Friday, December 26, 2014

Give a cheer for the preppies

EARLY THIS MORNING I watched a documentary on Sky News about preppies; those families in America who believe we live in troubled times and are preparing to survive all sorts of calamities that could threaten their families: calamities comprising of natural disasters, diseases like Ebola, terrorism (such as a dirty bomb); or even their own government if it were to stray from the American constitution and turn away from democracy – which was after all, what the right to bear arms was written into the constitution to help prevent. Which is why the ownership of guns remains legal in America; with the exclusion of course of those with a criminal conviction.
            
            At the affluent end of the preppie spectrum[1] we witnessed in the programme an entrepreneur who bought an old nuclear silo from the government, and transformed it into luxury survivalist apartments converted from the actual launch site of the IBMs; that went 10 stories underground and contains several $3 million apartments for the wealthy. The facilities in other parts of the silo included a cinema, large swimming pool, and an armoury. It even contained a large area for growing the residents own food, and a cell built with exactly the same dimensions and contains the same furniture found in an ordinary police cell in any American police jail…for anyone of gets cabin fever and punches a fellow resident; the cell gives them time to calm down.
            
            At the other end of the spectrum we have many communities who have come together to defend their families and neighbours. These preppies comprise hard working, in many cases professional middle class Americans who wear no ideological badge: indeed, they would see themselves purely as American patriots who believe in its constitution. From those I saw in the documentary, they were not red-necks in any understanding of the term; and neither were they paranoid (a label they are all too aware will be pinned to them).
            
            The head of one such family was seen teaching his teenage children how to handle an intrusion by a stranger into their home when the emergency they expect occurs. The father taught his 15-year-old daughter how to use a hand gun; and he insists that at least two warnings be given before his daughter draws the gun; and if the intruder ignores the third, only then will he or she be shot.
            
            What is being taught by the father to his children, is how to handle themselves and keep themselves alive if any such event occurs that may threaten them if they lose their father and mother. They are not red-neck  anti-communists as many, by now, antiquated Western liberals may still believe them to be. They have only their families survival at heart. They are not driven by political ideology, but by the unexpected; whether from a political cause, or from a natural disaster.

I BELIEVE THAT multiculturalism will, along with mass migration, in time, bring great social instability to the UK. But we in the UK have no culture of preppies as have the United States. Perhaps being the small island that we are, such social tensions are a far more likely threat to the social fabric of this country, than whatever the American preppies see as a threat to their own.
            
             So before we use such terms as loons, and paranoid, to describe our cousins across the pond; I suggest we think carefully about our own situation, instead of smugly and self-righteously pooh-poohing their fears as paranoid delusions.
            
             Time will ultimately tell. But I think that the way those American preppies think is wholly laudable. They are, small 'c' conservative men and women, as are the vast majority of the white indigenous English population. This does not mean that they all vote Tory, or in America's case republican. They believe in the family as the mitochondria of society that keeps it functioning, as it does biologically as a part of the human cell. And in this country all the main parties have small 'c' conservatives branding their backbone – that comprise the core vote of the two main parties.

WE IN THE UK are no longer allowed to own guns, unless we are part of small group of certain individuals like farmers…nothing, in fact, comparable with the USA. But there was a time when UK citizens did have that right. But it was abandoned following the end of the First World War, when parts of Europe were threatened by Bolshevik revolution in light of the Russian experience in 1917.
            
            Our returning soldiers had to hand in their weapons, and from then on the ownership of guns (with a few exceptions) were banned. But before the First World War, we had a similar arrangement to that of America. I have read of one account involving a London bobby in pursuit of and armed villain who stopped a citizen in the street  and asked if he had a gun. A gun was produced and immediately handed to him – the police remained unarmed.
            
            So gun ownership has a long history among citizens, even within Great Britain. The American founding fathers had the good sense to protect their citizens by giving them the right to bear arms. It was a wholly sane addition to the American constitution: one which does not leave the American citizen defenceless, but gives them the right to protect themselves and their families from all sorts interlopers… even aliens.
            
           Those preppies in the SKY documentary have made the right choice. Not because either today or tomorrow anarchy, driven either by nature, politics, or terrorism will come upon them. But because by doing what they are doing is eminently sensible…and if their fears come to nothing; what harm are they doing?  I would sooner we, in the UK, were given the same blessing by our unwritten constitution to bear arms as the American written one has given the American citizen.

IN THE UK TODAY the citizen's faith in justice has almost evaporated. The liberal concept of justice has abandoned the victim in favour of the perpetrator who needs to be put upon the road of reform. The victim of criminality invariably becomes the victim of the justice system. Once a crime has been committed; it seems that the liberal consensus decrees that the true victim is the perpetrator.
            
            Sentencing goes against the victim; as the perpetrator is often given a sentence by a judge which will often seem fair, but will be cut in half by the behaviour of parole boards, usually comprising faint-hearted liberals who would have believed Hitler to have come from a broken background and deserved a second and third chance.
            
           Under such a pitiful arrangement  the citizen's only hope is to allowed to be armed. But it will never come to pass in the UK - but in America, the constitution still guarantees such a right to it citizens, despite liberal president Obama's attempts at seeking to un-arm his citizens. As for the UK it will have to do the best it can. At 64-years-old, I will in all  in probably be dead before what I believe will happen, occurs.

           
  


           



[1] As seen on Sky

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