FROM MOUNTAIN MEDIA
EDITORS: THIS IS AN UPDATED VERSION OF VIN'S CLASSIC HOLIDAY COLUMN OF 1996
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE DATED MAY 28, 2001
THE LIBERTARIAN, By Vin Suprynowicz
Liberty, as Sen. Calhoun said, is easier to get than to keep
Memorial Day. The bugles blow, laughing children place flags on the
graves of the fallen, the surviving comrades of the silent dead squeeze
into too-tight uniforms (could they ever really have been so thin?) to
march a block or two beneath the flag.
Amid the picnics and the barbecues, on this first holiday of summer, who
can wonder that a peaceful land spares little more thought for those who
died to keep it free? Our carefree days, after all, are the very thing they
died to protect.
That, and our freedoms.
How safe, today, are the liberties for which so many generations of
Americans, in Mr. Lincoln's words, "gave the last full measure of
devotion"?
The first Americans to take up arms to protect American liberties were
the 70 militiamen who stood at Lexington on April 19, 1775, attempting to
block Lt. Gen. Thomas Gage from seizing an illegal stockpile of arms and
powder at nearby Concord.
The minutemen failed, at first. Eight died and 10 were wounded in the
first exchange of fire. Only after Gen. Gage's troops searched the nearby
village of Concord for hidden arms and turned back for Boston did the
colonists exact their revenge, picking off 250. Now the British knew they
had a problem.
Why were the colonists aroused? Parliament in February of 1775 had
declared Massachusetts to be in "open rebellion" -- a declaration that made
it legal for government troops to shoot troublesome rebels on sight --
precisely the kind of operating orders issued to federal agents at Ruby
Ridge in 1992, and at Waco in 1993.
Yet on May 10, 1996, the Boston Globe reported Massachusetts state
authorities had finally called on the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and
Firearms to help clear up an 11-year backlog of paperwork generated under a
Massachusetts law which now requires the registration of every firearm
purchased by a law-abiding citizen, and a five-year backlog in processing
permits "required to carry handguns, own rifles or purchase ammunition."
State legislators say they're worried police officers responding to calls
might be unaware which Massachusetts residents have been "stockpilig
arms."
As Justice Louis Brandeis wrote in Olmstead vs. the United States, "The
greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal,
well-meaning but without understanding."
How many times, on sultry Memorial Days, have we listened to the best
student in the class strive to remember Mr. Lincoln's words, without really
hearing in them our own call to action? (We leave uninspected for the
moment the irony that the tyrant Lincoln was personally responsible for the
slaughter, having launched a ruthless military re-conquest of the South
rather than allow those Americans the self-determination which Woodrow
Wilson would later so graciously bestow on any Balkan backwater willing to
hold a "plesbiscite"):
"It is for us, the living ... to be dedicated here to the unfinished work
which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced ... that we here
highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this
nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom; and that goernment
of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the
earth."
Armed government forces "can never be formidable to the liberties of the
people," Alexander Hamilton guaranteed in The Federalist No. 29, "while
there is a large body of citizens, little if at all inferior to them in
discipline and the use of arms, who stand ready to defend their rights and
those of their fellow citizens."
"To preserve liberty," wrote Richard Henry Lee of Virginia, who drafted
the Bill of Rights, "it is essential that the whole body of the people
always possess arms, and be taught alike, especially when young, how to use
them."
Most Americans believe the "freedom of religion" is still sacred, but the
IRS now yanks the tax exemptions of churches it finds too political.
Congress has recently passed a bill to regulate the Internet under the
guise of protecting children, motivation that its members apparently
believe gives them license to trash the First Amendment.
The Fourth Amendment right of the people to be secure ... against
unreasonable searches and seizures" has been eroded in the name of the War
on Drugs until police forces are now rewarded with a share of the booty if
they manage to seize the homes and planes of suspected criminals, even if
they're never charged with a crime.
In parts of Florida, it's reached the point where county cops just pull
over black motorists at random along Interstate 95, seize all their cash,
and send them on their way -- laughingly inviting them to return and ty to
"prove" they didn't intend to buy drugs, if they have some extra time and
money on their hands.
Only recently have the courts started to take hesitant steps to require
the compensation -- required by the Fifth Amendment -- of Americans whose
property is rendered worthless by regulation. Jaro Baranek, a
Czechoslovakian refugee, says he recognized from the old days what was
happening when he was forbidden to build a home on the $20,000 piece of
property he bought in Washington state. But while "The communists used to
take land without compensation, at least there you didn't have to pay
taxes. Here they take your land and you have to pay for it," Mr. Baranek
says.
The 10th Amendment, guaranteeing the government in Washington, D.C.,
would remain small, limited, and distant, has vanished with the buggy whip.
We now routinely dismiss from the "impartial juries" required under the
Sixth Amendment any juror who admits he might not enforce what he considers
to be an unjust law.
"What kind of government have you given us?" Mrs. Powel asked Mr.
Franklin as he emerged, at last, from the sweltering hall in Philadelphia.
"A republic," he said ... "if you can keep it."
Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the Las Vegas
Review-Journal. Subscribe to his monthly newsletter by sending $72 to
Privacy Alert, 1475 Terminal Way, Suite E for Easy, Reno, NV 89502 -- or
dialing 775-348-8591. His book, "Send in the Waco Killers: Essays on the
Freedom Movement, 1993-1998," is available at 1-800-244-2224 or via web
site www.thespiritof76.com/wacokillers.html
***
Vin Suprynowicz, vin@lvrj.com
"When great changes occur in history, when great principles are involved,
as a rule the majority are wrong. The minority are right." -- Eugene V.
Debs (1855-1926)
"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed -- and
thus clamorous to be led to safety -- by menacing it with an endless series
of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." -- H.L. Mencken
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