Two decades ago, among many other learning opportunities, I had the distinct pleasure of attending and graduating from a combat survival course run by the U.S. military. The first part of the course focused on evading capture. The second part of the course was all about surviving captivity as a prisoner of war.
During the P.O.W portion of the course, we were taught about the methods of control, oppression and exploitation that we might expect to be used against us in a P.O.W. situation. Further, the successful exploitation of the P.O.W. would then allow the enemy new methods of psychological warfare that could be applied against the American people. As I analyze the situation faced today by freedom-loving Americans, I recognize parallels between the P.O.W. experience and the methods of control being imposed upon us by what we have allowed our government to become.
For instance, recently I viewed a video of Representative Wasserman-Schulz responding to a question posed by a constituent during a town hall meeting. The constituent asked, “What gave you the right or authority to determine whether or not I have to purchase healthcare?”
Wasserman-Schulz denied that individuals shall be forced to purchase coverage. Her explanation: “What we are doing is that you will be in a different tax status if you carry insurance versus if you don’t carry health insurance… There is no requirement in this law that you must carry health insurance.” (See video HERE) This obvious equivocation was met with boos and scoffs from the assembled citizens. Those who have been paying attention are aware that the IRS has been given responsibility, along with illegitimate authority, to enforce the individual mandates of the health care “reform.” At this point, we can only use our imagination to consider what “different tax status” might mean.
[Many of the majority party who voted for the abomination of nationalized health care have been asked this same question. The variety of their answers indicates that they do not have a defensible answer to the question of constitutionality. Some claim that the commerce clause provides the authority, while others, like Wasserman-Schulz, claim that participation is not mandatory – an indication that she does not think that the commerce clause dodge will work in her district.]
Just as wise parents instruct their children to be cautious when signing any documents, in preparation for the P.O.W. experience we were instructed to resist demands by our captors to sign documents that they presented to us. With this advice came information on how those documents might later be used against us. Through the ages, as well as today, forced confessions are a standard tactic of oppressive regimes and are used against subjects, captured combatants, and non-combatants that get caught in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Without going into too much detail, during training, my fellow students and I were coerced into signing a document. The coercion was through complex and effective means such that it could not be described as a free will choice. Were our signatures used against us? They certainly were. They were used against us as individuals and they were used against us as a collective group.
The methods of the Marxist include equivocation, logical fallacy, and insidious sophistry (grade school translation: “They LIE! They lie without a hint of shame”). They use words and the intimidation of force, to create a lose-lose environment. Each of these elements was used in the methods used to coerce our signatures in a simulated environment.
Middle-class Americans are naturally vulnerable to these methods because we are generally a trusting people. We are a people who have a certain presumption toward fair play. We resist drawing to a conclusion that government officials, or “The Government” writ large would use, or even be capable of using such tactics, because… well, because it would just be so wrong, so unfair, so illegal, and so un-American. However, if we allow ourselves to realize that there is no intrinsic and impenetrable protection of our society against such poisonous methods, we will see that the current evidence holds abundant examples of these tactics being used against us, against our prosperity, and against our individual liberty.
One might wonder how our “honorable” elected officials allow themselves to bring this poison upon us. The explanation is simple. Equivocations, logical fallacies, and insidious sophistries are the characteristics of the stones that paved the road that they traveled to arrive in their positions of power. Similar stones also paved the road they traveled to moral and logical corruption that allowed them to form a worldview that is against truth, freedom, and justice (grade school translation: “They LIE to themselves, shamelessly”). Compromises of our fundamental values and principles allowed them to prosper as they traveled down these roads. Our complacency allowed them to install themselves in the seats of power.
Today, we are confronted with the methods of the Marxists. As much as they are by design, these methods are also intrinsic to the way they regularly think. It comes natural to them.
We must continue to build the wave of the electorate and vote the rascals out. Few remaining are the critical opportunities to preserve our Republic and our free and open civil society.
