In the most recent edition of the Libertarian Enterprise, L. Neil Smith considers a couple of ways to help oppressed peoples all around the world:
An example of the original Liberator pistol from WW2.
Screen capture from a Forgotten Weapons video.
The first is an idea that I originally read about in the 1950s in a short story by Arthur C. Clarke, author of 2001: A Space Odyssey. There’s a satisfying irony about using it against the Chinese communists,since Clarke himself was an ardent collectivist (among other nasty things) and wrote about it as a way that communists might bring Western Civilization to its knees. Building on Clarke’s original concept, imagine a tiny radio receiver, tuned only to a single frequency, with no moving parts, small enough to fit almost entirely into the human ear, and with the right coloration to be virtually invisible.
Now imagine a geostationary satellite standing 22,300 miles in space over China. The basic idea is like Radio Free Europe, but with significant differences. Instead of dull propaganda (I listened to some of those RFE and Voice of America broadcasts), there would be readings by celebrities like James Earl Jones and Dennis Haysbert from the works of Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, George Mason, and other Founding Fathers. Nineteenth century thinkers like Herbert Spencer, Auberon Herbert, Lysander Spooner, and Benjamin Tucker would be featured, as well, along with H.L Mencken, Ludwig von Mises, Rose Wilder Lane, Ayn Rand, Friedrich Hayeck, and Milton Friedman from the twentieth century.
Very importantly, these lessons in liberty would be interspersed by good, old-fashioned action-adventure radio drama, featuring the works of individualist scribblers like Robert A. Heinlein, H. Beam Piper, Poul Anderson, and little old me, Underdog. Jammed in there just to keep the comrades listening avidly, there would be what I like to think of as “weaponized pornography”, high-quality dramatic readings of Pauline Reage’s Story of O, among others. If it works in Chinese, it will work in Arabic or Farsi, as well.
The geostationary satellite would beam all these offerings down twenty-four hours a day to the millions of little radios that we have air-dropped or otherwise smuggled to the citizenry. Sailors on their brand-new ships would probably listen in, as well. The Chicoms would try their damnedest to outlaw them and maybe even shoot the satellite down, but 22,300 miles is a long way away, and battle-lasers can defeat missiles laboring at the peak of their climb. Such satellites are relatively cheap and replaceable, especially if they can prevent World War III, and we’d keep sending the Chinese those little radios.
That’s Idea #1. Idea #2 involves a World War II project most gun enthusiasts know about called the “FP-45 Liberator Pistol”. A million of the crude, stamped, single-shot firearms, unrifled and chambered for the .45 automatic pistol cartridge, were manufactured by the Guide Lamp Division of General Motors at a total cost of $2.10 apiece (that’s $31.55 today). The whole package contained a few spare cartridges, a wooden ejection rod, and a comic book illustration showing how to use it: sneak up on a Nazi soldier, blow his brains out, and steal his rifle.
You were supposed to throw the pistol away, but me, I would have kept it. You never know when you might need it. The Liberators are so scarce today that the bidding starts at $600, meaning that there are hundreds of thousands of the ugly little roscoes still tucked away in barns and attics in eastern Europe. Wikipedia, no bastion of liberty, claims that they were all rounded up and destroyed by Allied troops (which probably cost more than the guns did). If true, it means that I was right when I wrote in my first novel, The Probability Broach, that WWII was basically a conflict between competing brands of fascism.
