Metallicman On The Historical Fate Of Preppers

In his article, "This is what happened to the 'Preppers' during previous genocides and periods of national turmoil," he examines "how prepping (historically) helped out these people [i.e., preppers in other societies] to avoid or reduce the amount of stress and turmoil during national turmoil." He also narrows his scope to examine what he terms "political prepping": preparing for political, social, and genocidal upheavals. He also looks at different types of preppers:

The purposes, or the reasons why someone may set up a prepper situation can be classified as…

• “Buying time” to enable one’s family to escape from a conflict zone. These preppers “bug out” with the objective of moving to a safer place or a safer region. This is also known as a”safe house”. These preppers cling on to the “normalcy” vector. They hope that they can keep working on their day to day lifestyle, without interruption.
• “Ride out the storm“. Long duration defense of one’s property and family in a fixed, stable location. This is the “traditional prepper” lifestyle, and the one most people associate with prepping.
• “Fluidic survival“. The ability to float with your family in a general region in safety, but not be tied down to any fixed hard defensive location.
• “Militia Membership“. Being part of a much larger group that in cooperation, defends a community, farms and region from outsiders.
• “Hobbyist prepper” . A person who thinks that they are prepared for a SHTF event solely by reading, setting aside some provisions, and the purchase of some land in an isolated geographic location.
• “Life Boat prepper“. This is what I did. Long before the start of any SHTF event, I figured to locating a safe haven way outside the USA. Then I relocated my entire life there. The key here is that this type of prepping occurs long before the rest of society catches on that “storm clouds” might be a brewing.

The key thing for successful prepping and survival is time and a warning or triggering event. As the author points out, "Genocides, democides and Policides, are always sprung on an unsuspecting populace. There are few things that a person can do to prepare, short of leaving the country and setting up a second home in a peaceful and tranquil country." And preparations that might be successful for short term unrest by gangs or insurgents may ultimately prove unfruitful when facing a government determined to exterminate you and yours, and has the patience of years behind them. For instance, he relates:

    At one time Armenia was an independent nation. At that time, Armenia was a Christian majority nation. Then over time, their borders changed, swapped hands, and the majority of Armenians found themselves located within Turkey.

    The first widely studied modern democide occurred in Turkey between 1915 and 1923, when the Turkish government  decided to eliminate the  country’s Christian minority. This group consisted  primarily of ethnic Armenians and Greeks.  

    We do know that Turkey disarmed the populace in 1911, and for around three and a half years went door to door collecting the firearms and ammo from the entire civilian population. Then in 1914, they began rounding up all the disarmed Christians. They tortured them, they abused them, they marched them into the desert where they all died.

    I am quite confident that there would be "ride out the storm" preppers who, by geographic location, luck, or fawning being a Muslim managed to escape the democide and purge of Christians. But we will never know how many of these people existed, nor their own individual stories.

    What we do know is that Albania went from a 100% Christian majority nation to a 97% Muslim nation in a few very short decades.

"Christianity in Turkey has had a long history dating back to the 1st-century AD. In modern times the percentage of Christians in Turkey has declined from 20-25 percent in 1914 to 3-5.5 percent in 1927, to 0.3-0.4% today roughly translating to 200,000-320,000 devotees." 

Similarly, he notes that even though many Jews fled to Poland after the Nazis took power, their respite was short lived once Germany and the Soviet Union invaded Poland.

    It is all of this and more--read his article--that has convinced him that the best option is the "life boat prepping": simply pulling up and moving to a less hostile country. But if nothing else, he echoes the same sentiment that I've seen from FerFal and Selco about the best prep being a passport. 

    That said, I'm not convinced that the United States presents the same issues as other countries have in the past. While technologies and close interaction between law enforcement, intelligence agencies, and corporations makes it much easier for the United States government to locate and identify people it wants to persecute, it also has a much vaster land mass and population than the historical examples given by the author which would make it hard for the government to actually carry out a genocide or democide against a resisting population. On top of this, because the U.S. was originally conceived as a confederacy of smaller countries, the individual states still retain considerable authority independent from the federal government. 

    So what we are seeing in the U.S. is "life boat prepping" that involves moving between states within the United States, such as from California to Texas or some other "red state". While many liberals have also migrated bringing their problems with them--they are much like a disease--I do believe that we are seeing a type of self-sorting with conservatives flowing out of "blue states" to more conservative states. Enough of this and we will see the opposite migration of liberals from conservative states to more liberal states. This is important because if history teaches us nothing else, it is that the military and police will obey whoever is paying them, which we should hope will be conservative governments in conservatives states.