OT: But security sorta related...

["Brian Loe" <knobdy () gmail com>]

"Resistance is Futile":  Waco Rules vs. Romanian Rules

by Mike Vanderboegh


"What country can preserve its    liberties if its rulers are not
warned from time to time that their people    preserve the spirit of
resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set    them right as
to facts, pardon and pacify them." --Thomas Jefferson to William
Stephens Smith, 1787

"We are    the Borg. Lower your shields and surrender your ships. We
will add your    biological and technological distinctiveness to our
own. Your culture will    adapt to service us. Resistance is futile."
-- Star Trek: First Contact  "Resistance is Futile"

You know, the  most dangerous thing about liberals in today's America
is that they are always  taking policy decisions based upon three
fallacies:

a. Woeful ignorance  of the subject at hand,

b. Extrapolation of their own cowardice onto  their opponents, i.e.
expecting their opponents to react the way they do,  and

c. Willful refusal to grasp that the Law of Unintended Consequences
applies both to their world view and to the schemes that they use to
enforce  that world view upon the rest of us.

They are, in a phrase, without a  clue. This is not so dangerous when
they are out of power. However, as they now  control both houses of
Congress and have a better than even chance of  controlling the White
House in 2009, this has the potential to get a lot of  people killed
by 2010. An illustrative case in point is David Prather's recent
column in the Huntsville (AL) Times, entitled "In a Shoot-out, the
Feds Always  Win.". Mr. Prather, it seems, has second-guessed the
Founders of our tattered  Republic and come up with his own idea of
the futility of the armed citizenry to  secure their own liberty. He
writes with scorn of the belief that the Second  Amendment means
exactly and precisely what it says:


"This argument says that keeping firearms is necessary to ensure
that the public can resist government oppression should such arise. In
other    words, unless you can shoot back at the feds, you can't be
free. That's a    nice, John Wayne-type view of the world. But it's
wrong. It's not just    debatably wrong. It's factually wrong. And the
reason it is wrong is this: The    government has and will always have
more firepower than you, you and your    neighbors, you and your
like-minded friends or you and anybody you can    conscript to your
way of thinking. You simply can't arm yourself adequately    against a
government that is rotten and needs to be overturned. Your best
defense is the ballot box, not a pillbox.. . . . You can't beat 'em.
You'd be    foolish to try. So let's take that argument off the table.
I don't presume to    say that by doing so we will be able to reach a
consensus or a compromise or    whatever about how we should or
shouldn't control firearms in modern society.    I'm just saying that
shooting it out with the government is like the    exhibition team
versus the Harlem Globetrotters as far as who is going to win.    Only
a lot more bloody." -- David Prather, "In a shoot-out, the feds always
  win", Huntsville Times, May 2,
2007(http://www.al.com/opinion/huntsvilletimes/dprather.ssf?/base/opinion/1178097466131870.xml&coll=1)

I am reminded here of the famous Dorothy Parker  line, "You can lead a
horticulture, but you can't make her think." Now Mr.  Prather, who has
risen to the lofty position in life of Associate Editorial Page
Editor of the Huntsville Times asserts that we gunnies inhabit a "John
Wayne-type view of the world (that's). . .factually wrong." As the
quote from  the principal Founder above clearly shows, it is in fact a
"Thomas  Jefferson-type" view of the world. Mr. Prather believes the
ballot box is a  better defense against tyranny than the cartridge
box. Oddly enough I agree, as  long as the tyrants are willing to play
by the election laws. But what happens  when they don't? In his novel
Starship Troopers, Robert Heinlein offered an  answer:


"Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than    has
any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its
 worst. Nations and peoples who forget this basic truth have always
paid for it    with their lives and freedoms."Indeed, the Founders
were  only able to secure their right to the ballot box by taking up
their cartridge  boxes and muskets and standing against the army of
the most powerful empire in  the world at the time and fighting it to
a standstill. What has fundamentally  changed about the universe since
then? Communication is faster, weapons are more  powerful, but as we
see in Iraq, a determined armed minority can be impossibly
overmatched and still cause a good deal of trouble.

"Waco Rules"

Now I have spent a lot of  time since the early days of the Clinton
Administration considering the  Founders' concepts of the deterrence
of tyranny by the armed citizenry from the  perspectives of
philosophy, history, strategy and tactics. The catalyst for all  this
reflection was, of course, the twin menaces of the increasing
Clintonista  proscriptions of firearms rights (Brady and the Assault
Weapons Ban) and the  massacre of the Branch Davidians at Waco. The
subsequent failure of the  Republican congress and the courts to do
anything substantive about either  threat-- legislative tyranny or
rogue bureaucracy-- led many of us to conclude  that we had now
entered a time when we could only count on ourselves to maintain  our
liberties.

The Law of Unintended Consequences decreed that there  would be two
unexpected results of this Clintonista constitutional misbehavior.
The first was the importation and sale within a few months of several
millions  of semi-auto rifles (principally SKS and AK-variants) into
the U.S. This was in  anticipation of, and defiance of, the so-called
"Assault Weapons Ban." Indeed,  this was more rifles of these types
than had been sold in the previous TWENTY  YEARS. And it was in a
political climate where it was fully expected that the  next law would
call for the confiscation of such weapons. Why, then, did this
massive arming take place? Were we buying these rifles merely to turn
them over  later? When the Clintonistas realized that we were not
buying these rifles to  turn them in, but to turn ON THEM if they
became even more threatening to our  liberties, it gave them
considerable pause. I am told the analysts in the bowels  of the J.
Edgar Hoover building were particularly impressed.

The second  unexpected result of Clintonista misbehavior, although of
lesser import than the  millions of rifles, was the rise of the
constitutional militia movement. As  London Telegraph senior reporter
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard wrote:


"The Clinton era . . spawned an armed militia movement involving
tens of thousands of people. The last time anything like this occurred
was in    the 1850's with the emergence of the southern gun clubs. It
is easy to dismiss    the militia as right-wing nuts: it is much
harder to read the complex    sociology of civic revolt. . . No
official has ever lost a day's pay for    precipitating the
incineration of 80 people, most of them women and children,    in the
worst abuse of power since Wounded Knee a century ago. Instead of
shame    and accountability, the Clinton administration accused the
victims of setting    fire to themselves and their children, a
posthumous smear that does not bear    serious scrutiny. It then
compounded the injustice by pushing for a malicious    prosecution of
the survivors. Nothing does more to sap the life of a democracy
than the abuse of power." Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, The Secret Life of
Bill    Clinton
You see, what impressed us gunnies the most was  the fact that under
what we came to know as "Waco Rules", Catch 22 was in full  swing. It
was as if the Clintonistas were shouting, "We can do anything you
can't stop us from doing." The constitutional militia movement,
despised by the  administration, caricatured by the media (and
professional liars for money like  Morris Dees of the Southern
"Poverty" Law Center), and unjustly vilified after  the Oklahoma City
bombing, began to explore the question of just what could be  done to
stop such unconstitutional conduct on the part of the government. We
realized that another way to express Catch 22 is to say, "You can do
only what  we let you get away with."

I think the FBI realized our power before we  really understood it's
full implications. For one thing, we had them surrounded.  At its
zenith, the militia movement had perhaps as many as 300,000 active
participants, but we were backed up, you see, by the undeniable fact
of those  millions of rifles. Of the 85 million gun owners at the
time, how many would  join the militias if another Waco happened? That
was the question. Both sides  eventually came to the realization that
in any case, it was enough. As  Clausewitz observed, "In military
affairs, quantity has a quality all its  own."

And the first thing we noticed was that the FBI became very much  more
solicitous of our sensibilities and sought at every turn to avoid a
flashpoint. During each little potential Waco-- the Republic of Texas,
the  Montana Freemen, etc-- the FBI would seek out local militia
leaders and ask  their advice, seeking their opinions with what
sounded like real  concern.

The best answer that I recall to one of these FBI queries came  from
Bob Wright, commander of the 1st Brigade, New Mexico Militia. When
asked if  he and his friends would actually go to the scene of a
future Waco in another  state to assist the potential victims, Bob
replied, "Why would I want to do  that? There's plenty of you federal
SOBs around here." This was a perspective  the Fibbie had not
considered before, and it showed on his face.

So we  got through the rest of the Clinton Administration by waging a
low-intensity  cold war, the history of which has yet to (and may
never) be written. The  principal point was this: there were no more
Wacos. Although they never  renounced Waco Rules, they did not again
implement them.

The Three Fallacies

Which brings us to  today and our armchair theorist of contemporary
domestic military operations,  David Prather. Let us examine his
thesis: "the feds always win" by referring to  the three fallacies
listed above. First, let us test his woeful ignorance of the  subject
at hand. In fact, you CAN beat the feds in a shoot-out as was
demonstrated by the Branch Davidians in the initial raid of 28
February. Four  ATF agents died in this monstrous misuse of government
power and far more would  have, but for the fact that the Davidians,
having repelled the ATF raiders from  entering their home, allowed
them to leave after the men in black exhausted  their ammunition. In
effect, the ATF asked the Davidians if they could go home  and reload
their guns and the Davidians, being nice guys, agreed.

Had Vo  Nyugen Giap been running what the Feds later claimed was an
"ambush", none of  the ATFs would have left that property alive.
Indeed, had the Davidians  understood the full implications of Waco
Rules as they were being worked out for  the first time, they would
have put up a far tougher fight on both 28 February  and 19 April and
likely could have stopped the armored vehicles in their  tracks.

So, when Prather says "the feds always win", he's probably  thinking
of Waco, but then so are we. In his ignorance, he does not realize
that  others observed Waco and the exercise of Waco Rules with a
keener military eye,  took notes, studied and learned.

Secondly, Prather is extrapolating onto  others his own cowardice and
unfamiliarity with weapons. He knows HE could not  resist a predatory
police raid, so he assumes that others could not as well.  Should
there come another dark time when the feds think they can resort to
Waco  Rules once more, both they and Prather will discover that such
assumptions are  deadly mistakes.

Thirdly, The Law of Unintended Consequences is still  issuing forth
unplanned dividends from the Clinton misbehavior of the 90s.  Remember
those millions of rifles? They didn't go anywhere. They haven't
disappeared.

Romanian  Rules

So we have the rifles and we have one other thing: Romanian  Rules.

On 16 December 1989, riots in the Romanian city of Timisoara  ignited
a nationwide revolt which spread to the capital Bucharest. Parts of
the  army joined the revolutionaries, and on 25 December, after 45
years of communist  tyranny, dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife
Elene received a Christmas  present from the Romanian people when they
were summarily executed. Said one  Romanian radio announcer, "The
anti-Christ died. Oh, what wonderful  news."

Ceausescu had ruled the Romanians with an iron hand, using his
dreaded secret police to pick his opponents off one by one for
imprisonment or  execution-- until the day came when the people
learned their lesson and met the  secret police and the army face to
face. Thousands were killed in the fighting,  many because they lacked
the weapons to do the job. But we're Americans. We  observed the
Romanian Rules and learned. We realized too that we're much better
armed than the poor Romanians.

So what makes Prather think that Americans  who may wish to resist our
own government if it spins out of control again, will  sit idly in
their little houses allowing themselves to picked off one by one? In
his ignorance and arrogance, Prather has committed the ultimate sin of
military  planners throughout the centuries: he is presuming that the
straw-man opponent  he has created in his own mind will sit still and
wait to be beaten on his (or  Hillary Clinton's) own terms. He is
presuming that his opponent won't react,  won't be agile, and won't be
thinking.

Prather makes much of modern day  weaponry that only the government
may possess. But you know, artillery and  nuclear bombs are of limited
utility to a government when the battlefield is its  own cities,
towns, transportation hubs and commercial centers. Then it becomes
like Iraq, only far worse. It becomes a rat hunt where the rats
outnumber you,  and often, at the point of decision, beat you in the
one thing that is most  fundamental in an up-close infantry fight:
rapid and deadly accurate rifle fire.  Shouting Borg-like that
"resistance is futile" may scare the faint-hearted, the  weak-minded
and certain children under the age of ten. It does NOT scare  us.

And that is what invalidates Prather's fantasy scenario: we've had
almost 15 years to study Waco Rules now. Fifteen years of studying how
to best  direct the resources of the armed citizenry against the next
predatory  administration grown too big for its constitutional
britches. Fifteen years of  considering the lessons of Christmas,
1989. After the cold war with the  Clintonistas, we gunnies began to
understand the finer points of credible  deterrence. Now, having
completed a long and challenging curriculum, we  certainly understand
what Jefferson meant by "pardon and pacify them." It would  be wiser
if Mr. Prather and his historically foolish liberal friends did not
seek to give us a final examination in this subject of study, for the
results  are NOT academic. Just ask Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu. Of
course, you'll have  to go to Hell to do that.

Mike Vanderboegh
PO Box 926
Pinson, AL  35126
GeorgeMason1776ATaolDOTcom
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