Attribute to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

I have been writing essays like this one for almost six decades. Most of them have been about the United States of America and her sometimes rocky relationship with the U.S. Constitution. When it comes to foreign policy—and strategic defense issues—I’m a lot like Matthew Quigley (remember him?). I don’t have much use for it, but that doesn’t mean I don’t know how to use it.

My subconscious mind is a fairly nifty thinker, too. In 1981, it accurately predicted the collapse of the Soviet Union. Just this morning I woke up with the sobering realization that, historically speaking, the vital question of the twenty-first century will be this: what will the rest of the world do when an aggressive and expansionist Communist China attempts to seize Australia?

Already, they’re illegally trying to claim the South China Sea for themselves. They’ve violated the agreement they signed onto about Hong Kong. They have always desperately wanted to obliterate Taiwan. They treat a million Uighur Muslims in concentration camps the way Nazi Germany treated Jews. And any time that anybody is at all critical of them—for example, Senators Marco Rubio, Josh Hawley, Tom Cotton, and Pat Toomey, and Representative Chris Smith—they respond with absurd threats. They continue to build the size and power of their navy.

The Trump Administration has caught numerous Chinese agents red-handed (no pun intended), infiltrating our universities, the Internet, and other institutions. It has also caught American academics and others shamefully pocketing communist money to betray their country. I can only imagine the similar encroachments being suffered by Australians, helpless to defend themselves politically, economically, and philosophically after decades of left-wing toffee-nosed governments.

I now understand exactly how Billy Mitchell and Homer Lea (look them up) felt when their observations led them to predict the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, years before it happened. There is a sense of dread “fitness” and inevitability about this—like when you finally discover that missing jigsaw puzzle-piece—that’s deeply disturbing. The only world leader with the cojones to stand up to the Chinese is Donald Trump; he’s building ships, too. On the other hand, if Joseph Biden is elected this November, they’ll be speaking Mandarin in Sydney within the decade—and probably in New York not long after that.

There is a way out. It’s important in this analysis to realize that China is unstable politically, and that the grasp of its senilocracy on the people’s throats grows weaker and more attenuated every day. The actions that the government has taken—increasingly desperate and hysterical—make it obvious to anyone with the eyes to see. There are two things the Free World can do to take advantage of China’s fragility.

The first is an idea that I originally read about in the 1950s in a short story by Arthur C. Clarke, author of 2001: A Space Odyssey. There’s a satisfying irony about using it against the Chinese communists,since Clarke himself was an ardent collectivist (among other nasty things) and wrote about it as a way that communists might bring Western Civilization to its knees. Building on Clarke’s original concept, imagine a tiny radio receiver, tuned only to a single frequency, with no moving parts, small enough to fit almost entirely into the human ear, and with the right coloration to be virtually invisible.

Now imagine a geostationary satellite standing 22,300 miles in space over China. The basic idea is like Radio Free Europe, but with significant differences. Instead of dull propaganda (I listened to some of those RFE and Voice of America broadcasts), there would be readings by celebrities like James Earl Jones and Dennis Haysbert from the works of Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, George Mason, and other Founding Fathers. Nineteenth century thinkers like Herbert Spencer, Auberon Herbert, Lysander Spooner, and Benjamin Tucker would be featured, as well, along with H.L Mencken, Ludwig von Mises, Rose Wilder Lane, Ayn Rand, Friedrich Hayeck, and Milton Friedman from the twentieth century.

Very importantly, these lessons in liberty would be interspersed by good, old-fashioned action-adventure radio drama, featuring the works of individualist scribblers like Robert A. Heinlein, H. Beam Piper, Poul Anderson, and little old me, Underdog. Jammed in there just to keep the comrades listening avidly, there would be what I like to think of as “weaponized pornography”, high-quality dramatic readings of Pauline Reage’s Story of O, among others. If it works in Chinese, it will work in Arabic or Farsi, as well.

The geostationary satellite would beam all these offerings down twenty-four hours a day to the millions of little radios that we have air-dropped or otherwise smuggled to the citizenry. Sailors on their brand-new ships would probably listen in, as well. The Chicoms would try their damnedest to outlaw them and maybe even shoot the satellite down, but 22,300 miles is a long way away, and battle-lasers can defeat missiles laboring at the peak of their climb. Such satellites are relatively cheap and replaceable, especially if they can prevent World War III, and we’d keep sending the Chinese those little radios.

That’s Idea #1. Idea #2 involves a World War II project most gun enthusiasts know about called the “FP-45 Liberator Pistol”. A million of the crude, stamped, single-shot firearms, unrifled and chambered for the .45 automatic pistol cartridge, were manufactured by the Guide Lamp Division of General Motors at a total cost of $2.10 apiece (that’s $31.55 today). The whole package contained a few spare cartridges, a wooden ejection rod, and a comic book illustration showing how to use it: sneak up on a Nazi soldier, blow his brains out, and steal his rifle.

You were supposed to throw the pistol away, but me, I would have kept it. You never know when you might need it. The Liberators are so scarce today that the bidding starts at $600, meaning that there are hundreds of thousands of the ugly little roscoes still tucked away in barns and attics in eastern Europe. Wikipedia, no bastion of liberty, claims that they were all rounded up and destroyed by Allied troops (which probably cost more than the guns did). If true, it means that I was right when I wrote in my first novel, The Probability Broach, that WWII was basically a conflict between competing brands of fascism.

What we need now is a new Liberator pistol for the twenty-first century (we could do it for $31.55)—a small plastic semi-automatic designed to shoot a cartridge like the communists’ 9mm Makarov and can be air-dropped by the millions, exactly like the little radios. The instructions should show a female using it. Racist, sexist China would disintegrate overnight, and civilized individuals could regain control of Persia. It might even be helpful in New York City, Chicago, Philadelphia, Minneapolis, Seattle, Portland, or Los Angeles.

If you like these ideas, by all means pass them on where it will do the most good. They might just end World War III before it starts, but first, we have to decide who we are.

As usual, where we go 1, we go all.