Introduction
So the adage goes this way. You can vote your way into socialism, but you are going to have to shoot your way out. As I agree with this entirely, it follows that I need to set for myself two tasks to be accomplished before I look at the last paragraph of this post, put down the sandpaper, and call it quits.
My first task is to explain why socialism is essentially and inescapably bloody. Their rhetoric is all about “sharing,” and “contributions,” and “compassion,” and paying your “fair share,” but the outworking of such highfalutin zeal invariably involves a large number of corpses. It is a guided tour through history’s largest charnel house.
The second task is to show how the language of “shoot your way out” is not irresponsible recklessness on my part, with my sober qualifications thus forestalling the need for the FBI to pay me one of their little visits.
There Will Be Blood
There are two reasons why socialism results in violence. The first is the fairly obvious one, while the second takes a bit of thought to work through. The first concerns the violence that ensues during the establishment of socialism, and the second deals with the essential and permanent violence once the paradise of socialism is established and in place. The first recognizes that when the pillaging, rapine, and sharing are about to commence, the designated victims are frequently resistant. The second creates a new victim class out of some of those who had been in the forefront of the revolution.
But in either case, there will be blood. There will always be blood.
Those Pesky Kulaks
The kulaks were wealthy and industrious Russian peasants who were viciously persecuted by the communists of the former Soviet Union. They had larger farms, and were able to employ others to help work their land. They knew how to grow actual food, which obviously made them enemies of any socialist state. They also tended to generate wealth, which the ravenous state believed was an injustice simply crying out to be confiscated.
Socialism consists of a fundamental failure to distinguish the significant difference between meum and tuum. Mine and yours are esoteric concepts for the socialists, even though the two are easily distinguished by two-year-olds in a room full of toys. “I was here first” is one of Kipling’s copybook headings, and is simply assumed in commandments given to Moses on Mount Sinai. Just as the prohibition of adultery assumes the institution of marriage, so also the prohibition of theft assumes the institution of property.
Now obviously, in order to establish socialism in the first place, you need to go after the “haves,” and to do that effectively, you need to demonize them first. The haves, naturally, take this ill, and if they have the means to resist, they will do so. This makes them enemies of the golden future, as well as the future happiness of the have nots. In order to fund the establishment of socialism, confiscation is the name of the game. That is why conflict is the name of the game. That is the first place where things can get bloody.
But this is the violent aspect of socialism that is pretty obvious. It is especially obvious to those who have the kind of resources that are likely to be confiscated. They can see it coming.
When Things Don’t Work Out
Socialism is the kind of bad idea that can only be maintained in the teeth of the evidence, which means that it can only be sustained by Hoffer’s true believers. This is fairly easy to do for a time. In the process of establishing socialism, all the promises have to do with the future, which is just around the corner, and on top of everything else the innate thievery of the human heart enables the revolutionary to go on. But when the revolution succeeds, there eventually comes a time when the people start asking “when will the grand and glorious promises come to fruition? When will that happen?”
Because socialism is such a bad idea, it doesn’t work, and can’t work, and the promises never come to pass. When this starts to happen on the regular, and the failures start to pile up, ordinary people at the bottom become disillusioned. But even as the number of failures mount up, there will still remain some true believers at the top for a time. At this point, faith in the promised outcomes of socialism is, speaking frankly, a cult, and largely immune to evidence.
This is why it takes some time before the disillusionment works its way all the way up to the top. When it gets to that point, the top dogs are just maintaining a death grip on power out of sheer self-interest. In the final days of the Soviet Union, the only people who still believed in Marxism were in the English departments of land grant universities here in the States. A joke is told about the time that Brezhnev was showing his mother around a swanky new dacha he had obtained, and she was getting increasingly worried as the tour continued. He finally asked her what was wrong, and she said, “But Leonid, what if the communists come back?”
But prior to that point, the tenacity of the true believers when confronted with a wall of contrary outcomes is kind of admirable in a twisted kind of way. However, what this does is set up a kind of immovable object and irresistible force kind of conundrum. The irresistible force is the cult-like fervor of the true believer. This is the way. It has to be the way. All decent people know it to be the way.
The immovable object is the way the world actually is, and the way things actually have to work. The law of supply and demand is like the law of gravity, and not like speed limit laws. It is not possible to have it cost a dollar to make a loaf of bread, to make merchants sell loaves of bread for 75 cents, and still have bread. It might be more equitable for water to flow uphill, and the people’s parliament consequently decreed that it would henceforth be so, but lo. It is not so.
The absolute belief is that this socialist five-year-plan will work. The incontrovertible fact is that it did not work. These two facts have themselves a head-on collision, and there is only one possible conclusion.
There must be a traitor in the ranks. There has to be a saboteur. There was some form of wickedness that did this thing. All the party faithful start looking around the room, trying to identify who was the enemy of the people this time. When he is identified, the purge begins, and Emmanuel Goldstein is, um, ushered out of the room and excised.
As long as socialists are in power, and as long as socialism continues to be stupid, which is continually, there will have to be scapegoats. This is why there will always be blood.
Buy Guns and Ammo
So as the header says, buy guns and ammo. A friend might take me aside in order to say something like “urging people to buy guns and ammo is not the way to forfend any FBI visits.” One understands this point of view of course.
This anticipates the next section, but this kind of concern illustrates how mainstream gaslighting works, and how effective it has been. The received opinion is that the voicing of any kind of guns-n-ammo talk in light of the political situation is “extremist.” But look. In America, for every 100 million American citizens there is somewhere north of 120 million guns. And the popularity of gun ownership is not connected in any substantive way to deer hunting season, and is directly related to who just got elected or who might get elected. Buying guns because a commie might lock down the nomination is nowhere close to being an extreme position. As well call having an indoor toilet a “privileged” position. Only kulaks have indoor bathrooms.
As the meme goes, imagine going through the last four years and not being the slightest bit suspicious. Having just watched some of the FBI and Secret Service testimony before Congress, I can only conclude that we are either dealing with corruption at the highest levels or with stupidity at the highest levels. This does not rule out, of course, a possible combination of both. Either some high-ranking government officials were involved in trying to assassinate Donald Trump, or their fecklessness after the fact is designed to make everybody think that they were the key conspirators. In either case, one does not want a situation in which they control all the guns and ammo.
Live Not By Lies
The above analysis can strike some as pretty grim. Is there no other way? Must all of us stock up in preparation for shooting our way out? Well, you should stock up regardless, but there is something else you can do between now and November.
Did I mention that there will likely be a communist on the ballot this November? I say “likely” because the Democratic convention hasn’t happened yet, and between now and then Kamala might cackle over enough word salads to drive her poll numbers down into the crawl space. This could conceivably necessitate yet one more bum’s rush to protect democracy from the voters.
So yes, do all the normal election things. When I say there is something else we can do I was referring to something other than the obvious things like donating and volunteering and voting. Those are things you should have been doing anyway.
The one essential thing is that you must resolve to do, the thing that Christians must learn to start doing, is to contradict manifest lies. Has Oceania always been at war with Eastasia? We need to learn how to say really?
I trust that you are braced for Operation Gaslight. You are about to witness the power of propaganda, where the principalities of the media, by sheer dint of brazen and shameless lying, will try to convince millions of people that Kamala was never ever the border czar. That, my friend, is what we here at Fact Checkers Incorporated call “misinformation.” You know, fake news. What were you thinking?
In response to this, we need to make it our disciplined practice to contradict all manifest lies. Kill every cockroach you see, whether it is a big one or a little one or an in between one.
Contradict them in whatever manner you deem best. It might be the horse laugh, it could be a mere shake of the head, or it could be a long debate with your woke cousin. If you really want to make a statement, you could cancel your subscription to Christianity Today.