George Rebane

That was the lament from a businessman and demonstrator on NPR’s morning coverage of the Libyan crisis.  He told of the government hired mercenaries riding through the streets of Tripoli, machine gunning anyone caught in the open.  The death toll is over a thousand with thousands more wounded.  And this is not even the real story of what the Libyan people have had to endure for 41 years.

Governments like Gadhafy’s take a hideous toll on their people over the years which is totally ignored by our lamestream media.  I’m talking about the thousands of lives that have been snuffed by Gadhafy and his henchmen as a ‘natural cost’ of operating a tyranny.  Add to that the millions of lives that have been stunted along every dimension imaginable, and you begin to get just a glimmer of the impact that tyrants all over the world inflict on their populations.

In Libya, Gadhafy is using Stalin’s old trick to stay in power.  He saw how Egyptian and then his own military could become unreliable executioners of street demonstrators.  So he brought in mercenaries from other parts of the country and other parts of Africa.  These thugs have no inhibition in spraying AK-47 fire into crowds or people looking out of their windows.

Stalin’s standard operating procedure was to station troops from faraway places in the USSR where they were essentially foreigners.  This served two purposes – they would be reliable executioners to hold down local uprisings, and they would not collude with the local population against Moscow.  For example, in the Baltics the Red Army troops stationed there were natives of USSR’s central Asian ‘republics’ like Kazakhstan.

But the common denominator of all tyrants is to have a disarmed citizenry.  They all know along with Stalin that you have to “crack a few eggs to make an omelet”, and the egg cracking goes on year in and year out.  Nobody notices such a steady stream of killings because it occurs within the boundaries of a sovereign nation-state and is considered an ‘internal affair’.  Imagine the decades long murder of millions that is the internal affair of North Korea.  No one gives a big rat’s ass about those humans, most certainly not the progressives of ‘civilized’ western nations.

No one even wants to ask the question ‘how long could Kim Jong Il keep up the killing if his people were armed tonight?’  ‘How many of the 2 million Cambodians would still be alive had they had guns?’  Those are crazy questions, right?  Instead, our progressives are outraged as they cite anecdotes of little Suzy blowing her brother’s brains out accidentally with an improperly stored gun that everybody thought was unloaded.  Or how about a looney going on a killing spree in a shopping center?  Now these are reasons to disarm the populace if there ever were any.

In my book, that is the sum and substance of lame thinking, the kind that winds up costing millions of lives and reducing tens/hundreds millions of more lives to levels of abject and hopeless existence.  We turn a blind here because we focus only on the looney incidents and overlook the bigger historical picture – besides, we all believe that it can’t happen in America.  And we are awash in that kind of thinking as we watch but cannot connect the dots about what is happening in the Arab street.