Welcome to the Jungle

by Victor Milán
[email protected]

Exclusive to The Libertarian Enterprise

           Welcome to the Third World, folks.
           Welcome to the jungle.
           As Neil Smith points out, the US is already a police state. Now get ready for that foremost appurtenance of the true "Third World cesspool," as Danny deVito's character so eloquently put it in "Jewel of the Nile": tanks in the street.
           Tanks on your street.
           Hardly anybody's talking about it, but the Posse Comitatus Act is just about to get shot behind the ear. If - when - passed the new Defense Appropriations Bill will greatly expand circumstances in which the American military can be deployed within the United States. The reasons? The usual smoke'n'mirrors: drugs, terrorism, illegal immigration.
           Excuses. And flimsy ones. Ask the Seventh Day Adventists murdered by ATF agents gunning for glory at Mt. Carmel. F-Troop lied that it had information the Branch Davidians were running a meth lab, thereby triggering exemptions already sleazed into the Posse Comitatus Act, and allowing the Army's Delta Force to help train and equip (and possibly more) the ATF agents sent to attack the church. A good many members of the Special Forces community feel very strongly they were betrayed by their own brass on that one -- and they're right.
           Lying about something like a nonexistent meth lab is risky: it can be found, well, not to exist. But terrorists -- they can be anywhere. They can be anyone. Didn't you see "Arlington Road"?
           If we give our rulers a magic wand like "terrorism," they'll wave it till they sprain their wrists. And tanks will appear on our streets. Your street.
           This might be the most sinister political development in America in my lifetime. Perhaps it's the moment's fever making me write this: certainly there's plenty of competition, given that the Clinton Administration has already, with the slobberingly eager assistance of the "opposition" GOP, not just gutted the Bill of Rights, but quartered it, ground it, and packed it as sausage.
           But it's hard to get past this one. It makes us a Third World dictatorship with tanks in the street. It's just that simple. It's why the Founders always warned against a standing military. It is carte blanche for the military occupation of America, plain and simple.
           Of course, the bill is still being reviewed by a joint House/Senate committee. It isn't law yet. The civil-liberties-loving Democrats and big-government-hating Republicans might rise up together to smash it.
           Maybe the Tooth Fairy will veto it, too.
           Look out your window. Imagine a machine gun nest sandbagged on your corner. Imagine an Abrams tank buckling the pavement in front of your house. Imagine an Apache attack helicopter hovering above your neighbors' rooftop like some malignant insect. All bristling with horrific firepower, ready to unleash it at the least suspicion of "terrorist activity," with the brilliant, breathtaking, mathematical precision of ...
           ... a "smart-bomb" campaign that managed to trash everything in Yugoslavia except the Yugoslav army.
           So what'll be the first sign of terrorist intent the troops on your block will be ordered to root out? Why, naturally, ownership of guns. What's the first thing the US military has done in every one of its myriad interventions in the Nineties? Disarmed all the civilians it could catch -- including, disgracefully, the would-be Iraqi freedom fighters the US was urging to rise up to overthrow Saddam Hussein even as it deprived them of the means to do so (they rose anyway -- and were slaughtered).
           These things will happen. The tanks will appear before your front door, as they did the Branch Davidians'. The troops accompanying them will be told your guns are a threat, to themselves and the nation.
           Oh, and if you hate guns, and like Rosie and Rambo would welcome the military coming to take them from your neighbors: Maverick missiles and cluster bombs don't care if you're innocent. Ask the thousands of unarmed Serb and Albanian civilians Clinton's Kosovo terror-campaign killed. Ask the tens of thousands who fled to neighboring countries to escape the hell we created in humanitarianism's name. Your children will burn as readily as ours when an M202 FLASH rocket smashes "accidentally" through your picture window.
           Enjoy being "collateral damage."
           The tanks are getting ready to roll. Maybe the government will use Y2K as a pretext; maybe something else. But one morning they'll come.
           Please think long and deep about what you will do then.
           Or, better, before it happens.

Prometheus Award winner Victor Milán is hard at work on a novel of your future: The War For America.

Freedom can win.

EXCERPT:
Calif. Enacts Gun Bill
State Bans Assault Weapons
By Harry Mok
The Associated Press
San Francisco, July 20

As relatives of people slain by assault weapons watched, Gov. Gray Davis signed into law the nation's toughest ban on military-type guns and a measure to limit buyers to one handgun per month.

"Guns have a place in the theater of war, they have no place out on the streets," Davis said Monday during a ceremony six years after eight people were killed in a rampage at a San Francisco office building.

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OK, so next we should expect the governor to disarm all government officials?

No?

Why not?

Because criminals and loonies still have guns?

Then what was the point of the law?

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What we need now is an initiative to petition the Gov to take the first step and disarm (1) his personal protection unit, and (2) all other armed "law enforcement" and government officials!

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