This week, there are two sets of haunting images on the web that should be instructive for a lot of people. The first set are images from the Russian invasion of Ukraine in the aftermath of Russian forces being driven out. Corpses, evidence of torture, execution, and rape of civilians. At the beginning of the war, Ukraine forces were able to repel a vastly superior invading force using small mobile arms but notably also, arming a high proportion of foot soldiers/citizens. That and their determination to defend their homeland turned the Russians away from a siege of their capital. If only even more of the civilians had been armed, perhaps the terror of Bucha and other towns would have gone differently.
You may not have seen many of the second set of images. In China, they’re having a Covid Omicron outbreak and have locked down major cities and forced millions into forced isolation. The videos I’ve seen of the internments are nothing short of science fiction dystopia. White hazmat suited units of officials accost tagged people and haul them away in thousands of busses to hundreds of thousands of prison units. Those that resist or escape are brutally beaten in the streets. Some, even children are isolated from their families. The prisoners are charged the equivalent of nearly a thousand dollars for the involuntary confinement. The whiteness of everything, the hazmat suites, the masks, the confinement units, is eerie, sterile, anonymous. It’s a living nightmare. People selected for imprisonment are notified on their cellphone by a QR code that turns from red to green. If two people are deemed to have been close to an infected person, one may be taken, the other may not. City streets are guarded by robots or even arial drones broadcasting orders to stay inside, don’t open windows or communicate with one another. Literally, hundreds of millions of people are cowed by a far smaller number of enforcers. There is no collective will to rebel, and hardly any means. A zero-Covid policy is the cause de jour for the oppression, but similar tactics and worse have been used to subdue a whole ethnic group, the Uighurs, and Xi and the CCP’s list of other similar causes for state enforcement is long. Many in China live in hell.
What lessons could we take away from these tragedies? As beleaguered as conditions are and will continue to be in Ukraine, it’s at least a partial success story. They were supposed to lose in a week or less. Ukraine took Western allies by surprise as well who then belatedly started to offer more substantial assistance. It’s hard to imagine in most liberal Western countries, freely handing out combat arms to on-the-spot men compelled to defend their own nation. The Western liberal squeamish phobia over firearms runs deep, having long forgotten or even renounced our own roots of freedom. While the longer war in Ukraine will be about artillery, advanced an even illegal weaponry, it’s the rifle that gave that war a fighting chance and might yet be the only last resort from local annihilation. The images from Bucha and other towns should be burned into our mind. Surrender and defeat are not the last word in an inhumane war. All too often, it is torture and mass graves.
In China a completely different scenario emerged. There are no rifles, thus there is no voice. There is only the state. Its mind boggling in a way. China could be considered the most advance industrial innovator in the world right now in that they can build a high-spec factories and deliver a product seemingly over night, but there are no rifles. Using the slow boiling frog analogy, the frog was fully cooked long ago. The eye of the state is everywhere, twenty-four hours a day. When the state decides to enact an oppressive zero-Covid lockdown or enslave a whole ethic group, there are none to help any group or territory that might resist. They are all slaves with lives of no meaning except by the consent of Xi and the CCP. It is the final product of an absolute autocracy. There are plenty of ways that the regime might ultimately fail [to be discussed in a separate piece], and history says it will happen soon, until then, China is a warning to any freedom loving people of how bad it may ultimately get.
These two examples could be compared and contrasted with the United States, even as embattled as we are on several fronts. There are in fact two America’s; there is an oppressed America where progressive liberalism seeks to and largely succeeds in forming a people that are as passive, disarmed, and almost as oppressed as the Chinese people that I described. There are corporate, tech, academic, and government leaders that openly admire China’s control model and are already incorporating some of the same technologies here. Progressive liberal strongholds even claim to love and want even more of their oppressed status.
On the other hand, free America is armed according to constitutional principle. There are presently about 393 million firearms owned by the citizens of the United States, one for every man woman and child with an additional 67 million left over.
If we would learn any one thing about oppression as experienced anywhere else in the world and in our own oppressed progressive liberal jurisdictions, it is this: in the absolute, the only thing guaranteeing any freedom anywhere in the world in this present age is a gun, the threat of a gun, the presence of a gun. The goal of mass ownership of firearms is not to use them in self-defense; it is to never HAVE to use them in self-defense because any aggressor would be a fool to come against you individually and us collectively.
There’s another hidden lesson in the examples I cited and its this: go back a year, or five or ten years; the conditions they face and the threats we face here even now were unimaginable. You cannot take any peace, prosperity, or freedom for granted. The Biden regime extremist are presently taking the United States toward the edge of a cliff. There is no guarantee that they will be stopped in time or that we will not hit a tipping point from which we can never recover. There are dozens of issues in which our domestic and international safety are quickly being sold out from under our feet. The threat and presence of a gun is our first line of defense and if we are ever over-run, it will be our last line of defense.