Comments Elsewhere

Rainbough: More dangerous than a speeding tornado… [etc., etc.]

Well, not to come across as the humorless scold, but really what’s happening in Zimbabwe is beginning to sound more and more like an echo of forced de-urbanization. Like. In. Cambodia. I fear that it’s rapidly passing the point at which even the most sardonic humor is appropriate.

Marc: Instead, I say the US needs to become an active exporter of revolution. Bring people from oppressed dictatorships around the world to the US, and train them rigorously in BOTH military skills AND constitutional law, and return them to their homelands – with some free M-16’s as a going away present.

“Exporting” United States Constitutional law in its present form strikes me as about as useful to a freedom-loving insurrection in the Third World as the free M-16s.(1) Especially when the understanding of the law is being doled out by the United States government.

(1) N.B.: mass-produced AK-47s are far better suited to the kind of work that guerrillas have to do and the kind of conditions they have to do it in than finicky, expensive M-16s.

That said, there is nothing that I know of that prevents you, now, from doing this — except, perhaps, the M-16s, which might come under federal arms control laws. You could gather the money, rent some land out in the country, make some contacts with Zimbabweans and Zimbabwean ex-pats over the Internet, and hold a Zimbabwean Freedom Summer Camp every summer. Heck, since you don’t have to count on the good graces of U.S. government functionaries anymore, you could even do something more useful — like giving them a crash course in the works of Lysander Spooner and supplementing militia training with a solid grounding in, say, the history and tactics of nonviolent passive resistance. And then help them gain the organizational skills and resources necessary to create similar camps in safe areas in sub-Saharan Africa (say) to do the same thing.

If you really want to “Help the world by helping people help themselves,” why not start by helping yourself instead of depending on the government to do it for you?