Bcc: xx Dear cj, This posting is relevant to our thread about reaching out to groups with whom "we" have serious disagreements, in an effort to overcome elite divide-and-conquer tactics. Incidentally - I've been receiving interesting communications from organizations in Australia and New Zealand in this regard, which I'll report on later. The gentleman below (xx) has been sending me messages describing the infamous "Year 2000" bug. He is a computer consultant helping financial institutions fix their software, and his professional estimate is that the millions of lines of code that drive the computer/chip/nerve-cells of our society (from bank accounts to 747s to VCRs) simply cannot all be fixed. He forsees unimaginable chaos. He went on to characterize this situation as an OPPORTUNITY for The People to take over the country - an enlightened and well-organized network of Patriot Cells will swoop from the hills into the vacuum, so to speak, and bring us a new age of decentralized society and the end of government control over our lives. Such an imaginary scenario is out of touch with reality on so many dimensions that one hardly knows where to begin to respond. I recall being in Kauai a couple years back, helping my parents clean up after the Iniki Hurricane. We were in a situation of mild chaos, with foodstores closed, refrigerators, lights and water not working, roofs blown away, etc. FEMA and troops came in with helicopters, water trucks, tents, tarps, humvees, MREs (Meals-Ready-to-Eat) and compensation claim-forms. They were welcomed like heroes; they served meals three times a day; and their Tent City became the friendly community center where people went down to see their friends and get cheered up from the daily travail. No one was thinking about the "evils of federal government" that month on that island - everyone was damn glad to see the boys in olive drab, and "Welcome GIs" signs went up everywhere. The lads carried anti-looting M16s the first couple days, but weapons were never seen after that. The point here is that crisis is a time when people are grateful for the organization that government represents. When infrastructures fail, nothing is more welcome than the sight of an army-truck convoy keeping the supplies coming in and contact open with the outside world (and reassurance that there IS an outside world). This is not a time when popular support would be available to armed insurrectionists. Not even close. My initial response to xx, below, was along different lines, looking at the phenomenon of militia/Patriot organizations, and considering what kind of plans the feds MUST have in place to deal with them. Obviously my argumentative stance toward xx can hardly be expected to make an ally of him in particular. My intention in the dialog is to understand his attitudes and what thinking is behind them, on the assumption that he is representative of others. I find his willingness to engage in constructive debate most educational. --- Let me just restate for the record that there is only one way out of our political mess, and that is MASSIVE GRASS-ROOTS PEACEFUL NON-SECRET POLITICAL ORGANIZATION, based on CROSS-CONSTITUENCY COALITION, and aimed at NOTHING LESS THAN A BOTTOM-UP DEMOCRATIC RENAISSANCE, and the ASSERTION OF POPULAR SOVEREIGNTY OVER NATIONAL ASSETS, ECONOMIC AFFAIRS, AND GOVERNMENT. It's not that this is my favorite "movement", or that it promises the brightest future, or that it is easiest to implement - it is simply the ONLY THING that can make any difference at all. Recycling Coors cans will not save the environment; Greenpeace (god love them) will not save the whale nor stop clearcutting; shopping at Oxfam will not end Third-World exploitation; and militias will most certainly not bring about a revolution. To pursue only narrow "solutions" is to be a sheep following one of the officially designated guide dogs. It makes us part of the problem, not part of the solution. Regards, rkm @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ To: xx From: •••@••.••• (Richard K. Moore) Subject: RE: pre-organized and cellular >Mac hardware and operating systems are a (qualified) okay. >However, custom and shrink-wrapped software, and their respective >data files could be susceptible to lapses committed by the >vendor/author. > Check them ALL! Dear xx, Thanks - it's a TINY BIT comforting to know my Mac MIGHT be safe, but what good will it do me when the power goes off, Internet goes down, etc? How do I test - just set the system clock ahead and try to open & create documents in each application? There is ONE "silver bullet" re this problem: the world might end by OTHER means FIRST (accidental engineered virus? financial collapse? massive plutonium spill?...) --- > A *PRE-ORGANIZED*, Militia/Patriot-style (cellular) >organization could effectively deploy, USAwide, at the instant of >drop of the Martial Law "boot." Even the US Military can't be >everywhere at once! They're scattered throughout the world on >UN/NATO missions. It's difficult to impose anything when resources >are so deployed. No? > > SMALL, anti-repressive, "cell units" could effectively _secure, >reinforce and maintain_ LOCAL operation of (off the top of my >head...): [list of infrastructure elements] Thank you for being so explicit about your strategizing on this issue. Your emphasis on "pre-organized" deserves all caps - I agree that would be essential for any kind of ordering force to exert itself in the way you imagine - otherwise you just have a lot of small groups with guns, who would find it difficult to communicate and ogranize themselves effectively after the fact, with infrastructures in chaos. Without pre-organization, factionalism would develop, which would lead to a more general climate of distrust and disunity, and ultimately chaos, warlord behavior, etc. Are we together on this, so far? But effective pre-organization of armed cells, on a scale which could make a difference, simply cannot be carried out without being heavily infiltrated by whatever intelligence services consider such matters to be within their purview (BATF? Army? FBI? all of the above and more?) I would, quite honestly, expect the leadership cadre itself to be most heavily infiltrated, but even if that weren't the case, the overall membership, siting, arms caches, and tactics (all the pre-organization stuff) would be known by the feds from the time the movement was far enough along to play any noticable role. Do you doubt this? After the Oklahoma bombing, I thought one of the most telling comments I heard was from a former FBI official, who in some public forum announced that the FBI has NO informants in the militia movement. If he had said there were SOME informants, but that they unfortunately hadn't heard of the bombing plans (perhaps because McVeigh was a lone wolf), then I might have believed him. But when he says there are NO informants, then he's clearly lying. What could possibly be of more direct interest to the FBI than groups of armed folks who openly say they oppose the federal government? For such groups to be TOTALLY ignored by FBI investigators is simply unthinkable. That would be like the CIA ignoring an Iraqi missile battery in Cuba - and I don't exaggerate. And any investigation would obviously employ informants as one of the standard methods of intelligence gathering. Hence he was making a big fib - why? You aren't one of these people who thinks FBI agents go around in blue suits and grey sedans are you? Those are the UNIFORMED troops, not the undercover ops. The comprehensive surveillance, if not the cooption, of the militia movement is a certainty, even already. ASSUME lines are tapped; ASSUME the radically Patriot geezer who runs the popular arms shop has a hidden video camera at the counter and in the parking lot. Do not think lack of current suppression implies lack of current attention. If push ever comes to shove - if a situation ever looms in which a militia network were about to go operational (undertake intiative by force) - then the military response would be preemptive and thourough. The intelligence gathered would be translated directly into a decisive strategic response. Waco was not the relevant military precedent to this scenario - Waco was a POLITICAL field-test, not a MILITARY one. Waco experimented with what kind of propaganda campaign gets what kind of public response when you incinerate a building full of innocent civilians. What was learned is that a very shallow cover story can be very successfully sold to almost everyone, and the rest can be dismissed as conspiracy buffs. As with all Madison-Avenue-style efforts, later media handling would learn from experience and be more effective next time around. Notice, for example, the progression of media-handling expertise in the sequence of invasions: Grenada, Panama, Iraq. It was like watching the incremental growth in Spielberg spectaculars, from hit to bigger hit. Which brings us to the relevant MILITARY precedent re/ the suppression of any militia network. What you would see is pretty much what you saw in Panama. A carefully orchestrated set of simultaneous surprise midnight raids of overwhelming force. We're not talking about BATF agents sneaking through the forest with M16s and 4x4's, we're talking about night-vision helicopter gunships, fighter-bombers, airborne battalions, the whole nine yards, all coming in with all guns blazing, and with target coordinates accurately programmed in. On television you'd be seeing reports of murdered federal agents, their widows and children, and mention of a limited, measured response - "no details yet available, for security reasons". Whole sections of states would be heavily occupied, under curfew, with all outgoing communications cut off, and people being systemtically rounded up. Much of the core membership, along with their caches, families, and close neighbors, would be vaporized in the first ten minutes of Operation Patriot Storm. What I'm describing is simply the publicly-known state-of-the-art of handling such situations. It's all been tested. Did you see "Panama Deception"? It's much more relevant than "Rules of Engagement". --- >Even the US Military can't be >>everywhere at once! They're scattered throughout the world on >>UN/NATO missions. It's difficult to impose anything when resources >>are so deployed. No? This is VERY naive - comparable to someone who says there IS NO Year-2000 problem. VERY FEW U.S. troops are involved in UN or NATO operations. The available forces are much greater than would be needed for this kind of domestic suppression - it's pretty much the old case of the fly vs the jackhammer. --- They will re-validate the necessary weapons & communications systems in time for 2000. That would in fact be their highest priority - ESPECIALLY if the year-2000 consequences continue to bode so ill as you describe. rkm @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ ~=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=~=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=~--~=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=~=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=~ Posted by Richard K. Moore - •••@••.••• - PO Box 26 Wexford, Ireland Browse (not FTP): ftp://ftp.iol.ie/users/rkmoore/cyberlib | (USA Citizen) * Non-commercial republication encouraged - Please include this sig * ~=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=~=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=~--~=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=~=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=~
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