917 Woodrow Wilson and Vladimir Lenin started an ideological race to see whether America or Russia would form the perfect Soviet union. Fast-forward to the last decade of the Busheviks and Obamunism and it appears obvious the Russians came in second and we took the Gold Medal. The collectivist efforts of the Government Supremacist Party with its Democrat and Republican wings have finally paid off and we are entering the home stretch where the Federal Government now takes ownership in major corporate ventures, the entire banking system and the national security apparatus is being used to seal the deal. I would submit the system is doomed but it does not mean the DC regime won’t take the rest of us down with it.

Now we are asked to pledge our support and monies to a government that is not only out of control and extra-Constitutional but seeking to turn America into a Stalinist hellhole flying a Green Swastika.

So what is treason and what is traitor?

The Constitution of the United States, Article III, defines treason against the United States to consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid or comfort. This offence is punished with death. By the same article of the Constitution, no person shall be convicted of treason, unless on the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act, or on confession in open court. The more conventional definition means one’s refusal to acknowledge the legitimacy of the present government or performing services for foreign nations like spying or fighting as the Patricios did during the 1848 Mexican-American conflict.

Pay attention to the second clause. Who in America truly thinks we were destined to become a stronger imitation of the pathetic Soviet structure of state organizing principles embracing the worst economic nostrums, the brutality of occupation behavior by the central government toward its citizens ensuring the creation and nurturing of a special class of rulers in our own American nomenklatura? I would suggest that our rulers in DC are adhering to their enemies, giving them aid or comfort because they are contravening the Constitution and the spirit and letter of limited governance on a daily basis.

Let me make one more clarification that will alienate some readers. My reference to patriot is lower case much like my use of libertarian. I have no use for the conspiracists, religionists and opportunists who use the capital-P Patriot nomenclature as a thin disguise for their lack of intellectual rigor or a red, white and blue excuse to avoid their financial obligations (I am not referring to taxes). Whether the Christian Identity church or the self-styled Patriot lawyers who plead their cases before government courts, I am not interested.

It is high time to revisit the definitions because the gulf between our rulers and the people is ever widening and the knives are coming out. The question actually becomes who is the traitor. Those who seek to lift the Constitution above men to substantiate the rule of law or a rule by men who hold themselves above the Constitution in interpretation. I have commented before that the Supreme Court is the use of robed government employees to expand and approve the growth of the Leviathan state at the expense of individual liberty with an imprimatur of legitimacy and it has proven out.

We now see that there is nothing the Federal government can recognize as a brake or impediment to whatever power they wish to exercise. We have sophisticated men and women going through intellectual rationalizations of torture and the imposition of institutionalized physical pain on men who have no Constitutional rights whatsoever. Washington, with a sweeping gesture of overbearing arrogance, participates in the largest multi-trillion dollar money-laundering exercise in the history of man to satisfy bankster special interests and does not allow the bill-payers to see where or what the money is doing and discourages the borrowers to repay the monies loaned.

So it appears as if we are laboring under a tyranny that would make George III blush. The Tea Parties have at least encouraged some Americans to look at their roots. I, for one, agree with the recent Tea Party critic on LRC that the events are far too civil but the time for mischief is coming. The original Boston Tea Party did not file EPA impact statements or ask permission to smash the state.

The point is that treason is usually the term employed by the besieged statists when they discover someone has parted the curtain or discovered their tailors are using vapor fabric. The eminent Lysander Spooner would inform you it is no treason at all to oppose bad laws.

The Congress has even gone so far as to question the use of wiretaps that catch them in the net when they betray their country to a foreign power which are the very authorizations they themselves enjoined against the American people. CongressCreature Jane Harmon obviously has loyalty issues that are much more germane to the traditional understanding of traitorous behavior:

Lo and behold, Jane’s had an epiphany. She now “think[s] the question is about … did our government abuse the rights of American citizens, including members of Congress, with legal or illegal wiretappings…” It seems that compromising yourself on tape focuses the mind about as wonderfully as hanging does. And catch Jane’s conflating “members of Congress” with “American citizens.” What a wit!

What an ingenious defense from the same Congress that has appointed the illiterate Janet Napolitano to head up the Department of Fatherland Security which is presently hounding the right-wing terrorists of the nation who either agree with the Constitution or served in the military. A tangled web we weave. So, so (your best Joe Pesci imitation), let me get this straight. I am a traitor if I wish to observe the Constitution as the highest law of the land using strict constructionist interpretation but I am a loyal American if I seek to exercise leniency or influence on the outcome of a spy debacle by AIPAC. Just so you know that justice turns in the way we have cynically come to expect in DC, the espionage charges against the AIPAC defendants have been dropped.

The Tea Party in 1775 was a traitorous act by Britons against Britain and a necessary event to sever the illegitimate rule of a faraway government (much like DC but more mild and principled) which sought through taxes, regulation and military occupation to lord over a people who wanted none of it. It was a traitorous act in the sense it refused to any longer recognize the legitimacy and span of control exercised by a many-tentacled imperial beast reliant on a host to draw energy and power from much like a remora. DC is the sine qua non of the modern phenomenon of a Remora Nation. It represents the last gasp of a grasping, imperious and unprincipled kakistocracy (government by the least qualified or most unprincipled citizens) desperately clinging to power for the sheer sake of it.

We are in a unique situation in these united States as opposed to the Colonists. We have founding documents in both the DI and the Constitution (dare we say the unfairly maligned Articles of Confederation) that can be used as a measure of performance and a report card for our rulers in DC. They have failed. The whole Progressive and Neoconservative project is in an ascendant position that will either collapse or seal the fate of all freedom-loving Americans. I would suggest that we are strikingly similar to the Soviet Union in the 1980s with the implementation of policies that are nonsensical, dangerous and economically illiterate. They are conducting themselves much like a nomenklatura bent on securing their fortunes and immunity before the whole rotten system known as modern twentieth-century American governance rips asunder under the weight of its stunning contradictions and absurdly vicious behavior to its host population.

My point is that the traitors aren’t us; it is every man and woman who places their allegiance to a contemporary power structure in DC and not to the foundational documents that animated the Founding. In the end, the government-media complex is a powerful propaganda tool which may succeed in identifying Americans who want limited or no government as traitors, so there it is. If a traitor is the American who takes a stand, draws a line in the sand and stands against the Red Tide emanating from DC, count me in the ranks. I love my country but fear my government.

“…it does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people’s minds…”

~ Samuel Adams

William Buppert [send him mail] and his homeschooled family live in the high desert in the American Southwest.

William Buppert Archives

~ Mohandas K. Gandhi

All the mainstream news outlets are laughing at the secession sentiment across the nation, so brace yourself. There are over eight state sovereignty resolutions floating about under the rubric of the Ninth and Tenth Amendments in addition to nearly twenty pending resolutions in other states. The DC embrace of Obamunism is frightening plenty of folks to include state legislators and driving Montana to kick the ATF out of the state in a landmark move to completely ignore the unconstitutional and hoplophobic notions of our rulers in Mordor on the Potomac when it comes to the keeping and bearing of weapons.

Secession has been broached in polite conversation by the Governor of Texas, no less. It is not as if the notion is new since the unfortunate victory of Union/Yankee forces in 1865. New England threatened it decades before Lincoln’s War and the Great Depression spawned a variety of secessionist discontents.

We don’t have to be embarrassed by the notion of secession. We are a nation birthed in divorce from a tyrannical Crown and the Second American Revolution popularly known as the Civil War. Lincoln’s Jacobins won that fight but we don’t have to suffer that forever nor yield them a high ground of virtue.

The esteemed Donald Livingston avers:

"As part of expanding this imagination, we must work to remove the moral and philosophical prejudice against the very idea of secession. America was born in secession; secession is essential to the idea of a self-governing people; and until 1865 was widely considered an option available to an American state in all parts of the union. But secession short of national sovereignty is also possible. Parts of cities and counties may secede. A part of a state may secede and form another state as twenty-seven counties in northern California proposed to do in 1992. The mere discussion of the merits of such proposals, whether or not they succeed, will serve to detoxify the idea of secession and re-awaken in Americans the long slumbering notion of self-government induced by the opiate of the Lincolnian ideology of a modern unitary American state."

For the first time in generations, secession can be a topic of polite conversation albeit slightly odd. We need to capitalize on this and shake Americans out of the government supremacist fever dream that has gripped these united States since the woeful conclusion of the Second American Revolution.

A number of readers have written and inquired after a basic canon of reading to reinforce the intellectual gunships of our minds for the coming fight. I have made a number of book recommendations throughout my essays and these will be new additions. I am purposefully suggesting the more arcane or unknown tomes because many writers before me have provided ample lists or annotated bibliographies. Consider this an introductory sampling to whet your insurrectionist taste buds.

First and foremost, the number one imprint in my mind for these books is Liberty Fund. I have been collecting their books for nearly two decades and the offerings are huge and may consume a lifetime of reading pleasure and exploration in the mental forests of liberty and freedom. Tall timber indeed. Start with Cato’s Letters by Trenchard and Gordon loosely credited with providing tremendous impetus to the First American Revolution. They are lyrical, witty and eminently readable despite their eighteenth-century pedigree. In Cato Number 15 (1720), to wit:

"Freedom of speech is the great bulwark of liberty; they prosper and die together: And it is the terror of traitors and oppressors, and a barrier against them. It produces excellent writers, and encourages men of fine genius. Tacitus tells us, that the Roman commonwealth bred great and numerous authors, who writ with equal boldness and eloquence: But when it was enslaved, those great wits were no more."

Next, I would suggest Hyneman and Lutz’ American Political Writing During the Founding Era: 1760—1805. Worth every penny just to read the stirring Noah Webster entry, “An Oration on the Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence” (1802). Take a gander at the selections available at Liberty Fund and you will find plenty of other books which speak to the issues of today despite their antiquarian vintage. There is a reason the Founders bridged back to the Greco/Roman epochs for their primary inspirations.

Now for the real intellectual heavy lifting. Start a liberty reading group and get together over adult beverages to discuss these. Look for a copy of the Anti-Federalist Papers and absorb these documents. They speak more to the libertarian mindset than the oft-quoted Hamiltonian articles and essays in the Federalist Papers.

The next volume would be a modest but important tome called Men Against the State: The Expositors of Individualist Anarchism, 1827—1908 by James J. Martin. Martin rivals Harry Elmer Barnes as one of the most important historical revisionist influences in American letters and a bracing writer at that. He explores a relatively unheralded fight by the embryonic state resisters in the nineteenth century after the initial hopes of limited government are dashed against the rocks of statism. Martin’s books provides a wonderful introduction to the man I consider the giant of liberty in the nineteenth century, Lysander Spooner. Lawyer, abolitionist and fiery polemicist, Spooner was prolific and devastating in his critiques of the state and its predations. Spooner’s No Treason is the first stop but you will find his reasoning irresistible to pursue. In a letter to Grover Cleveland (one of my favorite Presidents), he comments on his Inaugural Speech:

"Sir, if a government is to “do equal and exact justice to all men,” it must do simply that, and nothing more. If it does more than that to any, — that is, if it gives monopolies, privileges, exemptions, bounties, or favors to any, — it can do so only by doing injustice to more or less others. It can give to one only what it takes from others; for it has nothing of its own to give to any one. The best that it can do for all, and the only honest thing it can do for any, is simply to secure to each and every one his own rights, — the rights that nature gave him, — his rights of person, and his rights of property; leaving him, then, to pursue his own interests, and secure his own welfare, by the free and full exercise of his own powers of body and mind; so long as he trespasses upon the equal rights of no other person."

We move on to the trenchant critiques of the War of Northern Aggression of which Charles Adams is the first stop in his magisterial When in the Course of Human Events. I can recommend no more accessible and informative read for the layman than this treatise on why secession was not only justified but an imperative for survival of the Southron culture and people at the time. I eagerly await his anticipated volume on the exchanges between John Stuart Mill and Charles Dickens as the latter manned the gunwales to mount a withering defense of the Confederacy in the London papers. There is an entire cottage industry on Confederate apologia available as evidenced by the King Lincoln archives on LRC. In addition, both of DiLorenzo’s books on Lincoln are excellent resources.

I find the twentieth century is chock-full of courageous writers who speak to the individualist/non-interventionist strain of political philosophy to draw intellectual armament for the secession fight here and now. Whether it is Mencken, Nock or Chodorov; they are a sampling of the vast pool of knowledge presently in the memory hole which will lead us out of our present regrettable circumstances as a nation.

I would recommend the entire canon of my friend, Kirkpatrick Sale, leading sage of the Middlebury Institute and a keen advocate of secession. I also consider Gore Vidal’s canon to be an almost seamless narrative education in historical fiction on why the American Leviathan was destined to become the monster it is. I actually consider Vidal the keenest novelist in the twentieth century. And lastly, I would offer the fascinating ruminations of Bill Kaufmann, the iconoclastic author of Look Homeward America: In Search of Reactionary Radicals, an excellent writer who offers some savvy observations on America’s historical flirtation with localism and decentralist tendencies.

This list is not comprehensive by any stretch and I am sure more recommendations will follow in the future. I have arranged the books in a relatively chronological order for simplicity’s sake. America has been the most nourishing soil for individualism in the West since the Hellenic world. Individualism and the state don’t mix. The scales are falling away. Eyes front, the fight is ahead of us. Tom Paine would be proud.

“The liberties of our country, the freedom of our civil constitution, are worth defending at all hazards; and it is our duty to defend them against all attacks. We have received them as a fair inheritance from our worthy ancestors; they purchased them for us with toil and danger and expense of treasure and blood. It will bring an everlasting mark of infamy on the present generation, enlightened as it is, it we should suffer them to be wrested from us by violence without a struggle, or be cheated out of them by the artifices of false and designing men.”

~ Samuel Adams, article published in 1771

William Buppert [send him mail] and his homeschooled family live in the high desert in the American Southwest.

William Buppert Archives

“Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better. This is a most valuable, a most sacred right — a right which we hope and believe is to liberate the world. Nor is this right confined to cases in which the whole people of an existing government may choose to exercise it. Any portion of such people, that can, may revolutionize, and make their own of so much of the territory as they inhabit.”

~ Abraham Lincoln, (speech in Congress January 1848)

Idaho started the ball rolling and seceded from these united States. A total dissolution of America quickly followed as schisms and fissures erupted across North America. The collapse of the Mexican government caused a tidal wave of immigration to wash in to the southwestern portions of the former country. The great financial collapse of the world economy centered on the fiscal and monetary mischief in DC and Wall Street added yet more fuel to the fire. To tarnish the American reputation even more, hundreds of thousands of American troops were left stranded and penniless around the globe as the economic meltdown in America reduced the dollar to Zimbabwean valuations. To make matters worse, the government in DC instituted blanket loyalty oaths as a precursor for repatriation of returning soldiers who had managed to get home. This in turn caused entire National Guard and reserve units to return to their homes and assist in the buildup of forces in those states to fight the various doomed attempts by the central government to bring the rebellious states to heel.

The US followed in the footsteps of every other empire; corruption, decay and imperial overreach both at home and abroad. The District of Columbia still maintains a tenuous rump government known as the United States Socialist Republic (USSR) in control of the New England/Virginia states but power brownouts/blackouts, food shortages and insurgent activity have caused ambitions to whither to reunite the nation. Rumors of gulags, reeducation camps, oppressive domestic population controls and blanket censorship remain a common narrative for refugees escaping from the USSR. Repeated military strikes and adventures to bring the nation back to its original 2009 configuration failed and consequently, managed to cause the divisibility to exponentially expand. Total combat losses for USSR forces are unofficially estimated at 156,000 killed and wounded and a half-million missing in action. Excepting attempts by USSR guerillas to form pockets of resistance and insurrection, the entire effort has failed. There is some speculation FSA and Alaskan acquisition of nuclear devices on former US bases within their respective borders caused the USSR to pause and retreat but this remains unconfirmed.

The country has fractured into both natural and uneasy alliances. The west coast states formed a tight Green Coalition alliance in what is now Pacifica. Idaho, Wyoming, Utah, Montana and Nevada have formed the Free State Alliance (FSA) confederation with very close relations with the Alaska Republic. An immense brain-drain from Pacifica to the FSA has resulted from the ecotopian experiment. The Dakotas remain on the fence as to whether they will join them or sign on with the Midwestern Alliance. The Lakota Sioux will remain their own nation regardless. The American South and Southwest are still in the throes of a multi-sided civil war. Hawaii has reverted back to its roots with the inauguration of King Kamehameha VI and the annexation of all non-Hawaiian property back to the native islanders.

Quebec has broken away and fighting remains sporadic in the western Canadian provinces as the national government continues to press for its supremacy over the rebel Canadian states in the west. There are reports of insurgent materiel and support from the Free State Alliance to British Columbia but these reports remain unsubstantiated.

Mexico has splintered into approximately ten separate states with alliances between the various 31 states that comprised Mexico ebbing and flowing on a daily basis. While the USSR maintain strict drug prohibition, the decriminalization of drug laws in Pacifica and the Free State Alliance has significantly weakened the strength of the Mexican drug cartels to finance their activities.

Fears of meddling on the part of China, Russia and Middle Eastern states have appeared to be exaggerated as those nations grapple with their own economic and social collapse difficulties.

The rapid expansion of oil drilling unfettered by confiscatory taxation and regulatory nonsense from DC has caused an economic boom that may prove to leave both the Alaska Republic and the FSA as the North American "Tigers" economically.

The following interview was granted by Governor Lutrin of Idaho and broadcast on Voice of Liberty.

"Good morning, Governor."

"Good morning, John."

"Ten years ago, I suspect no one would have seen this transpire the way it has. No one would have suspected that the map of America would be this different. Do you think that this has been the outcome the Founders would have wanted?"

"Hamilton would be apoplectic but I suspect that Jefferson would be pleased and, of course, Tom Paine and Sam Adams would see this as inevitable. Why it took so long for the rotten structure to sunder itself, I will never know. Mind you, I did not come into office anticipating this chain of events."

"Has it been a rough ride for Idaho and the FSA?"

"Quite frankly, we sensed that there was nothing easy about the fateful decision to get DC out of our state and out of our lives. I was embarking on a journey that my great-great-great grandfather witnessed in South Carolina in 1860 and we were praying for better results. To say that we were stepping into a void is an understatement. Not everyone in the state agreed with our course of action but I was convinced the people hired me not only to represent them but to exercise my own moral compass and judgment much like the Founders when they seceded from the United Kingdom.

The death and destruction we suffered was tremendous as a result of both insurgents and US [now USSR] armed forces employed against us. Possibly the only thing that kept us from getting overwhelmed was the disproportionate number of US troops deployed overseas and the concomitant crisis where the currency collapse caused many of them to be stranded in Indian country abroad. That, of course, led to some bitterness. Idaho had a reputation as a rather well-armed bastion but the ensuing guerilla conflict against the Federal forces was far more than they anticipated. There were even several assassination attempts against me…"

"One of which you thwarted by killing the assassin yourself…"

"Well, I have always considered it sociopathic to outsource my self-defense to others so carrying a weapon was a daily routine even before the conflict…

I have to tell you that we would not have prevailed if other states such as Montana and Wyoming among others had not joined the fray. I have to say that the number of murdered civilians by Federal forces tipped the war in our favor. I can never mend those families but the massive indiscriminate firepower and total disregard for civilian casualties turned the tide against the Federal forces. I would think that the failures of military effectiveness in Iraq and Afghanistan would have been a consideration but the war on Americans in their own country became a very bitter contest. Federal units may have owned the roadways but once they started to step into the wilderness or hinterlands even in large formations they were picked apart and annihilated."

"There are rumors of Federal forces still in Idaho and the FSA…"

"Very true but those incidents are getting more and more scarce as time passes. Ironically, after the major hostilities ceased nearly six months ago, almost half the Federal forces in the region deserted and joined us once we had enjoined a treaty for repatriation of families and guarantees against reprisals with the DC government during secret talks."

"Why were the talks secret?"

"Six months into the conflict, currency collapses and corruption in DC had so stymied and hampered the war effort both here and abroad, they had no choice but to negotiate but they dare not do so in public or they would have lost electoral support and you know where a politicians’ bread is buttered. We got plenty of concessions and I was able to look the President in the eye and tell him: u2018No, you can’t!’. We could have avoided the bloodshed if we had simply been granted a civil divorce per our request in the first place."

"How would you characterize life in Idaho and the FSA now?"

"Life is difficult especially for those who have lost family, homes and fortunes. But we are rebuilding and we are free. We now have our own private banking system employing real gold & silver to back the specie. We have shut down and sold all Federal government property and are currently starting the second year cycle to bid out all Federal and State lands to private individuals and investors. There is zero government money going into the education system.

Each of the Confederation members in the FSA, and Alaska for that matter, are experimenting with different levels of state governance. In Idaho and Montana, for instance, all the timber interests subscribe to a private consortium for firefighting. Would you invest in a timber enterprise that did not seek to protect their own investment? So we think the incentives are more reality-based instead of the perverse and corrupting laws DC forced upon us.

We have left it up to the counties and subsidiary units to figure out what works best. The Federal Register has no weight here and all the courts are being privatized. The only gun law remaining on the books is if the gun is used in the commission of a crime. We have also imposed term limits on all politicians to one term in their lifetime.

Government is a nasty habit and it will take more than a year to kill the addiction but we feel that the competitive laboratories the states are creating will give us a running start to find the best path. This is the greatest failure of DC rule; it allowed no freedom of choice in so many areas of our lives. We are now free to choose, fail and prosper. We don’t have all the answers. For instance, we have eliminated all our drug laws on the books and have decriminalized possession, sale and production. Utah has not, so we will see how that works out.

The remaining part-time politicians in the statehouse are even offered personal bounties for reducing or eliminating budget items. I would much rather give a politician five percent of a one million dollar program than spend the money on the program in to perpetuity. We are also basing their salaries on an inverse ratio. In other words, the more money they vote to spend out of taxpayer’s pockets, the lower their salaries and compensation. Would I like to close the doors to the statehouse permanently? Sure, but we aren’t there yet."

"Governor, one term means you are out next year. What are your plans?"

"To mind my own business."

“When all government, in little as in great things, shall be drawn to Washington as the Center of all power, it will render powerless the checks provided of one government on another and will become as venal and oppressive as the government from which we separated.” ~ Thomas Jefferson

William Buppert [send him mail] and his homeschooled family live in the high desert in the American Southwest.

William Buppert Archives

~ Lysander Spooner

This essay is an incendiary device. My muse is Wilberforce and the subject is the abolition of the last existing institution of slavery in America — taxation. Like Wilberforce, we may be generations from satisfaction of the dream of the end of the coercive state but if the seed is not planted, the goal will never be realized.

I despise the income tax. I loathe the property, excise, gasoline, sin, estate, capital gains and every other tax. I think the colonists got it backwards, I want representation without taxation. These are often derided as utopian but I would suggest they are dystopian notions. I see no possibility of perfection in this mortal coil, but risk and possible failure are the engines of progress and capitalism invigorates the most powerful economic engine of all — self-interest to serve others. Mises claims "[t]he member of a contractual society is free because he serves others only in serving himself. What restrains him is only the inevitable natural phenomenon of scarcity."

I think it is loathsome for one man to own another and the involuntary tribute demanded by government is simply another form of owning another man’s wealth and labor. Taxation is the way collectivists practice their compassion by taking their neighbor’s money at gunpoint. It also violates the zero-aggression principle shared by many libertarians. Taxation and slavery have some very close confluences in definition. According to www.investorwords.com, a tax is:

A fee charged (“levied”) by a government on a product, income, or activity. If tax is levied directly on personal or corporate income, then it is a direct tax. If tax is levied on the price of a good or service, then it is called an indirect tax. The purpose of taxation is to finance government expenditure. One of the most important uses of taxes is to finance public goods and services, such as street lighting and street cleaning. Since public goods and services do not allow a non-payer to be excluded, or allow exclusion by a consumer, there cannot be a market in the good or service, and so they need to be provided by the government or a quasi-government agency, which tend to finance themselves largely through taxes.

These words are illustrative but couched in polite terms. Taxes are monies forcibly taken from individuals and whatever other entity they can be drained from by governments or organizations (tax farmers) chartered by governments to extract whatever wealth they can through force and threat of violence. Taxation is theft. James Bovard writes:

“The U.S. Treasury Department defines a tax as ‘a compulsory payment for which no specific benefit it received in return.’ No matter how many taxes a person pays, or what politicians promise, the taxpayer is not irrevocably entitled to a single benefit from the government. The level of taxation is thus a stark measure of government’s financial power over the individual — a precise gauge of the subjugation of the citizen to the financial demands of the state.”

The government has monopolized this enterprise because if you or I go to our neighbor and steal his funds or mug him at gunpoint, we go to jail. If you doubt the power of compulsion, notify the IRS personally that you will no longer pay any more of your income taxes…for life.

It is, frankly, un-American. We are a nation birthed in secession and tax revolt:

"We can now put in historical context Jefferson’s comment that it was good medicine for government to have a rebellion every twenty years or so. In the course of his lifetime there had been almost a dozen rebellions he was acutely aware of. Six were in the United States, starting with the Stamp Act Rebellion and ending with the Fries Rebellion. All of these rebellions, including the American Revolution, were tax revolts of varying degrees of intensity. In Europe, there were a number of tax revolts in the seventeenth century, from the excise revolts in Britain, to the tax-farmer revolts in the Netherlands, to the innumerable revolts and the revolution in France. Again, all were tax revolts. So when Jefferson tells us rebellions are good tonic for government, in his frame of reference he was talking about tax rebellions."

One of my favorite Presidents (a Democrat, no less), Grover Cleveland, came close to the truth when he said:

"When more of the people’s sustenance is exacted through the form of taxation than is necessary to meet the just obligations of government and expenses of its economical administration, such exaction becomes ruthless extortion and a violation of the fundamental principles of a free government."

Mine is a more radical notion. I don’t call for less taxation; I call for zero taxation because every time the government is given any capability to collect taxes, the institution is abused to the point of tyranny and despotism. In 1944—45 under RedDR, we had an effective marginal tax rate of 94% on all income over 200k dollars. Ninety-four percent! You’ll notice Eisenhower was so incensed by this that he immediately reduced it to 92% and graciously doubled the exemption to 400k. Now we have one of our esteemed members of Congress calling for a 90% tax on the wealthy in America. The Mafia could only dream of this magnitude of criminal behavior and subsequent benefit.

Now let’s examine what slavery is: A condition of subjection or submission characterized by lack of freedom of action or of will. It is the choice between submission and threats, fines, jail, maiming or death.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted in 1948 reads the following definition in Article 4:

"No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms.

Of course, our imperious betters at the United Nations would not deign to conflate this with taxation because they are a nest of interventionists and Marxoid government supremacists. Don’t expect relief from that august body of worthies.

I think even the eminent Frederick Douglass dismissed the allegations of Constitutional marriage to the wretched enterprise of slavery:

"Now, take the constitution according to its plain reading, and I defy the presentation of a single pro-slavery clause in it. On the other hand it will be found to contain principles and purposes, entirely hostile to the existence of slavery."

I think we have established that the institutions of slavery and taxation are ideological twins harnessed to the central idea of power, control and ill-earned profit at another’s expense.

So how high is the domestic tax burden in America? The Tax Foundation places Tax Freedom Day at April 23rd when the tax burden is complete. The problem with their calculation is that it is at 30.8 percent effective 2008. My personal estimate is closer to 60%+ of American incomes are consumed by government tribute when all the various and sundry taxes and excises across the nation are counted. It gets worse: James L. Payne, from my hometown of Sandpoint, Idaho, authored a brilliant book called "Costly Returns." The thesis is simple: we all pay corporate income taxes as an additional cost of doing business as consumers and we all pay for the tax accountancy and regulatory compliance businesses are forced by law to obey. We then pay indirectly for the enormous dislocation of rational resource investment and return dictated through government fiat through this economically illiterate statist interference. Acres and acres and tens of stories of every corporate building devoted to the hidden tax of indirect extraction and compliance with all manner of government absurdity in the Federal Register and its loyal subsidiaries at the state and local level. What some refer to as the "Vampire Economy."

Henry Hazlitt brilliantly elucidates this misallocation in the "Broken Window Fallacy," to wit:

"The glazier’s gain of business, in short, is merely the tailor’s loss of business. No new “employment” has been added. The people in the crowd were thinking only of two parties to the transaction, the baker and the glazier. They had forgotten the potential third party involved, the tailor. They forgot him precisely because he will not now enter the scene. They will see the new window in the next day or two. They will never see the extra suit, precisely because it will never be made. They see only what is immediately visible to the eye."

Economics at its most basic fundamentals is the study of the effective use of finite time and resources, and money is merely a medium and a visible signal of allocation. As Mises pointed out in the seminal book, Socialism, in 1920: the state simply cannot take these monies and allocate them rationally absent price signals of end users. Period. Worse still is the sure knowledge of the futility and waste of the stolen funds directed to wasteful, illegitimate or immoral spending through political fiat and favoritism.

So we have discovered that taxes and slavery seek the same end — the involuntary extraction of tribute or labor through the institutional threat or use of violence. Tax slavery is far more insidious than chattel slavery because the illusion of freedom is entertained throughout the entire sordid process and you are to be grateful to the highwayman and pleased with the conduct of the thief.

This is not a recent phenomenon in America. Within two years of the adoption of the Constitution under the unfairly maligned Articles of Confederation, state troops were hither and yon on the American frontier to chase after tax cheats and evaders during Shay’s Rebellion. Tax revolts and disfavor have peppered American history from the founding to the 1930′s Depression Era to the modern day iterations that will soon emerge with a vengeance. There is no history of a government respecting the rights of citizens to retain the fruits of their labors. These tax rebellions have been going on worldwide every year for the past few centuries.

So I am sounding the call not to reduce taxes but to abolish the last vestige of slavery in America. Don’t employ the language of the rulers, call it for what it really is. Slavery.

"When faced with this circumstance, does the State abdicate? It does not. The general lack of interest in production threatens its own existence, but it still cannot divest itself of its inner urge for power. It turns to the use of force to stimulate the production from which it derives taxes. It confiscates and tries to run the entire economy by rules, regulations, controls, and compulsion; the nation becomes a slave-labor camp. But the output of an economy that rests on force rather than on self-interest is meager. More important than lack of production is the slave psychology that such an environment induces. Men lose their capacity for self-improvement along with their sense of individual dignity. Thus civilization disintegrates and becomes an historical or archaeological curio. The State, of course, collapses with the civilization."

~ Frank Chodorov

William Buppert [send him mail] and his homeschooled family live in the high desert in the American Southwest.

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~ Thomas Paine

The Fed finally pulled the trigger on the Doomsday Machine and monetized the debt. The numbers don’t matter because we know they are inauthentic. The government has been deceiving the public about actual obligations and spending policies since 1913 when it decoupled the dollar from reality and rational economic behavior. I would suggest this analogy. You go online and purchase 250 sets of the misnamed Monopoly game, remove all the money from the games and start paying all your bills and creditors with it. You will achieve the same effect as the latest chicanery by the Federal Reserve. You don’t have to be a conspiracist or kook anymore to think that leaving the printing power for the nation’s currency in the hands of the Federal Government provides perverse incentives for honest and genuine specie. Welcome to the Ameribabwean dollar. I would urge free market advocates to play Anti-Monopoly, anyway.

Some worthies have even opined it is time to nationalize the Federal Reserve and let Congress run it. That sentence is loaded with such gall, hubris and misguided trust it deserves an essay just to tease out why it is wrong.

I am most certainly a pessimist when it comes to national survival but I have been war-gaming it long enough that I envisioned a few warning markers to look for. I had a number of culminating points in which I thought this or that action would be the tipping point for the imminent collapse. This is one of them. Aside from more minor indicators like wholesale seizure of firearms, Federalization of all police forces and official devaluation of the currency, monetization is the most insidious; for the general public does not understand the implications now. But they will. Public and private debt now essentially has lost any value in the market and all debts are to be interpreted through the distorted and economically illiterate lens of Federal fiat. Leave it to the government to adopt the worst of both worlds, debt monetization on the heels of adopting "mark-to-market" rules (FAS 157) which will incentivize even more massive creation of vapor money from the Fed to purchase all manner of nefarious financial instruments divorced from economic reality. Do you really think the fatal attraction between big banks and government will yield honest accounting when the system rewards exponential lending and deceit on projected gains? Aside from the black market, the price system is now dead and moribund in these united States.

There is no way to save the economy so the question is now how do we prepare and protect ourselves.

I have entertained some of these notions in a number of other essays but this is the klaxon warning that we have hit an iceberg. I love Gary North’s essays here at LRC because he invariably offers earthy and useful advice for every day living. So here is my shot at emulating the master with not-so-everyday advice. It is now time to quietly file onto the lifeboats and take stock of what you need to do.

• Do a detailed financial analysis of your household assets and liabilities and figure out the fastest to pay off debt and set aside the necessary monies to tide over a possible job loss for three to six months.
• Do the same if you own a business. If it is not too late, start to develop secondary income streams.
• Secure paper hardcopies of ALL important legal documents especially your house note.
• Get your food inventory increased to at least one year for your family.
• Guns and ammo — enough said.
• Train with your weapons.
• Spend one entire weekend without power to the house and take notes.
• Find a ride to work with somebody else for two days next week and assume all your vehicles are inoperable.
• Reconnect with family, friends and neighbors immediately. Have a potluck and assess people’s skill sets in self-sufficiency and protection.
• Go to the very next Farmer’s Market event closest to you and find out how to start a garden if you don’t have one already. If you garden, find out what you have that you can sell.
• Start or improve on your home library for everything from homeschooling to gardening to classic literature.
• Put in a supply of barter and charity items for the coming bad times because there will be people dear to you who simply did not or refused to prepare.
• Make preparedness a lifestyle and visit www.survivalblog.com everyday (and LRC, of course).

Space considerations preclude an exhaustive list and I would welcome any additional recommendations. If I receive enough of them, I will entertain a companion piece to this essay.

This may sound coarse but it is time to give up on convincing non-family members that a crisis is upon us. Put your body in to the harness and pull. I was on a radio show recently and asked why even concern myself with self-preservation and protecting the family. Think about it: as a husband and father, what other obligation do I have that trumps providing for and protecting my family? None. A hundred years ago it was a question absent in the American imagination.

We are about to enter an age that America has not been through since the War of Northern Aggression. It will be a country ravaged by poverty, division and the worst kinds of government behavior. We will see men under the influence of both their brightest and darkest muses. All this will be leavened by the usual Great Power games that plagued and distressed the world in the past as the global hyper-power is laid low.

A large component of good luck is meticulous planning.

"The real man smiles in trouble, gathers strength from distress, and grows brave by reflection."

~ Thomas Paine

William Buppert [send him mail] and his homeschooled family live in the high desert in the American Southwest.

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~ Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800—1859)

We live in tumultuous times that demand close attention to the yokes being placed on us. The US government is seemingly in the throes of a coup that is exponentially creeping and expanding into what was formerly a fairly autonomous province. Every sector and branch of human transactions that are palpable in this mortal coil is now being subject to regulation, taxation or both. With no authority whatsoever, entire swaths of American society are being subsumed under Leviathan state.

What is the authority or color thereof that these alien entities are gobbling up entire patterns of human existence? I have hinted before that the denizens of Mordor on the Potomac act as if their authority is unlimited and their ultimate reach is anything they please. We are witnessing a vicious brew of Sovietization and Mussolini-style state corporatism that will take a revolution to undo. The annals of Western history are full of this kind of grand hubris enabled by consent both willing and silent on the part of the populace. Humans tend to submit to a yoke or collar when invested with fear and anxiety about futures worse than now. The corpse-count in the twentieth century topped 165 million outside of warfare through democide.

These morbid thoughts seem intemperate measured against the apparently "peaceful" measures of Mordor to instill Keynesian stability and save the banksters from themselves with nary a peep of protest from the appropriately red-colored Grand Old Politburo. If you ever had the notion the parties were different, just look at the seamless transition between Bush II and Obama. The only difference between these monsters is skin color because collectivism is thicker than water. Look at the temptation — you step into the cockpit of the Offal (Oval) Office and decades of creeping totalitarian weeds have strangled and mastered practically every facet of American behavior and life. A simple touch of the controls and hundreds of thousands of subsidiary bureaucrats in the Executive agencies somewhat smoothly respond to the yoke to amp up taxation here and increase regulation there and the heady brew of total power starts to go to the President’s head. One can count on a single hand the number of Presidents who took the limitations on their power seriously (Van Buren, Cleveland and Coolidge among the all-stars). As Royce pointed out in his brilliant but underappreciated book — The Hologram of Liberty — that the Constitution was doomed at the beginning by Hamilton’s curse (Burr did not get to him soon enough) and the temptations of George Washington to start the executive imperial ball rolling (witness the Shay’s and Whiskey Rebellions) against state sovereignty.

The most basic building block for compliance to illegitimate authority is fear. Drivers speed but always take caution if a hint of police presence or the increasingly ubiquitous camera systems are in place. Rare is the libertarian who wants to pay taxes of any stripe but compliance is heeded to avoid fines and imprisonment, or worse. We do not obey because it is the core right thing to do when it comes to most government edicts. I don’t harm my neighbor nor do I steal his property because it is against the law but my inner moral compass best exemplified by the Ten Commandments or the Categorical Imperative provides my azimuth for behavior. I want to eliminate the perennial bugbear that the MSM and government schools drill into the populace — righteous and correct behavior only emanates from government coercion to make you do the right thing. Step back and examine that proposition. Can you think of any government initiatives or programs that not only supported perverse incentives but made you much worse off? I will let you ponder your own answers but they are legion. Just think — the entire Federal Register provides the enterprising social science researcher with a gargantuan solution set to the second- and third-order effects of perverse incentives and iatrogenic effect that animates the entire sordid history of government intervention.

Consider this. Of late, the usual suspects in Mordor are proposing the abolition of cosmetically offensive (the assault weapons misnomer) weapons at the stroke of an executive pen. There are tens of reasons why this is wrong-headed but one of the reasons proffered by the new Attorney General, Eric Holder, is that the Mexican drug cartels are getting weapons from America to use in their campaign against the Mexican government. So let me get this straight: the American Drug War has not only failed in America but has led to the instability of both Columbia and Mexico, forcing the latter to the brink of collapse which will have untold deleterious effects on every border state in these united States. As a result of these calamitous events, I now have to surrender my weapons to the FEDGOD to prevent them from falling into the hands of drug lords whose very existence is a second-order effect of Federal drug policies that enable their criminal empires. Decriminalize, not legalize, drugs in America tomorrow and in a month all drug cartel threats to Latin America dissolve. Remember the hoary and heavy-handed campaigns by the FEDGOD and their sycophants, the Ad Council, to proclaim in grand Potemkinesque tones the linkage between the purchase of illegal drugs to terrorism? Who is supporting terrorism now? I offer this as an illustration that doing the right thing is by no means the province of the government

Take the red pill a moment and ask yourself what motivates what you imagine to be judicious and right-thinking behavior toward your fellow man. Is it a result of government mind laundering or is it a result of religious conviction or secular philosophy? Among libertarians and anarcho-capitalists, it tends to be the latter and I suspect a burgeoning part of the American population, especially ruralites, arrive at the same conclusion. Which brings us to our next step.

What constitutes legitimate authority? Traditionally, it has been divined from the family and to the extended relationships formed among family and friends. Do you create friendships out of fear or affection? Coercion or persuasion? Then we examine how network and tribal relationships start to bloom as people start to establish communities from whence increasing concentrations lead to cities and consummate in the horrid state of affairs we are in now with overweening and oppressive government. If we tease apart this oversimplified flowchart, we discover that legitimacy of authority tends to the abstract the more impersonal the relationships evolve. In other words, the farther the authority strays from genuinely personal relationships, the more reliance on fear and coercion is necessary. Hence the government tends to use this as an exclusive means of shaping and conditioning obedience. Which bring us to the central question.

What constitutes legitimate government authority? Lysander Spooner far more eloquently answers the question than I can when examining the Constitution. To wit:

The consent, therefore, that has been given, whether by individuals, or by the States, has been, at most, only a consent for the time being; not an engagement for the future. In truth, in the case of individuals, their actual voting is not to be taken as proof of consent, even for the time being. On the contrary, it is to be considered that, without his consent having ever been asked, a man finds himself environed by a government that he cannot resist; a government that forces him to pay money, render service, and forego the exercise of many of his natural rights, under peril of weighty punishments. He sees, too, that other men practise this tyranny over him by the use of the ballot. He sees further that, if he will but use the ballot himself, he has some chance of relieving himself from this tyranny of others, by subjecting them to his own. In short, be finds himself, without his consent, so situated that, if he use the ballot, he may become a master; if he does not use it, he must become a slave. And he has no other alternative than these two. In self-defence, he attempts the former. His case is analogous to that of a man who has been forced into battle, where he must either kill others, or be killed himself. Because, to save his own life in battle, a man attempts to take the lives of his opponents, it is not to be inferred that the battle is one of his own choosing. Neither in contests with the ballot — which is a mere substitute for a bullet — because, as his only chance of self-preservation, a man uses a ballot, is it to be inferred that the contest is one into which he voluntarily entered; that he voluntarily set up all his own natural rights, as a stake against those of others, to be lost or won by the mere power of numbers. On the contrary, it is to be considered that, in an exigency, into which he had been forced by others, and in which no other means of self-defence offered, he, as a matter of necessity, used the only one that was left to him.

Mind you, apart from the temporal considerations of support for the Constitution, he further makes the keen observation that mere numbers and democracy are not the moral means to elicit support and in fact lead to the opposite of voluntary support. The Anti-Federalists were very wary of democracy and made their misgivings known at the time. Mr. Spooner further avers:

One essential of a free government is that it rest wholly on voluntary support. And one certain proof that a government is not free, is that it coerces more or less persons to support it, against their will. All governments, the worst on earth, and the most tyrannical on earth, are free governments to that portion of the people who voluntarily support them. And all governments though the best on earth in other respects — are nevertheless tyrannies to that portion of the people — whether few or many — who are compelled to support them against their will. A government is like a church, or any other institution, in these respects. There is no other criterion whatever, by which to determine whether a government is a free one, or not, than the single one of its depending, or not depending, solely on voluntary support.

If you are not a student of Lysander Spooner, you are poorer for it. I am trying to offer the suggestion that not only is democracy the wrong vehicle to determine the legitimacy of authority in government but leads to Bastiat’s prediction which is evident from every press release from Mordor: “The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else.” So we have identified some of the vehicles for legitimate authority but how do we parse the difference between legitimate and illegitimate species.

It all depends on your own moral compass and the principles you live by. Pol Pot and Stalin certainly had their own ideas which were in direct contravention to the notions of Jefferson and Spooner. The legitimacy of the authority is given power through compliance. Those who fail to comply and stand out as individuals will reap the greatest whirlwind but someone will have to stand up much like the ahistorical Kubrick production of Spartacus in which the Romans finally surround and defeat the slave Army. A Roman officer strides forward and demands that Spartacus identify himself. Spartacus stands up and does so and then one by one other members of his Army stand and declare — "I am Spartacus" — with the full knowledge that they are all going to suffer the gruesome death of crucifixion along the Appian Way for participating in a slave revolt.

The times ahead are going to be as challenging and devastating as the late War of Northern Aggression. It may be the right time to start considering how much compliance you are willing to lend to illegitimate authority as you measure it by your own moral compass.

Bad laws were meant to be broken.

"I do all the evil I can before I learn to shun it? Is it not enough to know the evil to shun it? If not, we should be sincere enough to admit that we love evil too well to give it up."

~ Mohandas Gandhi

William Buppert [send him mail] and his homeschooled family live in the high desert in the American Southwest.

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The increasing militarization of cops has worsened even more. Why do cops need to blouse military boots and wear the silly "high and tight" haircuts? I cannot watch an episode of "Cops" without an airsickness bag. Every show is a sordid chronicle of cops overreaching, overreacting and brutalizing people. If you start to think of cop behavior as occupation behavior, the parallels start to get even more eerie. David Kopel puts it succinctly:

"The militarization of law enforcement has created the equivalent of a standing army engaged against the American people — precisely what was feared by the Framers. The consequences have been just what the Framers expected from a standing army involved in domestic law enforcement (especially enforcement of laws against the possession of certain commodities): the erosion of the Bill of Rights, particularly the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable searches, and the deaths of innocent people."

I think that police as a government entity are prone to corruption and abuse in a fashion that leads to disastrous results for free men. The FLEA phenomenon has been emblematic of the rights-destroying enterprise that is now permeating the entire "criminal justice" complex in America. The thin blue line is a clear and present danger now. Police brutality is ubiquitous and not as uncommon as most think. I read a great little small circulation magazine, The Match, by Fred Woodworth out of Tucson, AZ in which he publishes a column called "Who the Police Beat." I have seen plenty of rough life in my time but I always have to pause after a few paragraphs after reading story after story of naked overreaction by the boys in blue across the country and wonder how can this happen here and not be common knowledge. Look here, here, and here. Take a gander at these videos, I do wish more cops would suffer the self-immolation shown in the last video.

America has the largest incarceration rate on planet earth with 2.2 million behind bars. This counts the housed population and not the parolee, newly released or house arrest numbers. The FEDGOD houses almost ten percent of this number. The Federal jurisdictional problem and supremacy in the entire legal arena is another discussion altogether. The percentage of victimless crimes being immense.

"Roughly half the arrests and court cases in the U.S. each year involve consensual crimes. More than 350,000 people are in jail right now because of something they did — something that did not physically harm another’s person or property. In addition, more than 1.5 million people are on parole or probation for consensual crimes. And more than 4 million people are arrested each year for doing something that hurts no one except, potentially, themselves."

What are some of these crimes that merit incarceration:

"Who are these 2.2 million people? Among them are Elisa Kelly and George Robinson, sentenced to 27 months in prison for hosting a drinking party for their son’s nine friends in their own home. There’s Jessica Hall, sentenced to 24 months for throwing a cup of McDonald’s coffee at a car that cut her off. And then there are the hundreds of thousands of people imprisoned for nonviolent drug crimes.

As these examples suggest, and the JFA report demonstrates with statistical evidence, the primary reason for overcrowded prisons is not an explosion of crime, but an explosion of prison sentences. Not only are these sentences many times the length of those for equivalent crimes in other industrialized nations, they are “significantly longer than they were in earlier periods in our penal history.” The result is greater expense for less effect, as is testified by rates of recidivism and crime alike.

The JFA Institute argues that its recommendations would save the U.S. taxpayer $20 billion a year and, eventually, reduce prison rolls by half. Certainly, they represent the real reforms that California and America as a whole need: reducing sentences, eliminating the use of prison for parole violators, reducing parole and probation supervision periods and, most importantly, decriminalizing victimless crimes, particularly those related to drug use and abuse."

Good luck in protecting yourself from what have become gang organizations in their own right. Paul Craig Roberts spoke to wronged innocents and their inability to defend themselves in an earlier essay on LRC:

"The law makes it impossible for Americans to defend themselves from police brutality. Law and order conservatives have made it a felony with a long prison sentence to “assault a police officer.” Assaulting a police officer means that if a police thug intends to beat your brains out with his nightstick and you disarm your assailant, you have “assaulted a police officer.” If you are not shot on the spot by his backup, you will be convicted by a “law and order” jury and sent to prison."

It almost appears as if a cop’s primary task today is to select various and sundry candidates to escort into the American penal system. In essence, statist concierges forever destroying vast swaths of individual lives and their associated networks of friends and family; a maw through which humans pass but are rendered unrecoverable by civilized standards after a few years inside. I think the confluence of the police industry and the massive (and illegitimate) expansion of criminal statutes nationwide has given a vicious inertia to the problem.

I am even hard-pressed to think of a good reason to keep police on the streets. Cops are basically historians who come to a crime scene after the fact. Their entire charter has changed from being peace officers to becoming law enforcers (no matter how silly). Has anyone else been irritated by the changing nature of police cruisers? Usually festooned with light bars and clear identification, the new trend has been stealth police cars with hidden lights and antennae. Why? Most likely to more readily stop speeders or other non-crimes for which the revenue streams are so lucrative. Imagine, for instance, if a state instructed all highway patrol organizations to stop speeders but only insurance points would be assigned with no fines imposed. The vehicle stops for speeding would dry up because the remuneration incentives would evaporate. This is not about safety, it is about revenue. "Research conducted by the Florida Department of Transportation showed that the percentage of accidents actually caused by speeding is very low, 2.2 percent."

One of the most frightening implications of all this is that the continuous shaping, conditioning and consequent cowing of Americans will lead to the seamless transition to a full-blown police state (we’re close).

I can think of a number of possible solutions to include the reduction and disarming of all FLEAs. In an America more anchored to the Founding roots, FLEA visits would be few and far between because state’s business would be the preemption at the border. The few FLEA visits that did occur could be escorted if necessary by armed local constabulary. L. Neil Smith, in one of his brilliant novels, even envisioned reflagging the mission of the US Marshals as the sole armed FLEA whose charter was riding herd on FLEA misbehavior. I can even envision the elimination of all police jobs excepting detectives who would be greatly curtailed in the level of violence they could visit on the population. A further step would be the total privatization of the provision of "law enforcement." The elimination of all Federal gun laws to include the 1934 NFA, 1968 GCA and every federal gun law on the books would make the country and the states much safer. I am wide open to new ideas because the current regime is awful and will only get worse.

I do take solace in the observation that every time a united States subject is stopped by the cops today, all visions of Officer Friendly are soundly defeated and they discover that the police are far more concerned about obedience than criminality. I have no beef with cops per se, I simply don’t need them.

William Buppert [send him mail] and his homeschooled family live in the high desert in the American Southwest.

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I don’t happen to agree with Igor Panarin’s prognosis that America will dissolve in 2010 but I do predict its demise in its present configuration no later than 2012—14. I have no good visual on what America will look like in the aftermath but it is coming. I think his assessment assumes that foreign nations will be able to swoop in and establish suzerainty over regions of what is now America. He even mentions that Alaska will return to Russian ownership. His analysis betrays certain intellectual prejudices common in academia that assume clean, if interrupted transfers of governments, even to foreign powers. They make this assumption because academia rewards the government supremacist philosophy and punishes all others.

I have mentioned before that the financial and economic meta-crisis we face is absolutely insoluble. It is certainly a primary component in the eventual devolution to come. The response by the Federal government so far has been woefully predictable but the magnitude of economic illiteracy has reached a new crescendo among the usual suspects. The Federal Reserve has become the Romulus and Remus of financial armegeddon by assuming the position of both subprime borrower and lender; in essence, promises to pay with no possible ability to see the contract through. The total acknowledged output of loans, printing and guarantees is most likely in excess of the 8.5 trillion reported. Almost two thirds of total suspected GDP for America in one year and counting. I say suspected because I don’t think the government has a clue about the scale of the underground economy and it is massive and un(der)reported.

The ensuing dislocation, civil unrest and eventual rebellions will draw from other factors, as well, to include social fissures, government over-reaction and abusive laws. I would mention unconstitutional but that is a fabled canard since the document has been dead since the end of WWI and Wilson’s completion of Lincoln’s unfinished national project to destroy sub-national authority in these united States. Witness the rush to myriads of new gun prohibition proposals being proffered in Obama’s new American order in spite of the DC v. Heller decision. I am a Heller skeptic especially in light of Scalia’s infamous three words in his decision — "dangerous and unusual" — which will be used to provide a Supremes imprimatur to any gun prohibition coming down the pike. This is yet another flashpoint that is going to be traced back in the history books as a political match our rulers wantonly tossed into the pool of gasoline they waded in.

There is much talk of the Red and Blue states and the cultural divides but I believe the true fissures are between urban and rural populations and the significant part of the population both Left or Right that have forsaken participation in the political theater in America, like voting, and instead devoted themselves to other enterprises.

If the rule of Mordor on the Potomac is viewed through a lens of occupation behavior, all the parts and pieces start to make much more sense. I would point out that the US has far exceeded even the bounds of Hague and Geneva conventions. An enterprising attorney could start a very interesting case impugning the violation of these conventions. Most occupations end badly for the author of the occupation unless totalitarian regimes are emplaced. The train of post-WWI abuses visited on the American population by their rulers since the end of WWI are thoroughly documented elsewhere and the resultant reactions are a little more dimly realized in our history.

As my friend Skip is fond of mentioning, the American Imperial enterprise derives zero material value from its involvement both small and large around the globe and foots the bill with no possible return foreseeable for the inputs. Almost sounds like a subprime lender mentality. The hubristic and tyrannical habits the FEDGOD has become accustomed to are impossible to break and will only end with the collapse of these united States. Whatever empires practice abroad eventually comes home to roost, witness the Fabian-Orwellian nightmare that is the United Kingdom. My cursory examination of Western history portrays a fate no different. The American collapse will lead to far greater privation than Great Depression I and I predict far more grisly violence than was seen in the Soviet collapse in 1989—91.

My advice is beginning to sound like a broken record — gold, guns and groceries. If you can relocate internationally, the gates are starting to close.

William Buppert [send him mail] and his homeschooled family live in the high desert in the American Southwest.

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DIGG THIS

I spent the last weekend at the Phoenix Appleseed Shoot in Arizona with a number of fellow shooters. I came with my wife, five children and my other best friend in tow. We resembled the Beverly Hillbillies pulling into the campground in my F350 crew cab truck and trailer that should require harbor navigation skills (notice that I don’t advocate licensure) on Friday night the day before the shoot. We were exhausted but excited after the four-hour trip from southern Arizona. Almost three-dozen shooters showed up for the training which is a fairly respectable turn-out.

What is an Appleseed Shoot? Fred, the proprietor of Fred’s M14 Stocks and famous for long freedom polemics (in a print size old people can’t read) in Shotgun News, started and built the program. The Revolutionary War Veterans Association is an umbrella organization that was created to bridge the gap between the Founding of the nation and the present day through educational outreach. It started as a venture to bring history alive and revive the principles that animated our divorce from George III (the other George) from whence was born the Appleseed Project whose modest goal is to create one million new Riflemen in America. To wit:

"The Appleseed Program is designed to take you from being a simple rifle owner to being a true rifleman. All throughout American history, the rifleman has been defined as a marksman capable of hitting a man-sized target from 500 yards away — no ifs, ands or buts about it. This 500-yard range is traditionally known as “the rifleman’s quarter-mile”; a rifleman can hit just about any target he can see. This skill was particularly evident in the birth of our country, and was the difference in winning the Revolutionary War."

Imagine a country that has a significant number in the population who can outshoot the standing army or any government muscle for that matter. Evidenced by the strategic standstill the insurgents have visited on the global military hyper-power with merely rifles and IEDs (Improvised Explosive Device), world events should certainly give ambitious tyrants pause. In Afghanistan, some of the rifles employed were designed and issued in the 19th century. Yamamoto claimed that "[y]ou cannot invade America. There is a rifle behind every blade of grass." Speaking of the Swiss nod to the importance of the rifleman, Stephen Halbrook opines in a previous interview on LRC:

"Shortly before World War I, the German Kaiser was the guest of the Swiss government to observe military maneuvers. The Kaiser asked a Swiss militiaman: “You are 500,000 and you shoot well, but if we attack with 1,000,000 men what will you do?” The soldier replied: “We will shoot twice and go home.”

While this may be apocryphal, it certainly speaks to the spirit that brought the Redcoats to their knees during their bloody slogs in the First American Revolution. You would be hard-pressed to find a better contemporary example of the "rifleman deterrence" phenomenon than "Target: Switzerland" by Halbrook.

While the two-day soire we attended was primarily a shooting event, Appleseed intersperses fascinating narratives during the shooting day about the events of April 19th, 1775 that sparked the First American Revolution (the second, of course, being the War of Northern Aggression 1861—65) to free the colonials from British tyranny. The historical narratives provide a fascinating bridge between why guns and freedom are so intimately bound together.

This not my first Appleseed, I have been to one other when I lived in Idaho, but this was the first one where I brought the entire family. The tuition was seventy FRNs for the weekend for me. My wife and ALL of my children were free due to a special promotion to get the family on the firing line by the RWVA. I have children ranging in age from 11—20 and varying levels of weapon and rifle expertise. My wife even managed to outshoot me in the Quick and Dirty Army Qualification Test and I consider myself a fairly able rifleman. My children did equally well and soaked up the outstanding training offered. There is no paid staff for the shooting events, which occur nationwide. The four volunteers who ran this particular event were omni-competent, knowledgeable about the rifle craft and patient with the most trying circumstances. Think about that: four volunteers, two of whom drove from New Mexico, show up for two days of grueling training that consumed almost every daylight hour at the range to improve the shooting skills and historical knowledge of complete strangers. They pay for their own expenses for the most part. This should tickle the antennae of any freedom advocate. This is spontaneous order of the highest magnitude

The RWVA and Appleseed program are ostensibly apolitical but the self-selection of attendees certainly betrayed a pattern: the most Ron Paul regalia you would see outside of a meet-up and a crusty skepticism of government power from a variety of perspectives. One of the participants, Luca, a tall and delightfully accented Italian immigrant to America, waxed rather poetically about the promise of America, our historical amnesia and the necessity to reorder freedom by reviving our roots as a revolutionary project. The other folks came from every walk of life from businessman to biker to housewives.

The Shoot Boss was AZGromit and the three assistant trainers were AZRedhawk44, TaosGlock and BlueFeather (the Appleseed instructors use their forum handles at the shoot). They deserve public recognition as an example of the volunteer spirit and more importantly, the contribution to waking up the sleeping giant in America.

The Appleseed Project has struck a match. It has become an integral part of our homeschool curriculum now.

William Buppert [send him mail] and his homeschooled family live in the high desert in the American Southwest.

William Buppert Archives

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I have discussed secession in two fictional conversations published on LRC prior to penning this one, and wanted to devote this essay to what secession is. The common definition is "[t]o withdraw formally from membership in an organization, association, or alliance." We seem to be of two minds on this in these united States: the War of Northern Aggression (1860—65) as portrayed in academia and the media paints a dark and malevolent picture of secession as a means to keep humans in bondage and sanctify evil deeds. As a revisionist historian, I have learned to take these assumptions with a grain of salt. Just look at the LRC King Lincoln archives for a dose of real history and not the mass-manufactured hagiographic state worship that passes for most history today. On the other hand, we are a nation birthed and mid-wifed through secession from England to establish our embryonic nation and expand across the continent. It was, after all, the Anti-Federalist papers that provided the original antivenin to big government here. Secession is a topic that can either get you labeled an oddball in conversation or quickly lead to your demise in less tolerant states. So let’s examine this from the bottom up.

Secession is the reduction of a larger enclave or polity into a smaller component of the same. It is devolution of power to subsidiary levels which then become the prevailing framework for rule and law. If the twentieth century is any measure, the benefits of economies of scale in enormous nation states have a much darker side in the equation — the bureaucratization of tyranny and slaughter. This has led the more enlightened of the victim populations to seek redress through autonomous regions or breakaway nation-states of much smaller dimensions. Dig deep into the current crisis between Russia and Georgia and you will find that secession is the root of the conflict. Actually, there is most likely a seed of desired autonomy at the heart of most conflicts. Of course, the French and Russian Revolutions proved that conquest can seduce the most ardent supporters of liberty with the malevolent visions of paradise on Earth once at the helm of the ship of state.

Let’s look at this from an individual’s perspective, using the logic of the state and its sanctions on secession: there should be no divorces. Period. Union forever no matter how dysfunctional or lethal. If we infer the same response at this atomistic level, the two parties which want a separation would be compelled through sanction or violence to remain together for eternity.

I am often told that contracts are a form from which one cannot honorably secede, yet the law and common understanding dictate that if one party to the contract has violated or cheated its intent and constraints, the contract is null and void. Lysander Spooner, the individualist anarchist giant of the 19th century, went so far as to claim that the Constitution is not binding to those who were not alive to sign and agree to it. Whether you agree or not, the argument is logically compelling insofar as chattel slavery in this nation and the world passed through generations by enslaving the newborn children of slaves. No consent from any party.

Let’s face it, the argument for smaller polities is a minority opinion resisted by the weight of almost the whole population of America if not the world. I think the ancient Greeks were onto something when they speculated on the carrying capacities of political communities before size dictated descent into tyranny. Most people have been convinced through the media and the government education system that bigger is better, that the notion of diverse communities is to be entertained only through a collectivist mindset and lens. Diversity is all the rage but the rainbow is evident and embraced for physical characteristics only and the intellectual/emotional internal landscape must be in monochromatic lockstep with government supremacism and the mindless patriotic gore that attends all the wars we have fought since 1898. Mind you, the nationalist notion of America went into overdrive during and after the War to Save Josef Stalin (1939—45). Before that time, technology and transportation had kept marginal polities and regions distinctive. I often think the stateless advocates for anarcho-capitalism are in the same boat as the English intellectuals in the 1780s that opposed the universal institution of slavery, both chattel and indentured. It may be decades if not hundreds of years before humanity wakes up as a species and objects to strangers dictating through violence their every behavior and decision in the current statist model of human organization. A number of intriguing possibilities abound from medieval Iceland to the canton system in Switzerland (is there a relationship between smaller and diverse polities in Switzerland, neutrality and lack of imperial ambition?). Fundamentally, we cannot achieve even that idyll until we have slowly and tirelessly devolved, diluted and atomized the size of existing political communities.

There are a huge variety of these movements throughout the world. Here in these united States, small elements in Texas, Vermont and Hawaii have all made significant noises about their desires to secede. The primary reason the notion is gaining traction is that the dirty little secret remains — the Federal Leviathan in DC cannot be reformed — ever. The organizational dynamics, nature of democracy and institutional corruption have all led to this sad but inevitable conclusion. Ron Paul has lit a fire and I am a stalwart supporter of the lion’s share of his philosophy but DC will never return to Constitutional constraints or the limited government vision he so eloquently champions. Under no circumstances should there be a desire to violently overthrow the existing political structures in these united States as it would violate the libertarian prime directive of non-aggression. I think it is time to reconsider the advantages of smaller polities and the peaceful dissolution of what was once the lamp of liberty for the world.

A note in the margin: in my previous essay, I credited Boston T. Party in his novel Molon Labe! with a concept that belonged to Matthew Bracken who wrote the book, Enemies Foreign and Domestic. Both these gentlemen write ripping good yarns that bring to life the libertarian vision in the novel.

William Buppert [send him mail] and his homeschooled family live in the high desert in the American Southwest.

William Buppert Archives

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"Mr. President, this is Governor Lutrin and I am calling on behalf of the nation of Idaho and the new Inland Confederation."

"Good evening, Governor Lutrin, I was hoping we could discuss a resolution to the latest…unpleasantness."

"Mr. President, I wanted to pass on to you my personal assurance on the territorial integrity of the remaining states in the former union known as these United States. The departure of Utah, Wyoming, Montana and eastern Washington into the newly revived Articles of Confederation was a happenstance our exit did not anticipate. We have no intention whatsoever of seeking additional members although I suspect your behavior has provided a tremendous incentive to cause more states to spin off from the orbit of DC. I would like to recommend the creation of a Summit to establish a peaceful reconciliation between the divorced parties to normalize trade and diplomatic relations."

"Governor, your actions have caused a cascading effect that has effectively opened national fissures that are difficult to contain."

"I would also like to offer my concerns on repatriating the surviving members of the 82d Airborne Division and elements of the XVIII Airborne Corps. Both battalions of the 19th Special Forces Group (Airborne) are remaining in the Confederation of their own accord to husband the creation of our own national militia. The critically wounded soldiers will receive the best care we can offer through their recovery and eventual return to your country. We have already dispatched the surviving 35 paratroopers to the border for return. I am hopeful we can sustain the agreed terms of the ceasefire and avoid any bloodshed in the future."

"That was the most lopsided defeat of American arms on our soil since…"

"Sir, we initiated no aggression against these United States and simply did what we tend to do best when our backs are against the wall. We are a rural nation with urban pockets and the character of these states tend to be rather impatient with being pushed around and bullied. Consider us as a porcupine that can do you no harm unless you visit violence on it. You can say that the fury your armed forces experienced was a century of pent-up frustration and aggression. Their sacrifice and bravery is acknowledged."

"The US is the most sophisticated and powerful military power on the face of the planet. If I simply picked up the phone and called for air strikes or military reprisals, we could bring you to your knees."

"That would be inadvisable to visit that kind of bloodshed on peaceful people. That particular scenario is not working very well for you in the Middle East. I would also hope severe condemnations from civilized nations around the world would grace your desk. I can promise you that we will initiate a number of retaliatory measures which require no military action on our behalf that will cause a modicum of grief to your administration"

"Such as…"

"Inspired by a terrific novel called Enemies Foreign and Domestic, we happen to have a complete database of all current physical addresses of all FLEAs (Federal Law Enforcement Agent) in the US available for broadcast release on the internet when we choose."

"I have filed a formal complaint with the United Nations Security Council to issue an injunction against your secession."

"We cannot tell you who to associate with but we are not nor will we be members of the United Nations. We already have formal recognition from 55 nations including Alaska, Switzerland, Russia and France where we are establishing formal consular offices. We have formalized the transfer of all nuclear weapons and military facilities on Confederation soil and will reimburse the US Government for their costs after the auditors have finished calculating the total Confederation tax bill bled to the rulers on the Potomac since 1913. Unfortunately, I suspect the books may not balance in your favor so receipt of the funds in actual remuneration may not materialize."

"Governor, that is clear and simple theft of US Government property to include the multibillion dollar facilities."

"Mr. President, taxation is theft and the weight of Federal encroachment on the states has been enormous. Once DC started to behave like an occupation government, all the natural forces seeking remedy and escape started to form the perfect storm of events that liberated the Confederation from the former US configuration. We will conduct a full accounting of the valuation and match it to the previously mentioned audit. We have no Federal Reserve and the Confederation will be relying on free banking to mint a new currency or currencies backed by hard metal. What little government we have will be financed through a one percent tariff at the borders."

"Governor, how can a government run on a one percent tax?"

"Mr. President, that is the original percentage of the income tax in 1913. We have already cashiered 98% of government workers in most of the states in the last two weeks. This includes the former Federal employees who chose to remain here. Each employee received the equivalent of five years salary in gold drawn from the caged IRS account in Boise. They are among the last people we hope will ever get government aid in the state. We have a unique agenda, we intend to shrink government over time and if the future allows us to zero it completely, so be it."

"That is impossible, how will people survive without government support and protection?"

"Like free men, Mr. President, like free men."

William Buppert [send him mail] and his homeschooled family live in the high desert in the American Southwest.

William Buppert Archives

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"Good Morning, Governor, how might we…"

"Mr. President, I realize you are a busy man so let’s get down to brass tacks…we are calling the ball and withdrawing our support of your Administration and the Federal government in DC. Effective immediately, we have coordinated to place all outgoing receipts to the IRS in a caged account here in Boise…"

"Governor, you can’t do that…"

"Please don’t interrupt while I am speaking as we are from this point onward peers in the family of nations. I hope you have reviewed the diplomatic instruments we sent by courier last night to Department of State which delineates the terms of our divorce."

"I did receive those and you have no earthly idea the can of whoop-…"

"Please, sir, maintain the decorum of these proceedings so we can move forward to an amicable separation. I give you my personal assurance on the safety and well-being of all Federal personnel we have detained for immediate repatriation to the remainder of these United States. Any non-law enforcement Federal personnel who wish to remain behind will be permitted to do so."

"I hope you have thought through the consequences of what you are embarking on."

"Mr. President, we have had over two hundred years to give the rulers on the Potomac a chance but that time has expired. Effective immediately, all so-called Federal lands now belong to the nation of Idaho and we will dispose of these lands at our leisure. In the interest of burying the hatchet, we will not seek compensation for the seizure, abuse and tenure of Federal practices on the aforementioned land and call the balance even."

"Those are my lands, Governor…"

"In actuality, they belong to neither of us, sir. On to other business, I have alerted my National Guard forces to establish checkpoints at all the main arterials in and out of Idaho. All National Guard forces deployed overseas will return home in the next 48 hours. I would also caution you on the use of military force to convince Idaho and its citizens to forcibly return to the yoke of the Union. Idaho has a well-deserved reputation as a rather well-equipped state in firearms possession and use. As Yamamoto said, you may find a rifle behind every blade of grass."

"Are you threatening the president of the United States?"

"No, sir, I am simply making an observation about the hazards of one country invading another."

"You are land-locked, Governor and wholly dependent on federal subsidy for a great deal of employment and infrastructure in Idaho."

"No longer, the tremendous tax burden across the spectrum formally imposed in our nation as a subject State in your country is now effectively terminated and we are going to unleash the free market to address all of our former shortcomings as a result of the overarching government supremacism practiced here before. In telephone conversations with my neighboring governors, we are on the verge of Confederation negotiations that will pave the way for Idaho embassies in British Columbia, Montana, Utah and Wyoming. We do intend on opening a consular office in DC as soon as we can ensure the diplomatic baggage containing sufficient weapons assures our safety in the greater DC metropolitan area for our diplomatic personnel."

"Governor, what Constitutional right do you have to secede from the US?"

"Mr. President, the behavior you have exhibited toward the Constitution has been at best characterized by active neglect and abhorrence for the restraint on governance in the Bill of Rights. I am rather surprised you would resort to assuming the document in any way has weight in Washington, DC. I would suggest my rights extend as far as our ability to throw off what has become a government of occupation instead of cooperation. We resign, sir and wish to go in peace."

"I will use every measure in my arsenal to force you back into the fold."

"Mr. President, thank you for the heads-up but we have taken certain precautions to ensure that any rash measures on your part have a disproportionate impact in the DC/Virginia corridor. Please don’t press us on the issue. I would like to offer one more rather moderate important proposal to our future business. These United States as administered by DC are now essentially bankrupt. War on the world, out of control spending and borrowing, debt and deficit, non-funded future liabilities in the tens of trillions and a banking infrastructure rotten at every level has pushed the US to an economic abyss from which it cannot shrink. We will provide you a demonstration project of tiny government, free banking and a formerly enslaved citizenry unleashed to realize their potential with no government interference. We simply wish to go our own way untethered from the Remora Nation DC came to symbolize."

"Governor, this conversation is over."

"Good day, Mr. President."

William Buppert [send him mail] and his homeschooled family live in the high desert in the American Southwest.

William Buppert Archives

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Why preparedness? I don’t like to use the term survivalist because it has become freighted with all kinds of negative images such as the armed survivors who actually relished the coming of the end of civilization hunkered down with cases of food and beer waiting to mow down bad guys and refugees alike. I feel that, as husband and father, my obligation to my family through thick and thin includes planning for all probable contingencies. Meticulous planning is a critical component of good luck.

What is the reason to hunker down and prepare for doom and gloom? I have been involved in preparedness since the early eighties during the peak of the Soviet atomic threat to these united States. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists used to employ a clock that would dictate how close to midnight we were for nuclear apocalypse or "The End of the World as We Know It" (TEOTWAWKI). While I think the organization is filled with lefty scientific illiterates, I still agree that the clock is justifiably closer than at any time since then for a variety of reasons.

I would suggest that nuclear Armageddon is a distant possibility with the interlinking nation-states rising now to challenge Earth’s singular superpower but the more pressing and immediate threat is the planetary alignment of economic catastrophe looming here and concomitantly, abroad. The national debt, enormous government spending, deficit service of the debt, Treasury printing with no adult supervision, regulatory overreach, aggregate tax burdens on all sectors and the looming complex banking crisis all possess precursors that make the Great Depression seem like a subtle economic interruption under RedDR. Y2K may have been an illusion but this a clear and present danger. We are facing an economic abyss from which we cannot shrink or retreat; we are committed to wandering through a valley for which Americans have no contemporary experience nor preparation. The more affluent the nation, the harder the fall and we are heading for a collapse.

I offer the scenarios here with a broad brush but these are simply candidate events and there may very well be dozens or hundreds of other variants looming. Three events will directly affect the American population in concert with an economic meltdown. There will be a grid-up collapse that will be a hyperinflationary environment in which no major services are disrupted but the downturn will lead to massive un(der)employment or dislocation of services. The more severe will be a grid-down scenario that embraces the worst of the latter in a collapse in which basic services will diminish or cease to function at all such as power, water and waste treatment complexes. The last and worst scenario is a nuclear fallout event in which its initiation is independent of or in concert with the first two scenarios. I cannot predict which of these will come to pass nor if they will even become reality. So how will we prepare for these rather anomalous scenarios?

There are three levels of preparation. I would offer the caveat that no matter how prepared you may think you are, you will always discover shortcomings in training and matriel as your plans evolve. The ruralite will have an instant advantage over the urbanite for two reasons — city folk pride themselves on their lack of self-sufficiency and country dwellers are positioned to advantage simply because of where they live. If you have any doubt of this, consider what the big cities will be like after the power has been off for more than three days and the ambient temperatures in refrigerated/freezer containers start to set food to rotting. I discussed guns and training in an earlier essay and will not emphasize that in this one. While I think the firearms battery is a cornerstone, it is simply a component of a larger matrix of skills and materiel that make for a well-rounded survival plan. Remember that you will never exceed your highest level of training.

The beginner will have completed the most difficult step in preparedness — acknowledgement that a severe problem is emerging that will endanger both the individual and his family. The inventory of skill sets and materiel shortcomings will commence and an enormous task will now present itself for you to get ready for the contingencies you are planning for. It is not within the scope of this essay to provide the comprehensive means to equip for the coming bad times but I will provide some link and book recommendations to get started. The first stop for both the novice and experienced preparedness family should be Jim Rawles’ outstanding site: www.survivalblog.com . If there is one-stop shopping for both the beginner and the expert, this is the place to be.

The intermediate family will have already acknowledged the looming crisis and taken steps to ameliorate some of the more unpleasant aspects of the disturbance or cessation of goods and services. This family may have put in a deep larder of foodstuffs either purchased at a big box store, a specialty store, or canned at home. They will have a generator set, the appropriate fuel storage and the means to defend themselves. More importantly, they will have mastered or dabbled in some skills such as welding, vehicle repair or orienteering.

The advanced preparedness family will have done all of the above, located themselves so they live at their retreat 365 days a year, thoroughly trained in all the essential elements from primitive skills to gun-fighting courses, and have the deep larder to be self-sustaining for more than one year.

So where to start? Wherever you may be in the preparedness continuum, you will discover that every new skill mastered or new widget purchased will identify another potential shortcoming to be addressed. Make no mistake; this is a lifestyle choice that will have benefits for any family if a collapse never materializes. Some of the trademark attributes in the movement is to get out of debt, get closer to the business end of food delivery (such as growing gardens and raising livestock), become proficient at fixing your own vehicles and learning 19th and early 20th century skill sets. Use scroogle or metacrawler to find the endless variety of sites dedicated to this subculture.

I recommend that you purchase one book to get you started and this will in turn through your own research lead to other areas of inquiry. Your bookshelves will be groaning soon enough if you decide to get ready for the coming bad times. The book is The Encyclopedia of Country Living by Carla Emery and it is worth every penny.

Next, go to Lindsay’s Technical Books and explore the amazing variety of offerings for books on everything from steam engines to metalworking. You will also be amazed at the advancement of technology in the days of old because we have this cultural conceit that things now are always better than they ever were.

There are a variety of magazines out there and I tend to stay away from the gun-centric-kill-’em-all scribblings that think preparation is all about the largest and latest piece of firearms hardware. I would recommend three to begin with: Backwoods Home, Countryside, and Backwoodsman magazine. The editor of Backwoods Home, Dave Duffy, is a self-professed libertarian whose editorials will bring a smile to any reader of LRC.

This is simply a primer to get you started on the path to self-sufficiency, and come what may, you will be richer for it.

Gold, guns and groceries.

William Buppert [send him mail] and his homeschooled family live in the high desert in the American Southwest.

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President Bush has embarked on the final phase of Pax Americana and is ushering in an advanced imperial stage that will endanger every living American. The coming election will assure us that every American will have his Second Amendment rights infringed or predated upon in some fashion no matter which party succeeds (is there a difference except the spelling?). Perennial readers of this site are better versed than most in the predatory nature of the state and its ability to target and vilify those it wishes to eliminate eventually whether through political neutralization such as Trent Lott or lethal means such as Waco or Ruby Ridge. I’d like to focus this essay on the practical application of what Boston T. Party refers to as “liberty’s teeth” or small arms. There are plenty of organizations like Jews For the Preservation of Firearms Ownership and Gun Owners of America which will provide you with all the intellectual ammunition you need to know why you should be armed; I want to tell you how. I want to offer a bare-bones primer on how to get started in amassing your personal armory (contrary to what the government says, an arsenal is where weapons are manufactured) and using the weapons you obtain. I have a military background that spans two decades, shoot competitively and currently instruct tactical firearms so I have left the armchair a few times.

There are plenty of sites from which you can obtain this information but I wanted to provide a fairly painless gateway to get started if you are beginning from ground zero. The black helicopter crowds are chockfull of hunker-down survivalist information which for the most part suffers from their barely hidden desire for the apocalypse to occur coupled with their propensity to be armchair enthusiasts unfettered by real world application of firepower. On the other end of the spectrum, you have the nation’s largest gun prohibition organization, the National Rifle Association, selling plenty of safety-oriented gun practices (while winking lustfully at the Beltway media and other hoplophobes) and ignoring any martial aspects of weapons or gun handling the Founders wrote the Second Amendment for in the first place.

1. Establish a mindset much like the Flinters in F. Paul Wilson’s novels. Fully embrace the initiated non-aggression principle. This is not a call for armed revolt or insurrection. This is summed up as leave me alone or else. Whether you own weapons now or not, you should be fully decided that when, not if, the government comes around to seize them you will relinquish them one round at a time. Or you have had the foresight to properly cache spares and you can hand over that Lee Harvey Oswald Carcano to the nice young men in black ninja suits who are from the government and just want to help you. If you have any doubt about that, stop reading this and take any weapons you now own and donate them to a paleoconservative or libertarian who cares. You may continue reading if liberty means more than lip service. The right to self-defense should be beyond question to this audience.

2. If you bought one book on the subject, buy Boston T. Party’s book, Boston’s Gun Bible (revised April 2002). Hey, we’re on LRC, you always want a book on the subject. As a matter of fact, this logical and sound compendium of gun stuff is worth a whole shelf of gun tomes. Read it two or three times and always have a highlighter in hand. He’s done all the work for you. You just have to read and heed. It has had a perennial place on my nightstand since I bought it. While those new to the gun community will be amazed at the pedantic disagreements that enliven every corner of the gun culture from ballistics to weapons choice, enquiring minds will really be energized by the level of intellectual ferment once you get the gun habit. If one only read the New York Times or the LA Times, you’d think all gun owners were backward hillbillies who only Jim Goad could love. Like so many American subcultures, there is a niche for every need or desire. For instance, I disagree with his number-one choice for a battle rifle (M1A v. FN-FAL) but that is the nature of the enterprise.

3. Write this on your whiteboard one hundred times: I will never, ever buy a weapon from a Federal Firearms Dealer (FFL). I will only make private party purchases through gun shows, the classifieds or through friends and neighbors. The Feral (no misspelling) government has developed a devilishly clever system using the BATF as their stalking horse to enable a de facto and de jure gun registration system established at the central government level every time a weapon is purchased at a brick and mortar gun shop. Check your risk tolerance and local and state laws to determine the regulations regarding private sales but the litmus test is easy. If you see guns for sale in your local newspaper classifieds, it is under the government radar (for now). Recent events such as the spate of college campus shootings and the attempts by local and state governments to regulate and suppress every manner of arms employment and provisioning should convince you that time is short. The same applies to ammunition; buy it at a gun show for cash as there is no requirement for a permit (yet) in most states. I hope you are fortunate enough to live in a state unlike Illinois or some of the Borg states in the northeastern part of these united States. When buying these weapons through private sales, always be prepared to walk away if it smells funny. Never buy any weapon that even appears to be fully automatic or is hinted to be. The Class III licensing system in the US regulates these firearms in a very draconian fashion under the auspices of the 1934 National Firearms Act. The government has a history of entrapment and provocation. Ask Randy Weaver if a half-inch on a ruler is hazardous to your health or that of your family.

4. I could write a book on what to buy but that is beyond the scope of this essay. Armed conflict is a discipline of distance. Different firearms have envelopes of lethality as distance is increased which is also a factor in accuracy. To paraphrase Boston, a pistol is what you fight your way to your rifle with. Spare no expense since your life depends on these tools. At minimum you need a rifle and pistol for every member of your family. The Glock pistol is the hands-down winner for accuracy and reliability. As to rifles, if you are poorer than dirt, scrape up $100 and buy a Lee-Enfield .303 rifle. These bolt actions are highly serviceable for social work. If you have more money, invest the hundreds and thousands it will take to get a proper battle rifle such as an FN-FAL, M1A or HK91 and all the equipment and ammunition to accompany each rifle for its care and feeding. Be sure to have a minimum of 25 magazines per rifle and ten per pistol. From this point, once you have started to empty your wallet, more equipment will start to appeal to you such as load-bearing gear, body armor and all manner of shooting accoutrement. The sky is the limit (and your income).

5. Pay for the very best firearms training you can afford; a single digit percentage of the gun culture pays for professional training and this is the greatest shortcoming you can have. No matter how American the concept of having the most elaborate toys, if you can’t employ them, then their value is moot. Go to Google or Metacrawler, type in firearms training in your state and see who offers it locally or go to the nationally renowned training centers like Gunsite, Thunder Ranch or Firearms Academy of Seattle (my personal favorite for value and quality). Take your spouse, too. She is your primary team-member.

6. Teach your children well. The gun culture has roots as far back as the first settlers in North America. This continuity is a result of parents passing on their knowledge and weapons to their progeny to continue down the line. Exposure to guns early enough can make liberty contagious.

Remember, guns don't kill people, governments and the criminals they create do.

William Buppert [send him mail] and his homeschooled family live in the high desert in the American Southwest.

~ T.E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom

This quote has a haunting quality of despair that even a Russian novelist would be hard pressed to elucidate better. While Lawrence was a "guest" of the Turks in 1916, he was subject to interrogation techniques most indelicate. The current prison/torture scandals and the Bush regime’s disdain for the Geneva Convention and international law have further reinforced the idea that America is a rogue nation. Plenty of Middle Americans are asking how could our armed forces do this? Like my colleagues Karen Kwiatkowski and Michael Pierce, I served in the US armed forces for most of my adult life and witnessed the reasons they can do what they do. Others have considered the famous student experiments in captor/prisoner relationships and the good German hypotheses but the crux of the matter for uniformed soldiers is the value of recognized ordinances of civilized warfare. This is not an oxymoron. I think the peace mankind experiences is merely a pause between conflicts generated the lion’s share of the time by government. These formalized protocols are what separate the soldier from the serial killer. Now we have the US armed forces pushing the edge of the legal envelope as it were at the behest of their civilian masters. It turns out that the intelligence organizations in the Army may be the catalyst for the prison abuse scandal. These are the "mandarins" of the intellectual caste. The Military Intelligence Corps prides itself as the "smart" branch of the US Army steeped in a culture of intellectual ferment and the ability to think like the enemy. Nothing could be further from the truth but I discussed that in an earlier essay. They share the same dysfunctions as the rest of the US intelligence apparatchiks: a signal inability to think outside the box, an absolutely ironclad lack of deference to different cultural norms and a rudimentary hostility to any other intelligence agency or branch.

The Cold War honed a system of intelligence which faced a monolithic threat and relied on a static empirical model of counting weapons, soldiers and materiel and trying to divine intent on the part of the enemy. An enviably simple task on reflection given the inputs from satellite data, observation and technical extrapolation of means and ability, although even that was flawed. Inevitably, the same qualities which animate most journalists — being stupid, venal and lazy — managed to permeate the bureaucratic rat’s nests of the US government. Intelligence at its distillate is the ability to reliably predict how other national actors will behave to stimulus whether it is a provocation from us or a response to weaker or stronger opponents. Match this with the bureaucratic imperative to risk aversion and the cultivation of a culture of obedience to political masters and you have a recipe for disaster. The CIA and the alphabet soup of other bunglers that comprise the pantheon of entrails readers for the Feds stumble all over themselves NOT to seize bold and innovative conclusions to intelligence puzzles. The intelligence products made for the National Command Authority will inevitably make sure their conclusions please the expectations of their masters at the top no matter the logical contortions necessary. As I’ve stated before, the US intelligence apparatus cannot conduct human intelligence (the coordination and maintenance of clandestine agent networks) because we are culturally and institutionally incapable of it; so we rely primarily on technical means that do not fare well against the relatively low-tech host of adversaries we’re now facing. Do you suppose Joe Q. Citizen, untrained in intelligence arcana, would purposefully sign off on destroying religious structures (with the worshipers inside), use Israeli-style helicopter gunship methods to "surgically" remove hostiles in urban areas or go medieval on prison inmates to soften them up? None of this took place without a finding or thumbs up from the associated intelligence activity. It never ceases to amaze me how the American brand of bureaucracy can sometimes out-Soviet the Soviet system when it comes to a penchant for micromanagement of details that in the end don’t matter but still manage to make things worse in the aggregate….

The intelligence system suffers from the same problem the rest of the Federal government suffers from: a consistent reward for failure and a perverse incentive to ensure a solution is not found and if it is, it remains well hidden. Additionally, a tendency to centralized decision-making, administrative bloat and sheer incompetence. One clear example is the abysmal lack of analysts’ language capabilities in their areas of expertise. Can you read translated reports or newspapers from a targeted country and get a true feel for the culture and driving factors in behavior? Does the frisking of Iraqi women and children at checkpoints and mass disarmament of the Arab male culture betray sensitivity to cultural hot buttons? I could go on with legions of examples but you get the picture — the US intelligence agencies are like a blind and naked man batting at a piñata, which is actually a hornet’s nest. Our pasty-faced, well-fed and squeaky clean analysts (are we sure they don’t have a labor union?) comfortably ensconced in Central Intelligence Agency or Defense Intelligence Agency cubicles will spend hours perfecting typos in full-color PowerPoint presentations for their bosses and maybe mere moments on the substance of the intelligence puzzles they are working on. Of course, much like the scene in the brilliant "Life of Brian," the Judean People’s Front and the People’s Front of Judea are mortal enemies bent more on each other’s destruction than the common threat. There is no more fit analogy for America’s current intelligence woes.

Is it true the Abu Ghraib prison scandals were as bad as is now claimed? I suspect the worst is yet to come. You combine the sheer obsequious idiocy of contemporary intelligence, the institutional proclivity of cops to dehumanize their assigned targets and the natural barbarity of prison confinement. I happen to think American prisons are much the same, given the number of political prisoners (unconstitutional laws), non-violent offenders (Drug War) and the overlooked pathology of prison rape (a wink and a nod by the corrections industry). The lethal combination of the feminization of the military, American exceptionalism to the Law of Land Warfare, the Israelization of American military tactics in Iraq, dehumanization of Iraqi civilians and sheer exhaustion of the only combat organizations the US can field in the world is setting the stage for a US debacle in which if we don’t leave soon, we will revisit the march of Xenophon but with much more unpleasant results. Remember what Lawrence achieved after he escaped the Turks? I wonder how many of the Abu Ghraib prisoners who are paroled alive will return with a vengeance.

William Buppert [send him mail], a retired Army officer, lives on a ranch in the Inland Northwest with his wife and their three homeschooled children.

Even
Bush the Younger has needed a pretense for this instead of risking
an Executive Order to make it so. All the methodologies are in place
including Congressional authorization in the form of HR
4633, "The Driver's License Modernization Act," a
particularly odious effort to nationalize databases to make it easier
for bureaucrats to track American individuals. Tom Ridge has been
itching to tattoo all American so his lads can better protect the
flock of sheep called Americans. If you think identity theft is
a problem now, wait until the Feds get their claws into data compilation
and collating. The abuses at the IRS will pale in comparison.

Remember
the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) promise
to revolutionize crime prevention under the Brady Bill? Let's ask
a simple question. Does NICS have a positive or negative database?
A positive database is a universal compendium of every American
citizen (not illegal, unregistered aliens or invaders). As much
as the Feds would like that, they aren't there yet. Witness Poindexter's
Total
Information Awareness debacle. The NICS database is a negative
database in the sense that it only lists criminal convictions of
applicants, which are retrieved when a gun sale purchase is made.
Yet, if said criminal applicant uses a fake ID or gives a false
name, he will come out clean and able to purchase the weapon after
filling out the BATF Form 4473 (the infamous yellow form). The FBI
and BATF will then, of course, violate supposed Congressional proscriptions
against record keeping and store the purchase information in
the alphabet agency's memory hole. Well, Tom Ridge may have a late
Christmas present for all the alphabet agencies in the Federal government.

The
National ID system will obviate this inconvenience to our rulers.
At last, the usual suspects in the halls of power will have the
means to track, identify and persecute the malcontents and criminals
they so urgently need to monitor for all manner of reasons. This
administration has been itching to find a reason to institute this
Orwellian device and some of corporate
America has been clamoring to get in on the action. To readers
of LRC, the privacy and liberty ramifications are obvious and this
will be the knockout blow. Mark my words; the Bush administration
will use the immigration initiative to justify a national ID card
for all Americans. Whether this is the true purpose behind the initiative,
I don't know, but watch for the trial balloons to crowd the skies
over the Capitol and the polluted fever swamps in the Beltway media
complex.

January
19, 2004

William
Buppert [send him mail],
a retired Army officer, lives on a ranch in the Inland Northwest
with his wife and their three homeschooled children.

~
Mexican
Foreign Secretary Jorge G. Castañeda

"I
absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and
fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state or sovereignty,
to whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen…."

~
The oath of allegiance of a new American citizen

America
is done. The latest
Bush initiative which America's first Mexican CoPresident has
announced is a blanket amnesty and de facto naturalization process
for illegal invaders in the US. Much like Britain's fertility race
to become the first exclusively Anglo-Muslim
state in greater Europe, a short term liaison between politicos
trolling for votes and an intellectually stunted punditry poisoned
by politically correct notions of ethnic identity and victimhood
has our rulers squeezing the trigger of the gun aimed at our heads.
While Mexico remains a socialist disaster of the first order, they
certainly don't reciprocate the courtesy of either allowing northern
bound immigrants to trespass through Mexican territory with impunity
or treat invaders with the magnanimity we do; the Fox
regime is consciously fomenting an insurgency against the US
and we respond with a form of surrender. As Pat
Buchanan said, "Bush is erasing the US border." Fox
has declared war on us and we have hoisted the white flag.

The pattern is clear from our rulers in DC. We essentially took
the war to the civil population of Serbia for daring to secure their
borders in Kosovo
against a militant Islamic insurgency. The only permitted exception
is the murderous enterprise called Israel, which can destroy, invade
and terrorize with the US stamp of approval. Israeli borders are
sacred but American borders are fluid. Why is the current neocon
cabal so intent on opening the floodgates for third world immigration?
The short-term goals are raw vote totals, a willful self-destruction
of Western ideals and a ratcheting of the destruction of liberty
and freedom in the Republic. The long-term goal is a manifestation
of the preference for evil found among the political and chattering
classes. Borrowing Fred Woodworth's idea, a preference for evil
is the extension of the tired rationale in voting for the lesser
of two evils.

Bush ran on a compassionate
conservative program which has turned out to be National Socialism
with a happy face. His chief political advisor, Karl Rove, views
ideology as a transparent front for power aggrandizement and sees
islands of political voting blocs and they have adopted the Pacific
island-hopping campaign strategy from WWII to lead to total victory,
sometimes passing strongholds with the intention of mopping up later.
The goal is not victory over the Democrats who are clearly in league
with the Republicans but the abolition of the individual in American
life. As Paul Gottfried
has demonstrated, the "managerial state" seeks to subsume
individuals necessarily to ethnic or socioeconomic collectives for
more effective manipulation. The Democratic mantra of race/identity/class
has been melded with national security imperatives for a witch's
brew that permits the state to conjure demons out of whole cloth
to ensure the current regime flourishes. Have you noticed any national
initiatives from the Republicans to dismantle any of the American
apartheid apparatus currently in place for racial preference and
cultural leveling? A call for a balanced budget? A curb on federal
spending? Do you expect to see a massive deportation program of
the tens of thousands of immigrant felons presently in the US? Not
a prayer because of the PC straightjacket that has turned law enforcement
into a purely political enterprise that serves the whims of its
masters. It also conveniently midwifes ever-escalating crises that
demand "government solutions." The parasitic welfare state
will balloon to ever more unmanageable proportions and eventually
foment an economic collapse as producers decide to stop working
to support free riders. Karl Rove is a hybrid of Lee Atwater and
Joseph Goebbels. The leveraging of future wealth to secure present
power is the only visible modus operandi to support the neocon vision
of an imperial America. Democracy provides the perfect foil to deflect
blame from the rulers to the ruled with the implied patina of consent
when things go inevitably awry.

One could point to the Patriot Acts or the bloody campaigns overseas
as the means by which America is being dashed against the shoals
but the true gutting of America is and will be the immigration debacle
Bush the Younger is presently exacerbating. You can always leave
it to politicians to have no sense of second and third order effects
of their behavior and actions. Bush's proclamation is akin to commanding
a ship and ordering it to detonate its own powder magazines for
the good of the crew after inviting the enemy onboard. Rome on the
Potomac hopes to capture a larger slice of the Hispanic vote but
will instead usher in the final death throes of the Republic.

January
16, 2004

William
Buppert [send him mail],
a retired Army officer, lives on a ranch in the Inland Northwest
with his wife and their three homeschooled children.

During my travels around the globe, I've seen the Stars and Bars
displayed from Kosovo to Thailand. They aren't flying it to establish
solidarity with hate groups or a return to chattel slavery; they
are waving it because it is a universal symbol of opposition to
government tyranny. The War Between the States (how can you have
a Civil War where only one side wants supremacy over the other in
a martial contest?) resonates throughout the world as a fight over
sovereignty and centralization of government power. Lincoln was
a nasty cross-germination of Alexander Hamilton, Ralph Nader and
Joseph Stalin all rolled into a long, tall drink of a dictator.
The Lincoln revisionism
of the last decade that has broken the hagiographic cult of personality
that has permeated the court histories in America for over a hundred
years seems to be the tip of the iceberg with entire ice fields
filled with the likes of Wilson, FDR and LBJ ahead. Lincoln scholarship
has fueled a hatred of the south and the Confederacy in a way unprecedented
in American historiography. I don't think there is any need to plead
that the South acted in an angelic fashion during its time. After
all, isn't every reader or contributor on LRC at heart a dystopian?
We always expect the worst when it comes to government conduct whether
under Lincoln or Davis because it is the nature of the beast.

The Confederacy was, in some ways, the last gasp of the Jeffersonian
agrarians who were snuffed out permanently in the 1930's by the
emerging Moscow-on-the-Potomac farm programs (recent congressional
appropriations of nearly $20,000,000,000 for agribusiness). Dean
surmises that if he can co-opt ruralites with tax dollars and expanded
entitlements, he can purchase large blocs of voters to be sheared
once he assumes office. He has no idea of the depth and breadth
of distrust of rural and country folks for central government chicanery.
Whether the rural cleansing
taking place in Oregon or the urban expropriation of rural tax dollars
in states like Washington, country folk are under siege from every
quarter and they know it. That's why you see Confederate regalia
on cars, trucks and people from coast to coast. As a Southern expat
in the Inland Northwest, I do my part to keep the heritage and memory
alive. In their hearts and minds, they know Howard
Dean embraces "smart growth" and wants to move all
the rural residents of America into high density enclaves with mass
transit and zero tolerance for guns and automobiles. Then all the
rich white elites can allow nature to return to its pristine state.
God help us. The bottom line is that whenever you hear a politician
from either wing of the War Party attack the South or the Confederacy,
these are simply code words for the disdain our rulers and potentates
have for folks who live in the country away from the more
congested urban nests of dependent collectivists that consistently
vote for more and not less government. Message to Howard Dean:
If you want the rural votes, buy the biggest pickup you can afford,
place two rifles in the gun racks, always
carry a handgun, go to church and be as self-sufficient and
neighborly as possible. Ahem, Howard, get your hand out of your
neighbor's wallet. . . not that kind of neighborly. We don't
do that around here.

November
18, 2003

William
Buppert [send him mail],
a retired Army officer, lives on a ranch in the Inland Northwest
with his wife and their three homeschooled children.

Clause
11: To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and
make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water;

The problems of piracy and inadequate naval power plagued the young
Republic and letters of marque were an ingenious early adoption
of outsourcing. Most
of the literature demonstrates a very fine line between privateering
as a legal arm of the state and piracy as the converse image of
a thriving underground economy. The dearth of naval strength led
lawmakers to adopt more expedient means to combat both unsanctioned
piracy and to prevent the British and French from dragooning
US maritime manpower on the high seas. From its birth to the
1850's, letters of marque remained in effect. Wendy
McElroy writes:

On April
16, 1856, most of the major maritime powers signed an international
agreement called the Declaration Respecting Maritime Law –
more popularly known as the Declaration of Paris – which
abolished privateering. The United States declined to sign on
the grounds that its navy was so small that letters of marque
were required to bolster it during war. Without the letters the
United States would be at a disadvantage versus European nations
with large standing navies.

During
the Spanish-American War (1898), Spain and America – neither
of which was a party to the Declaration of Paris – agreed
to eschew privateering. It was not until the Hague Conferences
at the dawn of the twentieth century, however, that the United
States officially renounced the use of letters of marque and reprisal.
Thus, the term is antiquated in that it no longer applies to an
activity in practice.

Our Confederate
brethren during the War of Northern Aggression adopted this
strategy to limited effect. At the turn of the twentieth century,
the practice disappeared. Ron Paul recently introduced a bill
to revive the practice in our current War Against a Tactic. A number
of LRC columnists have commented on this idea if you search the
archive. The importance of a renewal of this constitutional prerogative
by the US speaks not only to its efficacy but its value as model
for the eventual destruction of the government military monopoly
in America. Just as the separation
of school and state causes most American minds to short-circuit,
so, too, the eventual dissolution of the state's stranglehold on
defense/protection functions is a hard pill for most to swallow.

Let's conduct a quick thought experiment. Suppose that Roosevelt
nationalized the production and delivery of all foodstuffs in the
US during the 1930's. He collectivized farms and everyone went to
Uncle Sam's instead of Safeway or Sam's Club. The lines were long,
the food was rarely of the quality it used to be and the Foodworkers
Union was the most powerful labor entity in the federal leviathan.
Fast forward to 2003 and picture a few timid souls politely suggesting
that maybe, just maybe, the free market could deliver more food
of higher quality at lower prices. All hell would break loose as
the paid mouthpieces of the Foodworkers Union, their lobbyists,
the Congress, the beltway media and the other usual suspects brayed
on about imminent starvation, market failure and the inability of
business to ensure the efficient production and delivery of food.
Polls would be taken and Americans would hold the majority opinion
that government is the only way to equitably distribute food. This
illuminates the difficulty of reacquainting Americans with the very
foundations that made the early republic so distinctly different
from the other statist enterprises around the globe.

This illustration is amusing but it certainly would pale in comparison
to selling the American public the idea that we could eventually
privatize national defense. The cracks are appearing:

1. About
   35 corporations like Military
   Professional Resources Incorporated (MPRI) are currently
   conducting outsourced functions for DoD and clients around the
   world. MPRI likes to boast it has more generals per square foot
   than the Pentagon. Unfortunately, the government-private sector
   alliance has tended to be a case study for Lord Acton's axioms.
   Von Mises' observations on bureaucratic expansion have also
   been validated when the Pentagon gets about a 35% increase in
   its budget ($400,000,000,000+) with active duty uniformed endstrengths
   remaining static and Brown & Root, et al., reaping the rewards.
2. David
   Hackworth has claimed there are 29,000 trigger-pullers in
   the US Army with a total of approximately 495,000 active-duty.
   This number is almost impossible to pin down because of the
   number of combat arms soldiers who are not in combat-related
   jobs. This translates to a tooth-to-tail ratio of about 17:1
   of support jobs to actual combatant duty. When you combine this
   with our present neo-imperialist commitments around the planet,
   the Victorian legions in the 19th century look positively
   flush with manpower. Something will have to give if Bush the
   Younger's ambitions extend beyond the present borders of Iraq.
   He doesn't have the uniformed manpower. While I would hope the
   dearth of manpower would put the brakes to his excellent adventures,
   Rummy's desperation may lead him to find more market-oriented
   solutions.
3. Despite
   multi-million dollar bounties being posted, both Saddam and
   Bin Laden have yet to be captured, dead or alive. One of the
   reasons for the inability to even capitalize on this has been
   the bureaucratic morass and regulatory web that surrounds the
   issue of the bounty. No individual in other countries trust
   the United States government enough to think they can collect
   the bounty and keep their heads. Couple letters of marque with
   the power of the market and the chances are much better of capture
   dead or alive. The market will create the escrow accounts, contracting
   services and other tools needed to ensure an effective bounty
   system can work from start to finish.

The time is fast approaching when the choice won't be a luxury but
a necessity. The potential blowback to our current adventures overseas
will arrive at our shores sooner than later and the entire military
organization we currently employ is an offensive weapon with limited
defensive capability to defend continental America. The Cold War
is over but you wouldn't know it if you spent a day in the Pentagon.
Current fiscal policies of infinite debt restructuring, double-digit
increases in discretionary spending and the huge inevitable waste
of government programs will culminate in a day of reckoning after
which the duty of national defense will have to be privatized to
a growing extent.

November
10, 2003

William
Buppert [send him mail],
a retired Army officer, lives on a ranch in the Inland Northwest
with his wife and their three homeschooled children.

"General,
do we have sufficient combat strength to deliver a bodyblow to Saddam
that will deliver the Iraqi people from his grasp?"

"Yes,
if we divert forces from the Balkans mission and deploy Marine ground
forces in concert, we can."

"Paul,
are all the Arab nations onboard with an invasion when we militarily
occupy the country after our sure victory?

"Of
course, Sharon tells me the door is wide open."

"George,
are the intelligence assessments onboard and congruent with our
policy prescriptions?"

"Uh,
well, I would venture to say, well, uh . . . "

"Great,
George, I'm glad our intelligence organizations are on top of things.
I'll have Bolton brief me later on the real deal."

These are imaginary extrapolations but probably capture the tenor
of the White House during the crucial planning phase for the "Operation
Iraqi Freedom" debacle. Read the Seymour
Hersh article in the New Yorker to get an idea of what the Administration
did to get its way despite the lack of evidence for Iraqi Weapons
of Mass Destruction (WMD). This, of course, was the initial pretense
to be followed by the clear and present danger pretext and the "Robert
Mugabe Citizen Hospitality Award" nomination proffered
on Saddam by the Bush administration.

As fantastical as all this is, you have to wonder why a politically
savvy player like Bush would plunge his administration and its legacy
into what appears to be a suicidal foreign adventure in the Middle
East. Not simply a one-country conflict but a play at becoming the
regional hegemon in the Middle East as a prelude to the cementing
of an Imperial
America as the dominating force on the globe. The Left rationalizes
this behavior as it always does by adopting paternal noises and
cranking up the propaganda box to sponsor government intervention
in every human transaction whether large or small. You'll note that
not even Dean,
the ghost of Henry
Wallace, wants to bring the troops home. The mainstream Right
(read neoconservative) accepted by the media, has pressed for a
Pax Americana as long as it has existed as a movement (which one
can date back to Leon
Trotsky's influence in the Communist Party). The prescient America
First movement in the 1930's was merely a blip on the American political
scene as the hideous colossus midwifed by Lincoln continued apace
through the next century and a half of American history. You cannot
point to a single Republican or Democrat Presidential candidate
who disagrees with this notion of empire in principle. You may point
to the rest (Libertarians, Greens, et al.) but America is and will
remain a one-party system for the foreseeable future.

Yet during what were most likely long and grueling planning sessions
did any inquiring minds speculate on the second and third order
effects of the invasion and subsequent occupation? Were alternative
readings of the Iraqi tealeaves permitted or was an orthodoxy of
accepted opinion already formed? Is there a formal methodology the
government employs to forecast worst-case scenarios and possible
futures that may lead to the opposite of what a foreign policy seeks?
The US Army employs a Military
Decisionmaking Process that provides a fairly good template
but it is geared toward short-term mission accomplishment and rarely
examines post-conflict scenarios. The question remains: did the
best and the brightest not see any of this coming?

A
Few Possibilities

For instance, did the Turkish refusal to allow US forces egress
to Iraq give anyone a clue of Turkish intentions to potentially
annex Kurdish territory in the north once we stop paying attention?
Washington and Ankara reportedly clinched a deal in January 2001
to establish a Turkmen Republic in northern Iraq if the US decided
to force Saddam out. According to the Kurdish newspaper, Ozgur Politika,
the republic would kill two birds with one stone by blocking an
incipient Kurdish state and securing US-Turkish control over the
Kirkuk and Mosul oilfields. Will we now permit this to transpire?

The Shiite majority in Iraq may very well manage to create a new
Fundamentalist Muslim rump state in portions or all of Iraq. Will
the destruction of their households and indignities visited upon
them during the occupation ensure they will be warm and cordial
toward the United States once we're forced to leave?

Can the United States centrally plan and engineer the creation of
a new and peaceful Iraqi society from the ashes the US created in
the first place? History is not kind to the notion and failure is
more likely than success. Like the UN in the Balkans, the US will
tolerate the outcome of democratic institutions only if they are
in concert with American wishes and edicts. God help the Iraqis
with us in charge of writing their constitution.
If the Balkans is any measure of American efficacy, we are in for
a long and bloody journey.

Was the bombing campaign prior to the ground campaign really designed
to cripple the power grid and oil extraction/delivery system? Yet
another stunning example of Henry
Hazlitt's wisdom and his parable about the "Broken Window
Fallacy" that so many neoconservative blowhards have ignored
at their peril to support the export of war. According to news reports,
we are now having to import dollars and know-how to rebuild the
oil infrastructure that was 90% of Iraq's GDP prior to our campaign.

Conclusion

These are just a few possibilities of unintended consequences and
second order effects. Many more both large and small will emerge
as the occupation matures. I certainly don't think all decisions
should be postponed or paralyzed at every level to ensure we have
all the answers. Those of us who embrace peaceful freedom know it's
a risky enterprise and we can never have all the knowledge. Of course,
the scales of complexity are much more vast at the level of the
Federal government and the knowledge
problem is that much worse. Government decisions, by their very
nature, especially in foreign policy, will always have unintended
consequences but the stakes are very different. As individuals,
we take decisions in which we have an interest for both failure
and success; politicians, by the nature of the structure they exist
in, are usually insulated from personal risk and many innocents
are put in the hazard by the politician's hubris. Politicians will
rarely allow common sense and logic to get in the way of progress.
With the exception of the ballot box, political actors rarely pay
for acts of stupidity or ignorance no matter how grave the offense.
Apart from assassination, they may simply find themselves out of
office and quickly moving into a lucrative position with a law or
lobby firm.

I haven't even touched on why we have embarked on the Iraq adventure.
The distance of time may be the only way to divine the true reason.
Rest assured, nothing will go as the Bush Administration planned.

October
29, 2003

William
Buppert [send him mail],
a retired Army officer, lives on a ranch in the Inland Northwest
with his wife and their three homeschooled children.

The US intelligence community used to be staffed by Ivy League graduates
and top-drawer intellects during World War III (also known as the
Cold War) whose colleges and even the government institutions for
which they worked had a respect for the employment of logic. Although
the cracks were starting to show in the 1960's when CIA and national
security analysts were using economic performance data published
by the Soviet Union to prove the coming ascendancy of centrally
planned economies overwhelming the West. They must have read too
much Paul
Samuelson in college. Now the lethal combination of a federally
funded university system and the leviathan state has devalued education
to such a degree that a liberal education is now only available
at a handful of universities in the US and even those pale in comparison
to the rigor of the early twentieth century (much less the classical
tradition in Western academe in the 19th century). Today,
anyone can graduate from college and have no more viable an intellectual
tool chest than they entered with. Logic, like the classics, is
on the endangered species list in the American academy. When Mortimer
Adler and Charles Van Doren published How
to Read a Book in 1940, many were amused by the irony of
the publication but it does not detract from its value. One could
issue a book to the intelligence community titled "How to Think
Your Way Out of a Paper Sack" and offer a service unprecedented
among the heavy intellectual lifters of America's elite intelligence
community. I would challenge anyone to examine the US intelligence
machine in the last three decades and discern the employment of
rigorous logic and reason. It would be amusing to find any vindicated
predictive analysis that was not an accident.

No one doubts America's technological edge and the ability to vacuum
up unprecedented data in mammoth quantities stored in countless
different media (including
tape reels, decaying microfiche and five and a quarter inch diskettes)
for our skilled archivists to warehouse. Guess what? We don't know
how to digest it. Grab any CIA or NSA analyst by the lapels and
administer a test in formal and symbolic logic and they will fail.
They could not identify fallacies
to escape the confines of the grocery bags they're trapped in. All
the information in the world is at their fingertips and they seem
incapable of asking the right question or framing the right data
for the problem they're approaching. As Richard
Mitchell has pointed out, reading doesn't begin until you take
your eyes off the page. You can receive all the information you
want, but if you are incapable of processing it and establishing
patterns and relationships from disparate sources, you may as well
be a librarian. Couple this with the Political Correctness that
is strangling intelligent discourse by fencing off forbidden knowledge
and you set the stage for the trillion dollar "defense/intelligence"
apparatus to be caught off-guard on 9/11. (Memo to all FBI field
agents: you will be subject to prosecution if you interfere with
the religious freedom of resident aliens to carry on their mandated
jihad against perceived infidels. Sensitivity training to be scheduled
at a later date. . .)

Bin Laden has remained afield despite the best efforts and countless
tax dollars shoveled into the coffers of our esteemed intelligence
community. This gaping maw of a black hole will gladly continue
to devour national treasure and not deliver a scintilla of protection
because it cannot analyze but it can archive. Are they amassing
this vast store of information hoping that one or two analysts may
come along to make sense of it all? The nature of the bureaucracy
lends itself to perpetuation of a comfortable niche versus solution
as von Mises demonstrated. Legend has it that the Indian nuclear
tests in the late nineties were a surprise because the Clinton worthies
sent a team to Delhi complete with satellite photos demonstrating
we knew they had the capability to conduct both underground and
aerial testing. The US delegation showed the photos to the Indians
who correctly ascertained satellite vector reconnaissance paths
and timed the preparation and detonation of their nuclear tests
when our overhead reconnaissance birds would be out of range. This
is the kind of incompetence that makes you gasp for air.

When I attended the US Army Military Intelligence Officer Advanced
Course training for nearly eight months at Fort Huachuca, Arizona
nary an hour was spent on formal logic or identification of fallacies.
After leaving the school and serving in various capacities in the
US Army around the globe, I have yet to meet anyone from any service
or civilian intelligence arm who was exposed to critical thinking
in a formal fashion.

Is there a difference between information and intelligence? The
latter should be a refined distillate of the former precisely focused
and able to answer critical questions to inform decisions for action.
This seems a mouthful but it captures the importance of being able
to discern the accurate from the fallacious. Simply put, if an analyst
cannot effectively use a methodology that acts as a filter for poor
or false information, he cannot deliver actionable intelligence
outside the rules of chance. The WMD
fiasco in Iraq illustrates perfectly the gullibility of undiscerning
analysts who substitute the whims of their rulers for clear thinking.
We haven't even touched on the lost intellectual endeavor of examining
possible second and third consequences of actions, but that is fodder
for another article.

October
18, 2003

William
Buppert [send him mail],
a retired Army officer, lives on a ranch in the Inland Northwest
with his wife and their three homeschooled children.

We are hearing increasing media attention to "terrorist"
actions against US troops. It appears to be a last ditch effort
by the usual suspects in the DC/NYC Axis to scare the American people
into supporting a conflict they are quickly growing disillusioned
with. Follow the yellow brick road of the neoconservative mind:
Our troops may be in the wrong place at the wrong time for all the
wrong reasons, but we will keep them there because they are getting
killed and injured. Our troops in Kosovo hunkered down in base camps
rarely venturing outside the wire for fear of harm; in essence,
staying hermetically sealed to protect themselves e.g., force protection.
The fearful and timid desk warriors in the Pentagon have made force
protection the endstate of every occupation we engage in. So we
embark on sexy imperialist adventures with young men as bait, plenty
are maimed and some get killed, and we remain in spite of this in
order for politicians to prove their bravado at others' expense.
A subtle variation on Bastiat's famous axiom. I am not making this
up. We're now replicating that failure in Iraq. Let's examine the
United Nations definition of terrorism from the UN Office on Drugs
and Crime:

"In
order to cut through the Gordian definitional knot, terrorism expert
A. Schmid suggested in 1992 in a report for the then UN Crime Branch
that it might be a good idea to take the existing consensus on what
constitutes a “war crime” as a point of departure. If the core of
war crimes – deliberate attacks on civilians, hostage taking and
the killing of prisoners – is extended to peacetime, we could simply
define acts of terrorism as “peacetime equivalents of war crimes.”

I'm amused by the idea of a UN Crime Branch since I thought that
was the entire purpose of the United Nations: making the world safe
for larger and more lethal statist enterprises. Readers of LRC are
well aware of the elasticity of war crimes since the bankrollers
of the Criminal Tribunal in The Hague appear to have a structural
immunity to any of these charges for US/NATO actions. Note the overarching
inference to noncombatant victims and the distinction of states
of war and peace. The numerous incidents since our "victory"
was consolidated in Iraq on 1 May 2003 of US troops "accidentally
" maiming or killing civilians remains perfectly excusable
but when Iraqi resistance and guerilla actions kill US occupying
troops, it is "terrorism." Mind you, the Zionist guerilla
actions against sleeping British military garrisons in Palestine
by Hagunah and Irgun during the struggle to establish a Jewish state
in the aftermath of WWII can yield a fuzzy application of the terrorist
definition. I'm certain that if American forces received intelligence
on a guerilla base or movement and conducted a raid or ambush it
would not be labeled a terrorist action. The antiterrorism industry
for the longest time made a distinction about politically motivated
violence against noncombatants as the prime directive of
terrorist behavior. Now we see the trial balloon floated by the
neoconservative brain trust to see if the US military can cry foul
when they're fired upon. Can this definition now be expanded to
mean that any resistance or response to American combat action
will be unfair and terroristic? This is not as outrageous as it
appears to the new warriors in the Pentagon and may be a direct
result of the new feminized, antiseptic, and technocratic paradigm
that is permeating the US armed forces from the top. The "old
school" muddy boots warriors are now anachronisms.

The dirty little secret that is a universal trait among all these
conflicts throughout millennia is that resistance to uninvited invaders
by disparate and spontaneous groups or individuals will flourish
as long as foreign troops and the apparatchiks they protect remain
incountry. Just revisit Roman troubles in England and British difficulties
in India and Afghanistan. I suspect there may be pockets of influence
by Saddam loyalists, al-Queda operatives or vacationing mujaheddin
but the lion's share of resistance which is stiffening and expanding
in Iraq is just plain-vanilla Iraqi men who have had their fill
of being fodder for yet another experiment in "Statists-R-Us"
(patent pending by the USA). I would suggest another distinct possibility:
during our incessant bombing in the pregame festivities to the ground
invasion, how many women and children were maimed or killed and
their men left alive? If there was even one and I suspect there
were many more, these men would certainly have the motive, opportunity
and intent to harm the occupying forces in any way possible once
the foreign invaders made landfall.

Bush the Younger and his coterie of chickenhawks are reaching a
point of no return in Iraq. All the administration pretenses and
lies are falling like a house of cards. If they choose to remain,
they must convince the American people that the bloodshed is nothing
more than a continuation of the War on Terror and Iraq is a stepping
stone to finally eliminate the threat altogether. If they choose
to cut and run, it will be the greatest recruiting tool Muslim Murder,
Incorporated will need. Al-Queda and every other terrorist faction
will be emboldened like never before. (Memo to the world: If you
are a nation-state and you don't have WMD, get them yesterday. The
Stalinist hivestate of North Korea is a shining example.) They will
choose the former until the flow of maimed and killed US soldiers
forces the latter. All the usual suspects in the media will simply
follow the latest Orwellian twist to the English language and we
will continue to rush blindly into the future dustbin of fallen
imperial powers. After all, if we're not an empire, why didn't we
hand Iraq to the Iraqis on May 2nd, 2003?

October
13, 2003

William
Buppert [send him mail],
a retired Army officer, lives on a ranch in the Inland Northwest
with his wife and their three homeschooled children.