ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ

by

And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family?
 
Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?
 
After all, you knew ahead of time that those bluecaps were out at night for no good purpose. And you could be sure ahead of time that you’d be cracking the skull of a cutthroat. Or what about the Black Maria [Government limo] sitting out there on the street with one lonely chauffeur — what if it had been driven off or its tires spiked.
 
The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt!

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The GULAG Archipelago

60 thoughts on “ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ”

  1. To paraphrase Stalin, the death of 20 children in an elementary school is a tragedy. The death of 10 million people in the Gulag is a statistic.

  2. Nothing in human or animal psychology makes possible fighting the secret police on the scale suggested by Solzhenitsyn. In animals, when fighting intraspecies, whether over food or mates, losers submit. That’s natural to them and to people. People then go on to murder those who have submitted. That too is natural, but only for people.

    No animal which treated contests of status as lethal contests would for long exist. Loser submits, loser submits and dies, that’s possible. But every contest is to the death; that’s not possible.

    I once had a long discussion with a Portland (OR) anarchist on the “propaganda of the deed.” It ranged over all history, but focused on the period 1870-1930. We concluded Solzhenitsyn is wrong: there is no shortage of volunteers for the secret police or other government offices. The line of people to be killed would be infinite.

  3. We may get a chance to find out, ErisGuy. I was in a gunsmith shop today and saw a doctor friend who I hadn’t seen in years buying an assault rifle (Feinstein variety) for his wife. The last guy I would expect.

  4. To ErisGuy,

    You say: “Nothing in human or animal psychology makes possible fighting the secret police on the scale suggested by Solzhenitsyn.”

    But, you contradict that by also saying: “People then go on to murder those who have submitted. That too is natural, but only for people.”

    You make the point well. An organized faction will kill another faction which submits. The answer is not to submit, because there is no gain along the path of submission. On the contrary, armed resistance causes the agressor to reconsider his plan.

    Switzerland’s Gun Control and History [edited]
    === ===
    In 1939, just before Hitler launched World War II, Switzerland hosted the International Shooting Championships. Swiss president Philipp Etter told the audience, which included representatives from Nazi Germany:

    = There is probably no other country which, like Switzerland,
    = gives the soldier his weapon to keep in the home…. With this
    = rifle, he is able every hour, if the country calls, to defend
    = his hearth, his home, his family, his birthplace….
    = The Swiss citizen does not part with his rifle.

    Switzerland won the service-rifle team championship. The lesson was not lost on the Nazi observers.

    Halbrook: The Swiss militia policy of a rifle in every home deterred a Nazi invasion. A Nazi attack would have cost far more in Wehrmacht blood than did the easy conquests of the other European countries, whose governments had restricted firearm ownership before the war. Many hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of Swiss, and refugees who found sanctuary there, were saved because every Swiss had a rifle, and was prepared to resist.
    === ===

    The Swiss maintained armed neutrality in World War II.

    German Jews had a particularly educated and pacifist culture. They were easy to target, demonize, round up, and exterminate. At the time, no one could imagine that the educated, sophisticated government of Germany, or its people, could so quickly turn to murdering an entire ethnic group.

  6. And the Swiss moblized for war in three Army Groups in different locations, went to a war economy, and fortified entire regions.

    “You cannot invade America. There will be a Rifle behind every blade of grass.”

  7. Eris –your argument is essentially vitiated by History. Yes there have been many submissions to slaughter, but most of them in Asia. There has also been so many accounts of resistance and rebellions they cannot be counted.

    If your argument were correct then all men would be slaves or masters.

    And I daresay it’s being disproved by current events.

    Now in reality I suspect that they’ll meet a lot more resistance by “normal” and legal means then they would seem to expect. Most of what they’ll intially do is make it harder to get a gun. The BATF already has these dealers by the shall we say their Solzhenitsyns. Now if it was just the dealers I swear they’d sell their mothers for their precious FFL.

    Of course they’ve got their fingers on the pulse of America [sarc] so perhaps they may go too far…as they did in the 90s when we last had a bunch of kids with a snout full of power. When they got an answer they changed their tune. They’re good at causing crisis and chaos. Managing one? Hmm. Off on a plane to Vegas.

    Finally this cast of Glee, ACORN organizers and university communists we call a government aren’t exactly the stuff of the CHEKA. That requires some nerve and courage, and getting your hands VERY DIRTY. This isn’t exactly a job you can farm out to immigrants.

    However if we want to take Mr Green’s warning – well if you wait for a CHEKA it’s too late…

  8. “The answer is not to submit, because there is no gain along the path of submission.”

    What’s the line from Heinlein: “You cannot enslave a free man, only kill him”?

  10. But Eris, we aren’t animals. We are Americans. That precludes our submitting.

    We are the rarest of species, us free men. But we are also the most lethal when finally pushed too far.

  11. I take comfort in there being a citizen with a loaded firearm behind every tree & blade of grass across America.

  12. VSSC, you may be right if you believe that it’s Obama and his crew that are calling the shots. I tend to think that there is a much more powerful group in the shadows pulling the strings, like the Soros, Immelts, Gores and their friends in the “international community”.

  14. “Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains or slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take but as for me; give me liberty or give me death!”

    If we remember these words of Patrick Henry and are committed to remaining free citizens of a republic rather than the subjects of a degenerate and corrupt leviathan, we will always know how to respond to tyranny.

  15. In Bill Whittle’s blog I read that one day when he was a child after seeing a picture of people being led to the gas chambers by a ridiculous number of guards without automatic weapons he asked to his father: “Why is that these people didn’t revolt? Do you think Americans would have reacted like that” And his father said, that no he didn’t think so.

    I think that people used to be armed don’t feel defenceless in front of a an armed man even if they happen to be unarmed at this moment. They will try to find means to knock him out and grab his weapon while people who have become used to be unarmed will feel powerless and will fail to exploit opportunities to reverse the tables. Look at that Norwegian who roamed an island for several hours shooting people without anyone (and most of the people were either in their early twenties or in their late teens ie the best age for a soldier) trying to ambush him despite the numerous opportunities in an island who was mostly covered by woods. That is what you have most to fear by Obama’s projects of disarming America, it will not be merely because you will be at the mercy of his thugs but because it will make sheep of Americans, Docile sheep watching the wolf approach without doing nothing.

  17. @JFM,

    But that’s not often enough what Americans do even if unarmed. They will often have a go at the perp.

    An Hour? I think we would have. There are many weapons other than guns.

  18. It’s alright to apprehend the approach of great and dreadful events.

    I’m prone to it myself. And people told me to Buck Up. They were right.

    So I’ll tell you. Buck up.

  19. “Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.” (Declaration of Independence)

    The ills of today are still sufferable. But the Government, having embarked upon its path of citizen oppression and elitist favoritism, will not be easily swayed from that path. It will test us repeatedly – how much will we suffer? Unfortunately, the way that the government will likely discover the limits to its oppression is when it exceeds them. This is in the human nature elements of governance.

    The American public is unique, though, in being not only armed but heavily armed. Perhaps the US government will be wise enough to stop their encroachments well shy of exceeding the limits of our tolerance. I hope that they are so wise, but I fear that that they are not. Meanwhile, I do not see us nearly angry enough as yet to precipitate a 2nd Civil War. There has always been this or that group who advocates for a shooting war over this or that monomaniacle issue. We are still a long way from that becoming a prevailing sympathy. I pray that we never (again) get there.

  20. There are many weapons other than guns.

    Not too long ago, Instapundit quoted from the recent publication “Two Cheers for Anarchism”:

    More regimes have been brought, piecemeal, to their knees by what was once called “Irish Democracy,” the silent, dogged resistance, withdrawal, and truculence of millions of ordinary people, than by revolutionary vanguards or rioting mobs.

    Don’t necessarily expect big dramatic rebellions, or even organized shows of civil disobedience. Rather, millions of people just doing a piss-poor job of fulfilling their expected roles of serfs.

  21. These things never turn out as anticipated, although often as expected.

    I expect the issue will come down to not is the tyranny more than can be borne but is the ruin and corruption more than can be borne?

  25. It appears unlikely that Leviathan will be turned from its current course easily or soon. The blame for the country’s plight rests upon both political parties and their leaders. Yet responsibility rests most heavily upon the people themselves. A people possessing civic virtue can never be enslaved; an immoral and degenerate people never will be free for long. It seems unlikely that these trends will be reversed through the normal functioning of the political process.

    The political parties feast upon the ignorance and gullibilty of voters. They happily betray the liberties of the people for the enhancement of their own power and prestige. They all swim in the same cesspool of special interest cronyism and elitism. Presiding over a majoritarian democracy in which a majority wholeheartedly embraces the fallacy that there is such a thing as a free lunch, the parties possess no incentive to change.

    The states – through their capacity to require a constitutional convention – seem to hold a key to national salvation, but it is only a mirage. In a collection of states so profoundly divided by ideology and culture, what do Georgia and South Carolina really have to say to New York and Illinois?

    Like any sane person, one hopes that all the crises confronting the country might be resolved peacefully with the restoration of a republic of free citizens. Like any reasonable person, however, one must doubt the liklihood of that solution. Ultimately, it might prove necessary to answer the question, “Can we preserve both the existing government structure and liberty, or must we stand upon one and let the other go?”

  26. @F.Sumpter,

    MAJ Lee,

    We are not governed by democracy for several decades. Democracy reigned from 1830-1933. Democracy stopped ruling with the New Deal. Most Historians accept this now.

    We’re governed by a governing class, a tiny number of which stand for office, that allows us elections to govern by illusion. Not unlike their money.

    This gives us who love Liberty an opportunity – we do not have to oppose democracy. We have the opportunity to point out we aren’t, it doesn’t exist anymore. It helps the enemy has publicly called for ending adherence to the Constitution. In the same month they move against the people being armed, and the people armed themselves faster than weapons can be produced. Certainly faster than the speeding Biden.

  28. “In a collection of states so profoundly divided by ideology and culture, what do Georgia and South Carolina really have to say to New York and Illinois?”

    What they should say to each other is simple. Limit the national government to its core functions and each state can pursue its culture and ideology as it sees fit.

    That is what Bennett and I propose in our book.

  29. The number of people who begge for mercy from Soviet, Khmer Rouge, Japanese fascists, Nazis, Ialian Fascists, Green Arrow Fascists and more, numbers in the tens of millions. If Americans become the first people to mass resist I will be very proud. But the price will be bloody.

  30. “We are not governed by democracy for several decades. Democracy reigned from 1830-1933. Democracy stopped ruling with the New Deal. Most Historians accept this now.”

    VSSC,

    While I agree with your point regarding the governing class and would describe it as the worst in our history thus far, I think it indisputable,that we do live in a majoritarian democracy. The members of the governing elite are elected and wield power based on the outcome of those elections. The ignorance of so many voters, manipulated by the venality of political prostitutes and aided by the collusion of a corrupt news media has produced its inevitable results. It was for this reason that the Founders created a republic. They would recognize what we have today as “mobocracy” and understood that, like the Caesars of Rome, the mobocrats would use the wealth of others to maintain the bread and circuses that first undermine and then destroy the republic. The process really began to accelerate with the elevation of Theodore Roosevelt to the presidency in 1900 and the beginning of the Progressive era. Since then conservatives have been in steady retreat.

  31. “What they should say to each other is simple. Limit the national government to its core functions and each state can pursue its culture and ideology as it sees fit.”

    Lexington Green,

    It seems that your prescription is exactly what “red states” say to “blue states” in every election, congressional debate, etc. The “blue states” first respond by denouncing us as a collection of ignorant, racist, homophobic, Fundamentalist, redneck gun nuts. They then say you must embrace our statist, authoritarian, fiscally irresponsible solutions to problems we created and only know how to make worse. They will not back down or relent regardless of evidence or reason. Power is their goal and they will rule or ruin — more accurately they will rule and ruin.

  32. Lexington Green Says:
    January 10th, 2013 at 5:38 pm

    That is what Bennett and I propose in our book.

    We are in a painful transition period. Our government is crushingly expensive, failing at its basic functions, and unable to keep its promises. It does not work and it cannot continue as it is. But the inevitable end of big government does not mean the end of America. It only means the end of one phase of American life.

    Big Government is doomed to fail in the long term. And it is willing and eager to destroy the entire country as it clings to power to the last gasp. We have, in the very short term, to keep them from doing fatal damage to the nation. Building a new, limited, Federal government is something we can hope to do after that.

    But to do that, we cannot skip over the next phase, with will almost surely involve the matters that Solzhenitsyn discussed as quoted above, and what at least some of all the victims of the collectivist totalitarians of the modern era have faced.

    Americans are patient. Perhaps too much so. Every day a lot of us wake up and more than halfway expect that while we were asleep the Administration has gone over the final line. Those who are supposed to be defending the country and Constitution to keep it from that “next phase” are derelict in their duty, or actively collaborating with those who would destroy us. So we are on our own.

    ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ

    “The answer is not to submit, because there is no gain along the path of submission.”

    Both bear saying again.

    Subotai Bahadur

  35. Rail and fume at the chains you think bind you. They are self inflicted, mainly by your massive greed. Your corporate masters, rebel against them fools, have sold you down the river. They also managed to pretty well break the world economy while sending all your jobs to cheaper places. Along with aggressive war making in places far from your shores you have bankrupted yourselves.

    You must expect a little churn as your people slowly come to realize it ain’t gonna get better soon.

  37. “PenGun, I suspect you are an expert on chains and self-inflicted bankruptcy.”

    LOL. Well the self inflicted bankruptcy for sure. Chains, well I used em’ when I was a trucker, apart from that not so much. I could get up tomorrow and decide to drive to Chicago if I felt like it.

  38. Yes do come.

    Hang Him.
    =========================

    These things never unfold as you expect and usually turn out the way you do..but as I’m a gambler I predict it may begin not with a Sumpter, but a Prague Defenestration of sorts..

  41. “PenGun seems to be deteriorating into anger and nastiness. I’ll be skipping your comments after this.”

    I’m not one making threats, well innuendo really. You have threatened to ignore me many times you know.

  42. Several years ago, there was a resident troll at samizdata who called himself “Kodiak”. He claimed to be french, and dropped into many of the comment threads to make anti-American or British statements, and then get progressively more ridiculous and outlandish with each response.

    The admin at the site finally figured out he wasn’t french at all, after several of the commenters pointed out his repeated errors when he attempted to use french in his comments, and the rest of us simply agreed to ignore him as a worthless waste of time whenever he tried to drop a turd in the punch bowl.

    After a few weeks of being a non-entity, he went away.

    I would suggest the same policy in regard to the horse’s patoot who drops his apples here on nearly every thread.

    His comments consist of insults and unsupported assertions. There’s nothing there, so why bother?

  43. I’d have to agree, VR – for all the interesting things that our PenGunny represents himself to be in certain comments that he has posted – he is actually rather incredibly boring and predictable. I’d have expected a 60ish Bhuddist Canadian truck-driver, computer-nerd world-traveller, wild-life enthusiast/expert,former motorbike gang VP, model 1911A shooter, classic Lincoln sedan restorer and Teamsters/SEIU union member to be … well, more interesting and original in comments.

  45. I (or Jonathan in an extreme case) will be the judge of whose comments get stricken from my posts.

    Rebut him or ignore him, but I suggest you not waste time on him as a topic of conversation.

  46. One of my friend’s comments a day or two before the election was that she really felt Obama was going to win, but if he did, it would challenge her belief in the wisdom of crowds.

    The resilient, American vision trusts the open marketplace; we can see how it has been distorted by crony capitalism, crony news services, bribery, coercion and an education system that argues against rather than for American exceptionaism (hell, the facts lead to a belief in that very exceptionalism). That challenge to our sense of the innate common sense and virtue of the American people is disturbing. We know that state-control encourages vice and mediocrity, that it doesn’t challenge us to become what we can be but enables us to be our worst. That others can’t see that is not surprising to us, that the majority doesn’t is disturbing.

    American culture didn’t listen to Solzhenitsyn and the other canaries in a world of coal mines. We’ve walked on, into the dark. But we are a democracy, we can’t say “they” the way so many other hapless citizens of other countries, ones that had never known democracy, might. It is we. Even if the “we” of flyover territory know better and perform better, we are a party to it, if only through passivity.

  47. These are interesting times Ginny. Obama has proven to have a top political machine – after all he beat the Clintons. And so much is his base is the “what are you going to give me” contingent. I have often thought of Lincoln’s “fool some of the people some of the time” quote.

    Politics lately has gotten me in a funk – not just for the recent events but the realization that it is varied monied interests that seem to get the legislation they want.

    Pick your party – left or right.

    2 things that have come to me via the Net in recent hours – I have a new “old” car – a 1996 MB – and it had a gas leak. Gas is dripping out the back – and fortunately I learn that it is just a couple of small rubber fuel hoses that have had pin hole leaks for quite some time. And I learn, caused by the ethanol-blended gas forced on us by the corn lobby. Currently it is 10% and the Feds want to ram through 15% – with the manufacturers saying it will void their warranties.

    Then I am mentioning on a thread somewhere else that the more the Federal government intervenes in the medical field, the more expensive – and less efficient – it becomes . I mentioned getting a minor operation a few years ago and a nurse telling me she spends half her time on the keyboard – all – it seems, mandated by the govt.

    And pushed by companies with the software to sell.

    Sgt Mom – the only thing you left out on Pengun – which seems to be accurate what you wrote (as much as any of us can tell from his lair somewhere in the forests of BC playing with the bears – – balding old hippy with a pony tail ;-)

  48. I had another physician comment to me last week that I had “gotten out when it was still good.”

    I haven’t talked to my students about this as I don’t want to be the harbinger of coming bad times. One hopeful fact is the coming shortage of doctors. They will be replaced with nurses and “lesser licensed providers” but there will still be a job for young doctors. I do worry about their student loans. I don’t know how they will repay them unless somebody gets wisdom and proposes a loan forgiveness program in return for service in some low income health service. I encourage students to think about the military, which will pay for medical school in return for an obligation. I think that is a good deal but college kids tend to be anti-military.

    The 2014 elections will be huge as we find out if the re-election was a function of the machine, which out organized the GOP, or if the country really has changed. By then more of Obamacare will be apparent and we may even see some results of the new Obama foreign policy.

  49. Michael Kennedy Says:
    January 13th, 2013 at 3:16 pm

    Young doctors are worrying, and pondering their choices. The woman who barely beat out one of my daughters for high school valedictorian [they have been friends since third grade] ended up being offered full rides at MIT, CalTech, Rennslauer (sp?), and Colorado School of Mines. She went to MIT, got her degree in Biochemistry, in the immediate post 9/11 period, she went to work for the government for a few years, and got her Masters paid for from that. Then she went to med school. Now interning, and wondering if all the effort was wasted and she should have done something else with her life. She is not as in debt as most, but medicine [either practicing or research which is where she is aiming] is beginning to look like a bad career choice. Don’t know what she will decide; but I suspect that those who aren’t as far along in the process may reconsider.

  50. Subotai Bahadur…”medicine [either practicing or research which is where she is aiming] is beginning to look like a bad career choice”

    Understand the issues with practicing at this point, but why is research so problematic?

  51. Ft. Sumpter,

    If a trial occurs and the government is not denounced for acting unconstitutionally and for having at best a sham democracy, whose election results are not respected by either party, then MOLON LABE all you want, to the extent they do they will do so from a position of legitmacy and their opponents illegitimate.

    Many Historians now acknowledge that the democratic governance period of the United States ran from Andrew Jackson and ended with FDR. We now are in what one called the Populist/Bureaucratic phase of governing. How populist it is is very arguable. It’s popular amongst those it pays.

    We are governed by a bureaucracy that holds elections and does as it pleases. It is supported by a cartel of Wall Street, Federal Reserve and it’s various Academies, NGOs, and media shapers of opinion. This is not democratic or Constitutional Government. It’s relationship to the Constitution is *Constitutional Law* taught by such as Louis Seidman to our esteemed President, that’s not the same as the Constitution. For instance to Constitutionally seize our arms requires a repeal of the 2d Amendment. I do not think that will happen [nor do I think they will successfully seize the arms].

    democracy? You mean acknowledging that the entire House of Representatives stood for elections and remains with the [hapless] Republicans?

    Did they acknowledge the enormous NO on the Wall Street bailout?

    Did anything change as a result of the 2010 elections?

    **The votes don’t count you see.**

    We shan’t begin to list the violations of the Constitution – that is many blogs in itself. The lack of a budget and that the Executive governs and spends in contempt of the Legislative is most glaring at present.

    You cannot grant them either cover of the Constitution or Heaven Help us “democracy”. **The votes don’t count you see.** But if it’s granted they do… in a trial that would place any resistance in the position of those who fired on Sumpter – in the wrong.

    [this is moving past the academic]

  52. David, research salaries for MDs are higher than, for example, English Literature PhDs, because the postdoc is seen as having the option to go into private practice as a physician. The same applies to government salaried MDs. There is always the potential option. It applies to football coaches, for example.

    Once that option is gone or negligible, salaries will fall and everybody who goes into medical research knows it. Right now, there is a viable option in molecular biology as Craig Venter is paying very high salaries to distinguished researchers from all over the world. Frankly, if I were doing it again, I would think very hard about molecular biology and genetic engineering. Venter is a billionaire and some of his recruited associates are driving Ferraris. Plus the weather at UC San Diego is very nice.

    I had a conversation a couple of weeks ago with one of my students who is interested in a research career in pediatric neurology. I advised her, and sent her some references, about autism research as I think that will be fruitful in the next 25 years. There are very interesting areas now and the clinical option may be ending. I would expect that Geriatrics will diminish as a career choice in spite of the growth in the elderly population because clinical choices in treatment will be severely restricted by the IPAB. The red pill, for example, instead of a pacemaker.

    [I increased the number of links that triggers moderation. J]

  53. VSSC

    I’ m not sure that we disagree for the most part. It is indisputable that the size of American political participation increased dramatically between 1828 and 1840 – the Age of Jackson – and continued to expand through the 1920s. It is also true that following the election of FDR, American politics increasingly became dominated by special interest, single issue political groups which alienated large numbers of the electorate. The expansion of protected dependent classes have further degraded the integrity of the political process as the Democrats often have succeeded in herding these dregs to the polls to vote in favor of extorting greater and greater wealth from producers to feed the insatiable maw of those who will not take responsibility for their own needs or wants. The intrusion of the government into ever expanding areas of citizens’ rights in a futile pursuit of filling unlimited demands for more and more with diminishing resources from fewer and fewer, led to the expansion of a necessary but counterproductive bureaucracy. BUT,the voters elect the people who surrender control to “civil servants.” So, we are a mass democracy in that any citizen (and some who aren’t) who wishes to vote may do so. This system of mobocracy is fatally flawed and doomed to failure. The real question is what will follow the current mob rule under the corruptocrats?

  54. VSSC

    Resistance is only “wrong” if you lose. If the Confederacy had made its bid for independence a success, historians would view it differently.

    Resistance, however, might never become necessary if the federal government continues on its current course. The behemoth could collapse of its own inbred inconsistencies and unsustainability. The aftermath would probably be bloody and unpleasant, but the restoration of the states or even the people to their original sovereignty would probably be worth it.

  56. @ Maj Lee [CDR Ft Sumpter],

    “The real question is what will follow the current mob rule under the corruptocrats?”

    Our government has those vices of democracy which were probably going to ruin us. But they didnt. That is not where we are or what has ruined us. Our government is a corrupt criminal enterprise executing a control fraud in full controlling partnership with most definitely un-elected partners in the Financial sector. I include the Federal Reserve. The Control Fraud and our actual governance is utterly extractive and predatory to the tune of Trillions per year.

    As we are actually governed: explain how the Federal Reserve is not part of the government, and what is the demarcation between Wall Street and Washington? Mind you the corruption is centered in Washington, but it ceased to be the Peoples choice in all but name decades ago. Where is the precious democracy that controls the Federal Reserve for instance?

    We are governed by a Mafia executing a control fraud, that happens to hold empty elections as cover and diversion. We decide nothing of consequence.

    You cannot attack democracy and have right on your side.

    You can however attack what we have.

  57. If one would – mmm – back up Molon Labe it’s helpful to assess your enemies as they are, not attack theories like “democracy”. Especially when they’re a useful religion, better used by you.

    It’s usually better to attack weakness, not strength. The Greeks met their foes at sea – where they were in their natural element – and at a narrow mountain pass.

    MAJ Lee you just politically drew up against vaster forces on an open plain where they can use their cavalry. Ahem.

    Good Heavens man they’ve got little enough morally going for them, don’t rally their troops.

  58. Yes democracy buttresses their rule. But it decides nothing of consequence.

    Yes democracies usually ruin themselves, and were quite likely to ruin us eventually.

    But we are ruined, ruined by pervasive corruption, not democracy.

    But we are ruled by a mob – but a Mafia not the people – and they govern. Not the people.

    We don’t have democracy, we have elections – it’s not the same.

    And here they are supremely vulnerable.

    And it’s that you attack. In the name of the people and any future, anywhere. What far corner of earth for those who would run to you plan to hide in?

    For if this vastly powerful nation falls further into the grips of a utterly corrupt Progressive fascism – their *actual* political economy – that has pretenses of social democracy [HAH!!] what then shall be done not just to us, but to the world in our name, using our nation as the tremendous force for conquest that it can be? For it has long been – and lo all our enemies are they not vanquished? Vanished? As are our friends? Our Mother Country England?

    Of course they wish us disarmed. We are the last obstacle before them, and for decades the chief target of their designs. And their boundless hate. Need I lay them out and tick off the fruition of their endless lists when all are aware? Do they even bother to conceal their contempt and animus any longer?

    You are correct, the Great Questions of our Times are what now? And what next? And who decides?

  59. VSSC

    I agree with so much of your basic assessment. We are governed by a Facist elite. They and their allies have created and encouraged the corruption which is rotting out the foundations of the country, but they have been able to do this as a result of the decline of civic virtue among the people. The government has encouraged this decay through the welfare state and benefited from it through increased power to turn more citizens into dependents.

    You seem to be arguing that we suffer from too little democracy;I would suggest we suffer from too much. It is the height of stupidity to put responsibility for electing our leaders in the hands of people who are unable or unwilling to be responsible for themselves.

    Your point that it is a mistake to criticize democracy may well be accurate but like Alexander Hamilton, I think it true that “Your people, sir, are a great beast. They seldom do or choose right.” The simple truth is that the leaders who are destroying the country are elected by the uninformed and the bought. Their allies in corpoate America and the NGOs only benefit from the corruption because they can buy and sell the DC corruptocrats.

    While, I hope the ship of state might be righted, I do not believe its course will be changed – except to make things worse.

  60. David Foster Says:
    January 13th, 2013 at 4:21 pm

    Sorry it took so long for me to get back to this thread.

    Short form, as government takes over the clinical side and reduces both the pay and the options for treatment, there is no incentive to develop new drugs and treatments. All new treatments are always more expensive at first. As the Death Panels [call them what they will be] look at things, letting people die is the cheapest alternative unless they are connected to the regime or are profitable to individual politicians.

    With no demand, no researchers.

    Our family has had experience with government health care in Britain. My daughter saw two deliberate murders of geriatric patients by medical staff that were SOP. And that is before the “Liverpool Path”. Active euthanasia of the elderly and the chronically ill is the end state of healthcare controlled by the government, especially if it is a one-party polity.

    Subotai Bahadur

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