Vanderboegh: Losing the World War for Liberty, or "Will Book Tour for Food"

From Mike Vanderboegh at Sipsey Street Irregulars:

Losing the World War on Liberty, or,

"Will book tour for food."


A buddy of mine called me the day after the election and said, "Mike, we gotta get the band back together." He was referring, of course, to the constitutional militia movement of the Nineties. Well, he was right, but wrong too. We need to prepare, we need small units of the armed citizenry to be training all over the country. We need to be preparing for the day when our fight moves beyond the political theatre. What we don't need is to repeat the mistakes of the 90s -- the fumbling, the failed attempts at regional and national organizations, the toleration of fools, "militia generals," conspiracy theorists and the Turner Diaries crowd who showed up claiming to be our allies. We have no time for those same mistakes. We didn't know it at the time, but the Clintonistas were punks compared to this crowd. Bill was just in it for the babes. Barry's in it for the raw power.

So the stakes are higher now, and the potential for catastrophe is higher as well. Let me emphasize one thing: we won't get a second chance at this. If we lose individual liberty here, now, in this country to our would-be socialist overlords, we won't get it back in the next hundred years, if then. This is a World War on liberty, people, and right now we're losing it, and losing it badly. We have all of the dangers of 1940 without any of the future promise of success. America does not sit in the distance waiting to come to the rescue of Europe. Name one government ANYWHERE which is committed to free markets and individual liberty. Name one. Unlike 1940, the United States has BECOME Europe. The night beckons.

So what do we do? The short answer is we do what we can. I am close to being finished with Absolved, a book that is at once a novel and a combined field and technical manual for the armed citizenry and might be useful in rolling back that beckoning tyrannical night. It happens that my work is getting great response from those who have read chapters on the Net. For this I am grateful. But we must get this information in the hands of the million or so Three Percenters who are with us but don't know how to proceed.

Absolved, when printed, will be done by an on-line, on-demand publisher. Lacking established writer's credentials to attract a regular publisher, the resources to produce it myself, and most especially lacking the time to get it out before the sea change following Barry the Lightworker's inauguration, this is the only way to distribute it.

A volunteer editor is working on chapters now, getting them set in pdf format so we can send them on to the publisher when completed. I am struggling to turn out the last chapters with a Lexington & Concord finish as fast as possible. But what happens after the book is available for sale? The Internet, powerful tool that it is, is still limited in its reach. The fact of the matter is that most Three Percenters don't even know that they are Three Percenters. I'm talking about the working fellers, the redneck NASCAR boys, the modern Deacons struggling to protect their inner city neighborhoods from the gangstas and the drug epidemic. The people who know vaguely that somewhere there is an Internet, but have neither the time nor the resources to figure out how to use it.

Yet it is precisely these people we must reach. Events, as they always have been, are our greatest recruiter. But how shall we help folks who are self-mobilized but unsure how to proceed? We cannot expect them to come to us. We must go to them. How?

For one thing, use the tried-and-true methods of communication while we can. Chief among these is talk radio. Once the book is out, mouth-to-mouth-to-radio tower is the best advertisement of all. Second, we must go where our fellow gunnies go: the private and public ranges, the gun shows, the marksmanship events and sometimes right into their homes, if they'll have us.

And while we're talking up the book, we can make other points of principle and praxis. We can also link up like minded people in a given area. So how do we do this on our own limited means.

Have laptop and sleeping bag, will travel.

One of the ideas that has been suggested to me is a low-budget book and speaking tour, where I could go on the road, ALICE pack, laptop and sleeping bag in hand, and travel from prearranged palce to prearranged place. It would go like this: I would arrive at a place where some Three Percenter would put me up for the night or weekend, I would do the gun show or speaking engagement, whatever, and the host would commit to see that I got to the next place, where I could do it all over again.

Among other things, this would take a considerable amount of pre-planning. I would committ to do it for say a month or six-weeks. The Three Percenters who wished me to visit their area would have to contact me well before the tour with their suggestions, and I would have to knit together an itinerary consistent with geography and schedule desires. The tentative period would be from 1 February to 31 March.

I'm open to suggestions, folks. Whaddaya think?

Mike
III

Drop a line directly to Mike at georgemason1776@aol.com.

Tempus fugit.