Coming to a Neighborhood Near You Soon...

If they keep piling the crap on us...The War of the Flea...

A War of the Flea is what happens when

... all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, (Declaration of Independence)

EVIL becomes UNSUFFERABLE!

The following is an excerpt from the above named book written in 1965 by Robert Taber. Starting on page 5, in the chapter, The Wind of Revolution, of my edition…

“Nationalism, social justice, race, religion—beneath all of these symbolic and abstract "causes" that are rallying cries of the revolutions of the past two decades, (Remember, this was written in 1965 C.L.) one discovers a unifying principle, a common mainspring. It is a revolutionary impulse, an upsurge of popular will, that really has very little to do with questions of national or ethnic identity, or self-determination, or forms of government, or social justice, the familiar shibboleths of political insurgency. It is not even certain that economic deprivation in itself is the decisive factor that it is widely assumed to be. Poverty and oppression are, after all, conditions of life on the planet that have been endured by countless generations with scarcely a murmur.

The will to revolt, so widespread as to be almost universal today, seems to be something more than a reaction to political circumstances or material conditions. What it seems to express is a newly awakened consciousness, not of "causes" but of potentiality. It is a spreading awareness of the possibilities of human existence, coupled with a growing sense of the causal nature of the universe, that together inspire, first in individuals, then in communities and entire nations, an entirely new attitude toward life.

The effect of this sudden awareness, this sudden fruition of consciousness, is to produce in the so-called backward areas of the world, all at once, a pervasive and urgent desire for radical change, based on the new insight, startling in its simplicity, that the conditions of life that had seemed immutable can , after all, be changed.

Limitations that were formerly accepted all at once become intolerable. The hint of imminent change suggests opportunities that had not been glimpsed until now. The will to act is born. It is as though people everywhere were saying: Look, here is something we can do, or have, or be, simply by acting. Then what have we been waiting for? Let us act!

This, at any rate, describes the state of mind of the modern insurgent, the guerrilla fighter, whatever his slogans or his cause; and his secret weapon, above and beyond any question of strategy or tactics or techniques of irregular warfare, is nothing more than the ability to inspire this state of mind in others. The defeat of the military enemy, the overthrow of the government, are secondary tasks, in the sense that they come later. The primary effort of the guerrilla is to militate the population, without whose consent no government can stand for a day.

The guerrilla is subversive of the existing order in that he is the disseminator of revolutionary ideas; his actions lend force to his doctrine and show the way to radical change. Yet it would be an error to consider him as a being apart from the seed bed of revolution. He himself is created by the political climate in which revolution becomes possible, and is himself as much an expression as he is a catalyst of the popular will toward such change.

To understand this much is to avoid two great pitfalls, two serious areas of confusion, into which counterinsurgency specialists seem to fall.

One such pitfall is the conspiracy theory: the view that revolution is the (usually deformed) offspring of a process of artificial insemination, and that the guerrilla nucleus (the fertilizing agent, so to speak) is made up of outsiders, conspirators, political zombies—in other words, actual or spiritual aliens—who somehow stand separate from their social environment, while manipulating it to obscure and sinister ends.

The other is the methods fallacy, held—at least until very recently—by most American military men: the old-fashioned notion that guerrilla warfare is largely a matter of tactics and techniques, to be adopted by almost anyone who may have need of them, in almost any irregular warfare situation.

The first view is both naïve and cynical. Invariably expressed in the rhetoric of Western liberalism and urging political democracy (that is to say, multiparty elections) as the desideratum , it nevertheless lacks confidence in popular decisions; it tacitly assumes that people in the mass are simpletons, too ignorant, unsophisticated, and passive to think for themselves or to have either the will or the capacity to wage a revolutionary war.

Ergo, the revolution which in fact exists must be due to the machinations of interlopers. The guerrillas must be the dupes or the wily agents of an alien power or, at least, of an alien political philosophy

On the more naïve level, it seems to be assumed that people would scarcely choose the revolutionary path of their own accord; certainly not if the revolution in question were out of joint with the political traditions and ideals held dear by Americans. To quote former President Eisenhower in this connection, relative to the war in South Viet Nam:

"We must inform these people (the South Vietnamese) of what is happening and how important it is to them to get on our side. Then they will want to choose victory! “

Alas! the victory they seem to have chosen was not General Eisenhower's.

Most American foreign policymakers and experts of the new politico-military science of counterinsurgency (the theory and practice of counterrevolution) appear more cynical than General Eisenhower. It is manifest in their pronouncements that all modern revolutions are, or are likely to become, struggles between two world "systems," the Communist on one side, the Americans and their allies on the other, with the people most directly involved merely pawns, to be manipulated by one side or the other.

Since it is the United States that is, more often than not in this era, the interloper in almost any revolutionary situation that comes to mind (Viet Nam, Cuba, Iran, Guatemala, Brazil, Congo, Venezuela, to name a few), it is not surprising that the Cold War psychology should lead us to look for our Russian or Chinese counterpart in the given area of contention, and, finding him, or thinking so, to assign to him a major role. To do so, however, is to succumb to a curious illogic, in which our powers of observation seem to fail us.

The following excerpt from an article entitled "Plea for 'Realism' in Southeast Asia" by Roger Hilsman, former United States Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs, is fairly typical:

Any analysis of the situation in South Vietnam [writes Hilsman] should probably start with the realization that we are not dealing with a war. The problem is more political than military, involving acts of terrorism rather than battles. Out of a population of 14 million, the Communist Vietcong numbers only 28,000 to 34,000 regular guerrilla troops plus 60,000 to 80,000 part-time auxiliaries. Its campaign is more like the gangland warfare of the nineteen thirties and the teenage terrorism of New York today than the war in Korea or World War II. In a very real sense, the F.B.I. has had more experience in dealing with this kind of problem than the armed services.

Hilsman's article appeared in The New York Times Magazine, August 23, 1964.

The italics are added, perhaps unnecessarily. Putting aside the patent absurdity of his comparisons—"teenage terrorism" indeed!—Hilsman's analysis suffers from grave defects of observations and interpretation.

Out of a population that is closer to sixteen million than to fourteen million, the Viet Cong did not have only twenty-eight thousand guerrillas, etc. It had as many as twenty-eight thousand, and President Johnson's decision early in 1965 to expand the war by the punitive bombing of military targets in North Viet Nam made it amply clear how potent a force that was.

By way of comparison, Fidel Castro's Cuban guerillas, fighting on an island with a population of close to seven million, never at any time exceeded fifteen hundred armed men. Yet when the decisive battle of Santa Clara came in December of 1958, cutting the island in two, the whole city, except for the isolated military garrison, became involved in the conflict. And when Batista finally fled the country on the last day of the year, virtually the entire population of Cuba claimed participation in the victory. Far from being isolated or indifferent, all had been rebels, it seemed.

With respect to the question of popular support of the Viet Cong in South Viet Nam, Hilsman himself admits: ". . . the vast majority of the Vietcong are recruited in the South; their food and clothing are procured in the South , and they collect 'taxes' in the South to import other supplies through Cambodia."

On this same question, Walter Lippman wrote in the New York Herald Tribune in April, 1964:

"The truth, which is being obscured for the American people, is that the Saigon government has the allegiance of probably no more than 30 per cent of the people and controls (even in daylight) not much more than a quarter of the [national] territory."

It should be fairly obvious that when a Vietnamese army of four hundred thousand men, supported by two divisions of American military "advisers," an immense armada of fighter planes, jet bombers, and helicopters, and financial infusions on the order of close to two million dollars a day, cannot control an insurgency, something more than "teenage terrorism" is involved. The error that the Viet Cong insurgency is the work of a fanatical minority directed from outside the country nevertheless persists, fostered by Washington for reasons which will be examined in subsequent chapters.

Can guerrilla tactics be employed successfully against guerrillas? The answer is negative. To suppose otherwise is to fall into the methods fallacy . Indian fighters do not become Indians by taking scalps. A spotted jungle suit does not make a United States marine a guerrilla.

The experience of World War II and of every conflict since then has made it clear that commando troops are not guerrillas. Nor can the so-called "counterinsurgency" forces now being developed in a more sophisticated school be considered guerrillas, although they may employ some of the more obvious techniques of the guerrilla fighter—the night raid, the ambush, the roving patrol far from a military base, and so on.

Such techniques are as old as warfare itself. It is possible to conceive of their use by Cro-Magnon man, whoever he was, against the last of the Neanderthals; they were employed by the aboriginal Britons against Caesar's legionnaires, and they are the techniques of savages in the Columbian jungle and no doubt of a few surviving New Guinean headhunters to this day.

Headhunters are not guerrillas. The distinction is simple enough. When we speak of the guerrilla fighter, we are speaking of the political partisan , an armed civilian whose principal weapon is not his rifle or his machete, but his relationship to the community, the nation, in and for which he fights.

Insurgency, or guerrilla war, is the agency of radical social or political change; it is the face and the right arm of revolution. Counterinsurgency is a form of counterrevolution, the process by which revolution is resisted. The two are opposite sides of the coin, and it will not do to confuse them or their agents, despite superficial similarities.

Because of the political nature of the struggle, the disparity of the means at the disposal of the two forces, and, above all, the total opposition of their strategic aims, the most fundamental tactics of the guerrilla simply are not available to the army that opposes him, and are available only in the most limited way to the counterinsurgency specialist, the United States Special Forces officer, let us say, who may try to imitate him.

The reasons are clear.

First, the guerrilla has the initiative; it is he who begins the war, and he who decides when and where to strike. His military opponent must wait, and while waiting, he must be on guard everywhere.

Both before and after the war has begun, the government army is in a defensive position, by reason of its role as policeman, which is to say, as the guardian of public and private property.

The military has extensive holdings to protect: cities, towns, villages, agricultural lands, communications, commerce, and usually some sort of industrial base to defend. There is also the purely military investment to consider: garrisons, outposts, supply lines, convoys, airfields, the troops themselves and their valuable weapons, which it will be the first tactical objective of the guerrillas to capture, so as to arm more guerrillas. Finally, there is a political system, already under severe strain if the point of open insurrection has been reached, to be preserved and strengthened.

In all of these areas, the incumbent regime and its military arm present highly vulnerable targets to an enemy who is himself as elusive and insubstantial as the wind.

For, while the army suffers from an embarrassment of wealth, and especially of expensive military hardware for which there is no employment, the guerrilla has the freedom of his poverty. He owns nothing but his rifle and the shirt on his back, has nothing to defend but his existence. He holds no territory, has no expensive and cumbersome military establishment to maintain, no tanks to risk in battle, no garrisons subject to siege, no transport vulnerable to air attack nor aircraft of his own to be shot down, no massed divisions to be bombarded, no motor columns to be ambushed, no bases or depots that he cannot abandon within the hour.

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Read the whole book HERE. Remember, it was written in 1965. The information provided is the same today and yesterday. The British fought against guerilla fighters made up of armed civilians, that could disappear into the civilian population easily. The didn’t stand facing the enemy. They hid and fought from the shadows. They were called MILITIA. You can swap out the word guerilla with militia and still maintain the same understanding. It is the REASON the founding fathers wanted a militia. Because a militia CANNOT loose against a standing army. A militia is what we need again in the US. It will also stop a lot of the militaristic invading of other countries that are taking place for the for profit CORPORATION known as the GOVERNMENT OF THE UNITED STATES INC.

With Notes of Reference to the Constitution and Laws of the Federal Government of the United States and of the Commonwealth of Virginia, as the “true palladium of liberty.” In addition to checking federal power, the Second Amendment also provided state governments with what Luther Martin (1744/48–1826) described as the “last coup de grace” that would enable the states “to thwart and oppose the general government.” Last, it enshrined the ancient Florentine and Roman constitutional principle of civil and military virtue by making every citizen a soldier and every soldier a citizen.

What do YOU think? Is the proverbial solid waste deposit from our rears getting ready to hit the bladed oscillating device? Many comments I have been reading suggest that may be the case. Will you be prepared?

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