Originally published at Notes from the bunker…. You can comment here or there.

By now the blogosphere is stirred up with reports, links, rumours, speculation and outright tinfoil-hattery regarding the arrest of memebers of the “Hutaree” militia. I find it that one of the charges listed in one of the articles was ‘teaching the use of explosives”…when did that become illegal?

Im going to be the first to say that I have not looked into this very deeply and only know what I see reported in the media (with its usual biases). But…it looks like these guys stepped on their own dicks in getting ready for the apocalypse. They foresaw an event, prepared for it and when it started dragging its feet in getting there they decided to meet it halfway. Bad, bad, bad.

Interestingly, this has happened on an international scale. Let me tell you about the secret stay-behind armies of the free world.

After WW2 many countries saw the handwriting on the bullet-pocked walls and thought that someday, maybe sooner maybe later, the communists would roll across Europe and start the push towards global domination. What could be done to prevent such things? Well, the usual diplomacy and military options were of course available, but someone thought that there should be plans for a resistance…governments in exile…caches of weapons for freedom fighters…that sort of thing. And thus just about every country in Europe created secret armies of personnel whose job was to form underground resistance movements when the communists took over. Safe house were established, arms were cached, shadowy parallel governments were formed, etc. And for a number of years these secret armies-in-waiting did just that – they waited. The years went by and practices became policies, secret treaties were formed, and eventually all of these separate stay-behind armies started to coalesce under a somewhat unified political structure – NATO. Amazingly, it was all kept pretty quiet. Until someone stepped on their own dick. Notably, the Italian version of the stay-behind army, dubbed Operation Gladio, decided that rather than wait for Italy to fall under communist rule they might take a proactive role and start ‘removing’ communist troublemakers preemptively…perhaps even foment some communist activities to get the ball rolling. And these guys eventually got found out…and when they did, it unraveled in a pretty spectacular way. Suddenly every nation in Europe was discovering there were secret military organizations within their borders setting up to fight WW3 when the communists took over.

You can read the details, with its bizarre conections to the Nazis, over at wiki.

What do these two have in common? Well, both had ideas and fears about what would happen in the future regarding political climates and both, in preparing against them, wound up getting impatient and trying to instigate them and speed up the timetable. And, as a result, both got knocked down into the dirt. Theres a couple lessons in there and I’ll leave it to you to figure out what they are.