If only Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson thought as you did, America might still today be part of the United Kingdom.
Yeah, like Canada and Australia.
Did either of those backseat drivers fire a shot during the revolution?
You should at least have the good sense to mention Patrick Henry today. Now there was a glorious leader everyone would follow over a cliff.
Holy crow, I just realized that after you said that!
Here is something embarassing. I only figured it out a few weeks ago. lmao
‘Who is John Galt?’ ‘Who is Ron Paul?’ Blast I will never achieve all knowing sight [:S]
Roam free within the cage.
Mencken used to say that all revolutions in history were brought over by hungry urban rabbles. While this may be a little too generical he had a good point: the only thing that can initiate a revolt, armed or not, is the so called breaking point. When enough persons reach this breaking point you have a revolt.
Politicians over the course of the last century learnt two golden rules: first, tame the people and turn them into docile human cattle. Mass media and compulsory schooling helped them achieve this. Problem is even the most docile cow can be enraged by extremes: that’s in the nature of things. This leads us to the second point: politicians have learnt that to achieve a goal they need to proceed by baby steps, perhaps while they build their Brave New World. The classic example is this: we’ll double ownership taxes on cars. A week of “heated debates” in the media follows and in the end you get a 10% increase on car ownership taxes, perhaps excluding some token category like hybrids since it’s all about saving Earth not getting some quick casheesh. People say: it could have been worse, dig deeper into their pockets and quickly forget about it. That’s how Socialism took over Europe and the US: not with an armed revolution led by a new Lenin or a massive popular uprising but by baby steps people didn’t notice. That’s what the Fabian Society has been preaching for decades and it has been refined to the point that a popular uprising has become pretty much impossible nowadays. You occasionally get a group of people rising up for their token rights: in that case the approved tactics is to either throw them a bone (if their demands do not go against the Great Leap Forward) or to suppress them by simply ignoring their demands and not giving them media coverage.
The only hope we have nowadays, and it’s a very faint hope, is that Leviathan is overstretching itself. The two most visible symptoms are overlegislation and overspending. Overspending has been covered a thousand times so I won’t dwell into it but overlegislation needs a little clarification. All modern States, all of them, have so many laws and edicts that they cannot possibly hope to enforce them all at the same time. The only solution is turning the State into a huge concentration camp like Pol Pot’s Cambodia but that may be a little counterproductive. That’s where you get to the point of a selective application of laws. At that point people will start thinking: hey, why was I fined? Hundreds of persons do that each day, why just me? Not only that but this engenders a chain reaction: people start thinking “hey, I will most likely get away with it, let’s give it a shot” or “everybody does it, why just me?”. That’s how a State power base gets corrupted. Another problem is what i call the “Red Guards Syndrome”: people criticizing the State for not doing enough or not furthering the Socialist cause enough. These persons force the State into a quick response which is often bumbling or downright counterproductive because politicians need to show they are doing something fast, usually before the next election.
That’s my idea: we won’t have an uprising against tyranny and Socialism. Never. But we’ll most likely see the Omnipotent State crumble on itself from overextension. And it will happen much sooner than we expect.
I agree with Stranger, a lot of what’s been said so far is a load of tripe.
I think people are taking Etienne de la Boetie too literally. Ideas aren’t the only thing that matters, believe it or not. You could have a country full of anarchists are as long as they’re too scared to do anything the state will continue to tax them and carry on with its business. On the other hand, once you stop with the hippie tactics and learn how to use a gun…
I was being sarcastic… My point obviously missed…
Yes I agree that a dedicated group of individuals acting by volition can fight for freedom, the problem is that if you are not ready to act alone, then it leaves me to believe that you are only willing to act as a faceless mass and that is bad…
I have a leather bound copy it is both and Fred the Greats instructions to his generals…
Definitely a worthy read if you are looking to understand Military tactics and political war…
There would not be a Canada and Australia had there not been an American revolution.
The fact is, by the time revolutions arrive in any country not only are the ideas that hold up the state totally discredited, the revolutionaries are also highly organized and capable of using force to implement them.
If ideas were the only thing holding up the state than dictatorships would be impossible, since no one believes in their ideas. However, no one is organized enough to stand up to them, and this is why they remain in power.
That’s actually a point in my favour.
I’m not even considering de la Boetie. I’m talking about mass organization around an idea, similar to what Gandhi did. I am talking about applying classic conflict and political tactics that have been used for centuries and are required reading for anyone who has ever had a leadership position of any great significance in the 20th century.
No one said they were. Information and communication are what matters. Strangers said so himself. It matters not that the troops are heavily armed, but that they are trained to work together. To do that, you need knowledge about who is doing what next to you, behind you and in front of you, and you need the communication capacity to change that at any time in unison. Which is essentially what a market is. A knowledge environment where people make decisions based on the latest information, and can adapt to changes, real or perceived, faster than the time to rely the data back to the central planners for them to make a decision.
I’m only casting these pearls because someone not inclined to write something dumb in response to me may find the information valuable.
Yeah just like Che Guevara…
Giles, You and I have a difference of opinion on a lot of things…
This , not so much, I do not live in lala land where people in power do not violently react to losing power, but the justification of revolution is not in firing first, it is in having reason on your side and reacting to gross injustice, the revolution in France was in response to mass starvation and the treatment of non nobility as rightless animals, the revolution in America was due to the mostly unresponsive British rule, and any response was negative to the colonies.
There was always the ideas that preceded the revolution, a revolution without a base of ideology is a revolution that repaces one tyranny with another…
Shoot first and figure it out later is not the route I would like to take…
I don’t think that was the point I made. You labeled two bureaucrats as the reason for the secession of America. Thomas Paine and many others had just as much to do with it. Paine was a pamphleteer. He was a communicator. He was a spreader of ideas. He was “doing the knowledge”.
I think we are somewhat talking past each other.
Right. Someone asked, in complete honesty, how to revolt. You gave him a lot of tripe that has nothing to do with his question.
I gave him the facts.
Sure it did. I told him to use his energy offensively, not defensively. You would have him waste time confronting the state.
We’re not going to push the state into a hole in the ground. It is going to collapse into it. When it is surrounded by so much activity that it’s knowledge problems start becoming exponential and hastens it’s end. We quite literally need to grow liberty and if that was not understood, we need to keep establishing new markets.
This is what you gave him.
When you are organized.
It’s vague, and meaningless. It lacks context and depth. If that is your contribution, then thank you for pointing out the obvious. Next time one of these comes around, maybe you should add more insight like,
“Keep your eyes open”
“Be prepared”
“Get involved”
“Take action”
“Have a plan”
Don’t post them all at once though. You’ll want to carefully release those gems in to the mass conciousness. People might not be able to handle it all at once.
ROFLMAO!!!
[G]
Fact is, Gandhi had one of the most powerful motivating forces on his side: race. If you want to use the race card somehow, I’m all for that, I just don’t think you do. Keep in mind, India was colony of the UK, colonies don’t really exist like that anymore, so things will be far more difficult for you than they were for Gandhi (although, look how far India has come since then, now its blessed with social democracy).
No, Stranger was talking about organization, and you’re equivocating.
Shouldn’t Blessed be in quotes or italicized???