From: John De Armond
Subject: Fighting City Hall (was Re: City Ordinances - Living/Parking)
Date: Tue, 07 Dec 1999 17:49:19 EST
Newsgroups: rec.outdoors.rv-travel

rvcrafter@worldnet.att.net wrote:

 
> Sometimes a person just gotta make a stand.........
> 
> "At some point even a worm will turn to face it's attacker"
> 
> Thanks for the comments,
> 
> Russ (the worm what is turning)

Great! Just don't let that anger fade.

There are lots of resources out there for civil disobedience and
direct action.  here's one link:
http://www.maxwell.syr.edu/maxpages/classes/max123/CD.htm.  Though
most of the outfits that teach civil disobedience are highly
leftist, the techniques know no politics. 

A few years ago I was one of the founding members of a group in
Atlanta called Citizens for Safe Government.  Tiring of trying to
motivate apathetic citizens and seeing the NRA sell us down the road
on gun control, CSG was formed to take direct action against
anti-gun politicians in the state.  We targeted individual
politicians for attention and had a 100% success rate.

We sent several of our members to a "train the trainer" school put
on by Operation Rescue, the radical anti-abortion group.  If you can
put the abortion issue aside, the techniques they developed and
taught are very effective.  Those instructors came back and trained
the rest of us.

One of the key things we learned from the OR school was that one
needs to plan on there being a core group of only a few activists
that get things done.  People often start out thinking they can
motivate like-minded individuals to get involved.  Just doesn't
happen.  People will contribute money to the effort if asked
directly and can be inflamed to take specific actions but this
inflammation typically lasts only a couple of days. This can be
exploited. The core group at CSG was only about 10 people.  

Another key thing is that there must be a charismatic leader to
motivate the core group.  Even within the core group, it takes
charismatic leadership to keep the fires in the belles burning.

A technique we used over and over was to inflame the population the
day before the election with a leaflet campaign.  What is on the
leaflet doesn't have to be 100% true (this is bare knuckle politics,
after all) because the target will not have time to counter.  

One instance involved a small town mayor running for the state
senate.  The election was on a Monday.  We formed what we called
political strike forces, each team consisting of 6 guys in the back
of a pickup truck.  Starting Sunday afternoon, the teams would
target an area such as a mall or a subdivision.  They spread out and
distributed leaflets at high speed while the driver looped around to
pick them up at a designated rendezvous point.  The leaflets stated
on one side that the mayor wanted to confiscate citizens' guns (an
exaggeration) and the other side stated that he wanted to force the
confederate battle flag off of the Georgia state flag - a real
hot-button issue in rural georgia.  We figured that one issue or the
other would get to most everyone.  The mayor sent the cops out with
instructions to arrest us and hold us overnight but thanks to a mole
in the police department who fed us intelligence via cellphone, they
never caught up to us.

The technique was a fantastic success.   This mayor was considered a
shoe-in.  The republicans didn't even put up an opposition
candidate.  We managed to qualify a 22 year old college student on
the last day or else the mayor would have run unopposed. Until that
Sunday, he never had a clue that he had serious opposition. On
election day, the mayor was defeated by about 400 votes!

These techniques of a) targeting specific enemy politicians,  b)
putting friendly candidates on the ballot, and c) taking focused,
direct action against the enemy is very effective, can be done with
just a few people and costs almost nothing.

For those of us raised to be ladies and gentlemen, these techniques
are somewhat distasteful.  However, the statist control freaks are
already using similar and worse technique against us.  At least
nothing we did was (technically) illegal, except perhaps
trespassing.