The Polish Example

In 1795, the nation of Poland, which had existed in one form or another since 966AD, was erased from the Earth and its territory was partitioned and occupied by the Prussians, the Austrians, and the Russians. The Poles suffered abominably under the rule of their occupiers; at best they were second class citizens, most were effectively mere serfs. Except for a brief period under Napoleon Bonaparte, there was no nation of Poland until after the end of World War One, in 1918. Then, after a mere twenty one years of independence, Poland was again invaded by, and partitioned between, NAZI Germany and The Soviet Union. The Poles suffered even more terribly under these two evil occupiers than they had in all the years before 1918. Within weeks, tens of thousands of their political and social elite were murdered by the Soviets. By the end of the war, Polish Jews had been all but completely exterminated by the Germans, and hundreds of thousands of other Poles had been forcibly sent to slave labor camps throughout Europe to work for the Germans. After the defeat of Germany, Poland was occupied by the Soviet Union, which murderously exterminated all anticommunist opposition and erected a communist puppet government controlled by Moscow. Poland then existed only as a slave state of the Soviet Union, and the Poles were ruthlessly oppressed by their communist slave masters until 1990 and the triumph of the Solidarity movement, which was also the beginning of the collapse of the Soviet empire. Today, because of an economic shock therapy program in the early 1990s, Poland is a thriving nation with a sound economy, and vastly increased individual liberty.

Why have I bored you with a short history of Poland? Because there is something that Americans who cherish individual liberty and responsibility can learn from the Poles. Right now, all of us who love our traditional American liberties and who wish to take responsibility for our actions, rather than relying on the nanny state, know that we are looking down the barrel of a political gun. It is doubtful that the U.S. Supreme Court will overturn Obamacare as a result of the suit being brought by thirteen states' attorneys general. It is also doubtful that the Republican party will gain enough seats in both houses of congress to override Obama's veto of any attempted repeal of the entire bill. Therefore, it is reasonable to assume that Obamacare will be around for a while, although some aspects of it may be modified or even eliminated given a Republican dominance of both houses after this November.

My fear, and it is the reasonable fear of many others as well, is that Obamacare is merely the foot in the door for those who want federal control of virtually every aspect of our lives, and that a later Democrat/liberal/progressive/socialist dominated legislature will use it to open the door further, and eventually rip the door entirely from its hinges. Let me be frank: I believe that this is likely to come to pass. The reason I believe so is that most voters are not all that smart, unfortunately, and they have a irrefutable track record of giving away their freedom to politicians in return for the promise of security and a free lunch. It is no use quoting Franklin on trading freedom for security or Heinlein on the nature of the free lunch, those truths do not cancel out the historical fact that the majority of the electorate routinely behaves this way. This is of particular importance because we have, over the years, become much more like a true democracy than a representative republic. That is unfortunate because, when the will of the people becomes the law of the land, as it is in a true democracy, the majority will always vote for the politicians who promise them the most lavish free lunch, combined with the most security. As Norman Thomas said, “the American people will never knowingly adopt Socialism. But under the name of 'liberalism' they will adopt every fragment of the Socialist program, until one day America will be a Socialist nation, without knowing how it happened." That is what we freedom loving Americans must brace ourselves for: a long dark night of socialistic oppression, brought down on us not by an attack by foreign invaders, but by the stupidity of our fellow citizens. Our children may even live to see the United States of America reduced to nothing more than a vassal state of a monolithic socialist world government; after all, that is what most progressives want in the end, whether or not they are bold enough to say so publicly.

It is because I believe that the above is all but inevitable that I point to the Poles as an example for freedom loving Americans of our time. They suffered almost unbelievable national and individual agony over almost two centuries of cruel and despotic oppression. Yet, by persevering, by never losing track of their identity as Poles, by indoctrinating their children in that Polish identity, and by rising up at the right moment, they not only triumphed over their oppressors, but were thereby instrumental in causing the complete downfall of their oppressors throughout Soviet occupied eastern Europe. We must begin now to indoctrinate our children in our core American values: Individual liberty, individual responsibility, individual property rights, the right to keep and bear arms, the right to self-defense, and underlying all of those, a constitutionally limited minimal government. We cannot let the progressive dominated public schools and mass media program our children to be good socialist slaves. We must program them to be good self-sufficient, freedom loving Americans. We must associate with each other, and begin to form a social framework independent of the main stream of popular culture, that will support our values and beliefs and carry them into the future. We do not need to break away from mainstream society, but we need to become a self-supporting, self- sustaining group within it. We must begin to do this immediately and we must sink the foundations deep, for when the time comes, this social framework will be all we have to sustain us, because the government will be against us, many if not most of our fellow citizens will be against us, and the long dark night of oppression may last even longer for us than it did for the Poles. However, if we can persevere, as the Poles did, if we never loose sight of who we are and what our values are, as Poles did not, and if we transmit those values to our children and they to their children, as the Poles did, we will triumph over our enemies in the end, just as the Poles did.