Don’t Necessarily Trust the Government or Law Enforcement

All major governments have contingency plans in place to ensure their survival after a global disaster. In 2007, for example, George Bush signed into place the National Security Presidential Directive, which claims the power to execute certain orders in the event of a catastrophic emergency – President Obama also signed a National Preparedness executive order in 2012. The thing is, most of those preparations are classified – we won’t know what they are until it happens. What we can be fairly certain of, however, is that it will involve the suspension of constitutional government and the installment of martial law. To some degree.

“Based on the continuity of government plans we have in the US and Western Europe, there’s no doubt that you would have a visible force presence on the streets to try and maintain order,” says Ahmed. “There would be all sorts of things necessary in a pandemic scenario – the need to quarantine, the need to contain the spread of the virus.

“Whatever the situation, there’s also going to be more of a need, as infrastructures fail, for people on the ground to establish and maintain order. We saw this during the Olympics when the security contractor effectively collapsed and the army had to come in. It showed the need to maintain discipline, and it also showed that the army is trained to respond to a situation where systems start to break down.”

But here’s a slightly paranoid question: what if it has been decided by contingency planners that civilians are somewhat surplus to requirements? What if the security personnel aren’t actually on our side?

“Never 100% always trust the military – especially when they’re in your own territory.”

Instead, we should be using our fledgling communication networks to gather public support and ask questions. “The fact is, we have democracy for a reason – there are checks and balances. The government has said that they need to have these continuity operations and we’ve said, ‘okay I guess we need those’ – we’ve given our consent by not really complaining about it. But at the same time, we know that’s not the way we want the country to run.”

“So the moment we shift into a state where suddenly the police and army, this un-elected minority of people, have all the power, and where all the political processes are suspended then, yes, there is a justifiable level of skepticism. Populations need to be asking, when is this situation going to end? At what point is this temporary suspension of our normal constitution going to lead back to the normal way of things?”

“This is a totally legitimate inquiry. You don’t necessarily have to be a conspiracy theorist to question authority. In the west, we know there is a certain degree of discipline and accountability that our militaries do have – there are rules of engagement. But we know from history that when you have this sort of situation, there is all sorts of scope for abuse.”

(The Guardian, 2016 https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/feb/10/how-to-survive-a-global-disaster-handy-guide)
 

 

"They are not your friends. They are government agents." - Burt Gummer (Tremors)

A 2019 article published by Indybay in San Fransisco "Don’t Talk to the Police – Ever!" https://www.indybay.org/uploads/2019/07/28/don_t_talk_to_the_police_-_ever.pdf  highlights our rights when dealing with the police and other government agents, and details some cases where government agents have been heavy-handed and far overstepped their lawful authority.  
  

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, writing in Rubin v. United States 524 U.S. 1301 (1998) said: “The complexity of modern federal criminal law, codified in several thousand sections of the United States Code and the virtually infinite variety of factual circumstances that might trigger an investigation into a possible violation of the law, make it difficult for anyone to know, in advance, just when a particular set of statements might later appear (to a prosecutor) to be relevant to some such investigation.”

Survivalism is NOT about committing illegal activities, but it may be that the things that best ensure one's survival are in fact illegal.

Harvard University professor Harvey Silverglate estimates that daily life in the United States is so over-criminalized, that the average American professional commits about three felonies a day. Federal criminal laws have become dangerously disconnected from the English common law. Prosecutors can pin arguable federal crimes on any one of us, for even the most seemingly innocuous behavior. The volume of federal crimes in recent decades has increased well beyond the statute books and into the morass of the Code of Federal Regulations, handing federal prosecutors an additional trove of vague and exceedingly complex and technical prohibitions to stick on their hapless targets.  

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You may also be interested in our earlier post 'Readings on Martial Law and Citizens in a Revolution'  https://cascadiasurvivalist.blogspot.com/2022/02/readings-on-martial-law-and-citizens-in.html