Recent
elections in Virginia have placed the Virginia government within arm's length
of widespread gun confiscation. Around eighty-four counties and
cities throughout the Commonwealth have pledged to ignore
and resist these measures. Some Virginia elected officials
have called for the National Guard to carry out such confiscation, which would
imply the arrest and disarmament of local officials who get in the
way. Governor Northam has stopped short of adopting such an idea,
but he will not rule it out. Additional stories indicate that the
government will disable internet and telephone access to affected areas during
the crackdown. The prison budget has
been increased in anticipation of gun-related arrests.
While the idea of soldiers
engaged in gun confiscation is not yet a reality, the proposal itself should
alarm every sane person in this country. Elected officials want to
send large numbers of uniformed soldiers in combat gear and armored vehicles
through residential streets in search of American citizens and their lawful
possessions. The
hyperbolic political debates of recent years notwithstanding, government
oppression has not yet reached the levels displayed by Stalin, Hitler, or Pol
Pot. But the Virginia gun confiscation discussion begins to come
close. The use of military tanks in residential streets for the
purpose of overwhelming law-abiding citizens (and local police) would equal the
oppression of Tiananmen Square or the 1968 Prague crackdown.
Democrat regimes have previously been willing to endure political
backlash from the temporary use of military force against
civilians. Waco and Elián González bear witness to this recent
history. The proposed Virginia gun confiscation would be far more
widespread, with more enduring consequences.
The real issue is how the citizens of Virginia and the rest of the
country should respond. It is safe to assume that other state
governments are watching to see how far they can go when mere constitutional
rights get in their way. Nearby governors might even contribute
their own troops to help Governor Northam. A proper response would
deter politically minded governors in other states and might even invite the
federal government to intervene to protect individual rights before the
Virginia crisis escalates. Widespread discussion of this response
now might even deter Northam from this military mobilization.
Any such military action would produce shocking imagery, but do
not expect the story to tell itself. The images and the facts will
be heavily censored — the same way that every other worthwhile story is
censored by the MSM. What few images do get through will be
overwhelmed by endless MSM commentary that blames law-abiding citizens for this
military intervention. The MSM will run stock footage from old school
shootings for comparison, thus reminding the viewers what the governor claims
to be fighting. They might even claim that the confiscations are
necessary to fight "global warming."
If you want the real story to reach America and the world, you
must film it and spread the story yourself. Do not rely on social media,
smartphones, or other internet-based communication — just in case the stories
about internet censorship turn out to be true.
For an example of the best response, we should look to Prague,
1968. The Soviet crackdown at that time involved tanks rumbling
through the streets of many Czechoslovakian cities. The Czech
citizen response is a model for at least a short-term response among the people
of Virginia now. When the Soviet tanks made their first appearance on
August 21, 1968, the head of a Prague film school immediately gathered his
students and distributed cameras and film. He told the students that
he did not know why there were tanks on the streets and that they might even be
witnessing the beginning of World War III. But he instructed them to
take as many pictures and movies as they could and see to it that the film got
out of the country to the rest of the world.
This use of citizen photography was very effective, as the record
it created generated a backlash that softened the crackdown and united the
citizens. The best description of these events appears in the 1988
movie The Unbearable Lightness of Being. If you have
any desire to understand the events that we may be about to experience, watch
this movie. It will help provide a model for action. But
do not simply watch the movie on Netflix. Get the DVD with the
director's commentary. This commentary tells the story of the
photographs: how the student photographers, during the chaos, would hand their
film to tourists on the sidewalks with the request that the tourists take the
completed film back to their home countries for development and
distribution. The viewer sees this strategy dramatized by the actors
in the movie. The strategy is not clear without the
commentary. The strategy worked, as the movie-makers later found
these images in countries all over the world. Museums, schools,
libraries, and media outlets throughout western Europe and North America ended
up with pieces of the story recorded on film. The world saw the
horror firsthand as a result of these student
photographers. The Unbearable Lightness movie
was made possible because of the contraband photographs and
footage. Clandestine audiences in Moscow eventually saw Unbearable
Lightness (with its contraband footage) in the final years of the
Cold War.
Today, we have an advantage that the people of Prague did not
have. We have advance warning. We can obtain cameras in
advance — cameras not dependent on the internet and that cannot be disabled
remotely by the government-compliant tech giants. We can plan now on
how to spirit the film and memory cards away. Virginia shares large
borders with neighboring states, each with many possible exits. Once
safely out of Virginia, the film or memory cards can be e-mailed to your entire
mailing list and shared on social media — and reshared repeatedly in the event
of tech-giant censorship.
We can plan our targets for photography now, including likely
locations for (1) troop movements, (2) arrests, and (3) the checkpoints and
long lines that inevitably accompany government crackdowns. We can
film local police as they are confronted and overwhelmed by the
military. Take and distribute many pictures. It takes volume
to make the news. It takes volume to make history. We can
tell this story our way instead of depending on the government-compliant
media.
But there are caveats. Do not expect the soldiers to
stand down or disobey orders. Do not shoot at
soldiers. You cannot win that way. The media are looking
for citizens to blame for escalating the violence. Regardless of
your political affiliation, you will be labeled an extremist who attacked
"the troops."
Virginia will not be a free state for some time. They
let felons vote just for the sake of maintaining socialist
control. The best that we can do now is take our lumps, film the
atrocities, and shame the rest of the country into avoiding this kind of
notoriety.
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/12/documenting_the_virginia_crackdown.html
