I don’t want anyone to read something sinister in what follows; it’s simply a thought exercise.
A couple of days ago I read this article:
Two FBI special agents were fatally shot Tuesday morning while serving a warrant in Sunrise, the agency confirmed, calling it “a very dark day for the FBI.”
The agents, it turns out, were serving said warrant on some scrote who is a child molester and who did the right thing by offing himself after whacking the two feds, thus saving us all the hassle of a trial. He’s not important to the story, so forget all about him.
The article’s headline is what caught my attention, because what it showed was just how easy it is to ambush law enforcement officers; and what it reminded me of is a story of a WWII British fighter pilot who, during the dark days of 1940 when the Nazis had overrun Western Europe and were seemingly poised to invade Britain as well, went home for a brief bit of leave/furlough. Sitting chatting with his father about the state of the world, he was surprised when his father asked him if he could get him a pistol or revolver. When the pilot asked why, his father simply said:
“So I can get my one.”
“One what?”
“German.”
The old man, who’d fought in WWI, explained that he was too old to join a military unit, but he was determined to “do his bit” for the war effort, and had decided that if he and thousands of others could all just kill a single German each, the task of occupying Britain would be impossible. The fact that he would almost certainly be killed in return didn’t bother him at all, because his death would be part of a greater good. “After all,” he concluded, “if Britain is going to ask its young men like you to sacrifice themselves in this war, why shouldn’t we all be prepared to make the same sacrifice? We’re all in this together, after all.”
What makes this subject so current is all the threats being oh-so cavalierly thrown our way by the Left, whether by loony Leftist politicians or by their equally-loony acolytes in the Press and academe, with talk of “deprogramming”, “universal gun confiscation” and the like — in other words, compelling those who disagree with their politics (the “seditionists” or “Trumpists”) to change their philosophy and/or behavior and be forced to show support for and comply with their ghastly policies and governance.
There sure is a lot of compulsion being talked about, isn’t there? But none of that is possible in the face of a mass of people who, like the pilot’s father, are prepared to “get their one”. That’s what Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was lamenting when he wrote these words:
What would things been like [in Russia] if during periods of mass arrests people had not simply sat there, paling with terror at every bang on the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but understood they had nothing to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people?
Nowadays, of course, there’s a problem with Solzhenitsyn’s proposition in that the modern State knows so much about people that a concerted effort at resistance — even by half a dozen people — might well be anticipated and probably doomed to failure. Efforts to create a “militia” or any kind of ur-Maquis French Resistance are going to be compromised by infiltration by law enforcement and subsequent destruction.
But if the above stories from Florida and WWII Britain tell us anything, it’s that properly-motivated individuals acting alone are quite capable of deadly resistance, even when facing the nigh-certain consequence of death for themselves.
It’s an interesting hypothesis, isn’t it?
