— by Polydamas
We at The Cassandra Times are ardent fans of science fiction and alternative history novels. One of the science fiction authors who has greatly influenced some of our libertarian political ideas was Philip K. Dick. A number of our readers may already be familiar with his dystopian and technologically-nightmarish novels and short stories which were adapted to the big screen. They include the 1982 movie “Blade Runner” starring Harrison Ford, the 1990 movie “Total Recall” with Arnold Schwartzenegger, which was re-made a few years ago with Collin Farrell, the 2002 movie “Minority Report” featuring Tom Cruise, the 2003 movie “Paycheck” with Ben Affleck, the 2011 movie “The Adjustment Bureau” with Matt Damon, and others.
More recently, libertarian billionaire Jeff Bezos’ Amazon Prime adapted to television one of Philip K. Dick’s most acclaimed novels named “The Man in the High Castle”. Both the novel and the television series are excellent, and we highly recommend them. The novel and television series depict an alternative history of our world, circa the 1960s, in which Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan decisively won World War II. After dropping an atomic bomb on Washington, D.C. to end the World War II, Nazi Germany conquered the Eastern, Midwestern, and Northern United States. Meanwhile, Imperial Japan occupied the Pacific States of California, Oregon, and Washington. These two countries imposed martial law on the remnants of the United States. Since then, the vast majority of the American people lives a life of subservient humiliation and helpless subjugation.
In this alternative history of America, Americans no longer have self-rule or the protections of the United States Constitution. American are routinely shot in the streets with impunity by the police forces of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. The secret police forces of these two countries keep Americans under surveillance at all times. They can arrest any Americans without any arrest warrants. They can kill and torture Americans in captivity without trial and due process of law. Homes and personal effects can be searched, seized, and looted on the whim of government bureaucrats, soldiers, and police officers. There are concentration camps in the countryside, complete with Zyklon-B gas chambers, where Jews, minorities, the mentally handicapped, the physically handicapped, and other Americans who are considered to be burdens on society are efficiently exterminated.
Most Americans live in fear and simply try to survive in this nightmarish world. Some Americans eagerly collaborate with their foreign occupiers in return for influential jobs, social standing, wealth, and material success. They salute one another with the Sieg Heil and proudly proclaim “Heil Hitler” to each other. Their children belong to Hitler Youth organizations and wear paramilitary uniforms.
In contrast, a small handful of Americans are members of the Resistance. Alas, firearms are strictly regulated and possessed almost exclusively by the authorities, their soldiers, and their police. The Resistance has little access to firearms. Resistance fighters have no chance of militarily resisting their occupiers, short of rare assassinations and small ambushes. The situation for the Resistance is mostly hopeless.
Keeping in mind the alternative history world of Philip K. Dick’s “The Man in the High Castle” depicted above, we at The Cassandra Times ask our readers — especially our liberal readers — to indulge us in a thought experiment. Let us imagine now to the music of John Lennon’s song “Imagine” that the legendary liberal President Barack Obama succeeded in passing laws that legally prohibited all possession of firearms by private citizens over the resistance of Congress and the National Rifle Association. The American military and police are the only forces that can legally possess firearms. The harshest possible consequences befall any private citizens who possess firearms or even have a photograph or a drawing of a firearm. America now has the world’s strictest confiscatory gun laws that put Japan’s, Australia’s, and Great Britain’s gun laws to utter shame. California’s Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein and former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg finally achieved their lifelong dreams of complete confiscation of firearms. In short, President Obama absolutely succeeded in ensuring that, not only are there no firearms on America’s streets, there are zero firearm deaths due to mass murders, deranged people, accidental shootings, murders, suicides, or gun crime. Of course, any society not composed of angels and saints cannot completely eliminate murders and other violent crimes — which are now committed with knives, clubs, and bare hands — but not with firearms.
Imagine now that the worst possible nightmare that any paranoid liberal could conceivably imagine actually transpires, namely, that, in the indeterminate future, one of the dastardly evil Republicans that liberals fear beyond all measure succeeds in becoming the President of the United States. This Republican President is literally the embodiment of every liberal anathema. He is the unholy mixture of George W. Bush, Richard Nixon, Joe McCarthy, Donald Rumsfeld, Karl Rove, Kenneth Starr, and every conservative bogeyman that liberals have ever used to scare their children. He appoints reactionary United States Supreme Court Justices who completely ban abortion under any circumstances. In the words of Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy at the confirmation hearing for proposed Supreme Court Justice Robert Bork, pregnant women who wish to terminate their unwanted pregnancies must resort to dangerous, back alley abortions. He imposes on America his version of militant Christian Sharia law and his reactionary moral values and punishments straight out of the Book of Leviticus. Adultery and homosexuality are punishable by death. Liberal celebrities like Martin Sheen, Susan Sarandon, Barbra Streisand, Tim Robbins, Robert Redford, Jane Fonda, Michael Moore, Markos Moulitsas, Sean Penn, and the like are all shipped off to gulags and re-education camps in Alaska. African-Americans and other people of color are either enslaved again or returned to the days of Jim Crow and Bull Connor. Liberal professors on campuses are fired from their tenured positions, blacklisted, and reduced to homelessness and begging for alms.
As far as liberals would be concerned, this reactionary Republican President and his henchmen would be no different than the Nazi German regime depicted in Philip K. Dick’s novel “The Man in the High Castle”. Although they fervently want to resist such a totalitarian regime and to return America to be a liberal democracy, alas, the American people had been completely disarmed by President Obama. As a result, they are without any hope or recourse against an oppressive reactionary government. They have condemned themselves and the rest of the American people to be armless and toothless victims.
The lesson here is that liberals, who wish to grant to the type of liberal government that they love today an absolute monopoly on firearms, is that they may later discover to their dismay that they ended up foolishly and irrevocably surrendering their ultimate check on tyranny to the type of tyrannical government that they will hate tomorrow.