"The Futility of the Oregon Armed
Standoff"
from "In Defense of
Rural America"
By Ron Ewart,
President
National Association of Rural Landowners (www.narlo.org)
and nationally recognized author and
speaker on freedom and property rights issues for over 10
years
©
Copyright Sunday, February 7, 2016 - All Rights
Reserved
The following article
was published on Newswithviews, February 3, 2016
There have been many confrontations between
landowners and the government, environmentalists and the Indians and those
confrontations are only going to grow. That rising anger has led to the Jarbidge
Shovel Brigade in Northern Nevada near Elko, the Klamath Bucket Brigade in
Southern Oregon, the infamous Wayne Hage lawsuit against the government and the
Bundy standoff against heavily armed BLM agents in Southeastern Nevada and now
the standoff at the Malheur Nature Preserve in Southeastern Oregon.
On the Indian front, besides Indian Casinos,
little has been said or is known about the Boldt decision that gave the Indians
50% of the Salmon harvest every year, or the giant monetary award to the
Puyallup Indians in Washington State ($162,000,000) over a land claim, or the
Coeur d’Alene Indians trying to claim for the tribe all of Lake Coeur d’Alene in
Idaho, or the Flathead Indians taking control of all land, water and electricity
rights in Western Montana, with the help of the federal and Montana State
governments.
Then there is the dictatorial control and abuse
by the Bureau of Land Management and the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Agency in the
management of federal lands that have spilled over into private land holdings
with a vengeance.
All of these events directly affect the rural
landowners of the Western United States and has lit a match to what could become
a raging land war in the West.
The Western landowners have found themselves in
the unrelenting grip of a giant bully known as the U. S. Federal Government.
They have tried in numerous legal ways to fight that government, but with courts
leaning in favor of the government and the radical environmental movement, the
rural landowner has found little redress going the legal route. The hard truth
is, you can’t fight the power of the federal government alone, which way too
many landowners try.
A blaring case in point is the Wayne Hage family
ranchers in Southeastern Nevada. They actually had won a court decree from the
U. S. Court of Claims to the tune of $14,000,000 after fighting horrendous
attempts by the federal government to thwart their every legal move. The elder
Hage’s have since died and their son has had to pick up the fight. Some reports
indicate that the Hage Family has spent over $2,000,000 in lawyers, court costs
and expert witnesses. In over 20 years of that court case and seeing the light
at the end of the tunnel by a favorable court award, the family’s hopes were
dashed when the federal government took the case to the 9th U. S. Circuit Court
of Appeals that reversed the lower court’s award and remanded the case back to
the lower court with a new judge.
The younger Hage said in a telephone interview
Monday that an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court would be difficult. "I don't
know what the future has in store for us." We have been dealt a lot of
ugly over the years. I'm not sure where it's going to go. It is a big
disappointment, not just for my family but for the entire
industry. They felt relief at the Jones decision.
Ranchers' rights had been upheld but now it has all been overturned. It looks to
me like the 9th Circuit just swelled the ranks of the militias." Hage said he is not involved with the militias but that he understands
their frustrations with the federal government."
The 9th Circuit overturned the lower court’s
ruling because the lower court judge allegedly harbored "animus" towards the
federal agencies. Imagine that! Since the courts most always lean in
favor of the government and against the citizens, that’s OK in the minds of the
FEDS, but woe be to the judge who dares to lean in favor of citizen’s rights and
the constitution.
Given this backdrop and the frustration of the
landowners trying to fight an intransigent government, it is no wonder that some
landowners decided to take matters into their own hands and confront the
government with guns at the Bundy Ranch in Nevada where a blood bath was averted
by cooler heads.
The Bundy standoff in 2014 has led to the
current Oregon standoff where trigger happy Oregon State Patrol and FBI agents
couldn’t wait to shoot one of the landowners at a traffic stop in what has been
reported by eyewitness Victoria Sharps, who was in the white SUV, as, "red
laser lights everywhere, shined on all of the occupants of the rancher’s car,
and a hail of bullets from the FBI agents fired into our car where Ryan Bundy
was wounded. It’s a wonder we weren’t all killed."
(See eyewitness video/audio: https://www.youtube.com/watch?
The apparent summary execution of Lavoy Finicum at the traffic
stop was murder according to Ms. Sharps. She stated that Lavoy. 54, a Mormon and
father of 11 children and 19 grandchildren, had his hands up when the FBI agents
shot him several times and while he was laying on the ground, they shot him
three more times. But let’s not forget that Lavoy Finicum tried to run a
roadblock.
The FBI calls Ms. Sharps’ testimony false and
has released a video of the event. The FBI claims Lavoy was reaching for a gun
when they shot him. Couldn’t they have at least waited to see the gun before
they shot him? The FBI video doesn’t mention or show the bullet-riddled SUV. Any
investigation into the shooting will likely be a whitewash.
But this begs the question of why would a father
of 11 children be at a place where he could be killed? That’s irresponsible. Who
will take care of the children and his ranch now that he is gone ….. the
government?
By the time this article is published, the
Malheur Nature Preserve occupation will probably be over. The apparent leader of
the ranchers, Ammon Bundy, from his jail cell, has strongly urged the other
remaining ranchers to go home, if they can get out of there without being
arrested, or shot. Hopefully, they will leave peacefully and no more blood shed
will occur.
There were only two possible outcomes from the
Oregon standoff. The first outcome is all of the ranchers would all be shot dead
by government agents. The other outcome was that they would be arrested for
breaking the law. Only one was shot dead and the rest have been, or probably
will be, arrested. They could serve many years in jail.
What did the ranchers hope to accomplish? Yes,
they obtained national news coverage, but that coverage labeled the ranchers as
thugs and terrorists. What the ranchers wanted was the Hammond Father and Son
Oregon ranchers to be released from prison for a trumped up arson charge by the
government giving them a five-year sentence as terrorists. That sentence was
obviously over-kill by the government and was and is a travesty of justice.
Nevertheless, even after the standoff is over, the Hammonds will still be in
prison. So there was no win on this demand.
The ranchers’ second demand was for the federal
government to cede all federal lands to the states. That demand was never going
to happen in the short term but several states are attempting to regain control
of federal lands in their states. We see movement along these lines in Utah,
Nevada and Idaho.
Even though we sympathize with the ranchers and
their cause, the occupation was futility by any other name, driven by irrational
anger and frustration. The news of the occupation will be dead in a week or two,
drowned out by the Presidential race. The trials of those arrested might be
covered but it won’t be front-page news. The press will crucify the ranchers and
when the ranchers go to jail, no one will care. The
ranchers will become nameless martyrs in a long war against rising government
tyranny, even though the ranchers’ honorable goal was to preserve, protect and
defend the Constitution of the United States.
What are the lessons learned from the Oregon
occupation event? The first lesson is, you have to be smarter than the
government and that shouldn’t be too hard given that government employees are
intellectually challenged at best. What the ranchers did was not being smarter
than the government.
The second lesson is that you don’t go up
against a superior force with a handful of disorganized armed citizens. That’s
not only folly it can be deadly and is in direct violation of the art of war. If
Americans decide they want to challenge the military power of the federal
government, they had better have no less than 10,000 heavily armed, dedicated
citizens with a tight organization, strong leadership, adequately supplied and
funded, a detailed plan and the commitment and courage to confront government no
matter what the cost. Any outright war with the 10,000 would be perceived by the
public as heavy handed and dictatorial and the mask of government tyranny would
finally be removed for all to see. That is probably why the government backed
down at the Bundy Ranch in Nevada in 2014 because of the adverse public opinion
if civilian Americans started dying in the desert at the hands of BLM
agents.
Anyone should know that the government can
easily over power a smaller force as they did in Oregon and the smaller force
will have gained nothing out of the confrontation. But a force of 10,000 or more
raises the stakes to a whole new level where the government will think twice
about a war where Americans are killing other Americans, albeit that didn’t stop
them in the civil war.
Government could not ignore the demands of an
army of 10,000 armed and dedicated civilians who intended to punctuate their
demands with guns. However, as far as we know, there is no force of an organized
group of 10,000 heavily armed citizens lurking in the shadows of America right
now.
Consequently, the only other way is to legally
challenge the government by using the courts, like the environmentalists do,
even knowing that the courts and brainwashed juries lean in favor of the
government and especially the environmentalists. Such a strategy requires a
non-beatable legal team and tens of millions of dollars to fund the legal
battle. Yes, we can take back America in the courts, with enough money.
If the 50,000,000 or so voters that voted for
Mitt Romney in the 2012 election donated $10.00 per month for a year, a war
chest of $500,000,000 would be raised each month (that’s $6 Billion Dollars
in a year) to fight a legal battle. Even if 10% of that 50 million would
donate $10.00, that would be enough. The giant legal firms would fall all over
themselves to represent this group in that they would sue their own mother if
there were enough money in it for them.
But until such a legal strategy is
mounted and the funds raised, nothing will change in America. As we said in our
last article entitled, "America’s Collapse Is A
Self-Fulfilling Prophecy – UNLESS", "….. a critical mass of
dedicated American citizens finally decide to resist government tyranny by acts
of civil disobedience on a grand scale, punctuated by the threat of force if
necessary." A Boston style tea party, or even a
million-man march on Washington DC, or an armed occupation at a nature preserve
in Oregon to seek a redress of grievances, just doesn’t cut it in today’s
America. The corrupt "system" will just swallow them up and spit them
out.
But we wonder who gets it, or even whose
listening, or worse, who cares?
If you care, let us know HERE.
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Ron Ewart, a nationally known author and
speaker on freedom and property rights issues and author of this weekly column,
"In Defense of Rural America", is the president of the National
Association of Rural Landowners (NARLO) (http://www.narlo.org) an advocate and consultant for urban
and rural landowners and a non-profit corporation headquartered in
Washington State. He can be reached for comment at: info@narlo.org.
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