We're gonna get a bit controversial on the TAE blog today. I know for a fact that some people will be very offended by this posting, written/compiled by Surly of the Doomstead Diner. Therefore, I'd like preface it with a disclaimer, so to speak. I am going to introduce the issues involved here and give you a few of my thoughts on why they are so important to be considered at this point in time.

The long and short of it is that the posting encompasses an ongoing (never-ending) debate between RE, Surly, I and countless others on various forums, including TAE and the Doomstead Diner, about the wisdom of launching a modern day Inquisition, or what I call the Orkin Man Master Plan ("OMMP") – a plan designed to systemically root out very high-level officials of our corporatist financial system across the globe, and ultimately exterminate them. Everyone agrees that the plan will invariably involve a significant number of innocent "casualties of war" along the way.

First of all, RE wants to make clear that this is just his personal view – one that he feels compelled to defend against critique – and is by no means a reflection of the majority view at the Diner or something that dominates the conversation over there. So let's just take this for exactly what it is – a comprehensive debate over the merits and the wisdom of the OMMP – nothing more, nothing less.

RE argues that such a plan is humanity's last best chance to take the offensive against these wicked forces and destroy them before they destroy us, and it is ultimately a Utilitarian issue of sacrificing a certain % of innocent lives to save an even greater %. Surly disagrees. Some of you may have also read the lengthy exchange between RE and I on this issue, and therefore you know that I whole-heartedly disagree with RE as well.

Surly and I both agree that, in the last instance, it comes down to a question of morality and personal values. Although, there is also plenty of room to debate the nitty-gritty details of this particular OMMP and how it will WORK or NOT WORK, as the case may be. Some of you may be wondering – why even give any credence or exposure to RE's view by acknowledging it in a posting here?

The truth is that most of us are eventually going to have to confront these issues in our lifetimes, and there's no sense in hiding from them now or pretending they don't exist. People are out there making similar arguments to RE as I write this today, and they are only going to make them even louder tomorrow, as societal conditions worsen. And they are dead serious…

Seeing as how the Golden Dawn (neo-Nazi) party has gained a good deal of popularity in Greece in its most recent national elections (GD obtained its first presence in the House of Parliament), this issue of radically reactionary policy is nothing if not very relevant to the process of financial, economic and sociopolitical collapse. It is exactly the type of blowback against "the system" that TAE has been warning about for some time.

Many of the people advocating for some form of OMMP, like RE, truly believe that such a path is our best chance to save the human species and the planet from total annihilation at the hands of minority elites, and have justice meted out to those deserving of it in the process. And some of them, like RE, also happen to be damn convincing with their arguments.

My personal participation in this whole whopper of a debate boils down to my belief that it is INCUMBENT on us to be prepared with a response to calls for blood, and to defend our commitments to avoiding such an outcome – whether those commitments are based in ethical, moral and/or practical concerns. If we are not prepared, then we have already lost the argument before it has even started.

Once the calls for retribution start sounding off in earnest, the momentum will be near impossible to stop. That is why I am posting this here and hoping that TAE readers share my concerns on the one hand, but also come to this issue with tolerance and objectivity on the other. If you are already offended just by reading this Intro to the article, then I strongly advise that you skip the rest of the posting altogether… because, trust me when I say, there is a lot more material for you to stomach below.

Now, with all that out of the way, what follows is Surly's article on the OMMP debate, which really does a great job of tying many different strains of thought together in a succinct and coherent manner. The centerpiece is Surly's very insightful look at the life and times of Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.

This exposition on Pol Pot is immediately followed by RE's response (separated by lines within the text), which has been excerpted from a more fully-formed response to both Surly and I that can be found on DD – Unforgiven. Surly's concluding thoughts on OMMP continue below the fold, where he ultimately tells us to reflect on the priceless question that must be answered by ALL of us at the end of the day – do you TRULY know which side you are on?

 

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The Orkin Man: Which Side Are You On?

 

 

The Orkin man is one of RE's favorite memes, often invoked as a symbol of retribution by the meek against the great. When we watch gangsters confiscate houses with impunity and murder by proxy and a pen (see the story of Norman Rousseau), run the economy into a ditch, commandeered great bonuses and be subject to none of the usual proceedings of justice, it is easy to despair and to look for revenge. This overwritten screed is a meditation upon what has become a thought-provoking thread rife with implications, a thought experiment which, if followed through the course of its own ineluctable logic, obliges each of us to measure where we would fall, and what we would do, in the event TSHTF.

 

 

What has actually happened here in this country on these rare occasions when people have stood up en masse to Fight the Power? In a previous lifetime, I investigated and created a documentary about the Battle at Blair Mountain. You will likely not have heard of this, the teaching of labor history having apparently been classified as a Class I misdemeanor here in the FSA. In the largest uprising in the United States outside of the Civil War, in 1921, thousands of miners waged armed warfare in Logan County, West Virginia against mine owners, sheriff Don Chafin, and federal troops, in an effort to unionize the mines.

In Mingo, Logan and McDowell counties, miners worked under incredibly bad conditions, were paid next to nothing, had no freedom of speech or assembly, and were dispatched with impunity by mine guards and local politicos in an atmosphere reminiscent of a third-world dictatorship, or contemporary South Carolina. In 1921, thousands of miners and families were evicted from their tents after having the temerity to join a union. The Miners' March, as it was called, was set to change all that. The military was engaged, as always, to Protect Property Rights, those most sacred and revered of all rights extended by the Hand of God to the white, male property owners who created the FSA. The miners' intention was to march to the southwestern coalfields and free fellow miners from abominable treatment at the hands or mine owners.

The miners were opposed by a well-armed contingent of mine guards and State Police with rifles and machine guns. These would eventually be joined by 2,000 regular Army troops armed with airplanes, bombs, and poison gas. The two forces met at Blair Mountain, in Logan County, along the ridge line.

This was the Battle of Blair Mountain.

The battle marked the first time U.S. troops were ordered to bomb civilians. Federal troops squared off against citizen miners, many themselves veterans hardened from recent service in WW I.

The union leader Bill Blizzard eventually surrendered his army in order to avoid further civilian casualties. Blizzard was acquitted in court of insurrection. Future UMW & CIO leader John L. Lewis fought alongside Blizzard at the Battle of Blair Mountain and succeeded in getting recognition for the union 14 years later in southern West Virginia.

One of the songs that sprung up in the wake of these labor troubles with the song "Which side are you on?" It was written by Florence Reece, the wife a union organizer for the UMW in Harlan County, Kentucky, when the miners of that region were locked in a bitter and violent struggle with the mine owners called the Harlan County War. In an attempt to intimidate the Reece family, the local sheriff illegally entered their family home in search of Sam Reece. Sam had been warned in advance and escaped, but Florence and their children were terrorized in his place. That night, after the men had gone, Florence wrote the lyrics to "Which Side Are You On?" on a calendar that hung in the kitchen of her home. She took the melody from a traditional Baptist hymn, "Lay the Lily Low".

 

 

A Song by Florence Patton Reece

 

Come all of you good workers

Good news to you I'll tell

Of how that good old union

Has come in here to dwell

 

Chorus:

Which side are you on?

Which side are you on?

Which side are you on?

Which side are you on?

 

My daddy was a miner

And I'm a miner's son

And I'll stick with the union

Till every battle's won

 

They say in Harlan County

There are no neutrals there

You'll either be a union man

Or a thug for J.H. Blair

 

Oh, workers can you stand it?

Oh, tell me how you can

Will you be a lousy scab

Or will you be a man?

 

Don't scab for the bosses

Don't listen to their lies

Us poor folks haven't got a chance

Unless we organize

So the miners organized together to Fight the Power, to take the law into their own hands because the law was an ass. What they got for their trouble was the full response of the state in all of its Majesty and force of arms. Eventually the legal system would catch up. In the fullness of time, union rights would be recognized, at least until after World War II, when the elites mounted their counterrevolution under the banner of "right to work" laws.

In my loathing for the Banksters and their apologists, I take a back seat to nobody. The bailout of 2008, otherwise known as the "banksters coup," was just the cherry on top of the same toxic milkshake served up as economic and social policy over the last 30 years. The insane clown posse that passes for the modern Republican Party has eyeballed the demographic trends, and pasted together an assemblage of what Drfitglass called "the scattered,raving remnants of the Confederacy for one, last glorious bonfire of democracy." Combine the wholesale assault of the remnant of the New Deal in an atmosphere of "industrialized political hatespeech," Fox News, Hate Radio and the Tea Party with its Billionaire backers, and it's easy to succumb to the desire to want to kill something.

Intellectually I hold with Kunstler's "lamppost and 40 feet of sturdy nylon rope" as the due for the "masters of the universe "who have ground down our economy and wrecked the ship of state. But personal morality makes looping the first skein of rope over the lamppost morally fraught. On the other hand, one is left with the spectacle of the pigmen rooting among the remains of the economy and the country, like Wu's pigs disposing of a fresh corpse in HBO's "Deadwood."

 

 

It is this episode that springs to mind as I consider the "Orkin Man Master Plan" (OMMP) as discussed on the forum of the Doomstead Diner.

The Orkin man is a favorite device of RE, the invoking of which I have enjoyed since the same since his days on The Burning Platform blog. The Orkin man is an exterminator who cleanses the dwelling of lice, vermin, termites and all manner of infestations. The analogy is clear. The remedy less so.

One poster on Doomsday Diner posed the question, "Who gets to be the Orkin man?" Indeed. Who gets to be the decider? Being the decider has great costs, which turned on a fundamental moral issue, at a time when our moral and spiritual institutions are in decline, church attendance down, and many people utterly and completely unequipped to weigh moral and ethical questions. And as much as I like to give voice to my inner hunchback, there is that "judge not lest ye be judged" morality imbued by a Catholic education and nun-beatings that inflects one's thoughts, processes and decisions, even decades later.

As I reflected on the more recent exemplars of individuals taking on such a strategy in this country, and after Blair Mountain, my mind skittered to thoughts of Kosovo, Afghanistan, El Salvador, Pinochet's Argentina, and then settled on the best recent example: Pol Pot whose efforts to form a Communist peasant farming society resulted in the deaths of 25 percent of the country's population from starvation, overwork and executions. Those Khmer Rouge wanted to return to the land as well, and also wanted to cleanse the parasites, usurers and useless eaters from the face of Cambodia. A cautionary tale about the work of idealists who want to remake a society by means of "cleansing" the "parasites…"

It took a while for ol' Pol to consolidate power– he needed to throw in with Sihanouk to fight the right wing junta the US had installed, then the US had to leave the 'Nam and Cambodia. But once in power, he began a radical experiment to create an agrarian utopia that would warm the heart of the most doomy doomster. Pol Pot had seen Mao's Cultural Revolution first-hand during a visit to Communist China, so he figured to go The Great Yellow River Swimmer one better.

Mao's "Great Leap Forward" included forced evacuations of Chinese cities and the purging of "class enemies, " a move that would apparently gain favor among participants in this thread. Pol Pot now stood up his own "Super Duper New and Improved Great Leap Forward" in Cambodia, which in itself was new and improved, hence renamed the Democratic Republic of Kampuchea.

Remember Pol Pot's ringing declaration, "This is Year Zero?" Ah, search your memories. Society was to be "purified." Capitalism, Western culture, city life, religion, and all foreign influences to be extinguished. Intellectuals, bureaucrats and other glasses-wearers were to push wheelbarrows, the better to repent of their pointy-headedness, and to learn the glories of peasant Communism. Foreigners were expelled, embassies closed, foreign economic or medical assistance refused. No use of foreign languages. Newspapers and television stations were shut down, radios and bicycles confiscated, and mail and telephone usage curtailed. Money was forbidden. (That will kick those usurers in the ass.) Businesses were shuttered, religion banned, education halted, health care eliminated, and parental authority revoked. Thus Cambodia was sealed off from the outside world, almost as effectively as if information were controlled by a small handful of media companies.

Something about that live-or-die thingy tends to bring out the excesses in our revolutionary heroes. I'll put that in my "Robespierre was overworked and misunderstood" file.

Can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs. All of Cambodia's cities were forcibly evacuated. At Phnom Penh, two million inhabitants were evacuated on foot into the countryside at gunpoint. As many as 20,000 died along the way. Can't let that stop a man with a purpose.

Millions of Cambodians accustomed to city life were now forced into slave labor in Pol Pot's "killing fields" where they soon began dying from overwork, malnutrition and disease, on a diet of one tin of rice (180 grams) per person every two days, the better to become compost and improve the yields.

 

 

Workdays ran to the 18 hour day, Pol having taken the American South's "right to work" euphemism to heart. The starving were forbidden to eat the fruits and rice they were harvesting, as that was confiscated by the Khmer rouge and loaded onto their own trucks.

And you can't have a party without the purges… a veritable binge of purges. Up against the wall went the remnants of the "old society" – the educated, the wealthy, Buddhist monks, police, doctors, lawyers, teachers, glasses-wearers all, no doubt. Ex-soldiers were killed along with their wives and children. Eventually the taste for human blood leads to a paranoia of sorts, and why not? Anyone suspected of disloyalty to Pol Pot, including eventually many Khmer Rouge leaders, was shot or bludgeoned with an ax. "What is rotten must be removed," a Khmer Rouge slogan proclaimed.

The casualty count rose until Vietnam launched a full-scale invasion of Cambodia seeking to end Khmer Rouge border attacks. On January 7, 1979, Phnom Penh fell and Pol Pot was deposed, and a Vietnamese puppet government put in.

Pol Pot disappeared into the jungles of Thailand with his Khmer Rouge remnant and waged guerrilla war against a succession of Cambodian governments for decades, eventually sputtering out and dying of an apparent heart attack before he could be dragged to trial before an international tribunal.

 

 

So it matters little who you pick as the Orkin Man, or how good your motives are, or how thorough your efforts at re-education or eradication may be. The role seems to carry some occupational hazards, as if the appetite for blood, human death and destruction carries with it the seeds of insanity.

Although the image of banksters and stockbrokers mucking out pigpens and pushing wheelbarrows through knee-deep mud remains compelling.

(Surly continued below the fold…)

 

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Unforgiven (RE's response to Surly)

I go through this bizness of the Nasty Dictators all the time with Ashvin over on TAE, and certainly it is not an easy position to take on the Orkin Man Idea when you have such nefarious types as Pol Pot in the Terminix bizness.

I am NOT defending Pol Pot here, because he took on this massively counterproductive attempt at social cleansing with tons of wrong ideas and with tons of corruption involved as well. It also was bound for failure because it was undertaken while the Conduits were still functional.

Taking out the Crystal Ball here and looking into the FUTURE though, let's consider some of the ideas involved in this mess.

 

 

Surly: Mao's "Great Leap Forward" included forced evacuations of Chinese cities and the purging of "class enemies, " a move that would apparently gain favor among participants in this thread. Pol Pot now stood up his own "Super Duper New and Improved Great Leap Forward" in Cambodia, which in itself was new and improved, hence renamed the Democratic Republic of Kampuchea.

On the "Forced Evacuation of Big Shities" question. It wasn't true for sure in Cambodia, but look at the Mass Death that may occur in the Big Shities if they are NOT evacuated before JIT delivery fails. You could have a 99% Death Rate in those places. If Pol Pot II was running the show and forcibly evacuating people NOW, maybe you only get a 50% Death rate. So here PPII goes down in History as the Mass Murderer of say 3B People. Except if PPII had NOT done this, 6B would have gone to the Great Beyond instead.

It's obviously a tough call to make for a Political Leader when to pull the plug on the Big Shities and tell everyone they have to EVACUATE NOW. It will inevitably result in a Massive Death Toll. But if you think it will be WORSE if you don't do it, if you are willing to take the heat as the worst Mass Murderer in all of Recorded History, maybe you do it.

Surly: Millions of Cambodians accustomed to city life were now forced into slave labor in Pol Pot's "killing fields" where they soon began dying from overwork, malnutrition and disease, on a diet of one tin of rice (180 grams) per person every two days, the better to become compost and improve the yields.

OK, here we have mostly agreed that Industrial life is going the way of the Dinosaur and people HAVE to go back to the Land as Farmers at least, if not H-Gs. What is going to happen to Obese J6P when you put him out on the land pushing a plow? Instant Heart Attack! Most people currently used to EZ Living courtesy of the thermodynamic energy of Oil simply are not IN SHAPE to work out in the Fields. Is it PPII's FAULT these folks are too fat and weak to pull their own weight out there?

Surly: And you can't have a party without the purges… a veritable binge of purges. Up against the wall went the remnants of the "old society" – the educated, the wealthy, Buddhist monks, police, doctors, lawyers, teachers, glasses-wearers all, no doubt. Ex-soldiers were killed along with their wives and children. Eventually the taste for human blood leads to a paranoia of sorts, and why not? Anyone suspected of disloyalty to Pol Pot, including eventually many Khmer Rouge leaders, was shot or bludgeoned with an ax. "What is rotten must be removed," a Khmer Rouge slogan proclaimed.

Here of course is the EXCESS which occurs in many an Inquisition/Reign of Terror type scenario. There is going to be a lot of BLOWBACK resultant from many people who have lost their comfortable life and who want to see PPII DEAD because of that. He gets blamed for the problems they have; he gets blamed for their loss of economic status in the society. So PPII gets PARANOID, for good reason. People really ARE out to get him. So he starts Killing Them before they Kill Him.

This of course is the Omellette issue Uncle Joe talked about. Its just about impossible to be a manager of massive Die Off without yourself becoming a Target. Yet if SOMEBODY doesn't get int here and try to manage it, the Die Off is WORSE. Morton's Fork situation of course.

Now, back in Uncle Joe, Mao and Pol Pot's era, if they played along with the Illuminati they likely could have avoided all that dieing. Except these guys wanted to Exit the Game early, and to exit it they essentially were cutting off their Noses to spite their Faces. They lost the ability to Trade with the outside world and were attempting to Go It Alone, and this messed up all their in place systems which sorta worked as long as you paid your Vigorish to the Illuminati.

So all of them go down in History as the most vicious and Genocidal Dictators in all of Recorded History, at least in gross numbers if not in Percentages. I still maintain that the Romanoffs were WORSE than Stalin, but that is not really that important here at the moment.

Moving into the FUTURE here, the issue is you cannot even Save As Many as you Can by PLAYING BALL with the Illuminati. Why? Because said Illuminati are Fresh OUT of Cheap Oil to sell you with Loans they hand out to you. So unfortunately here in this Morton's Fork situation, the social dynamic is likely to produce numerous PPIIs and Great Uncle Joes. Because unless somebody does SOMETHING to try to keep the society organized up, the Dieing will be WORSE than it would be if you have some Dictator FORCING people to evacuate the Big Shities. They aren't going to do that on their own until it is too late and they all are starving and Cannibalizing each other.

Surly: Although the image of banksters and stockbrokers mucking out pigpens and pushing wheelbarrows through knee-deep mud remains a compelling one for me.

You know, I paint all sorts of pictures based on the Spanish Inquisition and the Reign of Terror, but the fact of the matter here is that if you simply took away all their wealth and power and dropped these folks into a Housing project in Chicago and left them their Shoelaces, Silk Neckties and Gucci Belts, they would all Hang THEMSELVES in short order. So if you want to go about it this way to absolve yourself of a sense of Guilt for lopping off their Heads, I am fine with that one also.

Regardless of the means here, whether it is Seppuku or Capital Punishment, the situation is going to create the BLOWBACK from people who once had power, now removed. They will attempt Counter Revolutions and so forth. So you get forced into a battle here no matter what, and people DIE no matter what.

Practical sort of fellow that I am, I work my way through this dynamic to try to find the pathway with the least pain and the greatest survivability for the typical Slave in our society. The means I see working best is to take the battle to the Illuminati before they get the Death Camps rolling in earnest here. You do have to wait for the Failure of the Conduits though, because as long as the Illuminati have the Big Ass Military and Gestapo organized up and functioning, you stand no chance here. Once those Conduits fracture though, the playing field is LEVELLED.

Then you don't just get MAD, you get EVEN.

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(Surly continued…)

But point was that any kind of social engineering, social cleansing, ethnic cleansing executed by a political agenda will inevitably collapse, most often due to its own corruption and increasingly escalating paranoia on the part of the strongman or the secret oligarchy of "deciders." There is a reason that we are taught from a very early age, "vengeance is mine saith the Lord, " "Thou shalt not kill," and other Biblical admonishments against the taking of life.

It could be that this ancient wisdom recalls that wielding the tools of vengeance is simply above the pay grade of us mere mortals. On the other hand, psychopaths recognize no such compunction. But the question remains: what do we do, what action should we take at a time when psychopaths have commandeered the engines of government and commerce, economic or rate with complete impunity and beyond the reach of such justice as still remains?

We are thus faced with an untenable situation: if any one of us were to put on the Pol Pot T shirt, we would find ourselves in a similar situation, fraught with awful decisions and tinged by paranoia, regions of the mind visited by Joseph Conrad. Far preferable to remember the biblical injunctions that direct our conduct, as Ashvin observed:

Ashvin: It's not about what we you and I can justify to ourselves with our personal beliefs. It is what you can get OTHER PEOPLE to accept based on their beliefs. Anyone who truly believes in Judeo-Christian theology cannot accept OMMP any more than they can accept Infanticide, even when they are committed with "good intentions" for some Utilitarian goal. According to them, God is perfect and they are imperfect. God has commanded them to avoid certain Sins, and they must have faith in God's wisdom no matter what. It is not up to them to decide what sins are acceptable via good intentions or utilitarian calculations.

Matthew 7:14-27

 

14"For the gate is small and the way is narrow that leads to life, and there are few who find it.

 

15"Beware of the false prophets, who come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly are ravenous wolves. 16"You will know them by their fruits. Grapes are not gathered from thorn bushes nor figs from thistles, are they? 17"So every good tree bears good fruit, but the bad tree bears bad fruit. 18"A good tree cannot produce bad fruit, nor can a bad tree produce good fruit. 19"Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. 20"So then, you will know them by their fruits.

 

21"Not everyone who says to Me, 'Lord, Lord,' will enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of My Father who is in heaven will enter. 22"Many will say to Me on that day, 'Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in Your name, and in Your name cast out demons, and in Your name perform many miracles?' 23"And then I will declare to them, 'I never knew you; DEPART FROM ME, YOU WHO PRACTICE LAWLESSNESS.'

 

24"Therefore everyone who hears these words of Mine and acts on them, may be compared to a wise man who built his house on the rock. 25"And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and slammed against that house; and yet it did not fall, for it had been founded on the rock. 26"Everyone who hears these words of Mine and does not act on them, will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. 27"The rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and slammed against that house; and it fell—and great was its fall."

I'm just using [true Christians] as an example of people whose beliefs are fundamentally in opposition to OMMP. They will become your enemies… but them and who else? I think you can easily make the argument that most true Hindus and Buddhists will as well. Now we are easily talking about a lot of people. How many people who claim to believe in these Immortal Truths will have the nerve to follow through when your so-called Herd is stampeding against them? I don't know, probably only a small fraction.

 

But my point here is that some of them will, and people like me will admire them for doing so. It's an amazing thing, really, to have that kind of total devotion to some higher power even in the face of what appears to be the likely threat of species-wide extinction. Talk about a small gate and narrow way!

(Surly)

The question each of us has to address is, Which side are you on? If you knew that those in control were working to box you into a freight car headed to an unknown future, but which would likely involve Fresh Towels and Hot Showers, would you get on the train or would you take the fight to them? And would you take the fight to them knowing that they controlled all of the vectors and tools of violence with force overwhelming to individual scale?

Indeed, our elites have changed the laws to enable the military to operate with impunity here in the "North American battleground" (yes, friends, if you are paying the least bit of attention, we are indeed the enemy), as they have likewise militarized our local police forces, complete with spiffy looking SWAT team suits, armored vehicles. and drones, as the latest invention. We have as our president the only Nobel Peace Prize winner with a personal kill list. So it may be well to say that we're living in a time where the lessons of history no longer inform what we may be able to infer about the future. All bets are off.

 

 

Ultimately, I hold with RE when he says, "save as many as you can," although we may differ about what that means. As an occupier, I believe that our presence in the streets and withholding our consent is everything that we can do. The community gardening movement is a step toward self-reliance, and teaching others to be self reliant. A self-reliant independent populace is anathema to the powers that be. But even the most psychopathic will find it difficult to dial-up a drone strike against a community garden, unless I miss my bet. Our resistance will be nonviolent, as the state has an utter and complete monopoly of the tools of violence, and a demonstrated increasing bloodthirstiness in applying them. I do not wish to make it easy for them, and have little desire to become a martyr, in a time when even bankster loan officers can murder with a pen and a computer.

Hunter S. Thompson once described himself as a "Road Man for the Lords of Karma." Since nature, or God bats last, my own view is that through education, self-reliance, and nonviolent resistance we can change a culture. The history of this society guarantees a rain of vengeance and disproportionate response on the part of the minions of the elites, in a road that runs from the Cherokee "Trail of Tears" through Logan Country through Zuccotti Park. And even if successful, the victors turn into monsters. Changing a society will take generations; generations which we may not have. Our opponents have been at this for many decades; we should not expect the quick fix.

In the coming days, each of us will need to stand up and be counted. At least I know which side I'm on.