Throughout history, every religious and socio-political group
has had or does have its dark times — the times to which it refers and
proclaims, “Never again,” the times for which its members prepare with
grim purpose and pessimistic proclamations. For the Jews, it was the
Holocaust — and it remains the spectres of anti-Semitism and, if you
are a member of Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership, gun
control. For Christians it was the persecution of people of faith
throughout history, from the Roman Colosseum to the enforced atheism of
the Soviet Union — and it remains the litigious and systematic removal
of Christianity from the public sphere in contemporary American
society. For modern-day Pagans it was the “Burning Times,” including
the infamous Salem Witch Trials — and it remains the hostility,
suspicion, and discrimination on the parts of contemporary citizens
whose opinions of neopagan religions are based on misinformation and
misunderstanding.

For armed, prepared citizens, for martialists,
the dark times are comprised of any period in which the political,
social, and cultural pendulum swings towards control
— control of arms, control of training, control of individual lives.
For what is self-defense without the self? The
right to defend yourself and the legal freedom necessary to own the
tools and take the actions necessary to accomplish this goal are
aspects of your self-ownership, the concept that you
own you. Your are nobody’s slave and you
are nobody’s property. You don’t owe anyone
anything to which you’ve not agreed. You have the
inalienable, unquestioned natural right to yourself — and to the
products of your labors. To protect those rights, you have the right to
defend yourself. More importantly, you have the right, in a free
society, to be free of burdensome, invasive legislation that infringes
on your right to self-protection or otherwise unjustly deprives you of
your property, your time, or your life.

For example, the most recent dark times for men and women of
action — the people who are reading The Martialist,
for the most part — were the eight years of the Clinton
Presidency, eight years of abuse by the Bureau of Alcohol,
Tobacco, and Firearms punctuated by the Clintons’ contempt for gun
owners and anyone to the right of their political leftism. These were
dark times that saw the burning to death of the Branch Davidians, for
example — people whose crimes certainly included being deluded
religious nutjobs, but whose wrongs certainly did not merit an horrific
death sentence. These were dark times that saw a young boy, whose
mother died to free him from the socialist dictatorship of Cuba, stolen
at gunpoint by jackbooted stormtroopers — a boy stolen from an
American home in an American city by black-clad federal ninja wielding
submachineguns. (Thanks to President Clinton, Elian Gonzales was
returned to the prison-state that is modern-day Cuba, where he is the
property of the all-powerful government.)

These were dark times that saw a marked decrease in Federal
Firearms Licenses, as the government did its best to harass legal gun
dealers and put them out of business. These were dark times that saw
what was, at the time, the largest tax increase in history, accompanied
by ever-greater government control on the liberties, lives, and
livelihoods of those living and working in the United States.

For today’s armed and prepared citizens, the dark time remains
the Orwellian thought policing of that which is considered politically
correct, coupled with the increasing pacifism and passivism of American
popular culture. Ours is a culture that would rather see a woman raped
than allow her to carry a gun. Ours is a culture that would bring that
woman up on charges if she did have a gun and used it to shoot that
would-be rapist. Ours is a culture that, increasingly, equates weaponry
and even martial arts training with vice, with the desire to do
unprovoked violence to others.

The Centers for Disease Control, as politicized a public
agency as ever one could want, treat firearms like a disease.
Schoolchildren, increasingly brainwashed in government schools, are
indoctrinated to view all use of force as evil — sometimes even being
asked to inform on their parents’ firearms ownership, if news
accounts can be believed –and come home to their horrified parents
spewing politically correct clichés and revisionist history
with the wide-eyed innocence of true believers. They do all this while,
all too often, failing miserably to understand everything from math and
reading to simple weights and measures, to say nothing of mysteries
like grammar.  The invasion of privacy begins at birth; new
parents are frequently asked to answer the question, “Are there guns in
the home?” when they fill out paperwork at a pediatrician’s office for
the first time.

The coming dark times have, on occasion, seemed more distant.
In post-Clinton America, it seemed — beginning with the Republican
“take-over” of Congress during Clinton’s time in office — that the
tide was turning. Americans who believe in being prepared, in living
life actively and dynamically, in defending themselves and their
families, breathed premature sighs of relief. These American
anti-pacifists — whom I call martialists — even
saw the expiration of the national “Assault Weapons Ban.” (Lest you
think that this is a polemic against a specific political party, it is
not. Both Republicans and Democrats pose a threat to your liberty and
have engaged in the war on self-defense. For example, Governor George
Pataki, nominally a Republican, did more harm to legal gun ownership in
New York State than the infamous Governor Mario Cuomo ever managed
before him. Pataki signed into law what was, at the time, the strictest
gun control in the United States.)

For a brief moment in time, the American future — which
seemed inexorably to be moving towards greater tyranny, greater
statism, greater and more invasive government control, greater
socialism — seemed bright. Conservative radio hosts starting
arrogantly proclaiming (while ignoring their own political
functionaries’ infringements on personal liberty, not to
mention their failures to secure national security and individual
rights) that those on the political left simply couldn’t win
elections, that their ideology had been rejected by the American
people, that their party or parties were dying. It was, apparently, a
good time to be a martialist in the United States. It was, many
thought, a good time to be an armed and law-abiding American. It was,
so many hoped, a good time to be a free woman, a free man — a free
citizen.

The future has gone dark.

In truth, the future always was dark. It is
remarkably stupid, given the lessons of history, to rejoice when
Republicans take power, for they have wrought as much damage to
individual liberty as have their Democrat rivals. Substitute
“right-wing” for Republicans and
“left-wing” for Democrat in that sentence and the
truth is only slightly different. While I do believe right and wrong
exist — and I believe ardently that what is true and morally correct
is far more often characterized as “right wing”
than as “left wing” — the fact is that our society
is moving inexorably towards totalitarian statism.  The
adjectives applied to our political parties are sometimes only
convenient shorthand, when what these politicans do in office is
compared to what they promised before the votes were in.

Take, for example, the New London, CT  decision. the
Supreme Court of the United States ruled — legislating from the bench
as it so often does — that your government may take your property for
almost any “public good,” in what is surely the most gruesome abuse of
Emminent Domain ever to be handed down by our robed masters. This is
only the beginning. When your government can take anything you own for
almost any reason, private property does not exist. When private
property does not exist, de facto socialism has been implemented. The
dark times are coming — and they have always been coming.

When I first got the idea to write this editorial, the dust
was just clearing from the 2005 off-year elections. At that time, in
San Fancisco, all guns were banned. It was illegal to make guns, sell
guns, or own guns. You couldn’t carry a gun in the city; you
could not even have a gun in your home or your business. San Francisco
was thus destined to join Chicago and Washington, DC, as one the most
violent cities in the nation, torn by the lawlessness that is always
the result of disarming law-abiding citizens.

The law was since challenged in court, but the passing of the
San Francisco ban was not an isolated incident. Call it three years
ago, and Republican ballot initiatives in California were roundly voted
down. Left-leaning politicians, primarily Democrats, swept the most
consequential of the off-year elections nationwide in the wake of the
political scandals plaguing the second Bush administration. On the
opposite coast, Hillary Clinton was the front-runner for her party’s
presidential nomination  — and notoriously anti-gun Elliot
Spitzer, then an Attorney General eager to sue firearm manufacturers
out of existence, became Governor of New York State. The
national and local news media trumpeted the “political nightmare”
George Bush would face in 2006, with Democrats in control of Congress.

Since then, some individuals’ political fortunes have changed,
but the national trend has grown only worse.  Elliot Spitzer
was forced to resign in disgrace after it was revealed that he had
repeatedly purchased the services of a high-priced prostitution ring,
the very sort of ring he had prosecuted while Attorney General.
 His replacement is a blind man whose chief claim to fame is
having repeatedly introduced legislation in New York that would require
police to “shoot to wound” (and punish them if they failed to do so) —
a blind man who, in his first week in office, held a press conference
to admit to a pattern of serial marital infidelity.  In the
2008 elections, the Democrats are poised to seize a super-majority in
Congress, effectively removing any ability the Republican minority
might have to prevent devastatingly leftist legislation from being
signed into law.  The Democrat candidate for president of the
United States, the racist and avowedly socialist Barack Hussein Obama,
managed to defeat Hillary Clinton after a protracted battle for the
nomination.  Now, with a double-digit lead over Republican
candidate John McCain in some polls, Obama (whose voting record ranks
him as the most radical, left-wing lawmaker in the Senate) will be
sitting in the Oval Office ready to sign that legislation when it
reaches his desk.

Among the legislation to which Americans can look forward are
the so-called “Fairness Doctrine,” which will drive conservative voices
out of talk radio by making the endeavor too complicated and expensive
to maintain.  We can look forward to sweeping gun control
legislation, the Second Amendment be damned and the recent Supreme
Court decision (affirming this individual right) notwithstanding.
 We can look forward to much more invasive socialism, too;
Obama has expressed his desire to “spread the wealth around,” meaning
he wishes to confiscate and redistribute the earnings of American
workers.

The war in Iraq continues, without cessation.  The
war in Afghanistan has been relegated to last-page news, but it, too,
grinds on.  The American economy has collapsed utterly,
bringing us to the brink of depression and certainly the depths of
recession.  The mortgage and credit industries have fallen
apart, and once pre-approved home-shoppers and even buyers of cars and
other items cannot get loans.

Never a particularly strong president, George W. Bush has
proven to be perhaps one of the worst in history.  He has made
Jimmy Carter, once synonymous with failed US Presidency, look good by
comparison.  He is certainly his party’s worst enemy. He will
leave office to walk into the pages of history an utter failure,
leaving socio-political wreckage and economic anarchy in his wake.

As political conservatives have lost ground, so, too, have
armed citizens lost ground. Say what you will about the other politics
of the right wing in this country; complain, rightly, as much as you
like about “theocracy” and other issues associated with the G.O.P. that
are less than libertarian. For all the party’s faults, it did one thing reasonably well,
if at times with mediocrity: it stood up for firearms rights. Despite
traitors like George Pataki and other Republican In Name Only (RINO)
turncoats within the party, the Republicans’ legitimately conservative
members stood up for self-defense in the face of crime. They stood up
for martialism in the face of popular culture’s pacifist mantra of
appeasement, self-destruction, and self-delusion.

Of course, they did this while society continued to close in
around its members. They did this while, at times, aiding and abetting
the very forces of “big government” they claimed to
oppose. In a day and age when Congress and the President create and
sign into being not tens, not scores, but hundreds of laws —
from a pool of bills created in the Senate and the House that numbers
in the thousands
— it’s safe to say that all the really important and
necessary laws (such as not murdering our neighbors or stealing their
property) have been covered at some point in our more than two hundred
year history. That means that with each of the thousands of possible
laws your federal government tries to foist on you as an American
citizen, another piece of your life is cordoned off, boxed in, and tied
up.

There are now more laws on the books at the federal and state
levels in the United States — not counting the nearly limitless
regulations imposed by various and sundry federal and state agencies
and their faceless bureaucratic functionaries — than any human being
could possibly comprehend. No single person could keep in his or her
head all of the laws he or she must follow in order to engage in any
endeavor in his or her personal or business life. It simply
isn’t possible. As the web of laws continues to tighten, the
war on your freedom — the war on you, your individuality, your right
to self-defense — continues apace. The war on freedom starts with the
war on self-defense because a human being who can fight back is a human
being who can oppose all other forms of government control, government
intervention, and government theft.

As the coming dark times close in, it will become even more
difficult for American martialists. Already under assault from every
side in a culture that values victims over victors, defensively-minded
critical thinkers are becoming ever more rare among Americans. Think
about the other gun owners you know — and among them, think of the
hardcore “tactical” enthusiasts, the ones who post in online discussion
sites devoted to self-defense, the ones who spend hundreds of dollars
to train with people and at institutions like Gabe Suarez, Massad
Ayoob, Gunsite, Thunder Ranch, MDTS, and Progressive
F.o.R.C.E. Concepts, the ones who’ve studied or are studying
martial arts and who do more than wander through life blissfully
ignorant of life’s potential dangers. How many of them
consider themselves, quite rightly, members of an increasingly
shrinking minority? How many of them will tell you, quite honestly,
that they must live in the “tactical closet” for
fear that coworkers and family members will consider them paranoid,
dangerous, or otherwise mentally “odd” (at best) if their beliefs about
self-defense, weapons, and realistic martial arts training became
known?

As bad as it has been, it’s going to become much worse.
Martialists — martial artists, self-defense and combatives exponents,
gun owners, survivalists, and others who believe in basic preparedness
and objective reality over wishful thinking and utopian political
correctness — will become an increasingly persecuted minority. The
fiction that seemed so far-fetched even during the Clinton Years will
become chillingly relevant during Barack Hussein Obama’s rule. Across
this nation, martialists and like-minded armed citizens will reread
Jerry Ahern’s The Survivalist, The Freeman,
and The Defender. They will pick up and read with
shaking hands their copies of Unintended Consequences,
Enemies Foreign and Domestic (and its sequels), and Out
of the Gray Zone. They will realize with horror that there
are classics of English-language literature predating these more
contemporary offerings, classics that warned us of the coming dark
times in voices and images that are only too clear in our 20/20
hindsight. The communist dystopia of Orwell’s Animal
Farm will only too chillingly embody the attitudes of the men
and women in power, those people who presume to write laws telling us
what we may and may not do. The alarmingly prescient depiction of an
oppressed citizenry under constant video surveillance by a manipulative
and brutal government will no longer be confined to the pages of
Orwell’s 1984. Martialists will delve
into a cornucopia of libertarian short fiction, the most famous
examples of which involve everything from the smuggling of illicit
dairy products to costumed vigilantes waging ceaseless war against the
well-oiled machines of restrictive, pitiless autocracy.  Repent, Harlequin
— for you are worth more than all of the giraffes.*

If all of this sounds far-fetched, if all of its sounds like
alarmism and pessimism, if none of this seems likely to
occur… well, congratulations. You’re in the
majority of people who think it can’t happen to them. You
remember the famous condemnation of apathy in the face of oppression,
don’t you? It goes something like, “When they came
for the Jews, I did nothing because I wasn’t a Jew. When they came for
the [place persecuted minority here] I did nothing because I
wasn’t a member of that persecuted minority. When they came
for me, there was nobody left to stop them.”

When I was a young man first out on my own, I used to visit a local
gun store in a neighboring county.  The shop was run by a married
couple.  The husband was an old, grizzled, take-no-shit sort of
fellow with a gigantic walrus mustache who wore his Smith and Wesson
automatic openly on his hip.  He had a brass gatling gun chambered
for .22 short sitting right on the counter, and a pair of boulders —
actual boulders — sitting in front of the store.  According to
the local lore, he’d once experienced a break-in involving a vehicle
driven right through the front of his shop, so he’d set about making
sure it couldn’t ever happen again.  I learned a lot about guns
and about life from that old man.  One exchange will always haunt
me.

“If they pass a law banning guns,” I admitted to him one day, “I
guess I’d have to turn them in.  I mean, I can’t fight the
government.  I just got married.  I’ve got a wife to think
about.”

“That’s fine,” the old man sneered, “until they come for your wife.  What you gonna do then, boy?”

I thought about that for a long time… and I will always remember exactly what he was trying to tell me and to teach me. It is with that in mind that I do what I do to this day, in all of my writing projects.

The Martialist (and its online forum, Pax Baculum)
is and are more than a means to discuss weaponry, chat with like-minded
individuals, and entertain you with martial theory and application.
They are an attempt to give you the inspiration, the strategies, and
methods for living in, coping with, and preparing for a society that
hates your right to self-defense. In some ways this is a
self-help ‘zine, for The Martialist gives you the
means to cope — mentally as well as physically — with life as a
persecuted minority. Specifically, it teaches you how to conduct
yourself as an armed, prepared citizen in a community, state, and
nation that despise you for being (or wanting to be) what you are. It
teaches you what steps to take while you still can and while there are
options available to you before the dark times close in. It enables you
to build mental (and perhaps physical) fortifications against the
onslaught of the politically correct, the passive, the power-hungry,
and the pitiless.

The Martialist and Pax
Baculum represent
material that I have wanted to read, and failed to find, so many times.
I have wanted to read it whenever I became depressed, despondent, or
dispirited. I have wanted to read it whenever I contemplated planning
for the future — a future I was not sure I was happy about meeting. I
have wanted to read it for comfort, for information, and for
affirmation whenever I questioned just why I was different from so many
of society’s apathetic, passive, and pacifist sheep.

The Martialist and Pax Baculum
are the source material I have wanted to read whenever I was worried
about the coming dark times. I gladly share this material with you.

We will meet the future together. >>