The Coming Dark Times, Again

For armed, prepared citizens, for martialists, the dark times are comprised of any period in which the political, social, and cultural pendulum swings towards control -- control of arms, control of training, control of individual lives. For what is self-defense without the self? The right to defend yourself and the legal freedom necessary to own the tools and take the actions necessary to accomplish this goal are aspects of your self-ownership, the concept that you own you. Your are nobody’s slave and you are nobody’s property. You don’t owe anyone anything to which you’ve not agreed. You have the inalienable, unquestioned natural right to yourself -- and to the products of your labors. To protect those rights, you have the right to defend yourself. More importantly, you have the right, in a free society, to be free of burdensome, invasive legislation that infringes on your right to self-protection or otherwise unjustly deprives you of your property, your time, or your life.

For example, the most recent dark times for men and women of action -- the people who are reading The Martialist, for the most part -- were the eight years of the Clinton Presidency, eight years of abuse by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms punctuated by the Clintons' contempt for gun owners and anyone to the right of their political leftism. These were dark times that saw the burning to death of the Branch Davidians, for example -- people whose crimes certainly included being deluded religious nutjobs, but whose wrongs certainly did not merit an horrific death sentence. These were dark times that saw a young boy, whose mother died to free him from the socialist dictatorship of Cuba, stolen at gunpoint by jackbooted stormtroopers -- a boy stolen from an American home in an American city by black-clad federal ninja wielding submachineguns. (Thanks to President Clinton, Elian Gonzales was returned to the prison-state that is modern-day Cuba, where he is the property of the all-powerful government.)

These were dark times that saw a marked decrease in Federal Firearms Licenses, as the government did its best to harass legal gun dealers and put them out of business. These were dark times that saw what was, at the time, the largest tax increase in history, accompanied by ever-greater government control on the liberties, lives, and livelihoods of those living and working in the United States.

For today's armed and prepared citizens, the dark time remains the Orwellian thought policing of that which is considered politically correct, coupled with the increasing pacifism and passivism of American popular culture. Ours is a culture that would rather see a woman raped than allow her to carry a gun. Ours is a culture that would bring that woman up on charges if she did have a gun and used it to shoot that would-be rapist. Ours is a culture that, increasingly, equates weaponry and even martial arts training with vice, with the desire to do unprovoked violence to others.

The Centers for Disease Control, as politicized a public agency as ever one could want, treat firearms like a disease. Schoolchildren, increasingly brainwashed in government schools, are indoctrinated to view all use of force as evil -- sometimes even being asked to inform on their parents’ firearms ownership, if news accounts can be believed --and come home to their horrified parents spewing politically correct clichés and revisionist history with the wide-eyed innocence of true believers. They do all this while, all too often, failing miserably to understand everything from math and reading to simple weights and measures, to say nothing of mysteries like grammar.  The invasion of privacy begins at birth; new parents are frequently asked to answer the question, "Are there guns in the home?" when they fill out paperwork at a pediatrician's office for the first time.

The coming dark times have, on occasion, seemed more distant. In post-Clinton America, it seemed -- beginning with the Republican "take-over" of Congress during Clinton's time in office -- that the tide was turning. Americans who believe in being prepared, in living life actively and dynamically, in defending themselves and their families, breathed premature sighs of relief. These American anti-pacifists -- whom I call martialists -- even saw the expiration of the national "Assault Weapons Ban." (Lest you think that this is a polemic against a specific political party, it is not. Both Republicans and Democrats pose a threat to your liberty and have engaged in the war on self-defense. For example, Governor George Pataki, nominally a Republican, did more harm to legal gun ownership in New York State than the infamous Governor Mario Cuomo ever managed before him. Pataki signed into law what was, at the time, the strictest gun control in the United States.)

For a brief moment in time, the American future -- which seemed inexorably to be moving towards greater tyranny, greater statism, greater and more invasive government control, greater socialism -- seemed bright. Conservative radio hosts starting arrogantly proclaiming (while ignoring their own political functionaries’ infringements on personal liberty, not to mention their failures to secure national security and individual rights) that those on the political left simply couldn’t win elections, that their ideology had been rejected by the American people, that their party or parties were dying. It was, apparently, a good time to be a martialist in the United States. It was, many thought, a good time to be an armed and law-abiding American. It was, so many hoped, a good time to be a free woman, a free man -- a free citizen.

The future has gone dark.

In truth, the future always was dark. It is remarkably stupid, given the lessons of history, to rejoice when Republicans take power, for they have wrought as much damage to individual liberty as have their Democrat rivals. Substitute “right-wing” for Republicans and “left-wing” for Democrat in that sentence and the truth is only slightly different. While I do believe right and wrong exist -- and I believe ardently that what is true and morally correct is far more often characterized as “right wing” than as “left wing” -- the fact is that our society is moving inexorably towards totalitarian statism.  The adjectives applied to our political parties are sometimes only convenient shorthand, when what these politicans do in office is compared to what they promised before the votes were in.

Take, for example, the New London, CT  decision. the Supreme Court of the United States ruled -- legislating from the bench as it so often does -- that your government may take your property for almost any "public good," in what is surely the most gruesome abuse of Emminent Domain ever to be handed down by our robed masters. This is only the beginning. When your government can take anything you own for almost any reason, private property does not exist. When private property does not exist, de facto socialism has been implemented. The dark times are coming -- and they have always been coming.

When I first got the idea to write this editorial, the dust was just clearing from the 2005 off-year elections. At that time, in San Fancisco, all guns were banned. It was illegal to make guns, sell guns, or own guns. You couldn’t carry a gun in the city; you could not even have a gun in your home or your business. San Francisco was thus destined to join Chicago and Washington, DC, as one the most violent cities in the nation, torn by the lawlessness that is always the result of disarming law-abiding citizens.

The law was since challenged in court, but the passing of the San Francisco ban was not an isolated incident. Call it three years ago, and Republican ballot initiatives in California were roundly voted down. Left-leaning politicians, primarily Democrats, swept the most consequential of the off-year elections nationwide in the wake of the political scandals plaguing the second Bush administration. On the opposite coast, Hillary Clinton was the front-runner for her party's presidential nomination  -- and notoriously anti-gun Elliot Spitzer, then an Attorney General eager to sue firearm manufacturers out of existence, became Governor of New York State. The national and local news media trumpeted the "political nightmare" George Bush would face in 2006, with Democrats in control of Congress.

Since then, some individuals' political fortunes have changed, but the national trend has grown only worse.  Elliot Spitzer was forced to resign in disgrace after it was revealed that he had repeatedly purchased the services of a high-priced prostitution ring, the very sort of ring he had prosecuted while Attorney General.  His replacement is a blind man whose chief claim to fame is having repeatedly introduced legislation in New York that would require police to "shoot to wound" (and punish them if they failed to do so) -- a blind man who, in his first week in office, held a press conference to admit to a pattern of serial marital infidelity.  In the 2008 elections, the Democrats are poised to seize a super-majority in Congress, effectively removing any ability the Republican minority might have to prevent devastatingly leftist legislation from being signed into law.  The Democrat candidate for president of the United States, the racist and avowedly socialist Barack Hussein Obama, managed to defeat Hillary Clinton after a protracted battle for the nomination.  Now, with a double-digit lead over Republican candidate John McCain in some polls, Obama (whose voting record ranks him as the most radical, left-wing lawmaker in the Senate) will be sitting in the Oval Office ready to sign that legislation when it reaches his desk.

Among the legislation to which Americans can look forward are the so-called "Fairness Doctrine," which will drive conservative voices out of talk radio by making the endeavor too complicated and expensive to maintain.  We can look forward to sweeping gun control legislation, the Second Amendment be damned and the recent Supreme Court decision (affirming this individual right) notwithstanding.  We can look forward to much more invasive socialism, too; Obama has expressed his desire to "spread the wealth around," meaning he wishes to confiscate and redistribute the earnings of American workers.

The war in Iraq continues, without cessation.  The war in Afghanistan has been relegated to last-page news, but it, too, grinds on.  The American economy has collapsed utterly, bringing us to the brink of depression and certainly the depths of recession.  The mortgage and credit industries have fallen apart, and once pre-approved home-shoppers and even buyers of cars and other items cannot get loans.

Never a particularly strong president, George W. Bush has proven to be perhaps one of the worst in history.  He has made Jimmy Carter, once synonymous with failed US Presidency, look good by comparison.  He is certainly his party's worst enemy. He will leave office to walk into the pages of history an utter failure, leaving socio-political wreckage and economic anarchy in his wake.

As political conservatives have lost ground, so, too, have armed citizens lost ground. Say what you will about the other politics of the right wing in this country; complain, rightly, as much as you like about "theocracy" and other issues associated with the G.O.P. that are less than libertarian. For all the party's faults, it did one thing reasonably well, if at times with mediocrity: it stood up for firearms rights. Despite traitors like George Pataki and other Republican In Name Only (RINO) turncoats within the party, the Republicans' legitimately conservative members stood up for self-defense in the face of crime. They stood up for martialism in the face of popular culture's pacifist mantra of appeasement, self-destruction, and self-delusion.

Of course, they did this while society continued to close in around its members. They did this while, at times, aiding and abetting the very forces of “big government” they claimed to oppose. In a day and age when Congress and the President create and sign into being not tens, not scores, but hundreds of laws -- from a pool of bills created in the Senate and the House that numbers in the thousands -- it’s safe to say that all the really important and necessary laws (such as not murdering our neighbors or stealing their property) have been covered at some point in our more than two hundred year history. That means that with each of the thousands of possible laws your federal government tries to foist on you as an American citizen, another piece of your life is cordoned off, boxed in, and tied up.

There are now more laws on the books at the federal and state levels in the United States -- not counting the nearly limitless regulations imposed by various and sundry federal and state agencies and their faceless bureaucratic functionaries -- than any human being could possibly comprehend. No single person could keep in his or her head all of the laws he or she must follow in order to engage in any endeavor in his or her personal or business life. It simply isn’t possible. As the web of laws continues to tighten, the war on your freedom -- the war on you, your individuality, your right to self-defense -- continues apace. The war on freedom starts with the war on self-defense because a human being who can fight back is a human being who can oppose all other forms of government control, government intervention, and government theft.

As the coming dark times close in, it will become even more difficult for American martialists. Already under assault from every side in a culture that values victims over victors, defensively-minded critical thinkers are becoming ever more rare among Americans. Think about the other gun owners you know -- and among them, think of the hardcore "tactical" enthusiasts, the ones who post in online discussion sites devoted to self-defense, the ones who spend hundreds of dollars to train with people and at institutions like Gabe Suarez, Massad Ayoob, Gunsite, Thunder Ranch, MDTS, and Progressive F.o.R.C.E. Concepts, the ones who’ve studied or are studying martial arts and who do more than wander through life blissfully ignorant of life’s potential dangers. How many of them consider themselves, quite rightly, members of an increasingly shrinking minority? How many of them will tell you, quite honestly, that they must live in the “tactical closet” for fear that coworkers and family members will consider them paranoid, dangerous, or otherwise mentally "odd" (at best) if their beliefs about self-defense, weapons, and realistic martial arts training became known?

As bad as it has been, it's going to become much worse. Martialists -- martial artists, self-defense and combatives exponents, gun owners, survivalists, and others who believe in basic preparedness and objective reality over wishful thinking and utopian political correctness -- will become an increasingly persecuted minority. The fiction that seemed so far-fetched even during the Clinton Years will become chillingly relevant during Barack Hussein Obama's rule. Across this nation, martialists and like-minded armed citizens will reread Jerry Ahern's The Survivalist, The Freeman, and The Defender. They will pick up and read with shaking hands their copies of Unintended Consequences, Enemies Foreign and Domestic (and its sequels), and Out of the Gray Zone. They will realize with horror that there are classics of English-language literature predating these more contemporary offerings, classics that warned us of the coming dark times in voices and images that are only too clear in our 20/20 hindsight. The communist dystopia of Orwell’s Animal Farm will only too chillingly embody the attitudes of the men and women in power, those people who presume to write laws telling us what we may and may not do. The alarmingly prescient depiction of an oppressed citizenry under constant video surveillance by a manipulative and brutal government will no longer be confined to the pages of Orwell’s 1984. Martialists will delve into a cornucopia of libertarian short fiction, the most famous examples of which involve everything from the smuggling of illicit dairy products to costumed vigilantes waging ceaseless war against the well-oiled machines of restrictive, pitiless autocracy.  Repent, Harlequin -- for you are worth more than all of the giraffes.*

If all of this sounds far-fetched, if all of its sounds like alarmism and pessimism, if none of this seems likely to occur… well, congratulations. You’re in the majority of people who think it can’t happen to them. You remember the famous condemnation of apathy in the face of oppression, don’t you? It goes something like, “When they came for the Jews, I did nothing because I wasn't a Jew. When they came for the [place persecuted minority here] I did nothing because I wasn’t a member of that persecuted minority. When they came for me, there was nobody left to stop them.”\

When I was a young man first out on my own, I used to visit a local gun store in a neighboring county.  The shop was run by a married couple.  The husband was an old, grizzled, take-no-shit sort of fellow with a gigantic walrus mustache who wore his Smith and Wesson automatic openly on his hip.  He had a brass gatling gun chambered for .22 short sitting right on the counter, and a pair of boulders -- actual boulders -- sitting in front of the store.  According to the local lore, he'd once experienced a break-in involving a vehicle driven right through the front of his shop, so he'd set about making sure it couldn't ever happen again.  I learned a lot about guns and about life from that old man.  One exchange will always haunt me.

"If they pass a law banning guns," I admitted to him one day, "I guess I'd have to turn them in.  I mean, I can't fight the government.  I just got married.  I've got a wife to think about."

"That's fine," the old man sneered, "until they come for your wife.  What you gonna do then, boy?"

I thought about that for a long time... and I will always remember exactly what he was trying to tell me and to teach me. It is with that in mind that I do what I do to this day, in all of my writing projects.

The Martialist (and its online forum, Pax Baculum) is and are more than a means to discuss weaponry, chat with like-minded individuals, and entertain you with martial theory and application. They are an attempt to give you the inspiration, the strategies, and methods for living in, coping with, and preparing for a society that hates your right to self-defense. In some ways this is a self-help 'zine, for The Martialist gives you the means to cope -- mentally as well as physically -- with life as a persecuted minority. Specifically, it teaches you how to conduct yourself as an armed, prepared citizen in a community, state, and nation that despise you for being (or wanting to be) what you are. It teaches you what steps to take while you still can and while there are options available to you before the dark times close in. It enables you to build mental (and perhaps physical) fortifications against the onslaught of the politically correct, the passive, the power-hungry, and the pitiless.

The Martialist and Pax Baculum represent material that I have wanted to read, and failed to find, so many times. I have wanted to read it whenever I became depressed, despondent, or dispirited. I have wanted to read it whenever I contemplated planning for the future -- a future I was not sure I was happy about meeting. I have wanted to read it for comfort, for information, and for affirmation whenever I questioned just why I was different from so many of society’s apathetic, passive, and pacifist sheep.

The Martialist and Pax Baculum are the source material I have wanted to read whenever I was worried about the coming dark times. I gladly share this material with you.

We will meet the future together. >>