Baugh: A Nation Without A Country, Part III - Warm Live Hands

Prior installments here and here.

The latest in Tom Baugh's six-part series:

When Forrest County, Mississippi, Sheriff Billy McGee liberated two ice-laden FEMA trucks in 2005 in the wake of Katrina, he probably didn’t intend to spark secessionist ideas in others. Yet, his landslide re-election in 2007 spoke volumes about how eager local citizens, particularly in rural communities, are to stand behind their local servants who keep community interests in mind. But to the nationals, his actions were intolerable. So, he and three of his deputies have been charged with national crimes against the people. His case is an abject lesson of how, in normal times, in the real world, no good deed truly goes unpunished. The nationals have all the time on their hands they need, and all the resources, too. If they run out, they’ll take more from you, or print more, which amounts to the same thing, of course.

Despite Sheriff McGee’s re-election in 2007, and the overwhelming support reported for him among the locals, there is nothing that the national subjects in his jurisdiction can do to protect him. His case has been moved from Jackson, Mississippi, to Baton Rogue, Louisiana, presumably so juror outrage can be whipped up against him. To Forrest County residents, he may be a hero, but he can be painted in Louisiana as a scoundrel who stole ice intended for them. So much for a jury of your peers, and the inherent check on nationalism, jury nullification, which that Constitutional protection implies. As needed, the nationals can move your case to wherever they can find a sympathetic jury. Presuming they bothered to not just simply shoot you on sight for resisting.

Take heed, secessionists.

As you will recall from the previous articles, we first laid a foundation for discussing secession in the real world. Next, we discussed a hypothetical escalation of seemingly normal legislation, prompting some rural sheriffs to mass-deputize the citizenry to bypass restrictions against gun ownership. In our tale, this led to a calling of the national bluff, in which the nationals then restricted gun possession by local law enforcement, and posted national watchdogs to ensure compliance. Keep in mind, also, that there isn’t a single entitlement program or an oppressive legislative act that doesn’t ultimately result in a check for hundreds, or thousands, or millions of us who weren’t getting a check the day before. And so peel off more and more of our fellow citizens into the nationalist camp.

Now let’s return to our italicized hypothetical narrative.

Sheriffs who had mass-deputized their fellow citizens found themselves essentially prisoners in their own offices, their actions watched constantly by the national overseer installed there. The Made in China bank vault armories, installed previously by local contractors run by men most of these rural sheriffs had known their entire lives, stood as a stark reminder that sheriffs the nation over had simply become figureheads in their own counties; serfs of the nationals. There would be no more Billy McGees. These hotheads would be stopped in their tracks from now on.

More and more, black-clad masked nationals swarmed the countryside, rounding up weapons and killing resisters while the national media cheered them on. Each act of resistance, while noble, was simply a pointless sacrifice. Even the right-wing media, if there could be such a thing, sold out the resisters and joined the public relations war against them; alligator tears aplenty as dictated by the need to attract and hold ratings among a growing female audience who were rightly concerned by the developments. Suburban papers ran recruitment ads for the unemployed and able-bodied to join the fight against these domestic terrorists. Former military and local police swelled the ranks, many of the former chasing promises of educational and career benefits, the latter enticed by promises of finally making it to the big leagues.

Cold dead hands were in no short supply, particularly among the rural population. Suburbia, having been taught compliance by years of submission to zoning restrictions and home owners’ associations, didn’t understand why all those farmers were insisting on breaking the law by using unregulated fuels to warm their herds and flocks in the first place. After all, Joe and Sally Suburbia reasoned, why should rural people dodge all the taxes they were required to pay to heat their suburban homes? It just wasn’t fair, those farmers should be taught to pay their taxes like the rest of us. And now there was talk of local militias taking over counties at the hands of renegade sheriffs. The circulating theme among the respectable was “We had accomplished so much by putting the GOP back in Congress in 2010, and now those fools are just going to ruin it all. Beck is right, they are going to destroy the Republic.”

Don’t read into the narrative above that I think all former military and local police are stormtroopers on the hoof. No, but enough of them are. Let’s do some math. Assume that in the past decade we have trained and discharged about a million servicemen and women, not even counting the number of local law enforcement officials who are looking to trade up. If even only one percent of those were willing to oppress their fellow citizens, then the nationals could field an entirely new force consisting of ten thousand shock troops, each of whom needs the money after having squandered their productive formative years.

This force of ten thousand could be split into fifty two-hundred-man gun-seizure squads, which rivals the assault on Waco, one per state. Think about it. And how much would they have to pay to get two percent of that population of candidates instead of only one? Or five percent of them? Or more? The nationalists, who represent your neighbors’ claims on your property, can print as much money as they want, or, the equivalent, put as much on government debit cards as they wish. Even better, they can follow the precedent of the drug war and keep a lot of the loot they steal from you. For their agency, of course, but each valuable item taken from you, and then sold and auctioned simply means more of the budget that can be spent in bonuses, benefits and hostile fire pay. Even our local law enforcement has been bought for the nationals with that little trick, haven’t they?

Also, don’t read into the narrative above that I think everyone in suburbia is a spineless nationalist. No, but a lot of them are. Most of the national dollars that flow into our economy do so through the urban areas, and trickle out through the suburban. Even projects that are conducted in the countryside are administered through offices in the more populous areas. These offices are a combination of public administrators and proceed through a thick belt of government contracts at decreasing distances from the trough, but fed from it nonetheless.

Beyond those direct and indirect government contractors, how many of your neighbors operate businesses that would not exist without government regulation? Here is an easy one: accountants. A typical CPA’s bread is buttered by tax law, and tax compliance. Find one, and ask him what value he might provides absent complicated tax laws. After some stuttering and mumbling, he’ll mumble back something about helping businesses understand their economic status. Oh really? First, if you, as a business owner, didn’t have to track all of your expenses and income to satisfy tax laws, how much would you need to do to manage your accounts? That process would boil down to seeing whether the numbers in your checkbook are going up or down. And for businesses too big for that kind of simple accounting? How big do you think they would have to be if you started trimming all the fat such as human resources departments, quota positions, safety and regulatory compliance inspectors and trainers, and so on? CPAs are only one of many professions you can care to name that simply wouldn’t exist without the national government. Where do you think they are going to land when push comes to shove?

Those of you reading this who are unfortunate enough to be trapped in suburbia have probably experienced the trough-feeders in every direction around you in your neighborhoods. These are the people who you have tried to “wake up”, but then write off as sheeple.

Get your head on straight -- these people are not misguided sheep. No, for the most part they have decided for themselves that they like things just the way they are. The few that you think are waking up have probably just felt the same as you for a while, but were afraid to speak before now. Don’t worry - the nationals will put the fear back into your new friends.

The initial spate of resistance against gun seizures was short and bloody. For years, gun enthusiasts assured each other that they would fight and die rather than having their guns taken away. Themes of “they can’t get all of us” and “if the Jews had fought” filled the air. But, missing from these platitudes were the corollary “they can’t get all of us at once, but they can get us all individually whenever they like” and “Hitler didn’t have modern oppressive technology”.

In the face of up to two-hundred-man death squads, most gun owners simply let them in, while wondering why no one else was fighting. Others handed over what guns they hadn’t buried. Suburbanites, deprived of very much land in which to hide their weapons, found themselves subjected to ground-penetrating radar and other technology, which made finding hidden weapons on their tiny homesteads relatively trivial. These, at least those who survived the assault, were simply arrested on the spot and branded in the media as another domestic terrorist. One at a time, many fell prey to overwhelming force and, to save themselves, ratted out their friends.

But those holdouts in the rural areas were a little tougher to crack. After the first few nationals were killed, and their funerals held as a national media spectacle, the nationalists’ sympathizers were prepared to take it up a notch and get rid of these rural terrorists once and for all.

Enter the armed Predator drone, and the Active Denial System (ADS). The drone had become quite a media star in the practice war against insurgents, and now its domestic debut was ready. Each night the populace was treated to thermal video showing drones attacking and killing domestic terrorists holding out in their bunkers and compounds, which the week before would have simply been called homes and farms. The guns in the hands of these rural terrorists were clearly visible in most cases as they waited for an enemy they couldn’t even see.

Other rural terrorists were seized as they were in town shopping for food or transacting their daily business. Mere suspicion was considered sufficient reason to detain them, and then search their homes unopposed. No cold dead hands there. The nationals had all the time in the world to take these terrorists one by one.

Yet other terrorists were subjected to the beam of the ADS, and left squirming on the ground in agony as their skin was heated to painful temperatures by the microwave weapon. The noble national forces soon learned that repeated exposure of captured terrorists to this nonlethal weapon’s effects would result in a flood of information about other terrorist suspects. Throughout, the national media audience was assured that these effects were harmless. Even a few blonde anchors were shown yelping and giggling after exposure to the beam for a low power public relations demo.

Not reported, however, was that the beam’s energy can be modified at will by the operator, and even higher power by the contractors for the program. A higher setting, used to penetrate most walls to attack suspects inside, would blind an unprotected victim as their eyes began to boil. These horror stories were only reported on conspiracy-theory sites. Regardless, most holdouts subjected to a few minutes of prolonged exposure swept back and forth across their homes surrendered without a shot. Many, and not just the elderly victims, died of shock on the spot, as did their wives and children and family pets in large numbers that would be explained away as murder-suicides.

The underground secessionist movement soon learned to protect themselves with the simple expedient of shielding their homes with sheets of aluminum foil on the inside of walls and windows, which was sufficient to deflect the beam to allow some level of survival. However, like laws banning possession of certain molecules and body armor for the drug war, silencers and magazines for the war on guns, privacy and technology for the war on terror, and finally even home fortifications for the whim of the Oklahoma legislature, the mere possession of an excess amount of aluminum foil was criminalized by the very same new crop of nationalists sent to Washington only months before to save the day.

Throughout these excesses, local law enforcement served as traffic control and area security around the operation areas. Closely watched by their national overseers, they assured themselves that their hands were clean; after all, they weren’t seizing the guns, the nationals they were protecting were seizing them. No oaths violated here, they imagined at their traffic checkpoints, as the citizens who needed them the most squirmed and died in agony.

Where did I jump the track here? No villainous rogue nationals, as in Matt Bracken’s excellent book Enemies: Foreign and Domestic. No upstart pretender to national power, as in James Wesley Rawles’ equally essential Patriots. Not even an economic crisis, which many of us know must be coming. Nope, just your run-of-the-mill defiance of national authority over some wood stoves and tin foil, and the incremental escalation of the response, cheered on by the nationalists in our midst each step of the way.

Defiance gets in the way of your neighbor’s check. You may not be his keeper, but you certainly are his benefactor. Get back in your cage, they insist.

Sheriff McGee can tell you that the nationals have plenty of time and resources on their side. They will eventually get around to you. Oh, and the only reason why Sheriff McGee wasn’t just simply shot in 2005 was because he was wearing a badge. You or I, undeputized, would have been handled much more roughly, and with little media fanfare.

Some would say that his mistake was simple: his crisis at hand simply wasn’t big enough. Before we get to that big crisis and its implications, we’ll take a few detours around issues secessionists might face should they succeed in the next installment, A Civilized Secession.

Tom Baugh is the author of Starving the Monkeys, Fight Back Smarter. He is also a former Marine, patented inventor, entrepreneur and professional irritant.