Guest Editorial
BY LAWRENCE SELLIN, PHD | JANUARY 8, 2014
On the need for a political insurgency
An increasing number of Americans are recognizing that the United States no longer has representative government.
Politicians seek election, not to uphold the Constitution and serve the American people, but to obtain power, and to use that power to accrue partisan and financial benefits for themselves and their major supporters.
It should now be obvious that there are no untainted elections, there is no rule of law, there is no means to petition elected officials or the courts for the redress of grievances and there is no independent press to challenge governmental abuse.
In other words, all the traditional avenues to fight the corrupt practices of political expediency and crony capitalism have been blocked.
The method by which the ruling class maintains the corrupt status quo is by fostering a culture of political dependency. The Democrats create a culture of dependency by expanding government control through limitations on personal liberty, entitlements and tribal politics. The Republican establishment produces a culture of dependency by limiting choice, selecting candidates and carefully managing primary elections to produce a pre-determined outcome. Republicans want to remain the sole alternative to the Democratic Party and preserve their membership in the ruling class by cooperating with the Democrats and the media to maintain the illusion of choice.
The leaders of the Democratic and the Republican parties have ignored their oaths to support and defend the Constitution and enabled Obama to execute unconstitutional and irresponsible policies, which have endangered our national security, undermined our liberties and consistently thwarted the will of the American people.
The media have facilitated government corruption by misinforming and misleading citizens. Rather than challenging power, they have become the mouthpiece of the Obama Administration defending and serving the interests of its far-left agenda.
In Chapter Six "What Sort of Despotism Democratic Nations Have to Fear" of his 1835 book "Democracy in America," Alexis de Tocqueville warned us of the soft tyranny of excessive and intrusive government:
"After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd."
America has become what Sheldon S. Wolin described as a "managed democracy", where a governmental cartel stages elections every few years to obtain voter acquiescence in a "country where citizens are politically uninterested and submissive – and where elites are eager to keep them that way."
There is no better example of the disdain that the politicians hold for ordinary Americans and representative government in general than the war being waged against the Tea Party by the Republican establishment and the Chamber of Commerce.
The Republican Party should be abandoned as a political vehicle capable of providing effective opposition to the Obama regime, the Democrats or the mainstream media. It is also a party of big government, which has become unresponsive and unaccountable to the American people.
Any country ruled by a small group without broad, popular participation by its citizens provides a political basis for an insurgency. It is an axiom of unconventional warfare that insurgents succeed through chaos and disorder appearing anywhere. The regime fails unless it maintains a degree of order everywhere.
Army Field Manual 3-24 defines an insurgency as an organized, protracted politico-military struggle designed to weaken an occupying power. In our case the occupying power is the political ruling class which has perverted the Constitution, flouted the rule of law and undermined representative government.
Political chaos will inevitably increase as the extent of Obama's lies, fraud and failed policies become evident. Political insurgents can exploit the situation nationwide by identifying local targets of opportunity to disrupt, weaken and defeat the undemocratic activities of the two political parties and the mainstream media. The strategic end state of such a political insurgency is the restoration of the Constitution, the rule of law and genuine representative government.
We are sleeping on a volcano … A wind of revolution blows, the storm is on the horizon. - Alexis de Tocqueville
Lawrence Sellin, Ph.D. is a retired colonel with 29 years of service in the US Army Reserve and a veteran of Afghanistan and Iraq. Colonel Sellin is the author of Restoring the Republic: Arguments for a Second American Revolution. He receives email at [email protected].
