Ragnar Benson: Ragnar's Urban Survival: A Hard-Times Guide to Staying Alive in the City

Sandbagged emplacements are recommended to control fire and to afford some protection from small-arms fire. These can be quite clever, including sandbagged overhead racks, frontal barriers, and floors. Often these s:ructures take on the character of gun emplacements. While those who intend to fight with the urban guerrillas need to know the theory behind these, they are mostly unnecessary for city survivors and will not be covered here, except in passing.

Those interested can secure U.S. Army training manuals on urban warfare as reprints from Paladin Press or in their original form from military manual suppliers. Most military manuals are available in local university libraries where they can be freely copied. Look for anything on combat in built-up places.

Not only is warfare likely in cities where we live, it is also like ly that this warfare will be bitterly fought. Modern commanders know from past experience that a well-prepared and mutually supported position in a city can usually be defended by a small force. Attackers are likely to suffer heavy losses and perhaps even temporary defeat against a smaller defending force.

Small, portable weapons that give individuals great firepower will be a decisive factor in urban combat.

At one time wise commanders bypassed builtup areas, allowing defenders be gradually starved out. East of the Mississippi and in Europe, urban development is so extensive that this tactic is no longer considered practical.

In this and most other cases, survival has proven possible if we limit our defense to our own immediate area. Personal defense in cities, especially when the distinction between the military and police is blurred, is complex. More about this in subsequent chapters.

Urban warfare is old hat to some and terrifying to others. Recently some good friends in the militia movement argued at great length that because our military has studied warfare in builtup areas, it was planning to attack Citizen America. In that regard, the topic was terrifying to them. More likely our military studies this situation because it is the one that must be dealt with. We who plan to survive in cities also need to study it to know what lies ahead.

If anything, this situation demonstrates that successful city survival is the ability to remain flexible, creative, resourceful, and knowledgeable under city warfare conditions. It's about knowing how urban warfare will most likely be undertaken and how to pick places least likely to be heavily affected. It's not about banding together to engage in open, violent urban warfare against a common enemy. People surrounded, identified, and cut off will always eventually be destroyed.

Those reporting'the greatest success claim that they husbanded and hoarded all their resources so that, after the enemy had passed, they had the necessary supplies to allow them to hunker down for the long haul-the real work of city survival.

Chapter 3

The Government's View of Survivalists

"So, you define a modern, practical survivor as being an individual who is not dependent on government for any kind of help or assistance," a reporter assigned to a nationally known modern men's magazine quoted back somewhat skeptically.

"Yes," says I, "but add in the fact that government help is always intervention, not help. They try to put a human face on things but look how many people have been manipulated, ruined, and even murdered by their own government in the 20th century alone."

Governments never trust freedom-loving, independent citizens.

It seemed especially curious that he had called from New York-not an especially notorious center of freedom or survivalism or individual liberty.

Judging by the trite little collection of shallowness and trivia he eventually came up with for an interview, the fellow really didn't get it. Even as brief as it was, his article was shot through with scorn and ridicule toward survivors or anyone who would ever dream of living free. It was the same day the Albanian refugee crisis hit the front page. People are being murdered en masse by their own government and he ridicules anyone who would think of living free from government "help."

I asked which goods and services he personally depended on that came directly from central authorities.

He didn't want to hear it, but Mao, Stalin, Lenin, and even Heinrich Himmler, director and early organizer of the Nazi Schutzstaffel (SS), fully recognized that counter-revolutions traditionally have started in the countryside. Himmler believed it could be a good revolution if it was kept entirely under his personal direction, philosophy, and control. Perhaps this is part of the origin of Mao's and Stalin's intense paranoia regarding rural freedom-loving survival-type individuals. Yet, keep in mind, Lenin predated any serious SS philosophy by at least 10 years. Why he really feared country folks and wanted to herd everyone into cities is probably lost in history Lenin said it was to industrialize the country. So they became worker bees in his own private hive!

We see it today in our own society. There are people who believe the government can solve problems and are willing to allow others to take control of their lives. There's no question that the bureaucracy still believes that if it herds enough citizens into cities and provides enough essential services, the rank and file can be brought. under their control. Substantial amounts of propaganda regarding the indispensability and wisdom of government are a prime ingredient in this formula. Then those who wish to continue this feudal system under t:ieir own superior "leadership" can prevail over the rest of us.

This simple little concept in this brief chapter is the core of city survival: Those who are and/or will allow themselves to be wards of the government don't have the slightest prayer of making it in a truly grinchy city-survival situation. In times past it was said, "Understand this concept and live free. Neglect it and become a slave." In cities it's life and death, not just freedom and slavery

The problem is that city survivors have a greater struggle in avoiding this evil trap. Providing essential goods and services to naturally independent, widely scattered, historically self-sufficient country people is so inefficient that governments that try quickly go broke. Currently few make the effort. There are just not enough people concentrated any place out in the country to be worth dealing with.

Observation and police helicopters will be used against city survivors.

Also, I strongly suspect that in our modern times, other than in a few remote and insignificant regions around the globe, there no longer are enough people in the country to carry out a successful counter-revolution.

This does not suggest that government officials are no longer paranoid in the finest Maoist-Stalinist tradition. Although it is not widely known or popularly understood outside certain regions, significant numbers of freedom-loving citizens in Washington state, Oregon, Idaho, and western Montana view current government Wild Lands proposals-which are plans to move people from their rural homes and into cities to allow the land to go back to nature-as being little more than a thinly disguised method of putting the people in the position of becoming wards of the government. The fact that Wild Lands proponents receive huge amounts of under-the-table government money in direct defiance of congressional oversight or approval-very similar to CIA fund ing during our Vietnam era-does little to calm citizen fears.