The Tripwire
by
D. van Oort & J.F.A. Davidson
From The Resister
"How we burned in the prison 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?"-- Alexander Solzhenitzyn, Gulag Archipelago
What would be the tripwire resulting in open rebellion? Examining the Bill of Rights, and considering EXISTING laws only, and not failed attempts, you will find that every clause has been violated to one degree or another.
Documenting those violations would fill volumes, and it is important to remember that only government can violate the exercise of unalienable individual rights and claim immunity from retribution. We omit martial law or public suspension of the Constitution as a tripwire. The overnight installation of dictatorship obviously would qualify as "the tripwire," but is not likely to occur. What has occurred, what is occurring, is the implementation of every aspect of such dictatorship without an overt declaration. The Constitution is being killed by attrition. The Communist Manifesto is being installed by accretion. Any suggestion that martial law is the tripwire leads us to the question: what aspect of martial law justifies the first shot?
For much the same reason, we will leave out mass executions of the Waco variety. For one thing, they are composite abuses of numerous individual rights. Yet, among those abuses, the real tripwire may exist. For another, those events are shrouded in a fog of obfuscation and outright lies. Any rebellion must be based on extremely hard and known facts. Similarly, no rebellion will succeed if its fundamental reasons for occurring are not explicitly identified. Those reasons cannot be explicitly identified if, in place of their identification, we simply point to a composite such as Waco and say, "See, that's why; figure it out." Any suggestion that more Wacos, in and of themselves, would be the tripwire, simply leads us back again to the question: what aspect of them justifies rebellion?
For the same reasons, we leave out a detailed account of Ayn Rand's identification of the four essential characteristics of tyranny. She identified them quite correctly, but together they are just another composite from which we must choose precipitating causes. These characteristics are: one-party rule, executions without trial for political offenses, expropriation or nationalisation of private property, and "above all," censorship.
With regard to the first characteristic of tyranny, what is the real difference between the Fabian socialist Republican Party and the overtly [Bolshevik] socialist Democratic Party? Nothing but time. Regarding the second we have the FBI's Hostage Rescue Team and the ATF's enforcement branch. In action they simply avoid the embarrassment of a trial. Regarding the third, we have asset forfeiture "laws," the IRS, the EPA, the FCC, the FDA, the Federal Reserve, the Justice Department's Antitrust Division, and a myriad of other executive branch agencies, departments, and commissions whose sole function is to regulate business and the economy. Regulating business for the common good (fascism) is no different in principle than outright nationalisation (communism).
However, the fourth characteristic of tyranny, censorship, is the obvious primary tripwire. When ideology and the reporting of facts and how-to instructions are forbidden, there is nothing remaining but to fight. Freedom of speech and persuasion -- the freedom to attempt to rationally convince willing listeners -- is so fundamental an individual right that without it no other rights, not even the existence of rights, can be enforced, claimed, debated, or even queried.
Does this censorship include the regulation of the "public" airwaves by the FCC, as in the censorship which prohibits tobacco companies from advertising -- in their own defense -- on the same medium which is commanded by government decree to carry "public service" propaganda against them? Does it include federal compulsion of broadcasters to air politically-correct twaddle for "The Children"? Does it include the Orwellian "Communications Decency Act"? Does it include any irrationalist "sexual harassment" or tribalist "hate speech" laws which prohibit certain spoken words among co-workers? The answer: unequivocally yes.
Although the above do not pertain to ideological or political speech, yet they are censorship and are designed to intimidate people into the acceptance of de facto censorship. We say that any abrogation of free speech, and any form of censorship, which cannot be rectified by the soap box, the ballot box, or the jury box, must be rectified by the cartridge box -- or lost forever.
Americans have been stumbling over tripwires justifying overt resistance for well over 130 years. On one hand, we submit that gun confiscation is a secondary tripwire only. It is second to censorship because if speech is illegal we cannot even discuss the repeal of gun control, or any other population controls. If only guns are illegal, we may still convince people to repeal those laws. On the other hand, gun confiscation may be a sufficient tripwire because the primary one, censorship, can be fully implemented only after the citizenry has been disarmed.
( archive resources 2000 )
