Beware William Tell's Second Arrow

That was indeed a man: William Tell, seen here immortalized in bronze next to a likeness of his son, is a hero not just to Swiss patriots, but to all those in whom the desire for freedom is irrepressible.



"You Swiss are so proud of your 500,000-man citizen militia.... But what will you do if a 1,000,000-man German Army comes marching across your border?"

"That's easy. Each of us will shoot twice, and go home." --

A reported conversation between a German and a Swiss diplomat, circa 1939.


Seven hundred years ago, when Switzerland was under the domination of the Hapsburgs, a dissolute colonial overlord named Hermann Gessler sought to humiliate the residents of Altdorf, the capital of the central Swiss canton of Uri.


Gessler instructed his minions to erect a tall pole in the town square, at the top of which would be displayed his cap. Every Swiss man who entered the square would be required to pay fealty to Gessler, and the foreign imperial power he represented, by bowing before his cap.


One local resident was a man who distinguished himself by both his virtuosity with a crossbow and his contemptuous hostility toward bullies. Trying to force him to genuflect before another man, let alone his empty cap, would be a bit like trying to relocate the Matterhorn one shovel-full at a time. So while others prostrated themselves before Gessler's headwear, William Tell stood erect, burly arms folded across his broad chest, slowly shaking his head as his derisive laughter echoed through the town square.


Tell's defiance became known to Gessler, as did his reputation as a marksman. The Hapsburg stooge was worried about the possibility of Tell's rebellion becoming contagious. Endowed with the vicious creativity that so often replaces character in creatures of his kind, Gessler abducted Tell's young son, forcing William to leave his mountain home and stand before him.



Gessler told Tell that his son would be placed in the town square with an apple atop his head. Tell was placed at a considerable distance from his son and told that he was to shoot the apple from his child's head; failure to do so on his first shot would bring about the death of his son at the hands of Gessler's soldiers.



According to the legend, Tell hesitated not at all in fitting an arrow to his crossbow and letting fly, cleaving the apple without harming his child.


Tell's feat, and the composure with which he carried it off, were sufficient to impress even the porcine, self-enraptured Gessler.


As Tell collected his son and turned to leave, a second arrow fell from his coat. Noticing this, a puzzled Gessler asked Tell why he'd bothered to grab a second arrow, since the first shot would either have succeeded or brought about the death of his son.


Fixing the despot with an unflinching stare, Tell replied: "That second arrow was for you, if the first had wounded my boy."


Not long afterward, Tell's second arrow found its intended destination as Tell and his countrymen rose up against the foreign occupation, leading to the eventual creation of the Swiss Confederacy in the late 13th Century.


A true citizens' militia and its leader: Henri Guisan, appointed commander-in-chief of the Swiss militia during WWII, inspects the troops. Thanks to Guisan's leadership and strategic vision, Switzerland deterred a planned Axis invasion and was able to remain independent during the European bloodletting.

Owing to its tradition of resolute individualism, the unexcelled marksmanship of its citizen militia, and its decentralized political system, the Swiss have managed to avoid entanglement in the affairs of other nations and preserve their independence from foreign domination.



Efforts have been made to break Switzerland to the saddle of "internationalism": In 1798, the French revolutionary army invaded and occupied Switzerland, inflicting on it a centralized "Helvetic Republic" that lasted five years.


In 1939, as recounted in Stephen P. Halbrook's book Target: Switzerland, the German military drew up plans to invade and occupy Switzerland in the mistaken belief that its citizen militia would be no match for the Wehrmacht.


Under the leadership of Colonel Henri Guisan (at the time, it was the tradition that no officer would be appointed "general" unless the country actually went to war), the militia prepared a strategy called the "national redoubt": In the event of a German invasion, the militia would retreat into a series of fortified installations in the Alps and wage unremitting guerrilla war for as long as it took to drive the invaders from their land.


Confronting the prospect of fighting an entire country under arms, and horrified by the price that would be paid to pry the Swiss militia from its Alpine redoubts, the German High Command decided to leave Switzerland alone. What this means, of course, is that Switzerland actually won its war without suffering the hideous losses inflicted on any of the combatant nations.

A decade ago, another campaign -- this one more subtle than threats of military occupation -- was mounted to destroy Swiss independence. Beginning in 1997, Switzerland, which rescued tens of thousands of Jews from the Holocaust, was besieged by spurious claims that its renowned banking system was hoarding gold stolen from victims of the Nazis.

Stories were put into circulation describing the cynical heartlessness of banking officials in turning away aging survivors of Nazi cruelty; those stories invariably proved to be as substantial as cotton candy and as reliable as Jim Cramer's investment advice.

Nonetheless, a global campaign of defamation and invective, spearheaded by the coprogenetic Edgar Bronfman Sr. and eagerly abetted by the Clinton administration, indelibly branded the Swiss as Holocaust profiteers, thereby setting the stage for a shake-down that continues to this day.

No matter that on three prior occasions -- in 1946, as a result of the post-WWII Washington Accord; in the mid-1950s; and in 1962 -- the Swiss banking industry had conducted comprehensive, diligent, and transparent investigations regarding its wartime gold holdings.

Nor did it matter that the Clinton administration's inquiry actually exonerated the Swiss of claims that they had hoarded "victim gold" stolen from Jews who suffered and perished at the hands of the Nazis. The defamation campaign succeeded in prying some $14 billion worth of gold from the Swiss treasury and -- more importantly -- inducing the Swiss electorate to enact a new constitution that (among other dreadful features) repudiated the link between the Swiss franc and gold.

The Imperial Regime in Washington apparently believes it has reduced the heroic Swiss to a state of subservience, because its most recent demands savor of the same arrogant, unwarranted self-assurance that led Herr Gessler to place his hat atop the pole in Altdorf's town square.

This is the ugliest spot in Switzerland. I'm kidding, sort of.

Last year, Washington tried to impose a $780 million fine on the Swiss for their refusal to enforce U.S. tax laws within their own country.

Next week, the Regime intends to press its claims in court -- that is, in its own courts -- in the hope of forcing the Swiss to turn over confidential information on some 52,000 Americans who have private accounts protected by Swiss law.

To their eternal credit, and the benefit of those who cherish freedom everywhere, the Swiss are responding to Washington's imperial bullying with the equivalent of William Tell's laughter, augmented by an upraised middle digit.


Earlier this year, the Swiss People's Party (SVP) began a campaign urging their fellow citizens and elected leaders to resist Washington's imperial blackmail. After the Swiss government capitulated in late February to Washington's demand to pay a $780 million fine and disgorge the names of Americans who had opened private banking accounts, the SVP -- the nation's largest political party, which combines tradtionalist populism with enticing hints of libertarianism -- angrily demanded the repatriation of Swiss gold stored in the Swiss National Bank in the U.S.


The party also demanded a ban on the sale of U.S. commercial and government bonds in Switzerland (a sound proposal, if only because the sale of fraudulent financial instruments is a crime), an end to the Swiss government's role as a diplomatic intermediary between Washington and various national governments disinclined to act as U.S. colonies, and a refusal by Geneva to help Washington free itself from the tarbaby it created at Gitmo by taking in detainees freed from the detention facility.


Not everything about the SVP is entirely commendable, but in mounting this pressure campaign it was acting squarely in the noble tradition of William Tell and Henri Guisan. And the party's efforts may have helped the Swiss political class regain its backbone and virility: The Swiss government has announced that it will forbid UBS AG to comply with any order from the US central government requiring it to surrender confidential banking information -- and that Swiss authorities would seize that information, if necessary.


Already, major Swiss banks have announced that, of necessity, they will no longer accept American clients because of disclosure and paperwork requirements being pressed on them by Washington's commissars for international wealth extraction.


These extraordinary measures, notes Bill Bonner, are being undertaken by Swiss officials in order to preserve their country's traditional role "as a protector of foreigners' money." To that end, as well as the protection of its own citizenry and their economic interests, the Swiss are "sharpening their knives and tightening their borders," Bonner writes. That is to say, they seem to be recovering a hint of the intransigent patriotism that led them to evict the Hapsburgs, throw off Bonaparte's yoke, and stare down the Wehrmacht.


Washington, the focus of evil in the modern world, is displaying the behavior we would expect terminally corrupt collectivist kleptocracy: It needs revenue to satisfy its retinue of parasitic constituencies, has the power to seize it in defiance of the law, and believes that all people everywhere should genuflect before its demands. It is behaving pretty much the way Gessler did before he was brought down by Tell's second arrow.


Wouldn't it be delicious if Switzerland's resistance proved to be the precipitating event that brought down Washington's wretched empire of debt and deceit?

Video Extra:

From about twenty years ago, a Canadian comedy troupe anticipates the anti-Swiss defamation campaign:




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Why Liberals Should Support the Right to Armed Self-Defense

"[H]e that thinks absolute power purifies men's blood, and corrects the baseness of human nature, need read the history of this, or any other age, to be convinced to the contrary."--

John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, Chapter VII: Of Political or Civil Society; section 92.



The State in its elemental form: The implicit threat behind all government action is made overt in this police officer's personalized headgear....

... and here's the threat made tangible: The caption to this photo helpfully explained, "Anti-war protester learns a lesson about protesting."




For the second time in less than a year, a lethal mass shooting has been carried out by an obscure and probably deranged individual of vaguely right-wing inclinations.


Last Friday (February 27), Dannie R. Baker, a 59-year-old self-described minister who followed a distant and eccentric orbit around Florida's Walton County Republican Party, shot five college-age Chilean students, killing two of them. As is generally the case in tragedies of this kind, the a police tactical unit showed up in time to collect the shooter after his victims were already dead or critically injured.


Agent of "revolution"? Accused murderer Dannie R. Baker.



Crystal Lynn, a neighbor in the apartment complex where Baker lived and the shooting took place, recalled an incident in which Baker approached her "and asked me if I was ready for the revolution to begin and if I had any immigrant [sic] in my house to get them out." The victims of Baker's killing spree had come to the U.S. legally as part of an international exchange program.


The "Reverend" Baker was known to the local Republican leadership, who -- to their credit -- didn't actively seek his company, although he was described as "active" in the 2004 election campaign.


Last year, party officials became concerned about a series of "disturbing" e-mails from Baker and contacted the Sheriff's office to express their concerns.


The atrocity in Florida comes just days after the conviction of James Adkisson for murdering two people and injuring six more in a killing spree at a Knoxville, Tennessee Unitarian Universalist Church last July.


Murder victims: Nicolas Corp, 23 (left) and Racine Balbontin (22).



Like Baker, Adkisson was a middle-aged man of with a murky background on the margins of the Republican-aligned right. Where Baker's "revolutionary" intentions, if any, remain sketchy, Adkisson unflinchingly described his crime as an act of revolutionary suicide terrorism.


In a four-page written harangue left as a kind of suicide note-cum-political manifesto, Baker described his premeditated act as the "symbolic killings" of people connected to the liberal Democrats he passionately hated, and predicted that he would die at the hands of police in his effort to "get the ball rolling" on the supposedly worthy project of annihilating liberals wherever they could be found.


Some left-leaning activists and commentators insist that the actions of Adkisson and Baker are inspired by a tendency they call "eliminationism" -- a desire to exterminate the "other," however that category is defined. That analysis is difficult to dispute, given the way that conservatism in the Age of Limbaugh has curdled into a kind of tribalism seasoned by adolescent resentment and blended with an implacable appetite for power.


The dominant conservative critique of the Obama administration, after all, doesn't focus on its profligacy, foreign adventurism, and insistence on centralizing power at the expense of liberty; in that respect, Obama is just like his predecessor and, in some ways (at least so far), a touch less extreme. No, the critique is simply that Obama and his people are part of "Them," rather than "Us": They belong to the wrong tribe, and are exercising the power we covet.


After all, the GOP-aligned Right didn't erupt in revolutionary outrage when the Bush administration destroyed habeas corpus or created a corporatist economic dictatorship within the Treasury Department, to name just two of its myriad offenses against liberty. However, now that the power-engorged executive branch is controlled by Them, Sean Hannity has started to cultivate sedition and Limbaugh, envisioning the Republican re-conquest of the government, has started to talk about "payback" in terms that bring to mind a Khmer Rouge commissar contemplating a purge.


As somebody who considers the State to be nothing more than a criminal syndicate pursuing a monopoly, I consider sedition to be a fine and noble calling worthy of all decent and Godly people. But statists of the conservative stripe engage in purely situational sedition: They want to undermine our present crop of rulers in order to replace them, not to abolish State impositions on liberty.


That is the thinking behind Hannity's little survey about the preferred mode of insurrection and Limbaugh's crusade to bring down Obama -- to the extent that the term "thinking" describes what goes on behind Hannity's Neanderthal forehead ridge, or the process that leads to the verbal expression of Rush Limbaugh's appetites.


This isn't to say that the left is blameless in all of this. It was the left that not only legitimized but institutionalized the politics of collectivist grievance. Collectivist movements are always eliminationist in potential, and quite often in practice.

Homeland Security in Chile, 1973: Santiago National Stadium serving as an open-air detention camp for political enemies of the new junta.


The biggest difference I can see is that "right-wing"* collectivists prefer to eliminate troublesome people right away (vide the Chilean junta filling Santiago National Stadium with dissidents and other disposable troublemakers following Pinochet's 1973 coup), while left-wingers seek to "re-educate" their victims first before liquidating those deemed incapable of thought reform.


A subsidiary distinction: "Lone wolf"-style political violence is more the style of the pseudo-individualist Right, since the Left prefers a more systematic approach.


It seems likely that we will see other episodes of "lone wolf"-style armed terrorism by people like Adkisson and Baker -- comets dragged out of conservatism's Oort Cloud, or perhaps given a nudge sun-ward by federal agents of mayhem deployed for that purpose.


Given the possibility that people perceived as "liberals" will be targeted for future politically inspired violence -- in addition to the increase in routine criminal violence that will occur as the depression deepens -- a question urges itself upon us: Why aren't liberals (with a few worthy exceptions) reconsidering their opposition to the right to armed self-defense? Why aren't they buying guns, rather than supporting measures intended to take them away from others?


















"Eliminationism," as practiced by the Revolutionary Left: Under the direction of a progressive lawyer named Jean-Baptiste Carrier, the revolutionary French Jacobins conducted noyades -- mass drownings of Christian Vendeans deemed ineducable and thus subject to liquidation. Perhaps inspired by the given name of the official who supervised them, these acts of mass murder, which anticipated modern collectivist mass-killings from the Soviet Union to Cambodia, were called "republican baptisms."



I suspect that the answer is this: Just as Left-collectivists prefer institutionalized armed violence through the State to "lone wolf"-style episodes of individual political violence, they believe it would be best for all of us to be disarmed apart from the sanctified agents of State repression, rather than permitting individuals to provide for their own protection.


People of that political persuasion might want to re-examine their premises before the "eliminationist" Right regains power and renders the question moot. But there is a more immediate potential threat that should command the immediate attention of all of us, irrespective of our political viewpoints. It is described by Russian-born, America-educated Dimitri Orlov, one of the wittiest and most capable exponents of what could be called "Collapse Theory."


Orlov spend a great deal of time in the Soviet Union during its painful and tumultuous transition. During the 1990s, he began to see some crucial parallels between the behavior of that crusading socialist superpower just prior to its collapse, and the behavior of our own crusading corporatist superpower on the eve of its own systemic crisis. He was present when the State's administrative system broke down at the same time the country was inundated with waves of demobilized soldiers returning from Afghanistan, or from manning the garrisons of the far-flung Soviet empire.


The collapse of the Regime's financial system will quite probably take down the administrative apparatus as well. We're barely into what will be a very long and deep depression, and already every state government faces an acute fiscal crisis, with most large cities following suit. At some point, imperial ambitions will yield to fiscal reality, and the troops stationed abroad will come home, apart from those likely to be lost should the Regime manage to lose an entire army in the Gulf region.


Police departments, both state and local, will be forced to lay off personnel, and prisons bulging at the seams will start releasing convicts (most likely beginning with those who committed violent crimes against persons and property, rather than the non-violent offenders who could be considered political prisoners rather than actual criminals).


The Business End of the State, Russian Edition: Russia's Omon police force subdues a protester. The Omon forces are similar to American riot police, albeit better educated and less pathologically violent.


The end result, Orlov explains, "will be a country awash with various categories of armed men, most of them unemployed, and many of them borderline psychotic":


"The police in the United States are a troubled group. Many of them lose all touch with people who are not `on the force' and most of them develop an `us-versus-them' mentality. The soldiers returning from a tour of duty often suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. The paroled prisoners suffer from a variety of psychological ailments as well. All of them will sooner or later realize that their problems are not medical but political. This will make it impossible for society to continue to exercise control over them. All of them will be making good use of their weapons training and other professional skills to acquire whatever they need to survive. And the really important point to remember is that they will do these things whether or not anyone thinks it legal for them to be doing them."


It is important to understand that Orlov's observation is speculative only as it applies to our country; what he describes he has seen in "post-Soviet" Russia.


Even after the State lost its ideological rationale for plunder, the country was still buried beneath armed men who had made a career in extracting wealth at gunpoint. Oddly enough, being clothed in the power of the State and carrying out errands of violence on its behalf didn't purge such men of the "baseness of human nature." And rather than retiring when the Soviet flag was furled, they continued in the same profession as free-lancers until they found employment in the same field under the successor Regime.


The implosion of Washington's imperial State will probably follow a similar trajectory. What rational person of any political persuasion would choose to be disarmed in such circumstances, or any others?

__
*I'm aware that the political "Right" on a properly defined political spectrum would refer to less government, or even the absence of that institutional affliction. For the purposes of this discussion, I'm using the term "Right" with reference to nationalist and traditionalist tendencies, as opposed to the egalitarian and "progressive" impulses that characterize the "Left." In this model, total government can be imposed by either "progressives" or "reactionaries."




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