What happens when they steal your freedom

What happens when they steal your freedom

It can happen here.



It happened in Czechoslovakia, Chile, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Laos, Nicaragua, Ethiopia, Cuba,Mexico and dozens of other countries around the world. Free people woke up one morning and discovered they weren't free anymore. They lost it through invasion, or the manipulation of crooked politicians, or a coup by some army officers, or more often than we like to admit, through an election.

There weren't any atomic bombs, and most of the time, there weren't any devastated cities, executions in the streets, or massive occupation armies. For a good part of the population, it was sort of hard to tell they weren't free, for a while.

It takes time for a government to recruit secret police, get them spread throughout a society, and start the insidious process that turns men against neighbors and takes away the one thing humans must have to be happy-freedom.

In just about every country that's lost its freedom, there were a few people who have tried to do something about it. They joined resistance movements, fled into other countries, committed personal acts of sabotage, or tried to use whatever legal means were left in place to get some of their freedom back.

Unfortunately, almost always, there weren't very many people ready to take any risks to try to get freedom back. Most people in unfree countries decide it's easier to go along.

Too often, too many don't see the loss of freedom as that big of a deal.

That's the way the people who steal freedom want it. They want the average citizen still at the job, worried about what he is going to put in his mouth more than what he can say with it. The first day they take your freedom away, they are only too happy to let you get up in the morning, eat breakfast with the kids, take off for the office or the factory, and put in a full day's work.

It's only when you have gotten used to their being around that they start cracking down, taking a little piece at a time, a day at a time. Every inch of the way they will keep telling you it's all for your own good and safety.

That's bullshit. The only reason political leaders take freedom away is for their own good and safety. That's the way they make sure they keep their jobs.


TOO MANY PEOPLE DON'T GIVE A DAMN IF THEY ARE FREE OR NOT.


In every country that ever lost its freedoms, the men in power rule with the acquiescence of the general population. Ninety percent of the people in all those unfree countries not only tolerate the loss of their freedom, they actively cooperate with the authorities that have taken their freedom away. All too many of them, especially in those countries that lost freedom to clever politicians rather than invasion, think they are getting a good deal. They have bought the propaganda line sold by those who stole freedom. They believe that they really are better off losing a bit of freedom so they can be saved from hunger, political terrorists, Jews, blacks, Christians, commies, Nazis, crime in the streets, or whatever other fear stalks the streets of their own nightmares.

If you are living in one of those countries where freedom has been lost and you want to fight to get it back, you have to expect you are going to be in the minority. Most of your friends and neighbors aren't going to want to join you. In fact, most of them will gladly turn you in just so they can earn a little credit with the local boss. If you succeed in winning freedom back, they won't give a damn, they won't thank you, and they will probably hate your guts for taking away the goodies the local tyrant was handing out as rewards for people who would rather be comfortable than free.


DON'T SACRIFICE YOURSELF TO WIN FREEDOM FOR SOMEBODY ELSE.


All you want is your own freedom. If you do any of the things suggested in this opinion, you should only do them if it results in making you feel a bit more free.

You don't think it can happen here without at least a nuclear war? Don't kid yourself. Washington, D.C., is crammed with politicians who would love to trade large chunks of your freedom for promises to make life a bit easier, safer, or more secure.

What's worse, there are a lot of your fellow Americans out there that want that kind of trade, as long as they get to be the ones that benefit. Just make sure it's only the blacks, or the Jews, or the bankers, or the farmers, or the labor unions, or the people that like to wear cowboy boots and carry Winchesters in their pickups that get stomped on, and they'll sign up right away for the great crusade.

A couple of years ago some smartass showed several hundred city dwellers a copy of the Bill of Rights and asked them to sign a petition to make it a law. Sixty percent of the people who read it not only didn't recognize what it was, but they said they wouldn't vote for it.

One group or another is trying to take away every one of the rights guaranteed in Thomas Jefferson's inspired first ten amendments. They want to terminate your rights to own and use weapons for your own protection. They want to tell you what you can and can't read. They want to control how you spend the money you make. They want to tell you when, where, and how you can drink a can of Coors, and where you can go after you drink it. They want to tell you how to pray and when to pray. Every piece of freedom they want to take away, they'll do it while telling you it's for your own good, or for the good of "everybody."

If it's not enough that we have to put up with the vipers in our own country, there are all those other bastards out there, the Soviets, the Ayatollahs, the Red Guards, and the neo-Nazis that won't even bother with trying it through political means. They're waiting for one slip in our defenses and they'll be only too happy to move in and take our freedoms away by force.


IT CAN HAPPEN HERE.


Maybe it will come after a nuclear war that we lose but you survive. It's just as likely we'll do it to ourselves, voting the bastards in because too many people believe in their politicians instead of themselves.

You wake up one morning and find that the mayor has been carted off to a camp for reeducation, and some bearded kid wearing a cap with a red star is sitting in his chair signing orders to confiscate your tractor, your barn, your farm land, and your kid's pet calf.

Or maybe the sheriff has come around with a piece of paper in his hand and an apology while he collects your target pistol, two hunting rifles, and your kid's 410. Your favorite bar is selling nothing but Kool-Aid, the federal government has closed the bank and confiscated your checking account, and the only thing you can get on the TV is the mug of the new president appointed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff who is telling you what great things he is going to do for you.

What are you going to do then? You say you are going to take to the hills, that you have a food and weapons stash waiting for just this kind of thing to happen? You're going to do what the Afghan, the Nicaraguan, and the Angolan freedom fighters are doing: you're going to take up open rebellion and try to win freedom back through force of arms.

More power to you and lots of luck. You'll need it. Frankly, freedom fighters in the hills haven't been very successful in this century. They get good press and they die glorious deaths, but the countries they are fighting to make free get less free every day. Even so, I applaud you. If given the chance, I'll do what I can to help you. But I'm too honest with myself to try and fool you by promising I'll be up there in the hills with you. I look down at my gut and l'm honest enough to admit I'd just be in the way.


YOU DON'T HAVE TO RUN FOR THE HILLS TO FIGHT FOR FREEDOM.


So what do you do if you love freedom and want it back, but you're like me? You're on the wrong side of forty, you can't run a twelve-minute mile, let alone a five. You've had too many years of the good life which shows in the overhang covering your belt.

Or maybe you are in good shape. You hunt and fish every chance you get, you raise a garden in the backyard, you do your own home repairs, and you work on a construction job.

The problem is you've got a couple of young kids and a wife that's a homemaker, not a career lady who will keep bringing in a paycheck to feed the family while you play hero. Your job hasn't been abolished, even though your pay's been cut and your hours increased, and you already have heard some not-too-gentle suggestions about what might happen to that pretty wife and the two little boys if you don't show up at the factory on Monday morning.

Well, you say, you'll join the underground support mechanism. Work in town as a courier, carry out sabotage missions, help print and distribute secret newspapers, spy on the movements of the government oppressors, and report to the rebels in the mountains.

Again, more power and good luck to you, if you can make the connection. That will be the problem, finding the people in the underground. If you already have some ideas about who that might be if things go haywire, the people who take over will know about them, too. The first thing they will do is round up the most popular school teacher, or the commander of the local VFW, or whoever else is a community leader that believes in freedom.

Those people will all be in a reeducation center, if they're still alive. You start asking questions about where you can join up and you'll end up in the same camp with them.

Believe me, if it happens here, there will be spies everywhere, trying to ferret out your kind of people, people who don't buy the promises, who still want to control their own lives, who still believe the only choice is to live free or die.

No, I am not arguing that you have to go along, to keep reporting to work, to cooperate and keep your mouth shut, hoping that some time in the future somebody will give you, or maybe your grandchildren, back their freedom.

Unfortunately, that is what most people are doing in all those countries that have little or no freedom. But there is an alternative, and that's what this book is about. The alternative has its risks-fighting for freedom always does-but the things that are described in this opinion are the kinds of things you can do while cutting down the personal risks you have to take for both yourself and your family.

You don't have to get organized; in fact, that is what you want to avoid. You work in secret, letting no one know what you are doing.


DON'T TRY TO GET YOUR FREEDOM BACK BY ORGANIZING.


Grab every bit of freedom you can on your own and run with it. I know that sounds strange and goes against everything you have ever been told about the importance of organizing, the need to play on a winning team, and how there is strength in numbers. The people who preach organization don't want you to be free, they want to control you so they can be free to do what they want.

A truly free society is disorganized. In that kind of society, everyone is doing exactly what they want to do and taking orders froi-n nobody. That doesn't mean you can stomp the other guy for the fun it gives you. He's entitled to freedom too. Because everybody respects everybody else's right, a free society is peaceful, but it is disorganized. Nobody is in charge. Nobody takes orders.

You might think such a disorganized society would be easy to conquer, but it is not. Any society in which people refuse to cooperate unless they agree it's to their own advantage to do so can't be governed except by the will of the people, or by the massive application of force.

It's the ordered societies where people are used to doing what they are told to do that are easy to conquer. That's why a handful of Spanish soldiers conquered Mexico in the sixteenth century. They lopped off the head of the Aztec Empire and had every Indian in the country instantly obeying the orders of the new rulers. The poor slobs had been so organized by the Aztec emperors that they didn't know how to do anything else but follow orders.

If a lot of people all over a country that's lost its freedom did the kinds of things described in this book, then the devil help the people in power, because they are going to need it.

If only ten percent of the men and women living in the unfree countries of the world followed the advice in this opinion, things in those countries would fall apart so fast that the rulers would have to grant a few more freedoms.

Unfortunately, this opinion probably won't be read in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Chile, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Laos, Nicaragua, Ethiopia, or Cuba. (Although let's hope somebody does smuggle a few copies into some of those countries.) This is the kind of book that the freedom stealers fear the most.

There will be more than a few politicians in this country that will condemn this book. It is pretty obvious that some of the things I propose could make it difficult to impose their grandiose schemes of social control.

Screw them. The more people who buy this opiion, the more those fancy bastards will be put on notice that they had better not try it here. We still have a few of our freedoms, and the time to prepare to fight to get them back is before we lose them.

So read this carefully, memorize the suggestions and programs, but don't get caught with a copy or with any notes you've made if it does happen here. Just be ready to start your career as a secret freedom fighter.

That's what this opinion is about. How to not cooperate, how to secretly carry out a campaign that, when combined with similar campaigns by hundreds and thousands of other people, each acting as a lone individual, will give whoever has taken over so much trouble that they will soon regret the day they stole freedom.

If you are the only person in the country who does these things, you get the personal satisfaction of knowing that there was one free man or women left. If a lot of other people start doing the same things, then you will get your freedom back.


A FREEDOM FIGHTER FIGHTS ALONE.


Nobody ever gives an ant an order. Yet, by picking up a single grain of sand and carrying it away, the ant helps dig the nest in the desert. The secret freedom fighter is like the ant. Working without instruction or orders from anyone, he follows his natural instincts, fighting the oppressor whenever and wherever he can. Yet in a freedom-loving society, he will not be working alone. Others, hopefully hundreds and thousands of others, will also be operating, acting without direction or order.

The total sum of thousands of individual acts will give the appearance of a massive organization. That's what the oppressor will think he is facing-an organized rebellion. He will look for leaders that aren't there, secret headquarters that don't exist, and couriers who carry no messages.

The organization will never be found. All there will be is a single individual, multiplied thousands of times.