Mark of the Beast

“When your life and all you love are on the line”
-Verichip

It’s been hailed as the ultimate in personal identification and human tracking technology, and now it’s going mainstream. The VeriMed system, formerly known as the Verichip, is a passive RFID microchip measuring about the size of a grain of rice and is implantable under your skin, making it possible for health care providers and other parties to instantly access your medical history and other personally identifying information.

The chip itself doesn’t store a whole lot of information other than a personal identification number, much like a social security number. When scanned it connects directly to the Healthlink global network via the internet allowing doctors immediate retrieval of everything they need to know about you.

The systems are not only limited to human medical data storage, however, and have been used for years as location tracking for cattle and pets by Verichip’s former parent company Applied Digital Solutions.

Recently the UK prison system proposed that these machine-readable chips be implanted into prisoners to keep tabs on their whereabouts and help prevent escape:


Because of concerns about the security of existing tagging systems and prison overcrowding, the British Ministry of Justice is investigating the use of satellite and radio-wave technology to monitor criminals.

But, instead of being contained in bracelets worn around the ankle, the tiny chips would be surgically inserted under the skin of offenders in the community, to help enforce home curfews.

…

“All options are on the table, and this is one we would like to pursue.”

Source: NZ Herald

While reportedly plagued with security problems and health concerns, RFID chips are being rapidly implemented into society, often with the argument that that they will protect the safety of our loved ones, namely our children:


While interviewing Scott Silverman (Applied Digital CEO), Sean Hannity said on October 24, 2008: “[Parents are saying:] we can’t even allow our kids to play in the front yard. Is there anything – technologically speaking – that [parents] can do that can help the situation, like a kidnapping. Is there, for example, a microchip…we can use for our kids?” In the interview, Silverman describes a PLD, which is an acronym for “Personal Locating Device,” which is an RFID chip. This PLD is to be implanted into the body of the “child or someone you are interested in tracking.”

While Hannity initially presents the RFID’s use into the context of “protecting children from being kidnapped,” Silverman quickly admits the multi-function purpose of the RFID: “It is the first implantable microchip for humans that has multiple security, financial and healthcare applications.” Sean Hannity’s response: “I love this idea, Scott.” Security, financial, and healthcare: These are the vast categories of use which would encompass all of human life and activity in America.

Source: Right Side News

While VeriMed and its precursor the Verichip are reportedly designed for medical application, the system itself is already capable of wide ranging tracking implementation that includes personal location services. Coupled with the recent advances in federal surveillance technologies that include a massive newly built National Security Agency data center and tens of thousands of drones patrolling the skies of America, an implantable tracking chip would give the government unfettered access into the personal lives and daily goings on of every man, woman and child in the country.

As Mark Dice points out in the Resistance Manifesto, the ultimate goal of the chips is to replace “drivers licenses and cash by using these devices so that every person on the planet will not be able to buy or sell anything without one.”

I’ll Never Stick One of Those In My Body!

Revelations refers to it as the mark of the beast.


And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a MARK in their right hand, or in their foreheads: And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the MARK, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.
Revelation 13:16-18

To suggest that Americans would willingly accept such a “mark” under their skins for the purposes of health care or financial security may sound ridiculous, but it is not out of the realm of possibility.

Consider the current state of affairs in America and the world and we can see how easily global governing entities may move to force such a technology on the vast majority of the population.

There are hundreds of millions of people worldwide, including half of all American households, on some form of government assistance, be it medical insurance, welfare, food stamps, disability or retirement stipend. With all of the fraud rampant in the system as it exists today and the lack of funds to maintain it, it would only take one major crisis for the government to step in and pass a law that forces anyone receiving government benefits of any kind to be implanted with an RFID chip in order to continue receiving those services they can no longer live without.

Can’t happen? Heck, these days the government doesn’t even need to pass a law. The President can either mandate such an action through Executive Order (as he and his predecessors have done so many times before), or a government alphabet agency can simply instigate a new rule requiring it, such as the USDA’s recent call for exactly what is mentioned above – RFID tracking for those receiving food stamps.

Some would bow out of the system on personal moral or religious grounds, but millions would be left with no other choice but to concede their liberty.

Do you need to put food on the table to feed your family or gain access to that life saving medicine for your wife or child? Then you and your family had better have the chip, otherwise there will be no help coming to you.

It’s that simple, really.

With more Americans than ever before dependent on government redistribution of wealth and services to get by, acceptance by most people of this technology is not such a far off proposition, especially with the threat of cutting off access to those services which people have come to depend for survival.

Those who refuse the chip, of course, would soon be labeled unpatriotic domestic terrorists, added to no fly lists (because if you’re not chipped, you’re probably hiding something and are obviously dangerous), and we’d soon see FBI/DHS bulletins distributed to doctors, retailers and government bureaucrats about how to identify potentially threatening activities of non-chippers.

If you see an unchipped, say something. It’s your duty.

Regards,

Mac Slavo

Your Privacy is Yours

“I Lived. I Died. Now Mind Your Own Business.” That’s how I want my tombstone to read.

What do I have to hide? Everything! Which is to say, every piece of personal information someone or something demands to know is something I don’t want to tell because no one has the right to demand access to my life.

The right to privacy rests largely on a presumption of innocence. It assumes that — in the absence of evidence of wrongdoing — an individual has a right to shut his front door and tell other people (including government) to mind their own business.

Today, this assumption has been twisted inside out so that a desire for privacy means you have something to hide. You are expected to prove your innocence by revealing every financial transaction, by filling in pages of government paperwork, by allowing state agents to frisk your person and property when you board a plane or enter a public building. These invasions rest upon the presumption of guilt.

Privacy is also is the single most effective means of preserving freedom against an encroaching state. The act of closing your front door expresses the key distinction between the private and public spheres.

The private sphere consists of the areas of life over which you, as a peaceful human being, exert absolute authority and into which the government or any other uninvited party cannot properly intrude. Traditionally, the home or family is viewed as the private sphere. But it also includes the food you eat, your sex life, the books you read, your opinions of life.

The public sphere consists of the civic duties you owe to others. In a free society, these duties include paying your bills, respecting the equal rights of all and living up to contracts. In the current society, a set of designed duties require you to pay ruinous taxes, to restrain your own rights and to abide by a mushrooming mass of laws.

The Austrian school economist Murray N. Rothbard expressed what he considered to be the central political issue confronting mankind when he wrote, “My own basic perspective on the history of man… is to place central importance on the great conflict that is eternally waged between liberty and power.”

Historically, privacy has stood on the side of liberty as a bulwark between the individual and government, between freedom and social control.

Imagine a world in which you do not report your income; there are no government forms or census data; registration of everything from birth to marriage is optional; no permission is needed to open a business or travel abroad. Imagine a world in which personal data are private.

How could the tax man collect money without knowing your income or address? How could the military draft your children into war without knowing where to find them at home or at school? How could the censor punish your reading habits when no record exists of which books you buy? The machinery of the state is paralyzed without information about who you are.

Information has always empowered the state. On his infamous 1864 march through Georgia, Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman used county maps with information about livestock and crops in order to loot and pillage more efficiently.

After the 1942 bombing of Pearl Harbor, the American military used census data to locate Japanese-Americans and herd them into detention camps. The IRS has routinely compared the names on foreign government lists with those on its own in order to locate “hidden” assets.

The difference today is the higher efficiency of data collection, due to technology. Most people’s employment, financial, medical, military, educational, housing, marital, telephone, travel, Internet, automobile and family records are now stored or easily accessed by government.

It is no coincidence that statist governments are renowned for wiretapping, surveillance, identification papers, informants, secret police and censorship. The control of information throughout society is akin to the control of blood flow through a body; it is vital to functioning.

Today’s governments are intent on completely identifying everyone, as a miser takes inventory of his possessions. This has always been the case. In 1889, in a speech before the International Penitentiary Congress, France’s prison director, Louis Herbette, advocated fingerprinting in order “to fix the human personality, to give to each human being an identity, an individuality that can be depended upon with certainty, lasting, unchangeable, always recognizable and easily adduced…”

The difference today is technology… and the active cooperation of businesses like Facebook and Google, who curry government favor by catering to all requests for information. Technology converts the collection of data into an art form.

At this point, it is useful to take a “time out” to assert that the collection of data and issuance of documents can be a valid function of a free society. Quite apart from facilitating social control, identifying (ID-ing) people can function as a free-market mechanism of authentication. It authenticates those who should have access to bank accounts, property titles or inheritance; it certifies people as being skilled — for example, as a thoracic surgeon. But this authentication does not involve exploring their bank accounts, sexual preferences, reading habits, travel plans and political beliefs.

In asserting its superior claim over any free-market function of identifying people, the state does not outlaw competition; the state merely renders the free-market function irrelevant. The state makes its ID a de facto condition for functioning well in daily life.
The state and its documentation have become the only way for a person to “prove” his or her identity and, thus, to access the basic rights and “niceties” of life. The “unidentified” human being cannot board a plane or train, nor drive a car. He cannot open a bank account, cash a check, take a job, attend school, get married, rent a video (let alone an apartment) or buy a house. The unidentified person is a second-class citizen to whom the government closes off much of life and almost all opportunity to advance through labor, education or entrepreneurship.

Meanwhile, those who are “identified” by the state are vulnerable to having their bank accounts frozen, their access to health care denied, credit cards canceled, wages garnished, records subpoenaed. To become known to the state is to become vulnerable to a myriad of invasions that come from the government knowing exactly where and how to find you.

Those who resist being inventoried present a problem for the state. The first line of statist attack is to accuse them of being “suspicious” — that is, of having criminal or shameful reasons for refusing to answer questions.

“If you have nothing to hide…” the remark begins; it always ends with a demand for compliance. Invoking privacy has gone from being the exercise of a right to an indication of guilt.

This is a sleight of hand by which privacy is redefined as “concealment” or “secrecy”; of course, it is neither. It is merely a request for the personal to remain personal. As well as enabling freedom, privacy is part of a healthy, self-reflecting life.

Consider one example: Since childhood, I’ve kept a diary into which I pour my hopes, my doubts, my disappointments and desires. When I read them, I can still viscerally feel who I was at 10 years old, and this makes me understand who I am today. I don’t share these diaries, not because I am ashamed of them, but because they are personal. They are for me alone, for my eyes, my reflection — and not for anyone else.

Everyone has areas of utter privacy to protect. Some people wear lockets containing photos of deceased relatives; others daydream about a forbidden love; still other people lock the door while luxuriating in a hot bubble bath; or perhaps, they write a love letter that is meant for one other set of eyes only. These acts are a line drawn between the private and public sphere; they constitute a boundary over which no other human being can rightfully cross without invitation.

If a neighbor took it upon himself to read letters in your mailbox or copy down the details of deposits in a bankbook he “encountered” in your desk drawer, you would feel violated and enraged by the invasion. What is wrong for your neighbor to do is also wrong for a government agent to do, because there is only one standard of morality. Theft is theft; invasion is invasion. You have the right to slam the door on the face of anyone who says differently. A peaceful human being owes no debt to any other person.

Hold the state up to the same standard as your neighbors… because there are no double standards of right and wrong. Privacy is a right, not an admission of guilt. Your identity properly belongs to you… not to the state.

Regards,

Wendy McElroy

The State at Human Scale

Aristotle taught that “To the size of states there is a limit, as there is to other things, plants, animals, implements, for none of these things retain their natural power when they are too large or too small.”1 In this paper I want to explore Hume’s views on the proper size and scale of political order. Size and scale are not the same. The scale of a thing is the size appropriate to its function. Scale for human things is the human body and its capacities. Classical architects have long explored the relation between the human frame, its sensory capacities, and the proper size of doors, windows, courtyards, gardens, the width of streets, plazas, and so forth. What is the proper size and scale of political order?

The answer depends on what we think the function of political order is. Plato and Aristotle thought the function of political association is to achieve human excellence. Since virtue is acquired through emulation of character, face to face knowledge is required of political participants, and this places a limit on the size of the polity. Aristotle said it should contain “the largest number which suffices for the conduct of life, and can be taken in at a single view.”

Ancient Greek civilization was the work of some one thousand five hundred small, independent republics of which Athens, one of the largest, had a population of around one hundred sixty thousand. Notwithstanding their small size these Greek polities created a brilliant civilization from which we still draw inspiration. The republic of Rousseau’s Social Contract was modeled on Geneva, which contained around twenty-five thousand people. A wide range of scholars from different disciplines who have studied the matter have concluded that every need of high culture, along with a high standard of living, can be achieved in a modern city state of between fifty and two hundred thousand.

Hume inherited both the Aristotelean insistence on human scale, virtue, balance, and propriety in political things and an anti-Aristotelean Europe of Hobbesian individuals (and states), each disposed to pursue its power and glory with as few limits as possible. His political philosophy may be viewed as an effort to think through and make the best of this tension. Let us begin with the Aristotelean side of Hume’s thought. Throughout his career Hume gives primacy to the republican tradition. Civilization, he says, began in small barbarous republics which first cultivated the rule of law. This in turn created a measure of stability which encouraged curiosity and the development of the arts and sciences. Monarchies can also become civilized, but they owe their progress to what was first learned from human scale republics. So it becomes a contingent matter as to whether a particular republic or a monarchy is superior. Nevertheless, Hume remained committed to the republican form as, on balance, the most desirable for human beings.

And size alone tends to foster a sense of equality: “All small states naturally produce equality of fortune, because they afford no opportunities of great encrease; but small commonwealths much more, by that division of power and authority which is essential to them” (E, 401). All things being equal, then, the ideal polity for Hume would be a polity of human scale: “Where each man had his little house and field to himself, and each county had its capital, free and independent; what a happy situation of mankind!” (ibid.). Human scale polities also provide the material conditions for moral virtue. “A man,” Hume says, “who loves only himself, without regard to friendship and desert, merits the severest blame; and a man, who is only susceptible of friendship, without public spirit, or a regard to the community, is deficient in the most material part of virtue” (E, 26-27). Virtue is known and practiced through emulation: “A noble emulation is the source of every excellence” (E, 135). And emulation requires a polity of human scale. Again Hume writes: “A small commonwealth is the happiest government in the world within itself, because every thing lies under the eye of the rulers,” and the actions of the rulers lie under the eye of the citizens (E, 525). Human scale polities are essential to Hume’s conception of the material conditions for the virtues of rational inquiry. The ideal condition for learning, he says, is “division into small states” connected by trade and common interests (E, 120). Competition sharpens the wits of men, while national loyalty and jealousy hinder the spread of popular error from one state to another. Hume presents, as the best exemplification of this principle, the civilization of ancient Greece, which was composed of over a thousand human scale polities in competition with each other, while sharing a common language and broad cultural interests. Hume contrasts this civilization with medieval Europe where the Church, which he describes as “being really one large state within itself”, dominated learning and extinguished all competition (E, 121). By the eighteenth century, this vast centralized regime had been overthrown, and Europe, Hume says, “is at present a copy at large, of what GREECE was formerly a pattern in miniature” (ibid.). As an instance, Hume observes how French national enthusiasm for Cartesian philosophy hid its weaknesses, which were uncovered by jealous foreigners. Likewise, Newton’s philosophy was refined and made perfect by the necessity of responding to foreign critics. Hume’s view of eighteenth century European civilization, as the Greek model writ large, gives rise to two problems. First, the units of European civilization are monarchies, not republics, and, secondly, they are astronomically larger than the human scale republics of the Greeks. In a word, the political units of European civilization appear to be out of scale and of the wrong form. Now on first glance this might not seem a serious difference. For Hume taught that a civilized monarchy could be superior to a republic. He also held that the moderns have cultivated a deeper and more extensive sentiment of humanity and have a better understanding of the rule of law and liberty than did the ancient republics. Consequently, both modern monarchies and republics are generally superior to their ancient counterparts. So a civilization of modern monarchies might not be a bad thing (E, 94-95). Nevertheless, on balance Hume remains a republican, and much of his writing is an effort to theorize a place for the republican values of human scale in a Europe ruled by out of scale centralized monarchies.

The sort of monarchy that must be challenged is what was called “absolute monarchy.” Hume judged in 1752 that this kind of monarchy was only three generations old. What distinguished “absolute” monarchy from mere monarchy was the extraordinary efficiency with which it could centralize power by hollowing out smaller political units. Prior to the advent of absolute monarchy in the seventeenth century, Europe was composed of thousands of independent and quasi-independent political societies. There were small kingdoms, principalities, dukedoms, lesser noble estates, bishoprics, free cities, and leagues of free cities. As late at the seventeenth century the region known as Germany was made up of some 230 states and some 50 free cities. But gradually, over a period of four centuries, hundreds of smaller political societies were crushed into larger and fewer monarchies. By the end of the middle ages, monarchs had defeated the Church, the independent towns, and many small principalities. In Hume’s time monarchs were engaged in a contest to consolidate the nobility which gave rise in Britain to the Court and Country parties. Philosophical theories would be put forth to legitimate this new regime of centralization, notably by Jean Bodin in The Six Books of the Republic (1576) and by Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan (1651).The central idea in both Bodin and Hobbes is the concept of “sovereignty,” a notion taken from theological discourse and applied to the centralized states being built by monarchs. According to this theory there must be lodged somewhere an office having legally irresistible, infallible, and indivisible authority. This office, by whatever name it might be called, is what is meant by sovereign power. A polity of this kind is incompatible with the republican tradition, which demands divided and competing social authorities down to the human scale. Just as Plato removed poets from his republic, so Hobbes removed republican literature from the Leviathan.

In the essay “Of Some Remarkable Customs,” Hume went out of his way to refute this modern theory of sovereignty, according to which “imperium in imperio” is impossible. That is, there cannot be in the same political society two legislative bodies, both of which have full authority to make laws and neither of which is ranked above the other. Hume presents as a counter example the comita centuriata and the comita tributa in the Roman republic. Both had authority to make law and to nullify the laws of the other. Not only did this system of divided authority not lead to stalemate and the annihilation of government, it produced one of the most active, energetic, and illustrious republics in history (E, 370-73). Hume flatly rejected the modern theory of sovereignty. Not only can authority be divided, he defined what he called “free government” as one with divided authority: “All free governments must consist of two councils, a lesser and a greater...” (E, 522). And again: “The government, which, in common appellation, receives the appellation of free, is that which admits of a partition of power among several members, whose united authority is no less, or is commonly greater than that of any monarch; but who... must act by general and equal laws, that are previously known to all the members and to all their subjects” (E, 41).


In a monarchy that claims to be a “free government,” power will be divided among different social authorities and shared with the people. Each part of the constitution, Hume says, “must have a right of self-defence, and of maintaining its antient bounds against the encroachment of every other authority.” It follows that, in free governments, cases “wherein resistance is lawful, must occur much oftener, and greater indulgence be given to the subjects to defend themselves by force of arms, than in arbitrary governments.” So what Hobbes considered a disposition to anarchy, Hume considerslawful resistance.7 Hume supported secession of the American colonies as early as 1768, before most Americans did. In October, 1775, he wrote: “I am an American in my Principles, and wish we would let them alone to govern or misgovern themselves as they think proper.”8 “Friends of America” such as Edmund Burke and William Pitt sought reconciliation within the empire. Hume appears to be the only major British thinker at the time to have supported outright secession of the colonies. Indeed, as we will see, Hume was opposed to the very idea of a British empire. I have explored Hume’s reasons for supporting American secession elsewhere.{footnote Donald W. Livingston, Philosophical Melancholy and Delirium, Hume’s Pathology of Philosophy(Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998). See especially chapters 9-12. The vast, centralized administration, first created by seventeenth century absolute monarchs to control and exploit the small polities coerced into them, gradually developed an esprit de corps of its own, at the expense of society and eventually of the king himself. One instrument of exploitation that especially worried Hume was the invention of public credit or the policy of mortgaging future revenues. This device had a number of pernicious effects. First, “national debts cause a mighty confluence of people and riches to the capital, by the great sums, levied in the provinces to pay the interest” and “by the advantages in trade ... which they give the merchants in the capital above the rest of the kingdom” (E, 354). Second, a state with mortgaged revenues would have to create new ones; these would fall on consumption leading to “vexation and ruin of the poor” (E, 356). They would next fall on the proprietors of land, making life more difficult for their tenants. Third, with the collapse of the landed gentry and nobility, a traditional order rooted in land and place would collapse in favor of rule by a new rootless class of stockjobbers and paper money men. “These men,” Hume writes, having “no connections with the state...can enjoy their revenue in any part of the globe in which they chuse to reside, who will naturally bury themselves in the capital or great cities, and who will sink into the lethargy of a stupid and pampered luxury, without spirit, ambition, or enjoyment. Adieu to all ideas of nobility, gentry, and family” (E, 353). Hume’s criticism of public credit mirrors exactly Jefferson’s criticism of the public debt system proposed by Alexander Hamilton.9 Since the national stocks are constantly fluctuating and can be traded instantly, they can scarcely hold together “three generations from father to son,” and “even if they remain in one family, they convey no authority” (E, 358). What follows will be the destruction of those independent social authorities which had formed a protective buffer between the individual and centralized power. These constitute, Hume says, “a kind of independent magistracy in a state, instituted by the hand of nature” (E, 358). And elsewhere he describes them as a “middle power between King and people” (E, 358).With their elimination, a pure Hobbesian state would emerge with a centralized authority ruling directly over an aggregate of millions of individuals. In this condition, “every man in authority derives his influence from the commission alone of the sovereign.” And “the whole income of every individual in the state must lie entirely at the mercy of the sovereign” (E, 358-59). Hume thinks this form of despotism intimated in eighteenth century centralized states, if realized, would be “a degree of despotism, which no oriental monarchy has ever yet attained” (E, 359). What Hume considered despotism is viewed as normal today. A European monarch in Hume’s day could not order military conscription nor impose an income tax, which would have been viewed as a form of forced labor.


Hume’s vision of an order of human scale polities was at odds with the practice of political centralization begun by the great monarchs and imitated by smaller principalities. “Europe,” he said, “is shared out mostly into great monarchies,” and the smaller ones ruin their people by emulating the great with taxes, a superb court, and a standing army. He laments that “Swisserland alone and Holland resemble the ancient republics” (E, 403). It would be impossible to break the great monarchies of Europe into a large number of human scale republics in conformity to the model Hume took from the Greeks. But it might be possible gradually to transform a monarchy, especially a limited one, into a great republic which would be divided into human scale republics. And this is just the reform Hume proposes in the essay “Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth” (1752). The proposal was a radical one, for the traditional wisdom, from the ancients down to Montesquieu and Rousseau, was that a republic had to be small. Hume agrees that it is “more difficult to form a republican government in an extensive country than in a city.” But once established, its extensive size and division into small republics would make it less likely to fall into faction and disorder which has been the weakness of small republics throughout history (E, 527). Sheer size alone would make it difficult for the parts to combine to form a special interest. I will not take space here to explore the essay in detail; rather, my remarks will be limited to the parts salient to Hume’s view on the size and scale of political order.


The extensive republic, which Hume says is the size of Britain or France, is divided into one hundred small republics; each of which is further divided into one hundred parishes. Those satisfying a property qualification for voting meet annually in the parish church and elect one representative to their small republican government. This body of one hundred representatives elect, among themselves, ten magistrates and one senator. The senators, to the number of one hundred, meet in the national capital and exercise the executive and supreme judicial powers of the commonwealth. However, the ten magistrates and one hundred representatives remain in the capitals of their respective republics. The magistrates exercise the executive and judicial powers of the provincial republic while the representatives exercise the legislative powers. The provincial republics can pass laws within their territory, but these can be vetoed by the national senate or by another republic, in which case the matter must be decided by the legislative power of the whole commonwealth. The vote is by republics. Each republic has one vote, and a majority of republics decides the question. If there is a tie the senate casts the deciding vote. Laws are introduced and debated in the senate. If passed, they are sent to the small republics for ratification. If a vote fails in the senate, any ten of a hundred senators can require that the law be sent to the republics for ratification. Because it would be troublesome to assemble all ten thousand representatives for every trivial law, the senate has the choice of sending the law down to the ten magistrates of each republic. If sent to the magistrates, any five of the one hundred representatives can demand that the whole body of representatives be called for a vote on the proposed law.


Either the provincial magistrates or the representatives may give to their senator a copy of a law to be presented to the senate. Should the senate veto the proposed law, it, nevertheless, must be sent to the republics for a vote if only five of the republics concur. In addition to the checks just mentioned, there is the court of competitors designed to detect and prosecute fraud and corruption in the senate. Its members are constituted as follows. If a candidate for the senate loses an election but gains a third or more votes of the representatives, he automatically enters the court of competitors. This court has only the power of inspecting public accounts of the commonwealth and of bringing a vote of impeachment against members of the senate. If the senate acquits the person, the court of competitors can appeal to the people either in the form of the magistrates or the representatives for a new trial, under prescribed rules, which excludes members of the senate. Hume’s extensive republic is designed to check the centralization of power, which is the death of human scale political order in a large modern state, whether of monarchical or republican form. It would be more difficult in Hume’s republic to institute and abuse the policy of public credit. Everywhere there is a check on majority rule, and Hume’s polity is one in which the people enjoy considerable political participation. Only ten (out of one hundred senators) are needed to nullify the senate’s vote against a proposed law and send it to the people for ratification; only five (out of one hundred representatives) are needed to take a proposed law out of the hands of the magistrates and put it to a vote of the representatives. Only five republics (out of one hundred) are needed to override the senate’s veto of a law proposed by the representatives and to compel a vote by representatives of the whole commonwealth. Only twenty republics (out of one hundred) are needed to throw any official out of office for a year; only thirty, for three years. And there are a number of other minority checks to power which cannot be discussed here, including a militia army modeled on the Swiss militia, along with a law requiring that it be regularly exercised. Finally, to keep the republic fromexpanding beyond its proper size, there is a constitutional prohibition against conquests (E, 529).


Hume presents this extensive republic not as a philosopher’s utopia, but as an ideal identity already intimated in European political practice. Republican intimations are strong in limited monarchies, such as Britain, and are fully exemplified in the United Provinces of the Netherlands. Even the absolute monarchy of France contains republican intimations as, in Hume’s view, do all civilized monarchies. But Hume’s extensive republic is not the only form intimated in European political practice. More oppressive forms of absolute monarchy are intimated, as well as a uniquely modern form of tyranny that could be generated, for example, by the repeated abuse of public credit. Hume’s hope, however, was that Europe would evolve into an order of republics (both extensive and small) held together by trade and common cultural interests on the Greek model. And it might appear that vast regimes such as the European Union and the United States conform to Hume’s ideal of a vast territory divided into extensive republics. It is certainly true that the republican ideology is triumphant. Most regimes in the world today describe themselves as republics. There are democratic republics, democratic socialist republics, people’s republics, federative republics such as the United States and the former Union of Soviet Socialistic Republics, and so on. What this ubiquitous republican idiom ignores, and what is essential to republicanism, is the factor of human scale. Rousseau was one of the few westerners to be honored by the People’s Republic of China under Mao Tse Tung. And Rousseau has been invoked by the legacy of the French Revolution. Rousseau’s idea of “the general will” makes some sense in the human scale republic theorized in The Social Contract which he suggests at one point is a polity of around ten thousand people. But it makes no sense at all if mapped onto a country the size of France, not to mention China. So small is Rousseau’s republic that he does not even allow representatives, but requires direct political participation, something impossible if pitched to a scale of millions of political participants.


Even if we reject Rousseau’s demand for direct political participation as extravagant, entertaining a larger sphere for republican life, as Hume did, the ratio of population to representation should still be measured by the human scale if it is to be called republican. To appreciate this, let us compare Hume’s extensive republic with its modern equivalent, Great Britain, in respect to representation. Hume’s national legislature is divided into one hundred small republics, each with one hundred representatives. The total number of representatives in the nation is ten thousand. These sit and debate proposed legislation in their own provincial capitals. The legislators of modern Britain, however, meet and debate in London to the number of only 635 representatives. Britain in Hume’s day had around nine million inhabitants; today it has over sixty-five million. In Hume’s Britain there is one representative for every nine hundred persons; in Britain today there is one for every one hundred four thousand, not a human scale ratio of representation to population. Or consider the United States, which styles itself a republic. There are only 435 representatives in the House of Representatives, ruling over some 309 million people. This yields a ratio of around one representative for every seven hundred ten thousand people. A regime with this ratio cannot be considered a republic, not even a large Humean republic. What is true of the out-of-scale ratio of representatives to people in Britain and the United States is true of most large regimes in the world that style themselves republics. But if they are not in any meaningful sense republics, what are they? An answer was suggested by Tocqueville, who viewed the emerging European “republics” as in reality extensions of absolute monarchy. The French Revolution produced the first modern large scale republic ruling in the name of the people and declaring itself, in Hobbesian fashion, to be “one and indivisible.” The Revolution pretended to effect a total change of French political society, and was thought by many to have done so. Tocqueville, however, argued that the Revolution had fundamentally changed nothing.10 What he meant by this counter-intuitive claim was this. What was wrong with monarchy was not a hereditary executive, but the creation of a centralized bureaucratic administration with a would-be monopoly on coercion over individuals in a territory. The Revolution did not devolve power back to smaller, human scale units in France, but greatly expanded central power beyond anything eighteenth century monarchs could have imagined. No eighteenth century monarch could have ordered universal conscription, a barrier which limited the size of armies and the scale of war. The French “republic” was the first to order universal conscription. The result opened the era of total war. Whereas Louis XVI could raise an army of little more than one hundred eighty thousand troops, the French Republic at the demise of Napoleon had run through some three million troops, the largest military force ever assembled in history. One way to understand Tocqueville’s point is through the doctrine of the two bodies of the king. The first body was the flesh and blood king; the second body was the artificial corporation, the crown, seeking a monopoly on coercion over individuals in a territory. In the expression given upon the death of a monarch, “The king is dead, long live the king,” it was the second body that was affirmed to be immortal. What happened in the French Revolution was that the flesh and blood king was thrown out as the chief executive officer of the corporation, but the second body of the king remained, namely, the centralized system of coercion. The Revolution merely replaced the person of the king with the fiction of the nation-person. The people of France were now said to be sovereign, and what had been the second body of the king was now said to be their representative.


But this was little more than a pious fiction, for the “sovereign people” had little participation in the exercise of sovereignty. The Queen of Great Britain is said to be sovereign; and the government, her majesty’s government. But the British sovereign participates in political conduct only in a ceremonial capacity. Likewise, in large modern republics, the people are said to be sovereign, but their participation too is largely ceremonial and consists typically of choosing periodically between two candidates selected by national political parties of vast scale over which there is little popular control. Hobbes was the first to clearly understand the character of a modern European state. He theorized it as an artificial corporation, what he called an “artificial man.” Government as a public corporation differs from a business corporation in that it possesses a monopoly on coercion in a territory. Its subjects are compelled to buy shares in the corporation through taxes, but cannot trade them, i.e., they cannot secede from the corporation. Hobbes saw clearly that the modern state is owned by no one, neither an individual (the king), nor a collective (the people); nor does it represent anyone in the republican sense. It consequently is neither a monarchy nor a republic, though it may be called either. In its pure form, it cannot tolerate those independent social authorities that Hume called “a kind of independent magistracy in a state, instituted by the hand of nature,” capable of resisting centralization—and which Hobbes called “Wormes” in the commonwealth (E, 358). The Hobbesian modern state is only an ideal identity, but modern states, whether called republics or monarchies, have sought approximation to it. In Hume’s time the closest approximation was absolute monarchy. In our time it is mass democracy.


With these reflections of Hobbes and Tocqueville in mind, we might say that a modern state of vast size, such as the United States or France, is an eighteenth century absolute monarchy without the monarch, but falsely calling itself a republic to gain the legitimacy afforded by the human scale connotations of the term. A modern state cannot bear to describe itself in the stark terms theorized by Hobbes, namely, as an artificial corporation with a monopoly on coercion over individuals in a territory. But Hume provides us with another way of thinking about the matter. He taught that modern absolute monarchies contain “a source of improvement” and republican governments “a source of degeneracy, which in time will bring these species of civil polity still nearer an equality” (E, 95). The source of degeneracy in republics is the inevitable tendency to abuse public credit. Monarchs also borrow, but, if need be, they can declare a bankruptcy without destroying the people. This is not likely in a republic where the creditors either are the chief office holders themselves or financially support the chief office holders. It is through degenerate republics, therefore, that the most despotic form of modern centralized government is likely to occur—one, Hume says, that would be worse than an Oriental despotism and, consequently, worse than an eighteenth century absolute monarchy. A regime of this kind would be able to centralize power beyond anything previously known in history. Hans Herman Hoppe has explored the political economy of European monarchies where government was viewed as private property, in comparison with modern Hobbesian states styling themselves republics or democracies. He judges the monarchical age to run from the eleventh century to the mid-nineteenth century. During this period monarchs were never able to exploit more than five to eight percent of gross national product; whereas mass “republics” and “democracies” have been able to exploit some fifty percent.11 This would be a level of centralization and control quite beyond anything in Hume’s experience. However, he saw it intimated in the state’s exploitation of public credit, hollowing out the economy of the provinces and, consequently, driving people as well as financial and political power to the center, where a few hundred people—through finance capitalism structured on public debt—would determine the economic prospects of millions. Even worse, public credit enabled Britain to pursue needless wars of national glory and a policy of uniting trade with war, which necessarily issued in colonial empire and competition with other states for empire. We have seen that Hume supported secession of the American colonies, but this was merely part of his opposition to the emerging British empire itself, the symbol of which was “the great commoner” William Pitt. That “wicked madman Pitt,” as Hume called him, had come to power on a mercantilist platform of uniting commerce with war, funded by public credit, and legitimated by a republican ideology. Shortly after repeal of the Stamp Act, Hume wrote Gilbert Eliot 22 July, 1768 supporting American secession from the empire: “These are fine doings in America. O! How I long to see America and the East Indies revolted totally & finally, the Revenue reduc’d to half, public Credit fully discredited by Bankruptcy, [and] the third of London in Ruins....”12


A year later in a letter to William Strahan Hume indulged the same fantasy: “Notwithstanding my Age, I hope to see a public Bankruptcy, the total Revolt of America, the Expulsion of the English from the East Indies, the Diminution of London to less than a half, and the Restoration of the Government to the King, Nobility, and Gentry of this Realm.”13 In both of these outbursts there is a rejection not only of empire, but of the bloated size of London. But this sort of republicanized Hobbesian regime that Hume feared Britain was becoming could not really show what it could do, in terms of destroying independent social authorities and concentrating great masses of people under state control, until the industrial revolution. Hume’s philosophy was framed prior to that revolution, and he simply could not anticipate the changes a modern Hobbesian state could bring about. For example, Hume thought there was a natural limit to the growth of cities, and that no city could grow much beyond seven hundred thousand. That was about the size of London in Hume’s time when he judged that, in relation to the country, the “head is undoubtedly too large for the body” (E, 447-48, 354). He could not have imagined cities of over ten million, such as we have today. There are ten cities in the world today of nearly 20 million, and these are estimated by mid-century to expand to some 30 to 40 million, at which time a new crop of cities in the 20 million range is expected to emerge. Most of this growth is, and will continue to be, in the third world where functioning government services are scarce if existent at all. Such concentrations of rootless masses are not a city at all in the traditional sense, and new names had to be created. It is said to be a "conurbation," a "megalopolis," or an "agglomeration." Monster "cities" of this kind are artifacts of the twentieth century. Mexico City, for instance, had around five hundred thousand in 1900. Today it has over twenty million.14


The industrial revolution certainly facilitated the emergence of such agglomerations, but they were not the “natural” result of it. Such concentrations of population could not have occurred without the global triumph of centralized Hobbesian states that hollow out independent social authorities within a territory, leaving a mass of deracinated individuals controlled by the center. Three contemporary cities of twenty million each would equal the entire population of the Roman empire at the height of its power. There are, of course, more people in the world today than in ancient times. But that is not why monster cities exist. Nor do such cities exist because “the jobs are there.” The jobs are there because, as Hume saw, the rules are rigged by a union of public credit, business and finance corporations, and the centralized state (“one and indivisible”) to concentrate them there. Consider Mexico, which has a population of around a hundred million, over twenty million of which live in Mexico City. Mexico has an abundance of arable land, is rich in oil, and opens out to the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Its land mass and resources are enough to accommodate a number of countries the size of Switzerland. Though land locked, and in a mountainous region, Switzerland is frequently ranked among the top ten richest countries in the world in terms of per capita income. If the territory of Mexico were composed of, say, fourteen small Swiss sized states, each would have a population of around seven million. In that case there could be no monster city of twenty million people, and growing, in the territory known as Mexico. But this cannot happen today without secession. And as long as Mexico imagines itself to be a Hobbesian state “one and indivisible,” secession is ruled out a priori, as it is in every Hobbesian state.


The Hobbesian centralized state is not the natural or only form of political association, as many have come to think. It is an artifact little more than three centuries old. It was first constructed by European absolute monarchs, and perfected by mass democracies. After World War II, signs of its decline began to appear. Martin Van Creveld and others have argued that cultural and political elites are shifting their allegiances away from the post-French Revolutionary nation state to supra-national and to sub-national entities.15 The Hobbesian state was said to be one and indivisible, so downsizing it through secession was, as noted above, ruled out a priori. But that is no longer believable, given the relatively peaceful dissolution of the Soviet Union and other modern states thought to be “indivisible.” When the League of Nations was formed, it was limited to large states, but that is not the case with the United Nations. The current disposition to devolve power to smaller political units has led to a dramatic increase in the number of small states. Today, over two thirds of the states in the world are ten million or less. Over half have populations of five million or less. And more than a third have populations of one million or less. Seventy states have populations of five hundred thousand or less. Fifty states are in the Aristotelean range of one hundred thousand or less. Thirty-five states occupy no more than twice the land area of Washington, D.C. And one state is smaller than the Washington Mall: the Vatican.16 Theoretically and practically, there is no reason why more small states, even on the scale of the Aristotelean polis, cannot exist today. Indeed, technological innovations and global trade make small states more feasible than in the past. And even large states such as Britain, France, and the United States could be reformed, with an eye to a human scale ratio of representation to population, by reconstituting a “national” legislature into the joint voice of several regional or provincial legislatures in accord with Hume’s model of an extensive republic.


Modern political philosophy, from Hobbes to Habermas, has largely ignored the topic of size and human scale that was central to the republican tradition for some two thousand years. Hume, Montesquieu, and Rousseau are latter day exceptions, and have been largely ignored. But, as the Hobbesian state is in visible decline and is losing its moral authority, perhaps it is time to make the human scale of political order once again a central topic of political discourse—and especially of republican discourse.






This article is a further revised and amended version of Donald Livingston's essay, 'David Hume, Republicanism, and the Human Scale of Political Order,' which was first published in Arator: A Journal of Southern History, Thought, and Culture, Vol. 1, No. 1 (2010).



David Hume and the Republican Tradition of Human Scale



Written by Donald W. Livingston 5 Republicanism is inclined to the self government of human scale communities, and, in Hobbes’ view, encourages permanent resistance to sovereign authority and, hence, anarchy. Hobbes calls these surviving republican dispositions “Wormes” in the commonwealth that must be purged.64 What does Hume have to say about the relationship of size to political order? There is, first of all, a deep presumption against large monarchies and large cities. “Enormous monarchies,” he says “are, probably, destructive to human nature; in their progress, in their continuance, and even in their downfall, which never can be very distant from their establishment” (E, 340-341). And “Enormous cities are ... destructive to society, beget vice and disorder of all kinds, starve the remoter provinces, and even starve themselves, by the prices to which they raise all provisions” (E, 401). In the essay “Of the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences,” he argues that size alone, independent of other factors, is a material condition for moral and political virtue. “Extended governments,” he says, “soon become absolute,” whereas “small ones change naturally into commonwealths” (E, 119). Ancient Greek civilization, which began as a “cluster of little principalities,” gradually and naturally evolved into an order of small republics. Government over a vast territory is able to maintain control, even if a majority are discontented, because each part, being ignorant of the resolutions of the other parts, is afraid to resist. Great distance also enables the regime to magnify the virtues of rulers, whatever the form of government might be; whereas, in a small government, familiarity with the rulers subverts myths of greatness. In a small government, an act of oppression is immediately known to the whole, and it arouses more intense indignation because of the familiarity of ruler and ruled which human scale makes possible (E, 119-120).3 Throughout history republics have fallen within or even below this range. The Italian republics that created the Renaissance: Florence, Padua, Venice, Bologna, and others were in this range. Venice had a population of around one hundred ninety thousand. Florence and Bologna had around sixty thousand each. I turn now to a quite different notion of the function of political order, that put forth by Thomas Hobbes in his masterpiece Leviathan (1651), and one which, consequently, entails a quite different notion of size and scale. For Hobbes, the function of political order is to allow an aggregate of individuals to pursue their power and glory limited only by the constraints of civil association. Since, in Hobbes’ view, virtue vanishes as a condition of political association, the requirement of human scale also vanishes. All that is needed is a sovereign office capable of enforcing the rules of civil association. The limit of the state, in respect to territory and population, ends with the sovereign’s ability to enforce the rules. So there is no internal limit as to how large a Hobbesian state can be. Indeed its logic is to expand, if possible, to global scale, for the entire human race can be viewed as an aggregate of individuals in pursuit of their power and glory. Hobbes rightly named it Leviathan.2 Another classical measure was that one should be able to walk across the polity in a single day. The ancient Greek republics were of this human size and scale.

Low-Tech Solutions to High-Tech Tyranny

Imagine, if you will, a fantastic near future in which the United States is facing an unmitigated economic implosion. Not just a mere market crash, or a stint of high unemployment, but a full spectrum collapse driven by unsustainable debt spending and hyperinflationary printing. The American people witness multiple credit downgrades of U.S. Treasury mechanisms, the dollar loses its reserve status, devaluation of the currency runs rampant, and the prices of commodities and imported goods immediately skyrocket.

In the background of this disaster, a group of financial elite with dreams of a new centralized economic and political system use the chaos to encourage a removal of long held civil liberties; displacing Constitutional protections they deem “outdated” and no longer “practical” in the midst of our modern day troubles. This group then institutes draconian policies through the executive orders of a puppet president, including indefinite detention, assassination, and even martial law against citizens. For now, let’s just refer to them as “The Swedes”….

The Swedes have an extraordinary array of technological tools at their disposal. The kind of equipment dictators like Stalin and Hitler would have killed for…literally. This technology is so pervasive and so unprecedented in the history of tyrannical governments that average people shiver at the very thought of resistance. The Swedes seem to be invincible.

Some Americans think about escaping to a foreign country before the zealots totally dominate, but ultimately, running is meaningless. The Swedes want a global control grid, not just an American one. Eventually, the expatriates will have to face the music as well.

Others believe that they can take their families and hide alone in far off mountains to wait out the storm, but they do not consider what will happen to their country and its principles while they curl up in a ball and pray that the catastrophe does not touch them. They forget that survival is hollow if one finds himself and his culture enslaved in the meantime.

And yet others, those who are aware of the consequences of unchecked oligarchy, decide to build communities of liberty minded individuals in preparation for the dangers ahead. They seek local and national solutions, social and political. However, always in the backs of their minds sits the understanding that these situations rarely if ever solve themselves, and rarely if ever end peacefully. Despots only respect one thing – Power. Those who refuse to fight back are, in their eyes, nothing but an easy meal, like a wounded animal in a forest of wolves. This third group of awake Americans comes to realize that one day the Swedes will move with severe aggression, and will have to be physically stopped. But how…?



With modern computer-driven weaponry at their fingertips, any resistance appears futile. Some Americans, though, do their homework, and discover that most successful revolutions against better equipped opponents utilize low tech methods in highly intelligent ways. They study the inherent weaknesses of the enemy weapons platforms using readily available online manuals and scientific journals. They realize that these pieces of equipment costing millions of dollars each can be defeated using methods that cost little more than pocket change. A war of economic attrition ensues, whereby the Swedes find themselves completely dependent on systems that cannot be maintained without substantial financial sacrifice. With each new piece of hardware, comes an even more frustrating strategy of defiance. Here are just a few examples…

CCTV Surveillance Grid

Sam is a Liberty Movement sympathizer caught in the city during the establishment of a high-tech surveillance grid in his hometown. The dastardly Swedes relish the idea of being able to keep tabs on every person everywhere. They even establish a database in the heart of Colorado which collates information in real time, allowing them to build and organize files on millions of citizens. The success of this grid depends greatly on the capacity of their CCTV cameras placed in an ever expanding spider’s web across heavily populated regions. The cameras use biometric data collected and stored by airport body scanners which the “extremists” often refer to as “naked body scanners”. The data allows computers to quickly match specific body signs to identity.

The Swedes told the public that their data would not be saved for future reference, but of course, this was later found to be a lie. It did not take long before the scanners were moved from the airports, to train stations, to bus stations, to federal buildings, to street corners for random shakedowns. Sam knows that if his file is pulled up by one of the cameras, he is in serious trouble, and so makes plans to escape the city limits. With curfews being set earlier and earlier in the evening, he decides to make his move before it is too late.

The night vision and thermal vision capabilities on the latest CCTV cameras makes disguise nearly impossible. Makeup and prosthetics help to hide bone structure, and a knee brace helps to change the gait of Sam’s walk, but Sam also knows that the thermal filters on the cameras are actually able to see the heat of blood flow through facial arteries, which act as a face fingerprint. There is no low-tech way to forge this face fingerprint.

So instead, Sam decides to block the camera system’s ability to use thermal vision at all. He does this with a few dollars and a hat, gluing small Infrared LED lightbulbs into the cap along with a tiny battery source. The IR lights drown out the CCTV ability to make any clear distinctions in his face, thus preventing any positive ID. Sam is clever, and plants similar IR devices on other people without their knowledge, diluting the attention of Swedish law enforcement officials who are left wondering if their cameras are malfunctioning or if their city is swarming with “terrorists”.

Fingerprint Scanners

Angela is a worker in a Swedish detention facility. At first, she believed that all the people quartered in the facility were terrorists who represented a threat to innocent lives. But, over time, she came to realize that the true innocents were being housed in the prison, most of them detained for no more than criticizing Swedish policy or protesting a political injustice. Angela makes plans to steal confidential information on the camp from her boss’ office and hand it over to the resistance. Unfortunately, her boss uses a fingerprint scanner to unlock his door. Luckily, she had done research into fail-test methods for such scanners in scientific and security journals and learned how to make molds using latent fingerprints.

RFID Chips

RFID chipping is all the rage with the Swedes, so of course they were more than keen to introduce the intrusive technology to the U.S. once the control grid was established. The tiny inexpensive chips allowed tracking of nearly everything, from retail habits, to civilian movements, to common monetary transactions. Evan, a computer hobbyist and quiet supporter of the Liberty Movement, found that without certain RFID designations, many goods could not be purchased, at least in bulk. Only Swedish officials had the ability to go anywhere and to buy what they needed.

Evan found a solution, not necessarily “low-tech”, but easy enough to make using common materials and a basic knowledge of electronics and programming. His idea? Build an RFID Emulator/Cloner.

The cloner had the ability to read particular RFID chips, even from a distance, and to then copy their unique signal. Evan was able to clone any chip anywhere and then implant the code on an RFID card or any other item containing a chip, making life easier for him, and information easier to get for others.

GPS Tracking

Evelyn was a political activist and independent journalist before the crash. Her writing had become quite prominent in freedom minded circles, but the dollar had fallen, and with it, the Constitution had been scrapped. Her criticisms of the Swedish controlled government were well known, and she had heard stories of liberty writers “disappearing”. She decided to leave the confines of the city to stay with a friend before the noose was tightened completely.

As she entered her vehicle and made her way outside the city along backroads, away from the highway and possible checkpoints, she noticed that a nondescript car seemed to be shadowing her from a distance. She made a few unplanned turns, and did not see the car again for twenty minutes. Then, it appeared again, at the very edge of her mirror’s field of vision. She realized that she may have a GPS tracking device implanted somewhere in her car, and to find it quickly would be impossible. Thankfully, she had purchased a GPS jamming device months ago, which allowed her to block any GPS transmissions within a small to medium radius. The device was furiously labeled by the FCC as “dangerous” and “illegal to use”, however, they remained very easy to buy until the crash.

Electronic Surveillance In General

Whether it be a CCTV camera, or a body scanner, sometimes the best option is not to evade or disguise, but to pull the plug entirely. At least, that was James’ point of view after the control grid went into overdrive and he couldn’t walk his dog without a blue-shirted Swedish agent fondling him on the sidewalk or forcing him to walk through a body scanner. Finally, he had had enough, and so, decided that if they wanted to track every move of every person, it was going to cost them.

Using commonly available parts, James built a personal EMP device. Its range was dependent on the size of the power supply he tied to it, but when used properly, it would zap anything with a circuit within several feet of him.

The Body Scanners were useless. RFID tags went blank. CCTV cameras shorted. They would eventually be replaced, but the cost would be high, and as long as he didn’t get caught, James could experience, at least for a short time, the America of the past…

Sound Cannon / Silence Gun

Mary had seen her family in poverty, her country in ruins, and her government turn to outright treason. In her mind, the only recourse left was to take to the streets. However, this proved to be almost as useless as participating in the election process. New sound cannon vehicles were deployed in waves along with riot police to quell any and all protests, no matter how peaceful in nature.

Mary learned two things quickly. The first: always bring a gas mask to the party. The second: always think simple when faced with technological tyranny.

The sound cannon blast was terrible, making concentration difficult and causing panic amongst the protestors. Even worse though was the Silence Gun.

Which actually recorded and then projected back a person’s voice only a split second after they began to talk, causing mental confusion and eventually, frustration and silence. The device was popular at political events where activists were likely to interrupt a candidate’s teleprompter speech to expose the public to a few truths. Mary was not a hacker, or a military specialist, or a technician of any kind. So, she wore ear plugs. Problem solved.

Night Vision / Thermal Imaging / Predator Drone

A considerable threat to those who decided to fight back against the Swedes was the widespread usage of night vision and thermal imagers by troops sent to hunt down and capture dissenters (the Swedes called them “enemy combatants). The use of FLIR cameras on aircraft and the feared predator drones were especially terrifying to those who knew very little about how such technology actually functions.

David, an insurgent against Swede governance, was tired of hearing about how the Predator Drones would be the doom of all who defied the establishment. He felt that this outlandish perception came more from the fact that the drones had no human passenger, and so, no potential casualty risk. The concept of facing down a machine that feels no combat apprehension is certainly disturbing, but not insurmountable. At bottom, what the enemy cannot see, the enemy cannot kill. And so, instead of trying in vain to fight the drones and their thermal / night vision on the terms of the oppressive military presence, he decided to make their vision advantage irrelevant by studying IR evasion used in sniper training.

Regular night vision relies, in most cases, on the use of an IR light which bounces off targets within the field of view. This is often referred to as “Active IR”. Thermal Vision reads existing IR at a different wavelength, usually in heat producing or high IR producing bodies, called “Passive IR”.

For evading Active IR night vision, David found that regular camouflaging methods along with smoke worked well. For defeating night vision altogether, he found that bright IR flashlights and floodlights, and even regular bright lights like camera flashes, shined directly at the target wearer of the night vision device, would be blinded for a short period of time, leaving room for escape.

Thermal vision evasion was more difficult. David and his team first studied the IR Emissivity Tables of common everyday materials.

[And how to check emissivity here.]

All objects above the temperature of absolute zero release a certain level of electromagnetic radiation, which thermal imagers pick up and translate into a visual picture. Hiding one’s heat signature is difficult, but not impossible. The key, as David learned through military sniper training manuals and combat analysis, was to match his IR signature with that of his surrounding as much as possible.

He fashioned a hooded cloak using a material that would block much of his initial warmth, then lined the inside of it with emergency space blanket material, which reflects back around 90% body heat. The cloak design worked well because he could easily take down the hood and unwrap himself when not in immediate danger, allowing the material to cool as he walked.

Then David attached local vegetation to the material to help match its IR Emissivity to the surrounding foliage. This combination reduced his thermal signature drastically. Overhead drones could not identify him clearly as a human, if they were able to see him at all. Ground forces were a greater threat, but the element of surprise was still possible for the insurgents with cloaks.

In combat, the tandem dangers of drones overhead and ground forces in pursuit with thermal vision made life difficult. David carefully studied field guides to Predator Drone strengths and weaknesses.

David and his team then utilized a special strategy under these extreme circumstances called “False IR Signature”.

Operating in bad weather gave the freedom fighters an instant advantage. Heavy rain washed away thermal footprints and obscured body heat. Thick cloud cover made image integrity poor. Contrary to popular belief, the drones had many downfalls, and their eyes were limited in numerous ways.

When in the middle of combat, where drone surveillance was most dangerous to low-tech resistance, multiple fake IR signatures were created using whatever was available. David used a combination of IR Chemlights and hot burning road flares thrown all over the field to misdirect drone cameras. With IR hotspots everywhere, the thermal cameras had no idea where to focus, let alone which targets were real, and which were fake. IR strobe light flares flashed intermittently causing even more confusion, and masked to some extent muzzle flash from firearms.

Larger objects could also be faked using pieces of metal heated with fire, or even heated metallic balloons arranged in a sizable pattern to mimic a hot running car or tank. Drones would zero in on false targets and unleash missiles, only to waste the expensive ordinance on party favors and scrap. Through David’s knowledge and efforts, the game had become more level.

Technology Or Force Of Will?

Technological weaponry and surveillance should never be underestimated. Today’s advancements are terrifying, devastating, and were designed after decades of trial and error in peripheral wars and burgeoning dictatorships around the world. A technology cannot be defeated by someone who does not respect its capability. That said, in the end, wars are not won with fancy gadgets alone. All conflicts are decided by a primary driver; force of will.

Who has the strength of spirit to endure the longest? Who has the intelligence to outwit the technology? Who knows exactly what they are fighting for and why? These questions decide victory, not unmanned aircraft and computers.

In the introduction, I joke a little about the state of our Republic, but sadly, the fictional accounts above represent realities that Americans today must consider as practical and possible in the near future. “The Swedes” are not illusion, but a parable of the kind of totalitarianism that arises in the midst of any culture dominated by elitism and collectivism. Whether you believe this is realistic or not in our nation today I suppose is dependent on your level of awareness surrounding current events. My goal in covering the information above is not to convince you one way or the other of the dangers ahead. The point is to redistribute the knowledge so that one day, in the event that the stories portrayed turn out to be more true than you realize, you may have the ability to do something about those troubled times as an effective champion, rather than a helpless victim…

Brandon SmithBe Sociable, Share!

Liberalism

There are two uses of the word liberalism that I find heartbreaking, even disgusting.

The first occurs when a self-described liberal pushes government power as the solution to all our economic and social woes. Government is not liberal! Government is confiscation, coercion, the taser, the jail cell!

Another is when a self-described conservative condemns liberalism as the cancer that is killing society. What? Thomas Jefferson was a liberal. So was John Locke. So was Alexis de Tocqueville. Their ideas built the world we love.

Most of all, there was Ludwig von Mises, who proudly called himself a liberal. He was the 20th century's great defender of capitalism and the free society. He decided to settle the issue about what is liberalism once at for all.

Liberalism is Ludwig von Mises' classic statement in defense of a free society, one of the last statements of the old liberal school and a text from which we can continue to learn. It has been the conscience of a global movement for liberty for 80 years.
Liberalism first appeared in 1927 as a follow-up to both Mises' devastating 1922 book showing that socialism would fail and his 1926 book criticizing interventionism. It was written to address the burning question: If not socialism, and if not fascism or interventionism, what form of social arrangement is most conducive to human flourishing? Mises' answer, summed up in the title, is liberalism.

Even in these times, Mises was aware that the meaning of liberalism had changed from its common use in the 19th century. He had to clarify that his understanding not only included commercial freedom, but was rooted in it. Without economic freedom, no other form of freedom can have material meaning.

But Mises did not accept the idea that the term had been merely stolen from the proponents of free markets. He thought it had never been worked out scientifically, and therefore, the theory of liberalism became vulnerable to political manipulation.

Thus did Mises do more than restate classical liberal doctrine. He gave a thoroughly modern defense of freedom, one that corrected the errors of the old liberal school by rooting the idea of liberty in the institution of private property (the subject on which the classical school was sometimes unclear). That is the grand contribution of this volume:

"The program of liberalism, therefore, if condensed into a single word, would have to read: property, that is, private ownership of the means of production... All the other demands of liberalism result from this fundamental demand."

But there are other insights too. He demonstrates that the order inherent in a laissez-faire society stems not from a mystical source, but from the capacity of the price system to provide a means of rational coordination between independent actors. This rational pursuit of individual interest leads to the division of labor, the development of the money economy, the extended order of production and the coordinative signals of interest and profit. He argues that it is within man's rational capacity to understand the reasons for the prosperity and orderliness of freedom.

He further shows that political decentralization and secession are the best means to peace and political liberty. As for religion, he recommends the complete separation of church and state, and a cultural conviction that favors tolerance. On immigration, he favors the freedom of movement. On education, state involvement must end -- completely.

In some ways, this is the most political of Mises' treatises, and also one of the most inspiring books ever written on the idea of liberty. It remains a book that can set the world on fire for freedom, which is probably why it has been translated into more than a dozen languages.

Yet the concluding message here is something that every freedom lover needs to contemplate and return to again and again. Consider his words very seriously: 

"Liberalism is no religion, no worldview, no party of special interests. It is no religion because it demands neither faith nor devotion, because there is nothing mystical about it, and because it has no dogmas. It is no worldview because it does not try to explain the cosmos, and because it says nothing and does not seek to say anything about the meaning and purpose of human existence. It is no party of special interests because it does not provide or seek to provide any special advantage whatsoever to any individual or any group. It is something entirely different. It is an ideology, a doctrine of the mutual relationship among the members of society and, at the same time, the application of this doctrine to the conduct of men in actual society. It promises nothing that exceeds what can be accomplished in society and through society. It seeks to give men only one thing: the peaceful, undisturbed development of material well-being for all, in order thereby to shield the m from the external causes of pain and suffering as far as it lies within the power of social institutions to do so at all. To diminish suffering, to increase happiness: That is its aim."

"No sect and no political party has believed that it could afford to forgo advancing its cause by appealing to men's senses. Rhetorical bombast, music and song resound, banners wave, flowers and colors serve as symbols and the leaders seek to attach their followers to their own person. Liberalism has nothing to do with all this. It has no party flower and no party color, no party song and no party idols, no symbols and no slogans. It has the substance and the arguments. These must lead it to victory."

This is more than a theory; it is a proposed strategy for achieving a dream. It is one that should attract anyone who is truly serious about making a contribution to the cause of freedom.

In the thicket of political argument, in the confusing world of political lies and rhetoric, I find myself returning to this calm and brilliant book. I've probably read it through a dozen times. I always find something new, something inspiring, something that provides me new intellectual guidance.

Jeffrey Tucker
Executive editor
Laissez Faire Books

We're All Branch Davidians Now

Nineteen years ago, just outside Waco, Texas, the FBI demonstrated once again that the state at its core is a killing machine. Monarchy, democracy, or republic – any government as conventionally defined is a legal monopoly on violence. The state is always inclined toward oppression, division, conquest, and bloodshed, because these are its tools of trade.

Matters are no different here. The myth of a free America was always seen with bitter irony by those not blessed by such freedom. In the founding generation, as half a million labored in slavery, many who fought in the Revolution genuinely believed in liberty, but for the ruling elite who chided them on, liberty was hardly more than a slogan. This has always been true of our political leaders.

The Father of the Country was a centralizing slaveowner. Old Hickory talked up freedom as he threatened war on South Carolina and forced the Cherokee to flee from their ancestral land on a barbarously murderous walk of shame. The Great Emancipator turned America into a military dictatorship and abolished the revolutionary right of secession. Wilson's New Freedom was cover for a Prussianized war machine generating revenue for his profiteering buddies on Wall Street. Roosevelt's Four Freedoms failed to include the freedom not to be drafted or interned in a concentration camp. Ronald Reagan threw the word freedom around as he trained Latin American torturers and raped the Bill of Rights in the name of fighting drugs. The United States has never lived up to its rhetoric.

But the events from February 28 through April 19, 1993, still stand out in my mind as a watershed. It was the post-Cold War regime's coming of age, signifying a major event in cultural history.

Everything about Operation Showtime was brazen, and it seemed like an overreach even by some of the government's establishment defenders. Yet today Washington's fixers must look back at these embarrassments as a hiccup at most, as growing pains on the way to establishing a militarized law-and-order apparatus of nearly unlimited power. That this stepping stone was reached on the eve of the Internet era, right before the old media began its decline in influence, was most convenient for the police state and its solidification.

The propaganda against the Branch Davidians was perfectly tuned to appeal to the masses, each adjustment in frequency coming just in time to keep the people listening. Religious fanatics with a meth lab, armed and dangerous, abusing their children – few wanted to stand up for these people during the siege. Even fewer wished to identify the Davidian response to the original raid for what it was: self-defense. The Davidians fired on the ATF so long as the ATF fired upon the Davidians, and when the ATF ran out of ammo, the Davidians held their fire. The government's officials were the aggressors. What followed were fifty-one days of psychological warfare designed to isolate the Davidians – from water, from food, from the press, their lawyers and family – and break them down like any wartime enemy.

So preposterous was the standoff that eventually even the mainstream media began asking questions. A New York Times exposé on March 28 raised all sorts of troubling issues, which only multiplied in the days that followed. Federal agents said that supervisors had known they had lost the element of surprise, but decided to go ahead with the February 28 raid anyway. Agents were reportedly unhappy with their equipment and communication methods. The poor planning and lack of contingency options were exposed. No medical assistance had been prepared for the ATF's raid. Reports emerged that some of the ATF agents had injured or killed one another in friendly fire. There were hints that other agents might have even been captured and let go by the Davidians. The ATF intelligence chief stopped holding press conferences as the heat continued to mount.

On April 19, tired from the boredom and bad publicity of just standing around outside the "compound," the FBI drove a tank through the Davidians' home, pumped it full of CS gas, launched incendiary devices at the building, and watched it go up in flames. As soon as the stakes became higher, as soon as questioning the feds meant implying they had committed mass murder, the media stopped barking defiantly and jumped back to the government's lap.

The Democrats, home of America's center-left, oversaw this exceedingly important event in the development of the police state. Unsurprisingly, every respectable liberal defended the government and believed Clinton's people when they demonized the Davidians. The entire respectable right went along with the bloodletting, too. Why wouldn't they? It was a raid planned by George H.W. Bush's ATF, carried out by the Clintonistas, and ultimately rubberstamped by the Republicans in Congress, and so everyone could get behind it. Some libertarians wavered, including Randians and other proponents of violent national secularism, and much of the radical left went limp too.

The Oklahoma City incident two years later was spun by the media as an example of anti-government extremism somehow being a greater threat than the government itself. It became increasingly un-PC to bring up what had happened in Texas. The election of Dubya and 9/11 washed away the paranoid anti-statist instincts of much of the Clinton-hating right.

Waco, from the raid's planning to the cover-up and show trials, taught the U.S. government what it could get away with – which is to say, practically anything. It can gas innocent children with internationally banned chemicals. It can hoist a federal flag atop a torched American home, claim victory, and see its public image improve. It can throw grenades at people trying to escape a building and claim they are being held hostage. In the name of protecting these "hostages" and children, it can watch as they burn and keep the firefighters away. And the massacre will be tolerated, even applauded.

Dozens of people of color died at the hands of the federal government, and the official Civil Rights movement hardly spoke up. Dozens of people were targeted for their religion, and it hardly bothered many of the very conservatives who allege a war on religion waged by DC. The largest federal-military killing of civilians on U.S. soil in a century has now become one more notch on the progressive left's timeline of major events in anti-government extremism, as opposed to a principal example of government extremism where a tiny minority community was virtually exterminated.

Indeed, in 1993 the Davidians were only the most conspicuous and recent example in America's long history of the demonized Other, the marginalized underclass in the official hierarchy of human worth. Slaves, Indians, Mexicans, Southerners, Catholics, Irish and German-Americans, Chinese immigrants, Japanese-Americans, Mormons, homosexuals, alleged Communists, rightwing extremists, and many others have played the role, often for their imagined association with the wartime enemy, but always for being out of step with the government's accepted definition of legitimate humanity. Many look back at incidents of intolerance with disbelief that Americans could be so blind to oppression. Yet when the topic of Waco comes up, they will think only of those nutcases who, according to the government and media, attacked federal agents and then killed themselves.

In the nineteen years since Waco, we have seen the police state explode in every direction and now we are all ensnared. Some groups are always more threatened than others, but no one is truly safe. The prisons have swollen to the largest detention system since Stalin's gulags. The police conduct three thousand SWAT raids a month. The war on terror has made a total mockery of what remained of the Fourth Amendment. Torture has lost its taboo. So has indefinite detention. The feds irradiate and molest airline passengers by the millions. People are jailed for taking medicine, buying Sudafed, sharing songs, and selling milk.

The Kafkaesque regulatory state threatens people of all economic classes with crushing fines and a fate in a cage. The public schools, always authoritarian institutions, have become explicit adjuncts of the criminal justice system and military recruitment offices. Every major police department has tanks and battle rifles and drones are being used for surveillance and God knows what else. Each federal department has enough firepower to conquer a small third-world country. DHS alone has ordered enough ammo to shoot every American man, woman, and child. The president claims the right to kill American citizens anywhere on the planet on his say-so alone. And he exercises that power.

Why do some of us continue to fixate on Waco? If for no other reason, because April 19, 1993 was a squandered opportunity if ever there was one. The people could have risen up and said, "Enough!"

They could have demanded the military occupation retreat from their own neighborhoods – both the federal presence and its satellite jackboots in the city police. They could have demanded an end to the gun laws, drug war, and federal war on crime, each of which was instrumental in ending the lives of more than twenty children at Waco. They could have turned against the media whose elites stood and applauded the White House as it announced and defended its latest killing spree. They could have seen the federal government for the clear and present danger it obviously poses – the only government that had militarily mass murdered American civilians on American soil since the collateral damage at Pearl Harbor.

They could have turned their backs on the killers in DC, refusing ever to believe in their lies again, saving the lives of uncountable Americans, Serbians, Afghans, Iraqis, Libyans, Yemenis, Palestinians, and so many others who would bear the wrath of an unhampered imperial executive in the nineteen years to come, sparing the priceless liberties we have seen shredded on the altar of state power.

Instead, they looked the other way, they yawned, even cheered. There might still be time to turn things around. But the tanks are closing in. 

Regards,
Anthony Gregory
LewRockwell.com

Government is the real terror

America was founded by men who understood that the threat of domestic tyranny is as great as any threat from abroad. If we want to be worthy of their legacy, we must resist the rush toward ever-increasing state control of our society. Otherwise, our own government will become a greater threat to our freedoms than any foreign terrorist.

A government out of control, unstrained by the constitution, the rule of law or morality. Bickering over petty politics as we descend into chaos. The philosophy that destroys us is not even defined. We have broken from reality a psychotic nation. Ignorance with a pretence of knowledge replacing wisdom...

We are now in the midst of unlimited spending of the people’s money. Exorbitant taxation, deficits of trillions of dollars spent on a failed welfare-warfare system. An epidemic of cronyism. Unlimited supplies of paper money equated with wealth. A central bank that deliberately destroys the value of the currency in secrecy, without restraint, without nary a whimper, yet cheered on by the pseudo-capitalists of Wall Street, the military-industrial complex, and Detroit. We police our world empire with troops on 700 bases and in 130 countries around the world. A dangerous war now spreads throughout the Middle East and Central Asia. Thousands of innocent people being killed as we become known as the torturers of the 21st century. We assume that by keeping the already known torture pictures from the public’s eye, we will be remembered only as a generous and good people. If our enemies want to attack us only because we are free and rich, proof of torture would be irrelevant...

We need to quickly refresh our memories and once again reinvigorate our love, understanding and confidence in liberty... We must escape from the madness of crowds now gathering.

- Ron Paul