The Canadians are Coming!
The Canadians are Coming!
By L. Neil Smith
© Copyright JPFO. Inc
You'll recall that, a while ago, the President of the United States of America, George W. Bush, signed an agreement with Canadian leaders to permit each country to send troops to the other's aid in an emergency.
In short, the President authorized foreign soldiers to cross our border and push us around, exactly the same way various uniformed thugs did in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina provided them with an excuse.
The alert JPFO issued on this subject asked a rhetorical question: how would you like those foreign troops to come around smashing down your door to relieve you of the weapons that you -- along with every man, woman, and responsible child in the world -- have an unalienable individual, civil, Constitutional, and human right to obtain, own, and carry, openly or concealed, any time, any place, without asking anybody's permission? Only we didn't say "foreign troops". We said, "gun-hating Canadian troops" -- and we heard about that, loud and clear.
From Canadians.
One person wrote, "'[G]un hating Canadian troops'? Huh? You do us a huge disservice ... this agreement is completely harmless ... [Canadian Armed Forces] assistance must be formally requested by the appropriate government through an established chain ... I expect the lefties to over-react, as they have done, but I expect better of you .... [p]lease relax ... [w]e are not going to invade you and take away your guns ... [o]ur government hasn't even managed to do that here yet."
Another individual said, "Millions of Canadians own firearms. Legally owned handguns number in the millions ... Canadian troops are taking more than their share of casualties in Afghanistan, having been placed in Khandahar, the most dangerous part of the country ... Five Canadian[s] have been nominated for the Bronze Star. Canadian soldiers are among the most heroic in the world ... Clearly, just as in the US, it is a strong, vocal, unscrupulous tiny minority of Canadians who are 'gun hating' ... Would you be willing to offer some kind of retraction?
And a third correspondent offered this: "Actually, among most Canadian Armed Forces there is support for civilian firearms ownership. A high proportion of enlisted men come from rural or small town areas where owning firearms and hunting is still part of the culture. This has survived over 17 years of increasingly restrictive gun laws and a Main Stream Media holy war against civilian firearms ownership ... "
And that was pretty much typical of the mail we got.
First of all, thanks, Canada , but we don't really want or need your help with a couple of undeclared, unconstitutional, and illegal wars that were trumped up by "a strong, vocal, unscrupulous, tiny minority" of our very own. Nor with killing hundreds of thousands of civilians and destroying what was left of the world's most ancient civilization.
But more to the point, nobody who wrote to us reacted to the evil and unprecedented event -- inviting foreign troops onto American soil -- that motivated us to write the alert, just to three little words we chose when perhaps we should have chosen others. Maybe we should have said, "Troops taking orders from a gun-hating Canadian government, carrying water for a gun-hating American government". Would that have been better? No, because then we wouldn't have gotten any feedback at all.
Furthermore, it doesn't make a bit of practical difference, in the end. We know that lots and lots of Canadians own, enjoy, and depend on their guns. Some of them are even members of JPFO. We know that they've resisted government mandates from time to time to register their guns or turn them in. Good for you guys, and that's not meant sarcastically.
But history clearly shows that governments invariably create emergencies so they'll have a credible excuse to shorten your leash and mine. (In an ideal world, it would be illegal for any government employee to utter the word "emergency" or, for that matter, the word "children".) If you have any doubts on this score I urge you to get a copy of the JPFO video Innocents Betrayed and read Death by Gun Control.
And what happens when you put on a uniform and take a solemn oath to obey the orders of those who claim to be your superiors? Will you kick down the door of an 80-year-old veteran, and when he won't let you take his trusty Garand, smash his teeth in with your rifle butt? Of course you will, because that's what you've been told to do, and besides, everybody else is doing it. Later on, you can always say you were "just following orders", like the Nazi concentration camp guards did.
Don't tell us that you won't. We know too much about history and human nature. The Roman thug who shish-kebabbed Archimedes probably had a wife and kids he enjoyed taking to the Colosseum to see all the latest gladiators. He may have recited -- or even written -- poetry or knew a lot about wine. But when his moral turning-point arrived, he shoved eighteen inches of bronze gladius through the solar plexus of the world's greatest physicist, exactly as his centurion had told him to.
"I was just following orders."
And if you don't do it, you'll be shot in the back of the head, kicked aside, and somebody else -- most likely a mercenary from Blackwater -- will do it and get a lot better paid for it than you were.
This is what we've come to, my dear Canadian friends; every day the crouching spiders in our governments make it worse. No matter what government -- they've proven themselves to be all alike -- no matter what spiders. Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely. Trust me, the coming American election won't make even a microscopic particle of difference. If the other party returns to power, they'll just take whatever the previous party was doing -- or planning to do -- and pile on another layer of tyranny and oppression all their own, as the Nazis did with victim disarmament laws passed by the Weimar regime.
That's how it's always been.
It's how we got where we are now.
Sadly there are American troops who will follow evil orders, too. And what happens, my dear Canadian friends, when those American troops come for the guns your own government couldn't pry you loose from? If you survive the process, will you get to be in your own, separate, Canadian concentration camps, or will the trucks and cattle cars take you to the ones Halliburton is building in the American heartland for us? Is that what clinched this midnight backroom deal between our two governments?
Free concentration camps?
Admittedly that's less likely than the previous scenario with the old guy and his Garand; the whole reason for this exercise -- agreeing to come to each other's aid in an emergency -- is that the American Empire's legions are stretched a bit thin of late. Barely holding onto Iraq and Afghanistan, it longs to invade Iran and Syria. It already has military bases in about 150 other countries around the world. It has more civilian "security contractors" in Iraq than it has genuine troops.
Don't believe it? Go to Google, put "mercenaries"+"iraq"+"180,000" in the slot, and then stand back as your query gets 11,000 hits like this"
http://middleeast.about.com/od/iraq/a/me071031.htm
Even so, our government still doesn't have enough warm bodies -- dog-faced ground-pounders with mud on their boots and a stick in their hands -- to enforce his anti-Constitutional will at home. So what happens when those "contractors" have honed their "skills" and are finished Over There?
What will they be hired to do Over Here?
That's where you come in, too, my dear Canadian friends. While the American Empire busies itself overseas trying to occupy the world, you folks get to help occupy America, a nation that, in private hands, possesses -- by various estimates, from a low-ball guess made by the BATFE of 250,000,000 guns of all kinds, to an industry figure quoted by the late Jan Libourel of 750,000,000 firearms "of modern design in good working order" the wherewithal to make it a bloody and expensive undertaking.
America is a nation consisting of somewhere between 70 and 100 million gun owners (half the country's household are armed), of which around four million are politically active and aware. It is a nation whose gun owners boycotted and bankrupted Smith & Wesson when that company colluded with Waco Willie Clinton to obliterate their rights, and nearly did the same to K-Mart before the corporation wisely fired Rosie O'Donnell, its obnoxious hoplophobic spokeswoman. It is a nation that expends some two billion rounds every year, of .22 Long Rifle alone.
Don't misunderstand, we're ecstatic that some of you are gunfolks, too, my dear Canadian friends, and politically savvy ones, at that, it appears. But both of us (and Mexico, too, in the long run) are facing a bizarre threat of being pinned down, disarmed, and oppressed by foreign invaders -- each other! -- taking orders from our gun-hating governments.
Maybe we should all get together and figure out what to do about that.
What do you think?
A fifty-year veteran of the libertarian movement, L. Neil Smith is the Author of 33 books including The Probability Broach, Ceres, Sweeter Than Wine, And Down With Power: libertarian Policy In A Time Of Crisis. He is also the Publisher of The Libertarian Enterprise, now in its 17th year online.
Visit the Neil Smith archive on JPFO.
© Copyright Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership 2012.
