RE: OT: But security sorta related...

["Richard M. Smith" <rms () computerbytesman com>]

Was this written by the Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh?  

Richard 

-----Original Message-----
From: funsec-bounces () linuxbox org [mailto:funsec-bounces () linuxbox org] On
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Sent: Saturday, May 05, 2007 6:19 PM
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Subject: [funsec] OT: But security sorta related...

"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/11
78097466131870.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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