from: http://www.zolatimes.com/V4.36/the_day.html Click Here: <A HREF="http://www.zolatimes.com/V4.36/the_day.html">The Day We Shut Down the City, by Michael Gilso�</A> ----- The Day We Shut Down the City by Michael Gilson De Lemos >From Old to New Libertarian In 1971, during the anti-Franco student riots in Barcelona, a city if not the cradle then the trainer of the Old Libertarianism, I and the nascent New Libertarian group there, armed with Murray Rothbard and using the Spanish Army Manual on tactics, brought the city to a standstill for three days by having 5,000 students flush their toilets on the half hour while turning on their home lights and calling government services. This was not as hard to organize as one might think. One classroom of 40, contacting 5 or 6 students and having them contact others, became the equivalent of a Roman Legion in 3 rounds of phone calls. When people are ready to act, this is a useful fact to know, more precious than bullets, more powerful than any regulation against guns or anything else. Please understand, if we had created a small ruckus, I would have been content. But what did I know? As lights flicked and toilets flushed, placing whipsawing loads on electricity and water pressure, strange things happened as the government of Francisco Franco, at that time fairly lax, tried to assert authority . Water mains collapsed, fountains rose and fell before delighted onlookers, generators blew, false alarms arose over the city. Soon, fire and water service trucks clogged the streets, and telephone communication collapsed, with bureaucrats answering banks of mysteriously ringing phones to hear the little man who wasn't there. "It's the students!" people exclaimed, soon pouring out of barbershops and offices and clogging the already clogged Ramblas and the large Avenidas to see if they were missing anything. Teams of students laid down sequentially at multi-lane intersections in 5 minute relays, causing colossal traffic jams, and guns taken overnight, twelve each from from the military armories, were politely stacked up at the Plaza de Catalunya to show we were peaceful�because we wanted to be. Tanks found they could not enter the city. Police squads could not get past packs of students posing as tourists asking directions, various unions striking for numerous reasons to take advantage of the excitement, or even leave the stations as deliverymen cluttering the streets headed to the police barracks with meals phoned in by the students. Co-operative prostitutes, tired of their status, drew crowds by lying down in front of churches calling for an ambulance as they dramatically yelled their time had come and they saw Jesus. Old anarchist-Libertarian veterans murmured tearfully that if they had only done this, the great city might have successfully become an anarchist commune in the Civil War�and much more fun. Police arrived on day one at the papers to order them to report nothing, only to be told that the papers could print nothing as they awaited paper and ink. By day two the city was in many sections chaos. By day three the city was a festival, as the last student flushed his last toilet. The government announced it would accelerate plans for elections, restore weapon rights under the new Fuero or Law of Rights being debated, and slow down introduction of American schooling methods that were causing many students to be graded on a curve, which Spanish students viewed as a Germanic monstrosity. The well behaved and spectacular demonstration had the desired effect. And it conveyed something that any Latin, and many not Latin, could understand: that next time, we may not be so polite. In Spanish this is called "enviar un mensaje... para explicarlo." In English, that means, send them a message�to explain it to them. One comical sidelight was when the US Fleet, then in port, set up guards in confusion while sailors sneaked about trying to find a prostitute who had not gotten political. Thus at 16, I found myself heading a deputation to assure the Fleet that no violence was intended. "Say, aren't you American�what the hey are you doing, son?" asked the bemused Fleet official. "I believe I am projecting true American power, sir," I replied. But what did I know? Tank Photos I consider that colorful event, the Great Barcelona Student Strike, when I hear current debates on self-defense, or as I like to think of it, the right to opt-out of other people's stupidity, the right, not of assembly and association, but dis-assembly and non-association. It is often said that we might as well allow gun regulations, as modern government weapons are so fearsome. What can a revolver do against modern tanks and trained para-militaries? Isn't a person who keeps a reserved or defensive stance�keeping financial privacy, family secrets, refusing to give information�up to no good? It dismisses countercases as not relevant to advanced countries. This is not only factually problematic, it misunderstands what the Right of Defense as found in the US Constitution's 2nd Amendment is meant to highlight. Red Poland, the USSR and Romania were overthrown by a combination of Mass Civil Disobedience and arms, many imported or reconverted. Ultimately, government policies are irrelevant, and the people more and more find a way, though those that have not gotten the concept that rights are truly inalienable develop new schemes, like compulsive gamblers with visions of the man at Monte Carlo breaking the bank, at last. Poland allowed old long guns, Romania even prohibited type-writers, the USSR actually required gun training in automatic weapons of 12 year olds but locked the guns up in the teacher's office. A lot of good it all did when the people remembered they were people, not The People of ritual propaganda. Polish tanks found themselves confronted with farmer's homemade machine guns or angry women waving cleavers calling for their testicles� while rolling to a stop because someone had placed sugar in their gas tanks and plugged their barrels with diapers. Funny, you can find pictures everywhere of that poor fellow in Tien-An-Men Square, but not of Polish tank commanders being led away by angry housewives and leather jacketed students with ear-rings and zip guns. The communist government of Afghanistan seized all weapons yet was overthrown, Russian troops rolled in, were in turn killed with old guns and knives by assassins, and relieved of portable tank and plane destroying weapons. A sidenote is that the Red Counter Coup in USSR was partially stopped when Libertarians in Russia sabotaged the Red's internet /phone communications at a crucial moment, isolating them. You don't read about that in the New York Times or Scholastic Book Service for the schoolkids either. During these times a relic of the failed 1956 Hungarian anti-communist revolution came to successful use. Russian Minister Molotov had stated that individual weapons were useless against Russian tanks, then admittedly the most fearsome in the world. Hungarians put gasoline in beer bottles with a cloth wick and threw the disabling firebombs on the helpless tanks. This people's response to Leftist intellectual elitist sophistry was dubbed the "Molotov cocktail." The Libertarians Are Coming; and They Understand Guns Nearly all US- and Russia-supported Latin dictatorships were brought down similarly, by civil disobedience and by arms, including the Latin penchant for a tight group from nowhere assassinating truly annoying dictators like the Dominican Republic's Rafael Leonidas Trujillo. I know. My mom's earliest memory was of helping her dad�who had refused the Vice-Presidency of that country as being socially questionable for a lover of Liberty� load bullets to pick off Communist guerillas in 1913 who were invading the farm as is happening in disarmed Zimbabwe today. My aunt, the Hon. Lillian Monfort De Lemos, was made Trujillo's Minister without Portfolio in a move to gain some credibility for his diseased regime. Trujillo was a typical do-gooder who lost it when he came to power. Things were great for a few years, social services improved, he got the first civil rights laws for blacks and so forth, then the destruction of the last remnant of Dominican liberties began. In two decades the country was a nightmare, the former Pearl of the Americas and burial place of Columbus a Daliesque landscape of forfeitures, confiscations, draconian sentences, and continuous legislation regulating everything. Trujillo went clinically insane from his depredations. His troops would go on joy rides with visiting US Military shooting people at random for fun. He was praised by US intellectuals of both Left and Right, a fact forgotten today. After lengthy maneuvers to make sure the US did not get funny ideas on how nice a fellow that monster was�his hobbies included stewing his enemies for lunch in a way that would make Hannibal Lecter blanch� my aunt arranged his permanent retirement after seeing he had gone to confession (because we De Lemos from Roman times are nice guys, that's why). Generalissimo Trujillo, buddy of J. Edgar Hoover, whom the US State Department praised as a model Democrat, had disarmed the whole country and most of his military. He wanted to be sure. He traveled with armored vehicles and motorcycles. The CIA declared him impregnable, foreign presidents viewed his security as a model. He had a uniform that would make a doorman envious and beautiful boots. He carried a machine gun and kept three more in his bedroom. A lot of good his precautions did him, also. My aunt arranged for him to be assassinated with his bedroom machine guns. To send a message. He died shooting (to his credit) yelling "You jerks, where did you get the guns?" as his guards, after firing a few shots to show they had done their duty, made tracks. To this day, whenever I travel in Latin countries on LIO business, I am invariably invited by some official to come and tell the story first hand, including the De Lemos Military Academy of Argentina, the region's VMI. I assure them Libertarians are very pacific, just determined. And to ignore the paper: it's the Libertarians who are coming. They all know about the bedroom guns. It was explained to them. US scholars, who want to sell us on a different vision of things, never discuss them, though. They talk about the deaths of Trujillo, Allende and others as if these were acts of God or the Leftist equivalent, a shadowy capitalist corruption. Yet you cannot read the Classics without seeing it�perhaps one reason we are told not to read those macho-man Classics. The importance and inevitability of weapons in maintaining liberty was a hot topic among early philosophers. Aristotle stated flatly that who had the weapons made the rules. Plato's Republic begins with an argument on "Sword Control" and locking home weapons away, exactly similar to those of today. Such things have logically one result. While cities sue gun manufacturers for not tracking unregistered guns�which it is actually illegal for them to do if they tried�the dirty secret of the gun debate is that the major source of stolen weapons in the US is the military. Maybe from under the bed of some overpaid general's bedroom. And the other secret is this: Guns do not make the 2nd Amendment, people do. Knocked Down With a Feather It is not so much weapons as the spirit of spontaneous, non-authorized solidarity and personal self-reliance that governments fear. Wake up. If the 2nd Amendment protected the right to defend oneself with a feather, we would see denunciations of pigeons. Self-defense prohibitions or regulations in the US also include: non-sworn concealment of information, defensive materials such as vests, encryption, bows and arrows, and snickersnees, and endless regulations on peaceful demonstration, to the point that at recent convention demonstrations, police were ordered to mass arrest peaceful marchers and ignore looters. Florida recently prohibited mixed fighting in a poorly worded law. You may defend yourself in Miami with karate and judo, but not both at once, it seems. The intrusive divorce, custody, and domestic abuse laws are attacks on the first principle of defense, that your home is your castle, not a feed trough for those who cannot support themselves as they are too busy stealing. No, it is not mis-named Assault Weapons, but the will to do what is needed that petty tyrants, bullies, and coercive government fear. Such laws arise from hysteria and are cunningly employed to one purpose and arise from one motivation: to stupefy the spirit of other people. Thus a first world country with weapons control will not remain so�whether as first or empty of weapons�for long. The ingenuity of the people will die with the right to bear arms and its collateral rights, from lack of intellectual courage and a supporting atmosphere, and as a matter of practice, it will be the plaything of thugs within and without. True, some point to Europe. How short the memory of those who do. Today it is a picturesque playland that escaped by the hedge of its teeth submersion under Communist rule, and may yet still collapse into a Black Hole of socialist-fascist anonymity. Ten years before I was born, it was in a maelstrom of one of the most hideous Civil Wars in History as manic dictators, supported by envy-crazed majorities, liquidated unpopular minorities who believed that disarmament was protection. They too thought that that harbinger of dictatorship, the policeman, was their friend. They had forgotten the lessons of countries with no police but guns by the fireplace that had known peace. Fearing little criminals like myopic wall-flowers, they paved the way for street thugs with a vocabulary to don uniforms and hit the big time. And the thugs knew that friendly idealists would expect something, so they were often the first to go, as Hitler liquidated those who supported him and invading communist troops had as their standing order to immediately round up local communists and socialists, find a wall, and have them shot. A lot of good their gun regulations and schemes did them then here too. When Hitler attacked Britain, panicky persons raided museums of arquebuses and flintlocks with government approval in their gun-controlled paradise. My father, who led the Liberators at the first camp, Ohrdruf, and remained fast friends with Eisenhower after that terrible day when the worst rumors were confirmed, told me how the Nazis laughed at "how the stupid Jews" had called for gun control. Knowing their prisoners had become then so unfamiliar with guns, the guards reigned terror upon them deliberately striding about with unloaded weapons. Nazi documents he examined stated that had the Nazi government seen any resistance, its minions were under instructions to temporize, fall back, deny everything and make deals. And for third world countries, the reverse is true. If a country seeks to develop, it must arm itself , even if with feathers, find its spine, and walk with pride. Gandhi understood this. He, pacifist of pacifists, denounced all weapons control as an inhumane scam. He went further, saying that you have a moral obligation to be armed, so the morally weak and foolish are not tempted to big ideas and remind the rulers from the get-go who works for whom. Then, armed only with his diaper, a wog among many, he took the victorious and murderous British Empire to task, humbling it before the world, and, as Latins love to say, explained it to them. Sent a little well-behaved message. They Smile Yet Are Villains Gun control debates in the US have an oddly sissified quality, like a recruit afraid to develop because he might get a nose bleed while the Barbarians are not only past the gates, they preach the End of America from the college pulpits. We are, after a century of war and emergencies of one sort or the other, like a timid Ulysses returning to finding the suitors eating the seed corn while seducing Penelope, and turning away saying, "Well, it's her choice", and handing his weapons to those who do not care for him, whether in spirit, or practice. It is as if we do not want to complete the last battle, to curl up and suck our thumbs to lullabies, ten yards from the goal. For me there is a defining event. In my view in the US we have been a spineless country waiting for acquisition since November 22, 1963. At that time a flawed President who was yet trying to lower taxes, roll back regulations, solve foreign and domestic problems by calling for joint exploration of outer space and a new racial compact, and sought to abolish the CIA and diminish the corrupt FBI, was murdered in an obvious government job while his Army troops, supposed to protect him, had allowed themselves to be ordered to stand down. Trujillo's men showed more courage. The American military lost its honor by not resigning the next day for allowing itself to be the tool of treason. And we, citizens, lost our honor by not dismissing the military and returning to the Militia of our Forefathers, but instead turned it all into a TV show while the temper of our government was changed�and the slow government licensed media-orchestrated disarmament of our population began. Whatever Kennedy's faults, Libertarian-inspired investigator prosecutor Garrison was right when he said our country had become Hamlet, unwilling to acknowledge the bitter truth that we are the world's most advanced Third World Country; that like Hamlet, we turn our eyes away from our slain elected protectors who tried to end-run the establishment and, as Taylor Caldwell noted of Kennedy, like slain Cicero tried to recover a little freedom. Hamlets, waiting for permission to lead our less certain fellows and, in action, grow up�by doing what is right. Why are we surprised then, that we are treated like children by the spoiled brats we elect? Do we subconsciously hope that by electing questionable men, they will avert their eyes from our own sins and all will be well? When we let our lives become absurd, why not a society that is a theater of the absurd? Many things led up to the events in Barcelona that year. But one was symbolic to the students that they did not want to live in the future it seemed to represent, potentially enforced by the looming vessels of the NATO navy in the port. Or worse, by no one, because that was the way of the world. A popular play, "The Death of Socrates," was shut down by the government, allowed to re-open, and shut down again by the authorities for "attracting anarchist and Libertarian attitudes." The play was an almost verbatim transcription of Plato's Apology. This censorship was fantastic enough. But what unnerved everyone was that Plato (to the Franco-ite's credit) was required reading in High School. You had to read Socrates in High School, but go see the play and boy, the cops were taking you home to mom and dad. And it was amazing to hear the guidance counselors explain that there was a logic to this, it was actually helping prevent tyranny, just like the drug war. It was just too much. Many saw that government acted without sense for the simple reason it was indeed a senseless institution that thus attracted people of no sense to carry out its decrees. All you had to say was, "Socrates", and like a code word out came the bottles of wine and people started discussing how organize to give them�a message. I remember someone saying, "We have to flush this nonsense down the toilet!" and having an epiphany, and a wild plan was born. The Day The old ways will not be restored. Jefferson himself said that the US Constitution was defective, that true freedom would come with a new generation. When the time was ripe, sober men would strip the last sorry remnants of that antique institution of government forever away. That is why they don't teach the ins and outs of Jefferson in grade schools anymore, and most Americans are as innocent as morbidly sensitive virgins of his observation that weapons and riding far and wide, not artificial team ball games, are the best physical and moral education short of Philosophy. At the last Libertarian convention, and at the ISIL conference, I electrified many Libertarians by saying what to me is obvious. We are a minority, but a minority of the best. We must not tell ourselves we are a minority movement, and repeat the zeitgeist of self-limitation. Instead, recognize we are the leadership movement in the intellectual desert of this time. In the next two generations, we will quietly but firmly set the agendas for the entire world. If we are not thinking of leadership and preparing to do it in acts great and small, we are worse traitors to History then a thousand bedecked Trujillos or galardoned Hitlers. For in a world that has lost its vision except to rob each other, in an alleged free market, in more ingenious ways, for more contrived government programs�we know what we're supposed to be doing. While many mill in panic, we are taking our posts and creating, one person at a time, hope and stability. And when, on what I have come to call The Day, a veto-empowered Libertarian minority will bring government to a halt, or create a large independent Libertarian Cultural Area, it must be ready to deal with the tanks. If done well, the tanks will stay there, flowers in their barrels, and not Atlas, but the world , will shrug. And each gentle act of resistance reminds people that they are still people with courage. And many will repeat these words: government is an idea whose time has gone. Until The Day, as for the calls for more controls, particularly on weapons, they will continue until a few people realize that they are adults. Like a few Catalonian students scared out of their minds but clear in their minds in Barcelona , who organized and inspired the less certain in widening ripples, we can wake up to a great truth. Adulthood in Liberty , not infancy in Permission to Live, is the purpose and benefit of contractual society. This is difficult for some to absorb in this time of displaced guilt. We abort fetuses in millions, then demand life-imprisonment for parents who yell at juvenile delinquents. We hand our children over to strangers to teach them, and are obsessed with paederastic fantasies. We have abdicated moral responsibility for instructing our neighbors, and then demand life in prison for the misguided adolescent who steals candy. We sense our loss of intellectual self-control, and try to hide it with Spartan obsessions on drugs, fat, and pleasure. We elect politicians in national carnivals on the explicit promise that they will enact bizarre regulations on the unpopular minority, businessman, then call for their hides when bribes are offered. We preach self-responsibility as we bomb populations in countries whose names we cannot pronounce. We allow contradictory laws that expand the economy through inflation and deflate it through regulation and sneer at its victims for being bums. And when someone "goes postal" and shoots up random strangers, we blame the gun manufacturer, seller, designer, TV show, to relieve our guilt of the fact that we constantly conspire to jail our neighbor for smoking, producing, saying or thinking something that we self-righteously pronounce as offensive. And we watch in fascination soap operas, telenovelas and talk shows of pseudo-purging of guilts that hide deeper ones, as wives confess of their struggle against chocolate cake and husbands how they found happiness in leaving their gun club to wear their wives' pink lace panties. This, we are told, is normal and healthy, while un-normal and un-healthy are the ideas of those who seek to imbue us with delusions of freedom and individual rights. Do not be deceived by those who say that your rights were voted away by a majority, the paperwork is in order, the time of appeal has passed. A majority is not needed to stop this. Moral leadership by the minority that can clearly say a spade is a spade and a shovel a shovel, and those who will walk with them, is all that is required. This ridiculous debate on the undebatable�our rights�will continue until we wake up, say to each other what in the world are we doing, and, at the right moment get out in the streets and the colleges. There is many a bum who should be President, and many a college teacher who is a bum. That Day we will send to those who currently rule us in our vacuum of spine a message: We have found our spine. Guns? We don't need no stinking guns. The Day has come. Your long Masque of the Red Death fool's party�with our rights, our tax money, our control of our own lives, our most sensitive feelings and personal possessions, with the legacy of our heirs, with the heritage of our ancestors, with our freedom to belong, and our freedom of dis-assembly, of not to belong� is at an end. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Michael Gilson de Lemos ("MG") is on the Executive Committe of the US Libertarian Party, and also co-ordinates the Libertarian International Organization. Retired as a Fortune 100 management consultant, he is working on books on management and libertarian philosophy. His email address is mg4u@c ityisp.net. from The Laissez Faire City Times, Vol 4, No 36, September 4, 2000 Advertisement Click Image to Jump to Next Article Back to Home Page Quick Menu ----- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, All My Relations. Omnia Bona Bonis, Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. Roads End <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance�not soap-boxing�please! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'�with its many half-truths, mis- directions and outright frauds�is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRLgives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. 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