Word
From Wirecutter.
Below is from a comment on WRSA:
If you get a chance on your next trip to Europe, detour to Vilnius and go to the NKVD/Gestapo/KGB Museum. Nearby is the massacre site at Ponary/Panieriu. About 100 km west of Vilnius is Kovno/Kaunas, site of the infamous ‘Ninth Fort’.http://www.europeanjewishfund.org/index.php?/member_communities/lithuania1/ You will likely draw a series of lessons from these excursions:
1) Government identification records are the clerical basis for mass murder and other atrocities: No, not every government ID scheme leads to genocide or expatriation. But for collectivists of the German Reich and the USSR, each victim’s identity card was part of the targeting and the “production record”.
2) Get to the forest early if you want to live: If you think they will be coming for you, you are probably right. Plan not to be where they know you work and live. Act early if you want to maximize your chances. You and your family will die if you are at your government-approved address.
3) The “Bad People” will have lots of help from your neighbors: The most disturbing moment for me in the KGB museum was not in the execution or interrogation/torture cells. It was realizing, while moving through the excellent exhibits on the mass deportations of Lithuanians after “liberation” by the Soviets in 1944, that most of the deportees (many of whom were subsequently executed or starved or died of exposure and disease) had been betrayed to the NKVD/KGB by their neighbors.
4) “Fascism” is not the mortal enemy of freedom and life; collectivism is: At each of the memorials, one could tell the provenance of any signage by reference to “fascism”. Mostly, such markings were from the Soviet era, during which — not coincidentally — many more millions of innocent human beings were killed than had been slaughtered by the Hitlerites and their collaborators.
5. Never report en masse when ordered to do so: Nothing good ever happens to folks who do.
6. Food and ammunition will be the vital shortages you must address in order to live: Empty weapons and bellies a successful resistance does not make.
7. The “Bad People” will torture and kill those who help you: Get used to the idea. Retribution killing is a standard totalitarian play. Try to avoid jeopardizing your allies to the extent possible, but know that they too will be swept into the whirlwind.
8. The “Bad People” will torture and kill your family members: Sippenhaft ain’t just a chapter in Vanderboegh’s long-awaited novel. The KGB museum was filled with execution orders with notations that not only had the subject been killed per order of the Party, but that “special measures” had or would be taken against the victim’s family.
9. You must be prepared to fight until victory or death: Once you go to the woods, you are there for the duration. The Baltic “forest brothers” stayed out until they were killed or captured.http://encycl.opentopia.com/term/Forest_Brothers
10. If you think it can’t happen here, you are wrong. Polish and Lithuanian Jews who were ground into dust by the Einsatzgruppen thought the same thing. So did the Lithuanians who couldn’t believe that the Communists under Stalin would hold their passionate patriotism against them.
Almost all of the folks who believed “it couldn’t happen” died. A few survived by running into the woods, or by bearing up under the brutal realities of the Gulag, year after year after year. Each of them knows the single biggest lesson from Lithuania: naked, brute force can and does triumph over kindness, love of kin and country, and simple human decency — often for decades or more.
Lose your illusions. While there is still time.
The overwhelming omission in today’s popular preparedness advice in America is that nobody makes any allowance for tyranny. History has numerous examples emphasizing that any effective survival plan must include that possibility. Good luck with that if Pol Pot, the Waffen SS, Stasi, Hamas, Shining Path, or Red Brigades show up at your retreat and you have no Plan B.
Witers scoff at the idea of “retreating into the wilderness.” OK, then, I would ask what is their Plan B, because they have none to deal with tyranny. Until someone offers a viable plan to deal with tyranny, I will not countenance experts who dismiss escape and evasion by ocean-going yacht or by retreating into wild places. Everything short of tyrannical mass murder is a walk in the park. Prepare for the worst and work back towards the merely inconvenient stuff.
So, picture yourself as a European Jew circa 1938. If your planning scenarios don’t address that worst case, for all the help and good you’re doing in your preps, you are complicit in wasting their sacrifice. In his book “Survivalist Family” Joe Fox addresses the need to bug-out from home base and discusses convoy tactics. As a serving US military officer he cannot be seen to be promoting paranoia about the “establishment.” http://www.amazon.com/Survivalist-Family-Prepared-Americans-America/dp/1935018256/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1302717357&sr=1-1
Other authors who don’t have that restriction, actively scoff at the very tactics which address the issue of surviving tyranny. Cody Lundin does say “the woods will be a hotbed of thug activity,” yet fails to anticipate organized thuggery on the part of a malicious government establishment.
Authors all work within the limits of their knowledge. To be well rounded they must travel to Africa or eastern Europe and speak to survivors of genocide.
In 1929, the Soviet Union established gun control. From 1929 to 1953, about 20 million dissidents, unable to defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated.
In 1911, Turkey established gun control. From 1915 to 1917, 1.5 million Armenians, unable to defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated.
Germany established gun control in 1938 and from 1939 to 1945, a total of 13 million Jews and others who were unable to defend themselves were rounded up and exterminated.
China established gun control in 1935. From 1948 to 1952, 20 million political dissidents, unable to defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated
Guatemala established gun control in 1964. From 1964 to 1981, 100,000 Mayan Indians, unable to defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated.
Uganda established gun control in 1970. From 1971 to 1979, 300,000 Christians, unable to defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated.
Cambodia established gun control in 1956. From 1975 to 1977, one million educated people, unable to defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated.
Defenseless people rounded up and exterminated in the 20th Century because of gun control: 56 million.
Gun control is not about public safety, but about projecting total power over the people. Do not be fooled by the belief that “progressives” leftists hate guns. What they hate is guns in the hands of those who still think for themselves and do not obey without question. They hate guns in the hands those whom they have already slated for a bullet in the back of the ear. The worst the Soviets had to fear was a pitchfork in the guts or a knife in the back or the occasional hunting rifle. Not much for soldiers with Kalashnikovs.
All of the private criminal thuggery of the 100 years does not equal a tenth of the numbers killed by government organized mass genocide. No horror movie can terrify the human spirit like witnessing systematic human slaughter. It’s one thing to watch your family die in an auto accident or from an epidemic, natural disaster or hunger and yet another to helplessly watch unarmed people being hunted down like animals to be shot through the head with an AK, exploding cascades of blood, bone fragments and brain tissue into basketball sized pink clouds, or to be butchered with machetes, slowly beheaded or burned alive writhing. Witnessing such carnage changes survivors forever, especially when victims are your own people. You might get lucky, the evil ones may settle for killing you by simple starvation or introduction of a biowar agent.
Refuse to assume vehicles and safe zones will be available, so plan accordingly. Localized natural disasters can be dealt with a credit card and some emergency cash. Well distributed wealth can soften economic collapse and social unrest, but tyranny is a whole other ballgame. While of low risk, it has extremely high consequences, like nuclear war and so is truly frightening, and must be avoided. In 1930s Europe few Jews read the ominous signals and most of the survivors fled early. Few who stayed did.
How different an outcome would have been if every Jew had a basic survival kit, and a rifle or handgun when the SS came to round-up village after village, and they knew how and had the will and determination to use their weapon, shoot, scoot, escape, evade and fight on. Never give up!
The naive assumption exists in the USA that the ATF will come for your guns. That could happen, but more likely if it really does, is that a criminal despotic government skip the incremental BS, just as Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot did. They would shut down PSTN, Internet and cellular networks, seal off commercial and business districts, to trap people at their workplaces and, using a ruse, require mandatory evacuation of residential areas to designated sheltering points. The only communications would be government controlled. Imposition of martial law would enforce a shoot-on-sight curfew at dusk. Civilian firearms would be collected voluntarily at first as a safety measure, and the remainder seized during the ensuing weeks. People would be relocated to “safe” areas according to their threat profile. Prepared people in rural areas would be required to swap homes with suburbanites. Anyone would be incarcerated at the first hint of resistance or “subversive” activity.
In subsequent months personal effects would be restored to rightful owners and jobs re-allocated according to the needs of the State. All that networking you did with rural neighbours and close family bonding would be for naught. Your support contacts would be spread to the four winds, and travel would be severely restricted to those with travel and work permits, who could demonstrate a need and afford high prices for rationed (or black market) motor fuel. This all happened during WWII. Today the real deal would be more decisive, efficient and thorough and the carnage may take only a month or three.
If every prepared person established their own area of operations, infrastructure, weapons and kept a long term ruck in their car, such a plan would not go as easily. If the government doesn’t trust me with my guns, why should I trust them with theirs? Hitler would not have been as successful in murdering six million Jews if a significant number of those families had refused to be compliant, like sheep, but instead fought back. A few did so, joined the resistance, and retreated deep into the forest.
http://jewishgen.blogspot.com/2009/01/real-story-behind-defiance.html
Planning to do so today is not a threat to a lawful government, but a reminder and warning that murdering 100 million civilians in the name of whatever evil men do will not be as easy in the 21st century as it was in Eurasia during the 20th. We are constitutionally empowered and tasked with defending liberty against tyranny. I don’t care what urban youth and woofters of the political left think. If anyone comes after my family and neighbors they are “dogmeat”. Molon Labe http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molon_labe
Woody Creek Farmer 