KUDOS & BRICKBATS

Editor's note: Kudos & Brickbats was written in response to Jim Beers following column "Reflections of a Nazi Tyranny".

By Jim Beers

My recent piece (Reflections of a Nazi Tyranny) has generated both kudos and some serious brickbats. As I answered one of the kudos and pondered what I might say to those that are so disturbed by what I wrote, the following combined response has come to mind.
To those that enjoyed the article, a reader on the West Coast asked, "I would appreciate any help or insight you may offer towards productive action we might pursue." Here was my response:
1. Form alliances to protect your rights and freedoms. Look to everyone from trappers, gun owners, and pet owners to ranchers being harmed by wolves and irrigators. Always remember that you are protecting the rights of you and your neighbors (in the national sense) and not making ideological judgments about whether or not people outside your community should be able to do this or that based on your personal preferences. As their rights go, so go yours.
2. Speak up in the family, at work, in professional groups and social settings about your concerns in ways that don't antagonize but explain your legitimate concerns in ways that all will consider.
3. Target those responsible for harming you (both declared enemies and those that Lenin referred to as "useful idiots") in ways intended to make them reconsider their actions. These arguments should be made public as much as possible to make as many folks as possible understand your issues and what needs to be done.
4. Regain control of faculties and curriculums in public schools and in State Universities.
5. Strongly, openly, and forthrightly oppose politicians that harm you. Make your reasons simple, public, and understandable.
6. Clean-up corrupt voting processes and corrupt voting administrators at all levels.
7. Explain rural living and private property issues and concerns at every opportunity and in every available media.
8. Treat State and Federal bureaucrats as self-serving individuals concerned with their own (NOT YOUR)) interests. Minimizing their numbers and power, like making politicians and judges always respect the Constitution, should be a never-ending task for each of us.
9. Always support and consider subsidiarity.
Subsidiarity holds that nothing should be done by a larger and more complex organization that can be done as well by a smaller and simpler organization. In other words, any activity that can be performed by a more decentralized entity should be. This principle is a bulwark of limited government and personal freedom.
Subsidiarity conflicts with the passion for centralization and bureaucracy characteristic of the Welfare State. A community of a higher order should not interfere in the internal life of a community of a lower order, depriving the latter of its functions, but rather should support it in case of need and help to coordinate it with the rest of society, always with a view to the common good. The principle of subsidiarity is opposed to all forms of collectivism.
When the principle of subsidiarity is ignored, governments often overstep their bounds in managing matters best handled on a more local or individual level. Typically this decreases economy, efficiency, liberty and the personal character of the social order.
I hope this helps. It would be good to sit and talk about this somewhere and sometime but for now, this would seem to be all I can jot down.
Good Luck, Jim Beers
Now to you reluctant readers that condemn what I wrote, particularly my references to the US government exhibiting traits in common with dictators like Stalin and Hitler, the following quotes by two of the better-known tyrannical killers of the last century are offered in response. I submit that these quotes are as relevant to US policies and leaders today as they were to the dictatorships, executions, gulags and shared misery that these two bums were imposing on Mother Russia in their day.
From Joseph Stalin:
"It is enough that the people know there was an election. The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything."
"If the opposition disarms, well and good. If it refuses to disarm, we shall disarm it ourselves."
"Education is a weapon whose effects depend on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed."
"Ideas are more powerful than guns. We would not let our enemy have guns, why should we let them have ideas?"
"Everyone imposes his own system as far as his army* can reach."
(*Note: Think domestically and substitute Geithner's IRS and Napolitano's Homeland Security and the President's promised Domestic Army made up of "organizers" like ACORN and their ilk for Stalin's "army".)
From Vladimir Lenin:
"The way to crush the bourgeoisie is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation."
[bour-geois (boor zhwä) Fr. n.1. a member of the middle class. 2. any person owning property.]
Lenin described those Western reporters and travelers who would endorse the Soviet Union and its policies in the West as "useful idiots of the West". In the United States today, the term is used to imply an ignorant person that is easily swayed (made 'useful') toward causes that are against their own interest, or what they would consider to be the greater good, were they better-educated.
And some people think those guys never had anything worthwhile to say! Some people grab their role models where they find them, just as I use relevant examples of disproved and deadly philosophies wherever I find them.
Jim