What To Do – Armed Resistance
If all else fails, my suggested approach of last resort is armed resistance. Note the focus on “resistance”. I do not advocate citizens initiating an armed attack on the government for several reasons. The main one being that it could appear to put the government in a favorable light. Instead, the government should be made to appear the clear aggressor with the people only protecting their rights. Lets look at it:
PRO:
- It is the way people have won and protected their freedom and their property for centuries.
- It is justified. All people have the right to defend themselves against enslavement and plunder. Our government’s fiscal policies certainly do both.
- Many of us would rather go down fighting than to meekly submit to tyranny.
CON:
- Obviously, armed conflict means wounds and death.
- There is no guarantee the right people get shot. The guilty are the office holders and the bureaucrats who do their bidding, yet the police and military are the ones most likely to make themselves targets.
- It is not clear whether a sufficient number of citizens would join the freedom fighters.
- Armed resistance to government tyranny often leads to an ongoing state of guerrilla warfare, bringing endless death and destruction without settling anything.
ISSUES:
- It is impossible to determine in advance how the US military would react. I suspect a number of citizens would be killed or wounded at the beginning of hostilities, simply because the military is trained to do battle. However, some number of them would become sickened by the sight of their fellow countrymen being slaughtered. How many of them would come over to the side of freedom?
- If such action must be taken, it must be in response to the attempt to confiscate of our weapons. If such confiscation is allowed to succeed, then there is no way to form an effective force for resistance.
ASSESSMENT:
Not a desirable approach and probably not viable. Should be tried only as a last resort. However, should the situation get to the point where there is no other option, it MUST be attempted. Rational people hope it never comes to this. Yet rational people also know that freedom is worth defending and worth bleeding for. Force and violence may well be the only thing tyrants really understand.
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Daedalus Said,
March 10, 2009 @ 11:09 am
Armed revolution, passive or active is not going to succeed unless you have about a third of the people in the country or geographical area in active agreement with your aims.
Before starting any journey to improvement, one has to have a reasonably clear idea of what one expects to achieve by the effort. If you could get thirty percent of the folks to agree with your goals then you might have a chance. How will you do this? Obviously it has to be done by education.
Before consideration of any of your methods (actions) clear goals have to be established and justified which means clarification of what is good and bad and why in such areas as politics and economics. This can only be achieved through philosophical thought, and if you are trying to repeat the success of our founding fathers, secular philosophical thought. So, “what to do” should first address “establishing a consensus.” If a third of the people know where they are going and why most of the rest will follow along. The ones that don’t will resort to many tactics of violence and subterfuge but being in a minority will probably not succeed.
What to do? Vote; won’t happen without education.
Secede; will go from one immoral government to two or more immoral governments without education.
Daedalus Said,
March 10, 2009 @ 11:19 am
Sorry, I pushed a wrong button before I was finished.
Sit here and hope for the best; No action, no direction.
Armed resistance; Not succesful without substantial support which is obviously not there presently, that is why we are in this mess.
A constitutional convention; with the present prevalent philosophies you will end up with a worse constitution full of altruistic claptrap.
Troy Said,
March 11, 2009 @ 3:21 pm
Dae,
We have had this conversation before. I totally agree that education is the best answer, at least for those who can be educated. What I can’t understand about your approach is how you propose to get a lot of people to become educated under the current circumstances. The incentive is just not there, nor are the educational facilities.
This is a “Catch-22″ of sorts in that we need better education in order to get more control over the government, yet we must gain more control over government before the education mess can get fixed.
There is, however, an alternative that has been used for centuries… that is, to appeal to emotion rather than rational thought. Specifically, so scare the bejesus out of people then convince them your way is the only way to safety. The socialists among us are doing a pretty good job of it so why shouldn’t we?
If I were in a fight for my life, I would prefer the very best weapons to defend myself with. But, if all I could find was a club…
Daedalus Said,
March 13, 2009 @ 6:32 pm
Troy,
the re-education is already occurring. Sales of Atlas Shrugged are soaring this year. It and other books are being used in Public School Classrooms as a teaching tool.
ARI has opened an office in the nations capital.
All this is movement in the right direction, but it probably won’t lead to much in your and my lifetime.
Freethinking was pretty much dominated by leftist thought in the 1800 early nineteen hundred time frame. Leftists have been undermining our system for over two hundred years. Unlike Hillarious’ button, it will not reset over night. The advantage we have over the leftist-collectivist axis is reality. They have to mis-represent and conceal it.
Another big problem presently is folks like Beck. He is right in that we need principles and values to guide our actions, but justifying them by faith is no better than the Islamics methods. He already is violating his own values by saying the founders were god fearing. So are the Muslims.
He leaves his viewers with the feeling that the founders worshiped the God of the Christians and Jews. Which several of the did not, they were Deists. Tom Paine was the only atheist I know of, and by todays standards we would view him as a Socialist. I guess what I am driving at is that Becks values and principles are not based on reality so they can be undermined easily by refuting their base. He is however appealing to emotion to move folks in his preferred direction. In the long run it won’t stick.
Troy Said,
March 14, 2009 @ 7:44 am
Dae,
I truly wish I shared your optimism. I appreciate the increased interest in Atlas Shrugged and the Ayn Rand Institute. However, I do not think much of this interest is coming from those who most need educating. Today, there are sufficient mindless “takers” to determine the outcome of national, and many state, elections. I’m sorry but I don’t see most of these people reading Atlas Shrugged.
As for the bible thumping, so-called “conservatives”, I agree that most of them live in a fantasy world, just as do most liberals. The difference is only in the nature of the fantasy. Both are based on magical thinking.
Tom Paine was a socialist. His thinking on WHAT needed to be done and WHY it needed to be done were right on – and, that is the part I admire. His thinking on the structure of the replacement government was, to coin a phrase, out in left field. Thankfully, he was not invited to participate in the writing of our Constitution.
I leave you with this thought — humanity existed for thousands of years without a clue as to reality. Only recently have a few humans started to see the universe in mostly rational terms. My point is that, while a human grasp of reality is the desirable end game, things can go on for eons without it. Reality does its magic in the background whether we understand it or not.