The Critical Unraveling of U.S. Society
WHAT IS COMING?
Today (Tuesday morning), two friends sent me an article I've seen before, a "Firearms Refresher Course" that starts out by quoting George Washington ("A free people ought not only to be armed and disciplined, but they should have sufficient arms and ammunition to maintain a status of independence from any who might attempt to abuse them, which would include their own government."). It gets more "radical" from there.
It was interesting that these two should send this to me today. Yesterday, two of the transnational progressive web-magazines (Amped Status and AlterNet) published an article called "15 Signs American Society is Coming Apart at the Seams." (AlterNet and the full report is at Amped Status.)
Reason #14 was that ammunition and gun companies are making billions of dollars and cannot keep up with the demand for weapons and ammunition - "Americans are arming themselves to the teeth!"
Reason #15 was that it is claimed by the august Southern Poverty Law Center that more than 100 NEW militia groups have been formed while the total number of militia members has doubled in the past year. Since millions of us are starving and have no health care and no jobs and no future (according to them), all that is needed is a spark for the nation to be flooded with violence!
The logic of David DeGraw is that the "economic elite" are waging war against the American public, the environment has been destroyed by these elite, current government measures are ineffectual and inadequate and causing still more harm, and we are all gonna die (quickly, in this vast "worldwide" and "national" emergency) unless "the people" does something to retaliate against these "economic elite" and the government that is supporting the "coup." To DeGraw and the progressives he claims to speak for, the First Citizen is nothing but a shill for the "economic elite" and the rest of the Administration and Congress are all tools or members.
Now, this may all sound very anti-statist, and despite the irrational nature of many of the arguments (in the same paragraph we are told that 50% of ALL American children are short of food and have to have government food stamps, and then a few lines later the statistic of 1 in 4 is cited; health insurance is equated with "healthcare;" and such things fill the article), this will find a ready audience among many libertarians, especially "left-libertarians."
But in reality, this is nothing more than the same "anti-statis" rhetoric that has been the stock-in-trade for the bogus ("black-flag") anarchists and the socialists (whether Communists, National Socialists/Fascists/Peronistas/Falangists/etc., the "Christian Socialists" or today's Transnational Progressives) from the beginning. The "CURRENT" State is evil and corrupt and destroying us all, and worse, the current state is allowing the great unwashed masses to be destroyed and at the same time, forcing the populace into a massive (and always unsuccessful) popular uprising. They will be destroyed and the revolt will fail, of course, unless the populace accepts and follows the lead of the elite vanguard provided through sheer altruism by the... by the Progressives which include (strange how this works) some of the very elites and their proclaimed doctrines of salvation that are waging the war in the first place!
THEIR state, of course, will be "darned near-perfect" (to quote a friend) and won't have any of the faults of the current regime: everyone will be fed and have all the medical care and all the jobs and all the education that they need, and everyone will contribute to their maximum ability, and we'll all cut greenhouse gas emissions back to 1900 levels and the grass will be green and the rivers will flow and... ultimately, of course, when all the problems are solved (permanently), the state will wither away to be replaced by (take your pick based on the kind of socialism being highlighted - but some form of the Millenium).
We can't buy into it: this is what the demagogues of Athens and Corinth and Rome and Byzantium all promised; this is what the Levellers (and those who preached the Crusades) proclaimed; this is what those who urged on Wat Tyler and his peasants whispered; what the revolutionaries in the Tuileries fervently believed in 1789 and 1791 and 1848 and 1871; what the rabid Abolutionists in Bleeding Kansas and Harpers Ferry preached; what the Bolsheviks in Petrograd announced; what the Brownshirts in Muenchen and Firenza and Madrid and Buenos Aires marched to support; and the tune that the Red Guard and the Ba'athists and Jim Jones and the Khmer Rouge spilled blood to. Indeed, those who "made" Aaron cast the golden calf, the Caliphs that followed the husband of the widow - and no doubt the first Pharaohs of Kemet (Egypt) - spouted this same line. Self-proclaimed human messiahs are not interested in seeing the state wither away or even be violently put down; they work only for a new state in which THEY call the shots - in some cases, CONTINUE to call the shots, and in which the other 99% of humanity are little more than cattle or (at best) favored pets.
God did not make us to be pets - nor cattle. We cannot let ourselves be seduced into either embracing the man on a white horse or the self-appointed vangaard of the masses - we have to be free and independent and answer to God for our own actions. Otherwise, we have never truly lived.
