Brandon Smith offers some ideas on how one might go about this thing.

There is a simple fact that must be understood when it comes to the fight for liberty: Such a fight cannot be won by lone individuals. Freedom requires organized resistance and it does not matter how many millions of people stand against an authoritarian regime, if they are completely isolated from each other they WILL lose. It’s a guarantee.

Actually, I’m kinda conflicted on that. Admittedly, humans seem to be genetically predisposed to create organizations and hierarchical leadership structures to run them. In this context, though, organizing at anything above squad- or cell-level numbers will also create infiltration and surveillance/intel-gathering opportunities, among other highly undesirable failure points.

Many of us are already clamoring about the need to organizate, and expressing great frustration that no inspiring Great Man has yet appeared to lead Patriots into battle, then on to ultimate victory. I don’t hold with any of that myself. When the time is right and the need for him is apparent, Team LIberty will find the leader it needs readily enough. Until then, such a person will only make himself a target, a resource whose usefulness the Enemy will identify and exploit posthaste. Unsurprisingly Brandon is smart and experienced enough to know it.

It is important to understand the difference between a Lexington Bridge moment and a Fort Sumter moment – During Lexington Bridge, the revolutionaries took action to stop a British detachment from arresting colonial leaders and confiscating rifles and powder stores. The British were in the midst of an undeniable attempt to disarm and snuff out the resistance. At Fort Sumter, the Confederate attack was in response to an attempted resupply of the fort itself; which made sense strategically but looked like an act of pure aggression to the wider public. The concept of states rights (more prominent in the minds of the confederates than the issue of slavery) fell by the wayside.

Eventually tyranny has to put boots on the ground. A totalitarian system can function for a time on color of law and implied threats, but it will crumble unless it is able to establish a physical presence of force. Once those jackboots touch soil in a visible way and the agents of the state try to expand oppressive measures, rebels then have a free hand to disrupt them or bring them down. But this only works if there are objectives and enough decentralization to prevent misdirection of the movement.

Some organization is essential. It cannot be avoided. All the “Gray Men” and secret squirrel preppers out there that think they are going to simply weather the storm in isolation and pop out of their bug-out locations to rebuild are suffering from serious delusions. I can’t help but think of that moment in ‘Lord Of The Rings’ when the Ents refuse to organize to fight against the invading orcs. Pippen suggests to Merry that the problem is too big for them and that they should go back to the Shire to wait out the war. Merry laments:

“The fires of Isengard will spread. And the woods of Tuckborough and Buckland will burn. And all that was once green and good in this world will be gone. There won’t be a Shire, Pippin.”

If this fight is not pursued now, there will be no world worth coming back to, even if one was able to successfully hide from it. There will be a “new world order” as the globalists like to call it. There will be nothing left of freedom.

So, organization must be accomplished, and it should be built at the local level. This is far more important than any dreams of a national organization, at least for now. There is no one we can trust to lead such a nationwide revolt, and that includes political leaders like Donald Trump.

And on that last, I feel no conflict or uncertainty whatever—Brandon is one hundred percent correct, right down the line. The dilemna we face at present is a thorny one indeed, of which the “who do ya trust, who do ya trust” issue is one of the largest and sharpest. Yes, you’ll want to read all of it. Delve into the comments too; as is his wont, Brandon pops up there throughout, and the insights he provides there are every bit as not-to-be-missed as the article itself.

Since Brandon was clever enough to bring up Lord Of The Rings as a metaphor, and since I already recommended his comments section, one of the posters therein suggests this next as a sort of companion piece, one whose aptness regarding the current contretemps will have any Tolkien fan nodding his head in quiet satisfaction.* The opening sets the stage:

“Do you not yet understand? My time is over: it is no longer my task to set things to rights, nor to help folk to do so. And as for you, my dear friends, you will need no help. You are grown up now. Grown indeed very high; among the great you are, and I have no longer any fear at all for any of you.”
The Lord of the Rings, Loc. 996
 
“‘Good, good!’ cried Farmer Cotton. ‘So it’s begun at last! I’ve been itching for trouble all this year, but folks wouldn’t help.”
The Lord of the Rings, Loc. 1008

Introduction
There are many things to be learned in Middle Earth, and this would include things that we all once knew, but have since forgotten. And the things we have forgotten fall into two categories. We have forgotten some of the things we have already completely lost, and we have also forgotten the foundation of some of the remaining things we (for some reason) still have. We have forgotten what is long gone, and we have forgotten what might still preserve our remaining good.

In The Lord of the Rings, the hobbits of the Shire, protected as they were by the Rangers, took all their peace and security for granted. All that peace and security was somehow their birthright. It was just how things were, of necessity. It would just continue, right? All by itself, isn’t that correct? Well, no.

In other words, they forgot the basis of their security and safety long before they actually lost their security and safety. And this meant that once they were in trouble, and knew they were in trouble, they were leaderless and didn’t know the way out. When despotic and irrational rule takes over any people, the corruption is centralized and organized, while the unhappiness with the corruption is decentralized and not organized at all. The corrupt ones are organized and have a plan, and those who suffer under their ministrations haven’t even thought about a plan.

But once the hobbits had that necessary leadership—which came in the form of Merry and Pippin, and Frodo and Sam—they found they had hidden reserves. These hobbits of the Shire found they had hidden reserves because they were rallied by those four adventurous hobbits who had found out earlier about their hidden reserves.

I recently finished reading The Lord of the Rings (yet again), and the penultimate chapter is The Scouring of the Shire—which to my mind is the most satisfying episode in the whole trilogy, and as you well know, that is saying something.

But this time through, it was different. It struck me, reading through that chapter, that there were numerous things that Americans of our generation really need to learn from this. And so I have assembled some of those lessons in a reasonable order, and have made some observations about what the hobbits learned. I was astonished at how much their situation was parallel to ours.

He’s perfectly right to be, I couldn’t agree more: the parallels are in fact nothing short of astonishing. Once you’ve seen them, it’s hard to imagine how you ever missed them in the first place. Then again, a certain timeless relevance is characteristic of all truly great literature—one of the traits that defines great literature, actually. The above excerpt ought to be enough to whet your appetite for more, I believe. It’s a long ‘un, but well worth your time and attention, whether you’re a devotee of Tolkien’s books (I definitely am, since the age of about, oh, thirteen or thereabouts) or not.

*NOTE: That would be the books, I mean, not the movies. Peter Jackson’s magisterial film adaption left the Scouring of the Shire chapters that close ROTK out of the third movie altogether, an omission that baffled some and angered others. Personally, I wasn’t bothered by it, since he had already made such a bang-up job of cramming in everything else. If Jackson had included it, he would have needed FOUR movies to do it, not three. Just thought I’d mention it, since that last article uses the Scouring as its springboard and central focus.

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