I had my first live radio interview tonight, and was on the American Voice Radio network for 2 hours this evening. I was interviewed by Michael Lehman, and the topic of the day was family preparedness.

I’ve got the show right here. Just click the player button below and listen to the entire show…

 

 Rich Fleetwood on Civil Defense, Nuclear Preparedness and Fallout Shelter: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Rich

First, click here…

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=e…25&ie=UTF8&z=3

The map is off…but note the links on the LEFT side….

The White House is pointed out in A…but the next link below it goes to a blog. Hundreds of blogs were spammed with the same crap….fabricated BS using foreign land images…more on that below….

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q…-8&sa=N&tab=lw

Here…let’s try the first hit…

http://thinkprogress.org/2007/01/16/the-note-on-bush/

Here’s just one version of the damning “woo-woo” evidence…comment 45. Various versions of this are posted on the hundreds of other political blogs…

Really now? I’ve driven thru Hanna a NUMBER of times, and never seen any signs saying DHS CONCENTRATION CAMP, RIGHT TURN AHEAD…CAUTION…WE’RE HIDING…

Continue Reading »
ok….here’s the proof…RATHER long…NO USA Concentration Camps

I got one for you…

You wanna believe in US Concentration camps?

Google “Swift Luck Greens”

DHS facility supposedly right here in Lil’ Old Wyoming.

Aerial pix and everything!

Find the main story, and you’ll find the long/lat for the facility.

Enter those into Google Maps/Google Earth/Yahoo Maps…your choice.

Just northeast of Hanna, Wyoming.

All done now?

Come back here and tell me what you find…

Only THEN, will I tell you the truth about this facility…unless you find it yourself…and you can post that bit of info here as well.

Yep…I can prove it…

See the next post….

Source

French Youths Say They’re Marginalized
Nov 07 3:01 PM US/Eastern
By JAMEY KEATEN
Associated Press Writer

LE BLANC MESNIL, France - Theirs is a drab life of days spent smoking hashish, hanging out on street corners. They fidget and talk big. The only things they have in abundance are time and rancor. Ask what their dreams are, the response is blank stares.

Shouting over each other to be heard, the young toughs vented about their lives in Paris’ suburban housing projects and the rioting setting them ablaze.

“We hate the police,” cried one teenager. “It’s the start of war,” yelled another. “Put this in your notebook … ,” said a third, rattling off a string of obscenities about France’s tough-talking interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy.

All French-born children of Arab and black African immigrants, this group of a dozen or so teens at Les Tilleuls housing project north of Paris complained of being marginalized by French society.

Years ago, France welcomed their parents as labor, often to do menial jobs most French did not want, they noted. And now, there are no jobs _ or no one willing to give them one, they said.

“This isn’t good for anything,” says Farid, 20, angrily shaking his French identity card. He and the others refused to give their surnames, saying they fear repercussions from police or in the community.

None of the youths said they have participated in arson attacks, but their sympathies are clearly with the rioters who have shaken France to its core in the nights of mayhem that spread across the country from tough Paris projects like Les Tilleuls.

“The ‘elders’ of the projects have tried to calm us down, but we don’t care,” said 20-year-old Karim, gesticulating wildly with his arms and then concentrating on rolling a joint.

He said the rioting has unified various housing projects that previously fought among themselves. The target of their rage is Sarkozy, who angered many in the suburbs by calling neighborhood toughs “scum.”

“Before it was a gang warfare between different projects. Sarkozy’s given us a common target _ the government,” said Karim.

“If they fire Sarkozy, we’ll head straight to the police station and pop champagne with them,” said Bidou, 22, his baseball cap cocked to the side.

Before the riots, police rarely came by, and generally patrolled in cars with windows rolled up, the youths said. They have nicknames _ like “Lucky Luke” and “Cortex” _ for some officers they know.

They complained that police manhandle them during identity card checks, even claiming that some officers plant hashish on them as a pretext for arrests, and that they regularly fire off rubber pellets during sweeps.

“You wear these clothes, with this color skin and you’re automatically a target for police,” said Ahmed, 18, pointing to his mates in Izod polo shirts, Nike sneakers and San Antonio Spurs T-shirts.

So sad that Paris Is Burning…

THIS is what will happen here, if the feds dont’ get their act together and start getting WORKING plans for disaster, preparedness, and Civil Disturbances….

Source from NYT

RIOTING BY FRENCH-ARAB YOUTHS CONTINUES IN SUBURBAN PARIS
By CRAIG S. SMITH
NYT Express
11/03/2005

PARIS — Angry French-Arab youths clashed with police and firefighters outside Paris late Wednesday in the worst of seven consecutive nights of violence set off by the accidental death of two teenagers.

By late Thursday, more cars were burning in at least one of the city’s northern suburbs.

Gunshots were fired at police officers and firefighters in three separate incidents Wednesday night, said Prefect Jean-Francois Cordet, the government’s top official in Seine-St.-Denis, a department north of Paris that includes a belt of working-class neighborhoods with a large immigrant population.

In the clashes on Wednesday night, a police station was ransacked, a garage was set on fire and a shopping center and two schools were vandalized, Cordet said. Riot police forces have used tear gas and rubber bullets to repel the attacks.

Traffic was halted Thursday morning on a commuter rail line linking Paris to Charles de Gaulle airport after stone-throwing rioters attacked two trains. One passenger was slightly injured by broken glass, according to local news reports. The violence picked up again as night fell over the capital with burning cars reported in the suburb of Stains.

Rampaging gangs have torched more than 200 cars in the past week, and dozens of firefighters and police officers have been injured, none seriously, since the deaths of two youths.

Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, who canceled a trip to Canada this week because of the violence, urged citizens and the police to restore order. “Law and order will have the last word,” he told senators on Thursday.

The continuing violence has embarrassed the government and isolated the country’s tough-talking anti-crime interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, whom many people believe exacerbated the situation with his vow to “clean out” the troubled neighborhoods.

The interior minister’s initiative has been met with scorn by many people in the neighborhoods, who say they are being stigmatized by his campaign and that the increased police presence has resulted in harassment.

The latest violence began in the suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois a week ago after two teenagers were electrocuted by a power transformer while hiding from police. Local youths, who believed police had chased the boys into the transformer’s enclosure, took to the streets, setting cars on fire in protest. A preliminary government inquiry has since found that the youths were not being pursued by the police.

The report, released by the Interior Ministry on Thursday, stated that a third boy who survived the incident said he and his friends were aware of the danger when they entered the transformer’s enclosure. The report suggested that the boys were hiding from the police because one of those who died had a record of armed robbery and the other was among a group that had broken into a construction site earlier that evening.

The continuing unrest appears to be fueled less by perceived police brutality than by the frustration of young men who have no work and see little hope for the future.

Source From MotherJones.com / Commentary / Columns

Hard Questions About the Big Easy
The New Orleans disaster could yet change American politics—but only if we keep talking about it.
Paul Rogat Loeb
October 31 , 2005

As the New Orleans disaster recedes from the headlines, citizen activists face a choice. We can focus exclusively on other newer issues. Or we can work to make the disaster one of those key turning points with the potential to transform American politics. For this to happen, we need to consciously create new dialogue, reaching well beyond the core converted.

If we think back to the 9/11 attacks, which have shaped American politics ever since, a brief window of critical reflection opened up in their immediate wake. Middle East experts critical of U.S. policies had op-eds in our largest newspapers and appeared on network TV. Ordinary citizens mourned the victims, while asking what would make the attackers so embittered they’d be willing to murder 3,000 innocent people. The next day, when I spoke about possible root causes, with even more frankness than usual, at a community college in the overwhelmingly Republican suburbs just north of Dallas, the response was amazingly receptive.

But by a few weeks later visible public questioning had largely ceased. Most Americans accepted the Bush administration’s definition of a war of absolute good versus absolute evil. John Ashcroft warned that anyone who disagreed was an “ally of terrorism.” The space for reflection had closed.

New Orleans has revealed far too much about the cost of this administration’s priorities to similarly strengthen Bush’s current standing. Republican cheerleaders are trying their best to spin its lessons as a mandate for even greater mistrust of all government, as if our sole hope lies in a survivalist individualism. But no matter what they do, the legacy of this disaster creates a political liability for this administration, highlighting their lack of sound environmental policies, support for critical infrastructure, and the valuing of experience over political cronyism, not to mention their heedlessness of America’s growing economic and racial divides. The danger is that the disaster’s most far-reaching lessons will be quickly forgotten, as the voices of the city’s exiles grow quiet and fresh crises and issues dominate the news.

We can change that by helping our fellow citizens wrestle with the legacy of the disaster while it remains strong in common memory-to give it its due as one of those iconic moments with the power to transform political life and individual hearts and souls. For now America is still wrestling with what happened and why, with what it will mean for those now exiled, with how the disaster affects our common future. From my own recent talks in the heart of red state America, the disaster has led many to begin to rethink core assumptions about this country’s priorities. Through the lens of New Orleans, I’ve been able to raise all sorts of challenging issues to audiences that would have been far more resistant just a few months before. But like the post-9/11 reflection, this newfound concern won’t continue automatically. It needs a context in which to bloom.

Some of this is already being created, as we weave lessons from the disaster into arguments we’re already making on issues from global warming to the war in Iraq, to the dangers of selling America’s every institution to the highest bidder. But the tragedy also calls for specific responses. Suppose progressive citizen activists worked to convene conversations in every community about Katrina’s lessons and legacy. These conversations could include MoveOn and The Sierra Club and local social justice groups, but also mainline and conservative churches, synagogues and mosques, civic groups like Rotary and Kiwanis, maybe even Chambers of Commerce-as many institutions of civil society as would be willing to participate. Suppose every college or high school made New Orleans a focus over the coming year, working, from the perspective of every possible discipline, to explore the interconnected roots and lessons of the disaster.

After 9/11, author Vicki Robin and some colleagues created what they called “conversation cafes” (www.conversationcafe.org), which brought together people of differing beliefs to reflect on how to move forward from the tragedy. Though their outreach was relatively limited, the cafes offered a powerful experience for those who participated, and a model to build on. Imagine if we extended these conversations on a broader scale, mixing brainstorming, exchange of perspectives and emotional sustenance. In a time when it’s easy to feel overloaded, paralyzed with “compassion fatigue,” Robin sees a chance to create “containers where people can grieve, process, see deeper truths, have new creative ideas.”

Another model comes from community discussions that transformed Nebraska’s tax codes forty years ago. In the early 1960s, a group of University of Nebraska economists used the University’s statewide network of adult education extension offices to organize workshops, county by county, where people could discuss different ways to make a highly regressive state tax system more fair. The existing system had long weighed disproportionately on family farmers and low-income residents. Now, involving local organizations such as the Farmer’s Union, Farm Bureau, and the Grange, the economists invited people to see for themselves how a range of approaches would affect them and their neighbors. “If people just really had a chance to look at the numbers,” one of the faculty members recalls, “we felt they could come to an intelligent decision. But they had to have a context to analyze the system, and this seemed a perfect use of educational networks that were already in place.”

The workshop leaders pursued their task without laptops, computerized spreadsheets, interactive Websites, or any of the other tools that would now make a comparable process far easier. But participants examined who was getting a free ride, how to make the system more equitable, and the likely results of specific policy changes. Local and statewide media amplified the debates. It took a half-dozen years of follow-up education and debate, but Nebraska finally passed a far more progressive graduated income tax, which a Republican governor signed into law.

The issues embodied in Katrina’s destruction of New Orleans are more difficult than a single state’s tax codes, but could be addressed through a similar process of discussion exploring a series of interconnected questions: What are the costs of neglecting America’s core infrastructure, like the Bush administration’s $71 million cuts in the budgets for maintaining and repairing the levees? How do we challenge a pervasive cronyism, where being the friend of a top Republican fundraiser places the former head of the International Arabian Horse Association in charge of America’s national disaster responses? What are the hidden costs of choices of destroying swamps that traditionally acted as buffers to tropical storms? How do we address America’s widening economic and racial divides, embodied by those left behind in the rising floodwaters? How do we rebuild a devastated New Orleans in a way that it won’t just get flooded again, while honoring the right of return for those outside the sleek tourist zones? At what level of disaster do we take seriously the costs of global warming, and begin joining other nations in acting on it? Can we do any of this while giving $120 billion a year in tax cuts to the wealthy and fighting a $100 billion-a-year Iraqi war? And how can we keep our hope for change alive in a time of so much disaster and human pain?

The US has never faced the comparable destruction of one of our major cities, so we’re all in new territory. We need to resist Bush administration proposals to lift wage and environmental protections, give no-bid contracts to companies like Halliburton, and pay for rebuilding by slashing other social programs like Medicare, Medicaid, child welfare programs, and student financial aid. But if we’re going to have a chance of succeeding in offering more proactive alternatives, we’ll need to involve some of those ordinary and often apolitical Americans who watched in horror as the floodwaters rose.

We could complement the more intimate discussions with visible public forums. During the height of the nuclear arms race, Physicians for Social Responsibility scheduled multi-day forums throughout the country to focus public attention on the nuclear threat. They involved a variety of high profile speakers, including Nobel laureates, talking about the impact of the nuclear arms race attack from every perspective they could muster–the likely immediate death toll in the wake of a nuclear attack, technological escalations that were reducing the margin for human error, the arms race’s economic cost, and alternatives for de-escalation. The events mobilized large numbers of citizens and got major media coverage wherever they were held. They played a significant role in challenging the arms race.

We could adopt a similar model around New Orleans. Create a tour with high-profile experts on global warming, the politics of infrastructure, America’s economic and radical divides. Include voices from the city and those now exiled. Challenge Americans to think again about why the disaster happened, and what how we can best proceed in its wake.

We could also use the wake up call of the disaster to take a similar approach with one of the most difficult challenges it raises-the impact of global warming. Focusing just on that one overarching issue, we could hold high-profile local forums about the increase in extreme climate events like hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, droughts and forest fires; about impacts on public health through the migration of disease-carrying insects like the mosquitos that carry West Nile virus; about the impact on agriculture of changing weather patterns. These could feature scientists, journalists, religious leaders, businesspeople like alternative energy experts or representatives of insurance companies increasingly hit by climate-related property casualty losses. The goal would be to use the window of concern opened by Katrina to foster serious discussion in communities that aren’t normally exposed to it.

Finally, we can complement local conversations with coordinated national discussions. As David Dyssegaard Kallick writes in The Nation, New York City citizen groups came together in the wake of 9/11 to create the Labor Community Advocacy Network to Rebuild New York (LCAN). Their members met among themselves to determine their joint priorities, then pushed, with some success, for more equitable directions for post-9/11 reconstruction. (Their suggestions for the displaced Gulf Coast communities are available at www.goodjobsny.org) Major labor, environmental and social justice groups could similarly meet and talk out issues like where to generate the funding for reconstruction, how to balance protection against future floods with rebuilding the devastated communities, how give displaced residents the maximum possible voice. The more we can clarify our own priorities, the more effectively we can articulate them to others.

We tend to think of crises as highly visible calls to action, but real crises build up in the shadows. They’re revealed when clear disaster strikes or when citizens succeed in sufficiently dramatizing their impact on the public stage. Legal segregation was a daily crisis if you were African American, but not if you were white-until activists made it visible. The poisoning of our environment was unnoticed until ordinary citizens raised hard questions. Few talked about the destruction of America’s infrastructure until the water from Lake Pontchartrain spilled over the levees. What we do from this point forward will determine whether the underlying crises that created and compounded the New Orleans disaster get addressed.

If we reach out broadly enough, progressive activists wouldn’t control the direction of the resulting conversations, but we’d have a chance to talk to others of differing views and reflect on our own. From my experience, the disaster has opened up a space where citizens ordinarily resistant to key questions about our nation’s direction are suddenly far more receptive. Whether that opening leads to a new wave of citizen engagement or closes with distraction and time depends on the opportunities for reflection and participation we can create.

Paul Rogat Loeb is the author of The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen’s Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear, named the #3 political book of fall 2004 by the History Channel and the American Book Association, and of Soul of a Citizen: Living With Conviction in a Cynical Time. See www.paulloeb.org.

This story came out today on the web, and the link came to me via a ‘Google Alert’ email that I occasionally receive when Google finds a new webpage that has the word ’survivalist’ in it. I have many Google Alerts running, and rarely does something come that I don’t already know about. This one caught my eye because of its long term implications by a very minor part of the vast quilt of humanity that makes up the American Way.

To put my point before you…anarchists are the leading edge of domestic terrorists. Nothing good comes from their work. They are socialist and communist in nature, and would prefer YOU not to have that which you have…security, safe homes, plenty of food, good jobs, and long term prospects for success. Anarchists live to bring down governments, corporations, and anything that is organized in a way THEY don’t like. They claim to be on the left…liberal…democratic at times. But don’t buy into their claims. They aren’t in it for YOU…only themselves.

However, this particular story is quite disturbing. On first read, it looks like the ‘anarchists’ having plans to ‘take over’ the small pockets of government, “when the opportunity arrives”. This sounds exactly like the classic Loner Survivalist…the kind of person who has a huge stash of weapons, food, and comm gear…waiting for civilation to fall, in whatever degree large or small…that will allow them to profit off the weaker survivors. They refer to the Loner as something they can learn from, but not what they themselves want to be. They want to convert entire communities to socialist agendas.

Take that in any way you can, these anarchists will loudly, or silently, destroy what the rest of us work for…it means the Bad Guys will rule the Weak Folks…and anarchy reigns supreme…meaning those who have the firepower…the lightning (electricity)…the passes (roads and transportation systems)..and the means…will take over and destroy whatever civilization may be left…a more selfish and manipulative group of useless mouthbreathers you’ll never find.

It means Bad Things.

I don’t post this story below to convert anyone to anarchists (Lord knows I’ve never made claim to be one, and never will) …I post it to make you aware of the threats we have in our OWN population, from people that live on the dark side…hidden in the shadows…waiting for the chance to hurt, injure, maim, or kill people THEY want to…without judges, juries, or law. Nothing more than scum and vermin…a lawless society. They claim to be “for the people” …helping the oppressed…freeing the slaves from the capitalist pigs. Right…have they been watching Monty Python and the Holy Grail again?

I’ll make the more disturbing phrases more visible in this mishmash below…it’s not well written by this “anonymous” a-hole. But, the ideas conveyed are worthy of your attention since they are a threat to you, and America, as these evil Americans will hurt every innocent that gets in their way, and never look back. It’s the kind of thing you expect to see in big epic movies about survival of a nation…our nation.

Pass the word…don’t let them get away with hurting others.

Source

Radical Readiness
Saturday, October 29 2005 @ 05:06 PM PDT
Contributed by: Anonymous
WeiJi: Crisis= Danger + Opportunity
A call for Radical Preparedness

WeiJi is the Chinese ideogram representing the concept of “Crisis” which is made up of two characters Wei [Wei (representing “danger”) and Ji (representing “opportunity”). This symbology seems to perfectly represent the importance of crises for those seeking radical change, and why radicals must be prepared to respond to them.
Crises have been with humans since the beginning. Natural disasters, epidemics, wars, famine, social unrest, ecological disruptions and depressions are not new in this century and there seems no reason they shall not continue. In fact, many scientists and thinkers believe we are heading for many more and new types of disasters that due to globalization can spread quickly and widely. Only the most Pollyannish person could possibly believe that there shall be no more emergencies in the near future. Though it seems obvious that radicals (like anyone else for that matter) would put some energy and forethought into preparing for natural or human-made disasters this is often not the case.

There seems to be a natural knee-jerk resistance to emergency preparedness in even the most radical of the Left because of its association with military and government responses and terminology. The extreme right and religious fundamentalists of all stripes currently have a near monopoly on preparing for crises and thus have at least theoretically the best chance to capitalize politically on the opportunities available in our increasingly dangerous world.
This article will examine why radicals should care about being ready for crises and what are the dangers and opportunities that may come from responding (or failing to respond) to emergencies of all kinds. In addition, we hope to show why radicals are in a better position, than traditional survivalists to provide early and sustainable mutual aid during times of crisis.
Emergency preparedness should be approached like all of our political projects. Radicals, if prepared, have an opportunity to make deep social and political relationships with others during the crisis and create allies for future change.

----------

We should be prepared for crises for a number of reasons both social and political. The social reasons should be obvious. Crises present great danger for our lives and the lives of those we care about, work with and those we seek to help by making a world a better place. Often crises can bring out the worse in folks. The combination of stress, unfamiliar choices and a dramatic jarring of ones social constructs all work in tandem to make people react less than ideally during times of immediate danger. Ironically, it is at such difficult times that people need to draw most heavily upon their strengths, skills, compassion and good judgment. The strains of crisis can tear at the social ties with those we are most close to. Preparedness allows us to enhance our ability to act positively during times of flux and take time to concentrate on more than mere survival. By preparing ahead of time we are inoculating ourselves to much of the stress that accompanies disasters and emergencies. We know from research of emergency first responders and the military that practice and preparedness substantially reduce stress during actual disasters and assure better judgment and more decisive action. Often crises require immediate actions otherwise disruptions can actually multiply. The old adage “an ounce of prevention is a worth a pound of cure”, is not just good medical sense but also relates to emergency readiness.

No matter how prepared an individual is, they will undoubtedly need (or at least benefit from) the skills, thoughts and support of others. Crises can often disrupt our relationships with those we normally work with and trust. Communications may be so overtaxed as to be not available; travel may be seriously hampered or dangerous; normal gathering spaces maybe be vacant or inaccessible and normal routine encounters may be so disrupted that one can quickly find themselves isolated. Isolation during a crisis (despite what the right-wing survivalists say) is dangerous, unnecessary and possibly fatal. Our greatest security during any period of turmoil is to have a strong and prepared social network. Most people rely on a social network under current circumstances and would feel lost if it were suddenly removed in an instant. Part of preparedness is ensuring, as much as possible, that your social networks remain strong even during an emergency so collectively you can draw upon each other for support, mutual aid and decision making.

Autonomy and liberty almost always become the first casualties during an emergency.. Radicals have long critiqued various government agencies for being oppressive, irrational, exploitive, mismanaged, out-dated, inhumane etc. All of these faults are instantly multiplied during a serious crisis. It is naïve to believe that a government that daily exploits and oppresses large segments of the population without wealth and political capital will all of a sudden during an emergency care about those same people. All one needs to do is look at local and federal preparedness manuals of organizations like FEMA and one can see the first order on their agenda-- the priority is not to provide aid but to re-assert its control during a crisis. This has been the true since the dustbowl of the 1930’s to this year’s Katrina disaster. It should come as no surprise that government preparedness manuals for local and state governments spend as much time outlining plans to secure “commercial interests” as they do providing medical aid to those injured and in need. In fact, FEMA has a policy of not sending in first responders, like firefighters and paramedics , until police or military units “have established order”. The government’s concept of order, from reading the manuals, seems more akin to business as usual than doing anything to alleviate suffering. is the greatest government incursions in our lives occur during emergencies. Just when government should be promoting mutual aid and self-organizing among its citizens it does everything to marginalize these ideas and strip civil authority of all decision making. In one recent FEMA memo, during the Louisiana crisis, it suggests “Non-local Units [National Guardsmen from other states] should be used when possible…[because] local units may have too many connections to the local population”. In fact the entire concept of FEMA is to de-localize the problem, to bring in outside government authority that is not democratically elected in order to re-establish the status quo and to protect interests of capitalists and the politically connected. This type of callous and counterproductive coercion needs to be actively resisted during times of crisis. The government spends millions and prepares constantly to take control and assert exploitive and divisive powers over already weakened localities and populations during disasters; radicals must be ready to resist and bring control and decision-making back to the people most affected by the emergency.

Radicals that invest in emergency preparedness are in a unique position to aid local populations and actively resist the detrimental effects of non-localized government occupation. Leftists in this country have a long history of working with community groups, who are seeking to improve their neighborhoods and provide for each other what the capitalists and government will not. We have spent many years developing strong relationships and networks among a variety of people who have skills to organize. We have also taken time to improve and constantly re-evaluate our roles as organizers, seeking non-authoritarian ways of aiding self-organization among those exploited by capitalists and governments. We have not always been successful in our attempts to integrate with various oppressed communities but we continue to put a premium on organizing and activism, which puts us way ahead of most right-wing survivalists and makes our project of preparedness quite different from theirs.
Fortunately most people naturally seek to self-organize during a crises. However, often after an initial outburst of localized mutual aid and self-organization at some point the government and capitalists react. They always institute things like forced evacuations, curfews, frozen zones, etc. and then take control over all civil communications channels and seek to centralize people (often in refugee camps)which makes decentralized localized organizing very difficult if not impossible. Centralizing people breaks up normal affinity bonds like neighborhoods, religious affiliation, friends, co-workers, etc. treating all people as undifferentiated refugees. With these important affinity bonds destroyed people are forced to turn to the authorities who control all organizing efforts immune to criticism or advice from those most effected by the emergency.

Mutual aid is quite common during the earliest moments of a disaster, with neighbors helping neighbors and even helpful strangers lending a hand. Officials and “specialists” working for the powers that be usually interfere to stop such behavior under the pretenses that their help is “better”, more expert, and more appropriate. From daily experience we know that peoples’ needs are at odds with the powerful elites’ agenda. It would be foolishness to think if organizing was centralized by the elites that our best interests would be served.

For the radical interested in emergency readiness the crucial questions are: how to prepare in such a way as to promote spontaneous self-organizing and extend it; and how to resist government’s attempt to centralize all help activity. From experiences elsewhere (e.g. Argentina), it seems once people start organizing for themselves to take care of each other during a crisis they often are less willing to return to business as usual and defer power to the State. It is not surprising that most major radical social, political and economic revolutions have a occurred after some sort of disaster or crisis. Real life experiences in mutual aid and egalitarianism are worth a library-full of propaganda for creating lasting changes in society.

There are almost no models in the survivalist sub-cultures to draw upon for radical emergency preparedness. Right-wing and fundamentalist circles interested in survivalism do not have the same goals as us and thus their methods are quite different. While it is true most of these “survivalist” groups seek extreme changes to society (ranging from libertarianism to fascism to metaphysical theocracies) their models do not allow for radical social change.

Despite the popularity of such books like the Turner Diaries among right-wing extremists , there has been very little organizing among such groups. Even during their hey-day of the mid-1980’s and early 1990’s they could offer no organized response or message to such watershed events as Ruby Ridge or Waco. They lack both the communications infrastructure and the desire for group organizing. Instead they are taking a course of extreme individualist survival. They seek to provide bunker-like supplies, skills and support for only them and their family. In fact, they spend a great deal of time worrying about the spontaneous self-organizing of others. This leads to their nearly absurd preoccupation with weapons and self-defense. They have a deeply cynical view of others and hold many of the preconceived notions the elites have about poor or marginalized people (the most likely victims of any crisis in this country). The right-wing survivalists have failed to exstend mutual aid during times of crisis in this country. Instead they redouble their own personal efforts to prepare while offering nothing to those effected. Where the Left has been much quicker (though we must do more) to reach out and provide help to those suffering.

We need to reject the “bunker mentality” not only as right-wing fanaticism but as inherently not a good bet for actually creating sustainable communities after a major disaster. While it is acceptable for radicals to use the substantial infrastructural resources created by the right-wing for emergency preparedness their on-line supply stores; read their articles about storage; and even attend skill specific trainings however we must create our own models based on the work we already do every day, which is a much more complex task than what they are doing. We have a much better history and experience with organizing coordinated actions (albeit it’s often only temporarily) such as mass-mobilizations and extended campaigns that are regional, national or international in scope. We have developed fairly sophisticated processes for decision-making among varied groups that are both supportive and egalitarian. We promote decentralization but unlike the right, we want to coordinate decentralized groups into sustainable resistance networks based on concepts like solidarity and mutual support. In addition over the past few decades, we have been slowly been building relationships with various community groups engaged in projects different from our own, though these relationships have developed more slowly than most of us had anticipated.

We often complain about how the extreme right is out-organizing us, and how during a crisis “they have all the guns”. The reasoning seems to suggest that the right is better-prepared to take advantage of a crisis. This reasoning is not founded on any truth. The right has , perhaps, a better ability to “survive” as isolated individuals and families and protect what they have from outsiders but they are inherently unable to extend their influence to other communities or society at large. It must also be said that is not their goal. The few attempts over the past two decades for the right to resist the State has met with utter failure and little public notice or sympathy. In the end the right maybe able to survive a temporary localized emergency but never resist the State’s imposition of power.