The Citadel

[KingOrfeo]

No, not a military school. This is a planned community of "Patriots," to be built somewhere in Idaho. It will have two concentric walls with towers around the whole town, every neighborhood will be surrounded with its own towered wall, and, well:

Two: Every able-bodied Patriot aged 13 and older governed by this Agreement shall annually demonstrate proficiency with the rifle of his/her choice by hitting a man-sized steel target at 100 yards with open sights at the Citadel range. Each Resident shall have 10 shots and must hit the target at least 7 times.

Three: Every able-bodied Patriot aged 13 and older governed by this Agreement shall annually demonstrate proficiency with a handgun of choice by hitting a man-sized steel target at 25 yards with open sights at the Citadel range. Each Resident shall have 10 shots and must hit the target at least 7 times.

Four: Every able-bodied Patriot of age within the Citadel will maintain one AR15 variant in 5.56mm NATO, at least 5 magazines and 1,000 rounds of ammunition. The responsibility for maintaining functional arms and ammunition levels for every member of the household shall fall to the head of household. Every able-bodied Patriot will be responsible for maintaining a Tactical Go Bag or Muster Kit to satisfy the Minuteman concept. Details TBD and posted elsewhere.

Five: Every household within the Citadel will remain stocked with sufficient food, water, and other preparedness essentials (to be detailed elsewhere) to sustain the needs for every member of the household for a duration of one year.

Six: Every able-bodied Patriot aged 13 and older shall pass a class every three years sponsored by the Citadel on basic emergency medical care; the courses shall focus on battlefield and wilderness environments.

Seven: Every child attending Citadel schools — with parental discretion for maturity — shall have as part of every semester's class curriculum basic marksmanship and firearms safety training leading to the proficiency test on the child's 13th birthday as a "Coming of Age" rite of passage (a parent may attend the classes or personally train the child if so desired). Children attending schools beyond the Citadel, or home-schooled, are required to meet the same proficiency standards at age 13.

Eight: All Patriots, who are of age and are not legally restricted from bearing firearms, shall agree to remain armed with a loaded sidearm whenever visiting the Citadel Town Center. Firearm shall be on-the-person and under the control of the Resident, not merely stored in a vehicle.

Nine: Each household will provide ONE able-bodied Patriot (aged 13 or older) who shall muster one Saturday per month for Martial/Support Training for neighborhood-level training & musters, as set forth by the Militia Commanders of the Community. No single Patriot shall be required to muster more than once per quarter. In the course of every calendar year every able-bodied Patriot and every full-time resident in each household must participate in at least three musters (one neighborhood-level and two full-scale). Part-time residents must participate, in good faith, to the best of their ability.

The town's economy is to be based on its own firearms company. Of course.

 

[Ramone45]

Cool. Sounds good.

 

[mark_j]

No, not a military school. This is a planned community of "Patriots," to be built somewhere in Idaho. It will have two concentric walls with towers around the whole town, every neighborhood will be surrounded with its own towered wall, and, well:



The town's economy is to be based on its own firearms company. Of course.

And your problem with this would be?

 

[KingOrfeo]

And your problem with this would be?

Nothing much, really (though I am a bit apprehensive about the notion of a town where everybody has to go armed in public; there's no way that could go wrong, is there!). It's just worth sharing because it's interesting and amusing and really, really weird.

 

[phrodeau]

It's a micronation for microcephalics.

 

[pointless]

well, it's a good enough song, but 2000 man and she's a rainbow are the only two real reasons to own their satanic majesties request.

 

[KingOrfeo]

well, it's a good enough song, but 2000 man and she's a rainbow are the only two real reasons to own their satanic majesties request.

Makes as much sense as the Citadel.

 

[unregistered]

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

Guns make the work a whole lot easier.

 

[Liar]

Is it illegal? Are they breaking the law?

As long as they don't try to pull some soverign citizen nonsens, probably not.

Neither is wearing a beanie hat. But that doesn't mean it doesn't make the wearer look silly.

 

[RedAllan]

Sounds like something out of a graphic novel.

 

[oggbashan]

Nothing much, really (though I am a bit apprehensive about the notion of a town where everybody has to go armed in public; there's no way that could go wrong, is there!). It's just worth sharing because it's interesting and amusing and really, really weird.

In England in the Middle Ages every male had to practise archery every week and reach a level of proficiency. Butts (archery firing ranges) were set up in every community. Those who did not attend or did not reach the required proficiency were fined - unless their neighbours stated on oath that the individual was incapable through physical or mental disability.

Those archers helped to win Agincourt and Crecy.

But even though English (and Welsh) archers were deadly, there were few murders or assassinations by longbow (except King William Rufus which might have been accidental but probably wasn't!).

The difference in modern times is that it takes little skill or effort to pull a trigger - even a child can do it. Archers with long bows had to have strength, stamina, extensive training and discipline.

The war-trained English peasantry meant that they never suffered the near-slavery endured by their French equivalents. They were part of the English war effort to be respected and treated with care, not contempt.

 

[RobDownSouth]

In England in the Middle Ages every male had to practise archery every week and reach a level of proficiency. Butts (archery firing ranges) were set up in every community. Those who did not attend or did not reach the required proficiency were fined - unless their neighbours stated on oath that the individual was incapable through physical or mental disability.

Those archers helped to win Agincourt and Crecy.

But even though English (and Welsh) archers were deadly, there were few murders or assassinations by longbow (except King William Rufus which might have been accidental but probably wasn't!).

The difference in modern times is that it takes little skill or effort to pull a trigger - even a child can do it. Archers with long bows had to have strength, stamina, extensive training and discipline.

The war-trained English peasantry meant that they never suffered the near-slavery endured by their French equivalents. They were part of the English war effort to be respected and treated with care, not contempt.

The Boy Scouts still had the "Longbow" merit badge when you were a mere stripling, am I right?

 

[oggbashan]

The Boy Scouts still had the "Longbow" merit badge when you were a mere stripling, am I right?

They did have an archery badge, yes.

But I was older when I made a longbow using resources at my place of work. I researched as much as I could in those pre-internet days. The bow had a draw-weight of 180 lbs, and I couldn't achieve accuracy with that draw-weight.

But penetration?

A greased steel needle-point would pass through two inches of oak and 1/4 inch mild steel.

Edited: That was long before the Mary Rose was raised. Many of the longbows on board had draw-weights of 120-150 lbs. The archers of Crecy and Agincourt were expected to pull those weights all day long. No wonder they needed continual training and were well-paid.

 

[sigh]

Is it illegal? Are they breaking the law?

Apparently not, But don't you see this as rather odd? People do all sorts of weird things that are legal, but hardly normal. Like this, for instance:

http://matwilliamson.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/20111230-170018.jpg

 

[KingOrfeo]

Is it illegal? Are they breaking the law?

Not illegal, just pointless. It's survivalism.

Survivalism in practice

Somalia

Ironically, the sort of long-term breakdown survivalists expect has happened in recent years — in Somalia, a country where few people had the means to make the sort of elaborate preparations survivalists make. Survivalism is a game for the idle rich in search of self-actualization; those who actually have to concern themselves with day to day survival can't afford it. The big irony here is if the breakdown survivalists are expecting actually comes, they (like everyone else) will suddenly be dirt poor and forced to adopt the lifestyles of remote third world villages in order to survive. Cooperative living will be a necessity, and a stance of rugged individualism (in this case, a euphemism for being willing to knife someone in the back for a carton of powdered milk) will be a one-way ticket to starvation.

In addition, even with the collapse of the central government, many places still see some form of order — the northern states of Somaliland and Puntland have, for all intents and purposes, restored government in their areas and are de facto independent, functioning nations,[19] while in the rest of the country an assortment of warlords, pirates and Islamists hold power.

Argentina

One survivalist, Fernando "Ferfal" Aguirre, runs a blog called "Surviving in Argentina"[20] dedicated to his experiences with having lived in a developed country where a large-scale economic and societal collapse actually happened — Argentina, during that country's economic crisis in 2001-02 after the nation defaulted on its debt. His observations pointedly contradict many of the assumptions made by American survivalists:
* The logic of "bugging out" to a distant rural area to escape the chaos in the cities did not hold up in practice, as major cities like Buenos Aires and Cordoba were often the first places to see order and services restored. By contrast, rural survivalist compounds often found themselves outgunned and outnumbered by criminal gangs with nobody to help them for miles. Many such compounds were later discovered by the authorities looted and abandoned, sometimes with their would-be survivalist owners murdered.
* Government collapse is always temporary. By 2003, the crisis was over and Argentina's economy was booming again, partly as a result of the economic corrections triggered by the crisis[21].
* Even at the height of the collapse, collective effort was often the most conductive way for many working-class and former middle-class Argentineans to make a living, as demonstrated by the proliferation of worker-owned cooperatives.
* The rich, rather than being thrown from their lofty perch, got richer during and after the collapse — income inequality rose between 2001 and 2005, and at the height of the collapse the upper classes managed to defend their wealth by hiring armed private security.
* Likewise, the decadent pop culture and lifestyles that should have been swept away (according to American survivalists) were only reinforced. To give just one example, Argentinean TV studios and networks, reeling from the economic collapse, cut costs in any way they could and went for the cheapest programming they could find. Yup — the economic meltdown led to an explosive boom in trashy reality TV, and a similarly sharp decline in educational programming.

In short, total anarchy and a return to rural subsistence living failed to materialize even in the midst of a worst-case economic meltdown scenario.

Conclusions

The experiences of Somalia and Argentina together demonstrate many of the fallacies, shaky logic and biases surrounding the thinking of many survivalists, especially those on the right wing of the political spectrum. The prevailing stance of many survivalists is one of rugged individualism, an idealized vision of life in which a man can make it by the sweat of his brow without having to rely on anybody else. In reality, such a stance would get one killed as those who engage in collective effort, be they gangs, warlords or new city-states, out-compete them and eventually drive them out. Philosophical arguments about "common law" will matter to the armed men at your doorstep about as much as arguments about Roman law did in the Dark Ages. Even in the Wild West, it was never the lone cowboy that drove back crime, it was the new settlements collectively organizing for law enforcement and the other infrastructure of society.

Furthermore, many survivalists also assume that a return to rural and small-town living will be the "natural" result of the collapse, with cities descending into total chaos while the countryside weathers the storm. To be fair, this idea emerged in a time when the threat of nuclear war (in which cities would be targeted for destruction) was very real, but it is just as present in predictions of economic meltdown and other disasters. What they fail to account for is that the collapse of law and order will happen everywhere, including in their rural retreats, as trade and transportation break down and their Wal-Marts and country stores stop getting shipments of food. With the end of the Cold War and the threat of World War III, it becomes clear that this idea is rooted more in a bias towards, and an assumption of the superiority of, rural living vs. urban living than in any realistic assessment of a collapse.

 

[KingOrfeo]

BTW, they chose Idaho for a reason.

The "American Redoubt"

The "American Redoubt" in the inland northwestern US is a concept[12][13] that perfectly illustrates the right-wing undercurrent underlying much of the modern survivalist movement. Broadly defined, the Redoubt consists of the states of Idaho, Wyoming, Montana (particularly the western half of the state), and the areas of Washington state and Oregon east of the Cascade Mountains (away from those filthy tree-huggers, hipsters, and commies in Seattle and Portland).

The idea of the Redoubt was developed by James Wesley Rawles,[14] owner of the popular one-stop survivalist website SurvivalBlog, as a haven for survivalists and conservatives to relocate to on the basis of its being perceived as the exemplar of "true American" values, a place where small towns, farmers, the working class, and churches dominate political and cultural life. Furthermore, the region's mountainous terrain makes it prime territory for guerrilla warfare against an invading army — he explicitly disqualified North and South Dakota and eastern Montana from being part of the Redoubt, despite their similar values, on the basis of their open plains being "tanker country".

It was likely for this reason that the people behind The Citadel chose northern Idaho as the site of their planned community for "true Americans". The Flathead Valley in western Montana has also become a magnet for the "Patriot" community[15], with fundamentalist pastor and 2008 Constitution Party Presidential candidate Chuck Baldwin notably moving there from Florida in 2010 and calling on his fellow "Patriots" to follow him west.[16]

Coincidentally, the northwestern US was also chosen by white nationalists in the '80s as a place to relocate to in order to turn it into a white/Aryan "homeland" on the grounds of the area being overwhelmingly white.[17] Rawles and other Redoubt supporters insist that they're not racist, though; in fact, Rawles explicitly speaks of Orthodox Jews (and, of course, Messianic Jews) as being in line with his moralistic Christian ideals, and calls on them to move to the Redoubt as well.

 

[Sean]

Wow, America has a lot of scared people.

 

[unregistered]

 

[unregistered]

 

[KingOrfeo]

No more pointless than liberals attempting to resurrect Karl Marx and Thomas Hobbes to guide the building of Leviathan, from which to rule the totality of the masses.

If liberals were attempting to do that, it would have a point.

 

[unregistered]

 

[KingOrfeo]

Yes, like most of their endeavors, failure.

Even an endeavor that fails can have a point. Survivalism has none. Nothing the survivalists are doing will prolong their lives any -- not even if some kind of social collapse actually happens. See post #16.

 

[unregistered]

 

[RobDownSouth]

I think this Citadel thing is a marvelous idea. I think Lit should start a Kickstarter project so the grumpy Grampas here can relocate there.

If nothing else, it's a great place for the government to test out the new tactical "suitcase" nukes!!