To The Residents In Neighboring Communities Through The Network Distribution System: Fill & Download for Free

Is US MSM suppressing information about the Uighurs to appease the American government? Or is it a continuation of America’s CIA to perpetuate the clandestine efforts the US used in Afghanistan to see the defeat of the Russians now applied to China?Read a report from a neutral insider who has pieced together the facts the west doesn’t want us to know.“Islam is neither the Uyghurs’ native religion nor their only one but, in its Wahabbi form, it has caused problems around the world, for which we can thank to two fervent Christians, Jimmy Carter and Zbigniew Brzezinski,2 who considered a united Eurasia, “The only possible challenge to American hegemony.”In 1979, months before the Soviet entry into Afghanistan, Brzezinski drafted and Carter signed a top-secret Presidential Order authorizing the CIA to train fundamentalist Muslims to wage Jihad against the Soviet Communist infidels and all unbelievers of conservative Sunni Islam and the Mujahideen terror war against Soviet soldiers in Afghanistan became the largest covert action in CIA history.[2] Brzezinski’s ‘Arc of Crisis’ strategy inflamed Muslims in Central Asia to destabilize the USSR during its economic crisis and, when Le Nouvel Observateur later asked if he had any regrets, Brzezinski snapped, “What is most important to the history of the world? Some stirred-up Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe?”The Uyghurs had collaborated with the Japanese in WWII and Rebiya Kadeer, ‘Mother of the Uyghurs’ and a US Government client, after kissing the ground at Yasukuni Shrine, called Xinjiang’s postwar reversion to Chinese administration a ‘reconquest.’ Ms Kadeer’s connections are interesting. In the late 1990s Hasan Mahsum, founder of the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, ETIM, moved its headquarters to Kabul and met with Osama bin Laden and the CIA-trained Taliban to coordinate action across Central Asia. In 1995 Recep Tayyip Erdogan, then mayor of Istanbul declared, “Eastern Turkestan [Xinjiang] is not only the home of the Turkic peoples but also the cradle of Turkic history, civilization and culture. To forget that would lead to the ignorance of our own history, civilization and culture. The martyrs of Eastern Turkestan are our martyrs.” Under Erdogan Turkey became the transit point for international terrorists destined for Syria and Turkish airports were filled with Uyghurs traveling on Turkish passports.Twenty years later, in 1999, the CIA’s Islam strategist, Graham E. Fuller, announced, “The policy of guiding the evolution of Islam and of helping them against our adversaries worked marvelously well in Afghanistan against the Russians. The same doctrines can still be used to destabilize what remains of Russian power, and especially to counter the Chinese influence in Central Asia.”3We will return to Mr. Fuller anon but, first, some background from F. William Engdahl, “Today the West–and especially Washington–is engaged in full-scale irregular war against the stability of China. In recent months Western media and the Washington Administration have begun to raise a hue and cry over alleged mass internment camps in China’s northwestern Xinjiang where supposedly up to one million ethnic Uyghur Chinese are being detained and submitted to various forms of ‘re-education.’ Several things about the charges are notable, not the least that all originate from Western media and ‘democracy’ NGOs like Human Rights Watch, whose record for veracity leaves something to be desired.”Tarring China with the brush of intolerance will be hard work. The colophon of the earliest dated, printed book in existence–a ninth century Chinese translation of the Diamond Sutra–reads, ‘For universal free distribution.’ Though two-thirds of Chinese are atheists in the Western sense and one-fourth are non-religious Taoists, their Constitution guarantees freedom of worship in government-sanctioned religious organizations and their government supports seventy-four seminaries, one thousand seven hundred Tibetan monasteries, three thousand religious organizations, 85,000 religious sites and 300,000 full time Catholic, Protestant, Buddhist, Ancient Chinese, Taoist and Muslim clergy. The 2000 census recorded 20.3 million Muslims: 1.25 million Kazakhs, 8.4 million Uyghurs and 9.8 million Hui. Neither the Kazakh nor the Hui Muslims have caused trouble.Mr. Fuller is on a first name basis with Uyghur leaders. Ruslan Tsarni, uncle of the Boston Marathon Tsarnaev brothers, was married to Fuller’s daughter Samantha in the 1990s and was an employee of the CIA-contracted RAND Corporation. In media interviews in the aftermath of the 2013 Boston bombing, ‘Uncle Ruslan’ gave an overdone performance condemning his two nephews while verifying the FBI’s portrayal of them. The media ignored the fact that Tsarni not only worked as a consultant for CIA fronts like RAND and USAID and as a contractor for Halliburton but even established an entity called the Congress of Chechen International Organizations which supported Islamic separatist militants in the Caucasus, using Fuller’s Maryland home as its registered address.After deploying Islamists in Pakistan in the 2000s to disrupt Chinese infrastructure, in Myanmar to disrupt the China-Myanmar energy assets and across Sudan, Libya and Syria to choke off China’s oil and gas Fuller said, “Uyghurs are indeed in touch with Muslim groups outside Xinjiang, some of them have been radicalized into broader jihadist politics in the process, a handful were earlier involved in guerrilla or terrorist training in Afghanistan, and some are in touch with international Muslim mujahideen struggling for Muslim causes of independence worldwide.” Fuller assigned them to capitalize on the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics, weaken trust in China’s government and provoke repression that Western media could condemn as ‘human rights crimes.’ Three weeks before the Games he sponsored a conference, “East Turkestan: 60 Years under Communist Chinese Rule” and the National Endowment for Democracy, NED4, handled PR for the World Uyghur Congress (WUC) the emigré group headed by billionaire Rebiya Kadeer5 and her husband, Sidiq Rouzi, a Voice of America employee. Their ideology6 is familiar.On the eve of the Olympics an attempted suicide bombing on a China Southern Airlines flight was thwarted but terrorists in Kashgar, Southern Xinjiang, killed sixteen police officers four days before the opening. The next year Uighur extremists murdered another two hundred in Urumqi but Western media refused to characterize the attacks as acts of terrorism and the violence continued:October 2013: ETIM attack at Tiananmen Square in Beijing killed five.February 2014: A knife attack at a train station in Kunming killed 30.April 2014: A knife and bomb attack in Urumqi killed three and wounded 79.May 2014: Two cars crashed into a market in Urumqi and the attackers lobbed explosives, killing 31 people.September 2014: Suicide bombers and clashes left 50 people dead and 50 injured.October 2015: A knife attack on a coalmine killed 50.Then came the Syrian War and, on the sidelines of a May 2017 meeting between Syrian and Chinese businessmen in Beijing, Syria’s ambassador7 to China startled reporters with a surprising number, 5000, the number of Uighurs he claimed were fighting in Syria for various jihadist groups. Many have since returned to China and 12,900 (Uyghur families insist on traveling and staying together, even in prison) have been sentenced to up to two years, mostly for illegally entering the country and are held in re-education camps. The NED is not hiding its involvement:NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR DEMOCRACYChina (Xinjiang/East Turkistan). ASIA China [Xinjiang/East Turkistan] Advocacy and Outreach for Uyghur Human Rights Project. $310,000.To raise awareness about Uyghur human rights issues and to bring such issues to prominence globally. The grantee will research, document, and provide independent and accurate information about human rights violations affecting Uyghurs in China. It will also conduct outreach to Chinese citizens in an effort to improve the human rights conditions for Uyghurs. The grantee will organize leadership and advocacy training seminars for Uyghur youth; monitor, document, and highlight human rights violations in East Turkestan/Xinjiang; and strengthen advocacy on Uyghur issues at the United Nations and the European Parliament.Today, NED money supports the World Uyghur Congress (WUC) which calls China’s Xinjiang Province ‘East Turkistan’ and China’s administration of Xinjiang as ‘Chinese occupation of East Turkistan,’ runs articles like, “Op-ed: A Profile of Rebiya Kadeer, Fearless Uyghur Independence Activist,” and admits that Kadeer seeks Uyghur independence from China.Faced with an armed insurrection, most states impose martial law or a state of emergency, as Britain did in Malaya from 1945 to 1957 and the US did with the Patriot Act, but China decided–despite popular outrage–to write off its losses and play the long game.China founded The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO),[1] a political, economic, and security alliance, with Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan, who stopped funneling money and providing corridors for Uyghur terrorists to move into and out of China. The SCO has since expanded to include India and Pakistan and Iran has begun the accession process, making it world’s largest security pact in both area and population and the only one whose membership includes four nuclear powers.Forming the SCO was easier than assuaging public outrage. An unheard-of lawsuit by victims’ relatives accused the government of reverse discrimination so they stepped up security and published their objectives:restore law and orderprevent terrorists from inflicting more violenceuse ‘high-intensity regulation’contain the spread of terrorism beyond Xinjiangpurge extremists and separatists from society.Neighborhood community centres–labelled ‘concentration camps’ in the western press–educate rural Uyghurs about the perils of religious extremism and train them for urban jobs.In 2013 President Xi toured Eurasia and proposed the Belt and Road Initiative for three billion people, designed to create the biggest market in the world with unparalleled development potential, and built a gas pipeline to China from Turkmenistan through Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan which, like China’s other western pipelines, power lines, and rail and road networks, runs through the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.Beijing then moved jobs to Xinjiang and opened vocational schools to train rural youth in literacy and job skills and swore to protect its neighbors from terrorism in exchange for their pledge to reciprocate. To create jobs in the province Xi directed investment from forty-five of China’s top companies and eighty Fortune 500 manufacturers to Urumqi. Corporate investment increased from $10 billion in 2015 to $15 billion in 2017 and infrastructure investments of $70 billion in both 2017 and 2018 lifted the annual goods shipments past 100 million tons with a goal of hourly departures to fifteen European capitals. Half a million Uyghurs have relocated from remote villages to cities and, as a reult, 600,000 Uighurs were lifted out of poverty in 2016, 312,000 in 2017 and 400,000 in 2018. The last poor Uyghurs will join the cash economy in mid-2020.The real war is being fought in our media and an engineer encountered a classic example in the heartbreaking tale of savage destruction of historic Kashgar Old Town, which The Washington Post called, “An Ancient Culture, Bulldozed Away,” The New York Times, “To Protect an Ancient City, China Moves to Raze It,” TIME, “Tearing Down Old Kashgar: Another Blow to the Uighurs.” Professor Patrik Meyer⁠ takes up the story:As a tourist, those headlines resonate with me, too. I wish to keep the Kashgar Old Town untouched and to be able to wander along its narrow, shaded alleys lined by adobe houses. However, if I were responsible for the living conditions and safety of its residents, as well as for the modernization of Kashgar writ large, then I would see Beijing’s transformation in a more positive light. Given the almost unprecedented access I was granted between 2010 and 2013 to conduct ethno-political research in Xinjiang and my robust background in civil engineering, I consider myself well positioned to provide a broader perspective on the issues raised by Western journalists when criticizing the KOT renewal project. simple survey of Western media outlets shows that harsh criticism of Beijing’s renewal of the KOT is built on four central arguments: demolition of Uyghur’s historical heritage, destruction of Uyghur’s social fabric, absence of Uyghurs’ voices in the project, and the sufficient seismic performance of existing houses. Moreover, Western journalists often argue that the goal of Beijing’s works in Kashgar is to weaken, or even erase, Uyghur identity, not to improve their living conditions.KOT’s historical value is indisputable, but it is not as significant as assumed by the Western critics. While some houses are centennial, with charismatic courtyards and beautifully decorated wooden frames, the majority are a poorly built patchwork of old and new mud and masonry walls. Hence, while the old town as a whole has significant historical value, many of its houses are not historically valuable. Kashgar is one of the few Chinese cities where the old town is being partly preserved and remodeled following traditional standards. There is indeed some damage being caused to the Uyghurs’ historical heritage, but it is far less significant than the Western critics claim and it is intended to modernize Kashgar, not to “Demolish the Uyghur History” as argued by the Smithsonian. The second dominant argument, the tearing apart the Uyghur identity, is also happening, but again, not to the extent or for the purpose that it is being reported in the West. China’s fast modernization results in numerous communities being reshaped and displaced, including the one in the KOT. However, when asked for their view about Beijing’s renewal of the KOT, most of its dwellers welcome it. And for good reasons. Their houses are often very small, poorly ventilated, dusty and dark, have no toilets, and are unpractical. It is those who do not live in the old town–Uyghurs, tourist, and Western journalists–who are most critical of the renewal project. Hence, I believe that the KOT project is causing Uyghur identity change, not its destruction, as argued by the West.As for the third argument, that the Uyghurs have no say in the project, it is again only partially correct. Their voice is indeed absent from the upper levels of the project’s decision making process. However, the majority of homeowners decide whether to stay or leave the KOT and how to proceed with the repair of their houses. They are offered three options, the first being to permanently move to a free, new apartment larger than their old house. Second, they can opt to let the government tear down the old house and replace it with a new structure for free, which does not included finishing works such as flooring, windows, and decoration. During the time that this work is being done, the families can rent an apartment subsidized by the government at about $900 per year. In case the house is deemed to be structurally sound, the homeowners are given a subsidy (about US$90/m2) to upgrade the house themselves. Additional subsidies are also offered for those willing to finish the façade using traditional Uyghur style. While there might be some irregularities within this system, most homeowners affected by the renewal of the KOT have the choice to stay or leave, which the Western critics seems to ignore.Finally, a fourth dominant argument against Beijing’s KOT project is that the old town must be seismically safe because it has survived hundreds of years without being destroyed. Again, this is only partly true. There are a number of houses that were built properly over a hundred years ago, but the majority have been either poorly built or structurally modified in the last 30-50 years, making them prone to structural damage in case of a significant seismic event. Based on my expertise in seismic performance of adobe structures and my countless visits to the KOT, I can confirm that it is not feasible to retrofit most of its houses because of their deficient structural condition.But the destruction of KOT was small beer compared to the onslaught that began in August, 2018, at the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, then conducting its regular review of China’s compliance with the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination. Gay McDougall, an American lay member of an independent UN body, claimed that China was interning one million Muslims. The OHCHR’s official news release showed that its sole American member made the only mention of alleged re-education camps and said she was “deeply concerned” about “credible reports” alleging mass detentions of millions of Uighurs Muslim minorities in “internment camps.” AP reported that McDougall ‘did not specify a source for that information in her remarks at the hearing’ and video from the session confirms that McDougall provided no source for her claim. Though she failed to name a single source Reuters reported, “UN SAYS IT HAS CREDIBLE REPORTS THAT CHINA HOLDS A MILLION UIGHURS IN SECRET CAMPS.”China then invited the UN, the EU and the World Muslim Congress to send inspectors for independent investigations. Eleven muslim nations accepted while the EU and Turkey declined. The Muslim Council’s report commended China for its treatment of Muslims and one inspector, Mumtaz Zahra Baloch, gave an interview to The Times of India:“During this visit, I did not find any instances of forced labour or cultural and religious repression,” Mumtaz Zahra Baloch, the Charge d‘affaires, Pakistan‘s Embassy in China, told the state-run Global Times on Thursday.“The imams we met at the mosques and the students and teachers at the Xinjiang Islamic Institute told us that they enjoy freedom in practicing Islam and that the Chinese government extends support for maintenance of mosques all over Xinjiang,” said Baloch, who visited Xinjiang as part of delegation of diplomats.“Similarly, I did not see any sign of cultural repression. The Uighur culture as demonstrated by their language, music and dance is very much part of the life of the people of Xinjiang,” she said.Asked about the security situation in Xinjiang, which has been “beset by terrorism”, Baloch said, “We learned that the recent measures have resulted in improvement of the security situation in Xinjiang and there have been no incidents of terrorism in recent months.”“The counter-terrorism measures being taken are multidimensional and do not simply focus on law enforcement aspects. Education, poverty alleviation and development are key to the counter-terrorism strategy of the Chinese government,” she said.Xinjiang‘s regional government invited diplomatic envoys as well as representatives from Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, India, Pakistan, Indonesia, Malaysia, Afghanistan, Thailand, and Kuwait following reports about detention of thousands of Uighur and other Muslims in massive education camps.The UN‘s Geneva-based Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination last year said that it was alarmed by “numerous reports of ethnic Uighurs and other Muslim minorities” being detained in Xinjiang region and called for their immediate release.Estimates about them “range from tens of thousands to upwards of a million,” it had said.China defended the camps, saying they are re-education camps aimed at de-radicalising sections of the Uighur population from extremism and separatism.The US and several other countries besides UN officials have expressed concern over the camps.China has been carrying out a massive crackdown on the East Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM) in Xinjiang province, where Uyghurs who formed majority in the region were restive over the increasing settlements of Han community.Pakistan and several other Muslim countries faced criticism about their silence over China‘s crackdown on Muslims in Xinjiang.China has about 20 million Muslims who are mostly Uighurs, an ethnic group of Turkic origin, and Hui Muslims, who are of the Chinese ethnic origin. While Uighurs lived in Xinjiang, bordering Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, Hui Muslims resided in Ningxia province.A recent report in the Global Times said China passed a five-year plan to ‘sinicize Islam‘ in a bid to make it compatible with its version of socialism.“This is China‘s important act to explore ways of governing religion in modern countries,” the report said.Baloch said the delegation was given full and open access to the three centres that they visited in Kashgar and Hotan.“The training program includes teaching of national common language (Chinese), law and constitution and vocational skills. The students also participate in recreational activities like sports, music and dance. We witnessed several skill classes being offered in these centres,” she said.“During the visits to these centres, we had the opportunity to interact with both the management and the students. We observed the students to be in good physical health. The living facilities are fairly modern and comfortable with separate dormitories for men and women. They are being served halal food,” she said.She said the Uighur language is being used in official establishments, airports, subway stations, police stations or hotels.“Even the copies of the Koran that we saw in the mosques and the Islamic centre were translated into the Uighur language. The most visible sign of protection of Uighur culture by the government is the government-run bilingual kindergarten schools where children learn Putonghua as well as Uighur language and culture from a very young age,” she said.”Uyghurs, Political Islam & The BRIYou can read the entire article and comments by those who have visited first hand to Xingjiang and their view of what is happening and details involved. It is not as the west portrays.

“The Move” to New Hampshire was only triggered two years ago. This Phase 2 (initial move of libertarians to New Hampshire) won’t be complete until Mover #20,000 rolls his U-Haul next door to me. Carol and I were movers #1991 and #1990, and we just moved here two months ago, {See <0995>}, so we can estimate that Phase 2 is only about 1/10th complete.(And we’d complete a lot faster if you stop peeking over and wondering how we’re doing, and get your sorry backsides up here and lend a hand![1])Now … this first migration is accelerating.There were a few “pre-movers” over the couple decades it took to get enough libertarians to commit to moves. And what is interesting is that as they arrived, many of NH born-and-bred residents who happened to be libertarian-leaning or libertarian-curious joined the FSP (They’re called “pre-staters”). Together, the pre-staters and the pre-movers laid out quite the welcome mat for us. These guys were incredibly active, building new communities and starting organizations and setting everything up for us. So, when we arrive, we have a lot of space already prepared for us to move into! :)From my vantage point (after a whole two months), I think of the impact of the Free State Project {See <0534>} on NH can be most seen in these areas:InfrastructureNew political freedomsSlowing authoritarianism’s spreadEstablishing outside-of-political-control civic societyNetworking libertariansEntrepreneurshipAmplifying the liberty message1) InfrastructureFree State Project: Our infrastructure starts with the Free State Project office itself. Its volunteers provides all the support that movers need, from helping to think through why one might want to move, to giving you opportunities to visit, to helping find you a home and a job, to helping you move up, to getting folks to help you move in, to helping you connect to the other movers. And of course, to help you communicate to those friends you left behind in their authoritarian hell-holes that there is an alternative to just bitchin’.Monitoring Bills: The New Hampshire Liberty Alliance (NHLA)[2]is extraordinarily effective. Volunteers review bills that are coming up for a vote, to determine whether they increase or decrease NH citizens’ freedom. They print The Gold Standard {See example} and hand it out to legislators at the State House to guide legislators to vote against bad bills and to vote for good bills. And prior to elections, they rate legislators on how freedom-oriented their voting records have been. (See example of a voter guide.)Community Centers: FSPers conceive of NH as six different regions. Each region has its own flavor, with a range of activities and infrastructure. One major infrastructure development has been the building of actual physical community centers in some of these regions: for events, meetings, discussions, work, hanging out, lectures, school, trade, etc. For families and businesses and agorism and politics and startups.Libertarian Representation: Many FSP movers have taken office, as both Republican and Democrat representatives, (and some actually held office as Libertarians, although that may have been premature…) Of the 400 representatives in the house, already 10% are FSPers.They have established both a Republican Liberty Caucus (and there even was for a while a Democratic Freedom Caucus,) so that freedom leaning legislators can support one another.And of course, FSP movers must identify and coordinate with the many good non-authoritarians with whom they can ally even if they are not part of FSP.New Hampshire has the highest representative-to-constituent ratio, so if you get here, and you are at all interested, FSP political mentors will help you meet your neighbors and get elected into office. And before you can say, “I want to increase human freedom”, you’re on the House Floor casting your vote for freedom[3]..2. New Political FreedomsFrom that base, we’ve see these types of political outcomes:Of course, New Hampshire starts out pretty libertarian! That’s why we chose New Hampshire: it has been rated #1 or #2 “Most Free State” over the last 17 years. {See <0941>}.But guess what that doesn’t mean — it doesn’t mean that New Hampshire is already a libertarian state (at least, not yet ;); a high rating on that index just means that New Hampshire is a tad closer to libertarian — relative to a bunch of states that are all pretty darn authoritarian!So, there are a lot of onerous laws and regulations on the books right now that violate NH residents’ rights to our own bodies, to our own labors, and to our own property.Early movers, once getting established, organized, and elected to the legislature, have been passing laws that increase NH residents’ freedom, mostly by rolling back prior laws that impinged on freedoms.Just a few that have increase freedom:Same-sex marriage[4]Knife ownership[5]Medical marijuana[6] (1st state to pass by legislation, not referendum)Marijuana decriminalization[7]Constitutional carry[8]Castle doctrine and Stand Your Ground [9]Home schooling[10]Jury nullification (Defense attorneys are allowed to inform jurors they can nullify a bad law by voting “Not Guilty”)[11]Education Savings Accounts (Saving parent dollars for private schooling (… still working …)[12]Town Tuitioning Programs (Allowing towns to send students to private schools)[13]Education Tax Credit (for charitable contributions to support alternative schools)[14]Cryptocurrency legalization[15]Home breweries[16]Reducing civil asset forfeiture[17]Reducing business taxes [18]Needle exchange[19]Firecrackers[20]Home poker[21]Repealed 1600+ outdated laws still on the books[22] [23]Banning tracking of citizens by their cellphone without a warrant [24]3. Holding Back Encroachment to Freedom.Now, even though after the initial move, New Hampshire will have the largest concentration of libertarians anywhere in the world, we good guys will still be outnumbered by the bad guys, and one of the characteristics that is the most irritating about authoritarians? They can’t stop themselves from trying every which way to run our lives and to plunder us for their projects and cronies.Thus, much of our time is spent beating back their insidious attempts to drag us towards totalitarianism.Now, to be fair, this is not just something to worry about in NH! You have the same slow strangulation in your own states! It’s just that you’re so outnumbered that you’ve thrown up your hands in defeat and just accept your Death by a Thousand Bills. We have enough folks here that we’re able to fight the good fight!For example, of the four bills that I reviewed last week for the NHLA[25] — only one could I mark “Pro-Liberty”; the other three would have decreased NH citizens’ freedoms. My guess is the actual ratio is more like 10:1, but frankly I find it too exhausting reviewing so many authoritarian bills.For example, one bill proposed to increase the paperwork, reporting requirements, regulations, inspection raids, and punitive fines on small businesses that had the temerity to hire your 17 year old and give him some experience in the real world. One part of the bill even required that the business post in every room that your kid might walk into, those ugly government signs that no one bothers to read. Imagine that eyesore staring you in the face when you go out to your local restaurant for a romantic dinner with your honey! Would you hire a kid if you had to deface your establishment like that?This increase in paternalism would have reduced the number of real jobs in the real world for youths who, after a decade locked in a government institutional building sorely need real experience in the real world {See <1020>}, would have shifted economic opportunity away from small, local businesses and towards large corporations which can handle all the additional costs and overhead administration {See <0557>}, and would have prevented more intimate, win-win community ties between local businesses and families.The one bill that I was happy to grade “Pro-Liberty” proposed to include Lyme Disease, anxiety, and insomnia as allowable conditions for prescribing medical marijuana. {See <0931>} :)Thus, a lot of the political action right now must be beating back the growth of Leviathan. While this list necessarily would contain thousands of defeated bills, I’ve heard war stories from other movers about these major efforts:Defeating multiple attempts to pass mandatory seat belt laws[26]Rejecting eVerify and National ID cards[27]Preventing licensing that allows cronies to erect artificial barriers to easy-entry, low-capital, trade professions (e.g., hair braiding[28] )Preventing increased nanny regulation, especially of the over-burdened, and shrinking, small businesses. {See <0557>}4) Outside Of Political Control Marketplaces and InteractionsBut, you have to remember that we can achieve the central goal of libertarianism — removing the power of politicians to control our lives and to plunder us — also by circumvention.Some of the first movers are agorists, who offer services and make products and then set up “market days” throughout the state where farmers, homeschoolers, arts and crafts makers, recruiters, home bakers and home chefs, etc., can gather and trade without a lot of government red tape. And those are just our community markets; there is a strong underground person-to-person market.FSP is accelerating the use of crypto-currency — increasing not only our use of it, but educating non-libertarian businesses on how to accept crypto-currency for their transactions as well. It’s amazing to see prices posted in BitCoin, and we even have cryptocurrency stores on the main street of NH cities!Add to that, immediate videotaping of all intrusions of police[29], and we are developing quite a civic society, where the interactions are person-to-person, without Big Brothers.While naturally distributed amongst hundreds of people, examples include:Bardo Farm: A sustainable farm that sponsors lots of pig roasts, monthly feasts, markets around the state, and to which many FSP movers subscribe for their fresh food, unstamped by government and thus cheaper and fresher[30].Free State Bit Coin: A center for crypto currency education, trade, and diffusion throughout the state.5) Networking LibertariansIf you come from anti-libertarian states, a really shocking thing you’ll notice is the number of libertarian parties, gatherings, discussion groups, markets, businesses, … where you can almost immediately be talking about freedom without starting from scratch, “Um… Have you ever considered that rulers use threats of state violence to violate your ownership of your own body?”You have a selection of often multiple events every day.[31] I have gone to nine libertarian social events in just the last month, and I have been in state only half the days! And I skipped a lunch yesterday just to have time to write on Quora! (And am hurrying this up to make it out for lunch today at a Chinese restaurant.)Each of the six NH regions has its own regional social gatherings, open to all FSPers. My local region (the SeaCoast region) has one official, for-sure social gathering every week, in rotating towns about 20 minutes from each other. But there are also crypto drinks and market days and blood drives and toy drives and “help this new mover” and “Joe’s tools burned up so we’re buying him a new set” activities. And we have discussion groups and meetups for jazz and for rock ’n’ roll …. And those are just the events that are “open to all”.The libertarian community centers and libertarian bars allow informal gatherings and homeschooling and coordination meetings.I am trying out social events in all the regions in order to meet more folks here. (I mean, I’m not getting any younger, and I’ve wasted so much of my life in authoritarian states, that I’m looking for things to do and people to do ’em with!)And because I’m retired, and excited myself about the prospect of spending my remaining years finally building a freedom community, I’m helping to start up a new social group for empty nesters called “Live Free Before You Die”[32].And you probably won’t be surprised to learn that I’m hosting my first ethics discussion group next week!The FSP office creates statewide intellectual conferences (e.g., Liberty Forum in February) and statewide outdoor festivals (PorcFest[33] in June) And our presence brings in other festivals (e.g., NH Cannabis Festival[34], NH Hempfest and Freedom Rally[35])6) EntrepreneurshipThe libertarian movers are bringing with them to NH an incredible entrepreneurial energy.While that is not directly “political”, oftentimes new innovations undermine government control. (For example, Uber circumvented government’s cabby licensing scams that restricted people’s abilities to offer rides and to hire cheap rides.) Many of the startups in NH have a portion of their long-term strategy as circumventions of politicians’ control over free people in various industries.Certainly, the agorist and crypto-currency businesses are great examples of Small Is Beautiful entrepreneurship.We’re seeing everything from off-the-grid folks trading their home-made stuff to new high tech businesses.7) Amplifying LibertarianismAnd it’s hard to convey the resonance that occurs when you get so many libertarians this close together. We are naturally creative and out-of-the-box thinkers, and because we have all been so repressed for so much of our lives, now that we are gathering together there is a natural explosion of creativity and excitement and support.Our constant meetings invariably have political, intellectual, charitable, and social aspects. Folks are constantly recruiting for this group or for that activity, or asking you what type of school you’d prefer for your children, and everyone is brainstorming and networking new projects, and it’s an exciting time to be in an exciting place.We have several national libertarian organizations that come here regularly, or are even opening up satellite offices[36]. I anticipate that eventually, we’ll have NH residents providing permanent representation of most of the libertarian organizations.And the benefit of our work is not just for NH. For example, FSPers have build video and audio studios that have allowed us a very high concentration of libertarian-leaning podcasts and radio and videos.Support for your project, whatever it is, is just a meeting or a phone call away.However you want to contribute to the most important project of mankind — the freeing of human beings {See <0181>} — the Free State of New Hampshire is the place to dream, conceive, inspire, organize, connect, coordinate, build, and expand.Experience Freedom in Your LifetimeSee Related0534: What is the intent of the Free State Project?0941: 17 Years of Freedom in the States0995: I’m Moving To Free State New Hampshire0557: Who is killing the mom and pop stores?1020: What do libertarians think about child labor?0931: Why are libertarians so preoccupied with the legalization of drugs?0181: What is the greatest achievement possible for human kind?→ More recent answers that reference this answer→ Essays on <The Free State Project (FSP)> by Dennis→ Return to the <Table of Contents> for Dennis’ Libertarian Essays<, FSP, Dennis, Becoming, Parties, Secession, DenPref,>Footnotes[1] Join the Great Migration for Liberty | The Free State Project[2] About Us - New Hampshire Liberty Alliance[3] 2018 Candidate Endorsements and Results - New Hampshire Liberty Alliance[4] New Hampshire's Unique, Complicated Path To Same-Sex Marriage[5] The History of New Hampshire's Knife Rights Movement[6] New Hampshire legislature decriminalizes marijuana possession, sends pro-pot bill to governor’s desk[7] New Hampshire Marijuana Decriminalization Takes Effect[8] N.H. eliminates concealed carry license requirement[9] Stand Your Ground/Castle Doctrine | NH Issues[10] New Hampshire Considers Reinstating Restrictions on Homeschoolers [11] Jury Nullifies Case Against Man Charged With Growing Marijuana[12] New Hampshire Education Savings Account Bill Passed By Committee, Heads to House[13] New Hampshire – Town Tuitioning Program - EdChoice[14] New Hampshire - Education Tax Credit Program[15] New Hampshire Exempts Bitcoin and Other Virtual Currency Businesses from Money Transmitter Regulation[16] New Hampshire’s Libertarian Beer Renaissance [17] Asset forfeiture transparency bill becomes law in New Hampshire, earns praise from advocacy group[18] Bill would slash business taxes in N.H. once again[19] Needle Exchanges Are Now Legal In New Hampshire[20] Firecrackers Now Legal (And For Sale) In New Hampshire[21] Private home poker games now legal | News[22] Should Outdated Laws Stay or Should They Go?[23] New Hampshire eyes repealing law on adultery[24] Stingray: A New Frontier in Police Surveillance[25] News Archives - New Hampshire Liberty Alliance[26] Seat Belt Law | NH Issues[27] The New National ID Systems[28] Braid Free or Die: New Hampshire Governor Signs Bill to Eliminate Licenses for Hair Braiders - Institute for Justice[29] Manchester Pays $275,000 To Man Wrongly Arrested for Recording Police[30] Farm Products " Bardo Farm[31] Porcupine Calendar | New Hampshire Liberty Events[32] Live Free Before You Die[33] About - PorcFest[34] New Hampshire Cannabis Freedom Festival - NH art, camping, music rally[35] White Mountain Funk[36] Newsroom - Americans for Prosperity

This is one of the most interesting stories of WWII I've ever come across about the channel Islands .How the World’s Only Feudal Lord Outclassed the Nazis to Save Her PeopleWhen Germany invaded the Isle of Sark—the last foothold of feudalism in the western world—Dame Sibyl Hathaway protected her people with the unlikeliest of weapons: Feudal etiquette, old-world manners, and a dollop of classic snobbery.Dame Sibyl Hathaway had 275 Nazi prisoners on her hands and knew exactly what she wanted to do with them.It was May 1945. Five years earlier, Germany had invaded Hathaway’s home in the British Channel Islands, a tiny isle of 400 called Sark. Despite having no modern defense network or fancy gun emplacements—it didn’t even have electricity—Sark had proven itself to be uniquely prepared for its unwelcome visitors. The island had an advantage that the rest of Europe had discarded centuries earlier: feudalism.The Isle of Sark was the western world’s last fief. For 400 years, it had faithfully followed 16th century Norman law, and 61-year-old Dame Sibyl (as her subjects called her) served as their feudal overlord. She once defended the institution of feudalism by saying, “What is good enough for William the Conqueror is good enough for us."Now, just one week after Hitler had killed himself, Dame Sibyl walked down a steep, dusty path toward Sark’s main harbor to meet the British “liberation.” Around her, the island’s meadows appeared to bloom in celebration.The Dame greeted a group of British soldiers and led them to the Nazi’s island headquarters to discuss the terms of surrender. As Lieutenant Colonel K. Allen questioned the German Kommandant, Dame Sibyl translated everything into German. When Allen finished his interrogation, he turned to the Dame.“I can’t leave any troops here because so far only a token force has been landed in Guernsey,” Allen explained, referring to the island seven miles west of Sark. He was hesitant to continue. “Would you mind being left for a few days, or would you prefer to go to Guernsey with me?”Dame Sybil fought the urge to roll her eyes. She had been fending off the Nazis without any help from England since the war started. Why would she need help now? “As I have been left for nearly five years,” she said, “I can stand a few more days.”With that, the liberation team departed and Dame Sybil regained control over not just her island, but a new legion of German vassals.You could argue that she had been controlling them the whole time.Dame Sibyl once wrote that Sark is “an oasis of quiet and rest, unique in the present-day world.”Perched 350 feet above the English Channel, the island is a precipitous tableland blanketed by rolling pastures and a kaleidoscope of wildflowers. Narrow dirt lanes, walled in by tall hedgerows, sit shaded under the tunneled canopies of trees. On a clear day, you can peer across the island, past teams of grazing sheep and Guernsey cattle, and look onto a watery horizon that melts into the sky.The place is a time capsule. Cars are banned. Residents get around by bicycle, and the local ambulance and fire trucks are pulled by tractors. With little noise pollution, the island’s soundscape is a symphony of coastal winds, crashing waves, the clip-clop of horse-drawn carriages, and the rustle of waving fields bursting with whimsically named flowers: foxgloves, toadflax, dog violets, and oxeye daisies. Since there are no streetlights on Sark, the Milky Way gleams on moonless nights.ISTOCK/ALLARD1Along Sark’s coast, farmland cedes to golden slopes of gorse, which flirt with balding cliffs that tumble hundreds of feet into churning turquoise seas. Along the shoals, clouds of gulls scream, purple jellyfish bob, and the occasional puffin waddles. The island is tiny—only three miles long and 1.5 miles wide—but has so many nooks and crannies that it boasts 42 miles of coastline. When the strong tidal stream recedes, a wonderland of anemone-filled coves and caves is revealed.Victor Hugo, who visited Sark when he took exile in the Channel Islands in 1872, wrote that, “The island is a meadow and I work like an ox there. I do not graze there, however, though I gorge myself on flowers and dew … this beauty is absurd.” Four years later, the poet Algernon Charles Swinburne agreed, calling it, “On the whole the loveliest and wonderfullest thing I ever saw.”People have lived on this tranquil island as far back as 2000 BCE. Legend has it that, in the 6th century, Saint Magloire brought religion to Sark while riding the back of a sea monster. In the 13th century, the island became the property of the English Crown but remained mostly deserted (with the exception of a few "pirates, thieves, brigands, murderers, and assassins," François Rabelais wrote in the 1530s). In 1565, Helier de Carteret cleaned up the place after he earned Queen Elizabeth I’s permission to establish a fief there, bringing 40 families—most of them from the nearby island of Jersey. Each family received a parcel of land, called a tenement, and to this day Sark's plots bear old names in Norman French: La Varouque, La Sablonnerie, La Moinerie.Culturally and politically, Sark has changed very little since then. It, along with the three other major British Channel Islands—Guernsey, Jersey, and Alderney—are possessions of the British Crown, yet each island remains politically independent of the United Kingdom. (On Sark, there is no income tax, no welfare, and no help from the National Health Service.) During Dame Sibyl’s lifetime, homes were lit with oil lamps and water had to be pumped from a well or catchment. Anybody who wanted a warm bath had to light a fire by their tub. And most residents spoke a unique patois called Serquais, a remnant of the Norman French brought there by the island’s original settlers.When Germany invaded in 1940, many of the descendants of those original 40 settlers still lived on Sark. Heirs to more than four centuries of feudal rule, they had no intention of abandoning their island or their way of life. This was especially true of Dame Sibyl, who had been groomed to become the island’s leader since she was a little girl.As it turned out, the strict feudal etiquette she had spent her life practicing would become a potent weapon, a tool for bending the occupiers to her will.On the morning of June 9, 1940, Dame Sibyl Hathaway looked across her island and saw the horizon obscured by billows of black smoke.Twenty-five miles east, on the coast of France, oil storage tanks spewed flames. Weeks earlier, the Wehrmacht had penetrated the Maginot line, the bulwark of trenches and fortifications separating France from Germany. Now, as the occupation of France looked inevitable, the people of Normandy were sabotaging their own oil reserves.For Dame Sibyl, it was a private smoke signal. If Normandy fell, Sark would follow. (She knew the Germans would be hungry to occupy the Channel Islands; it was a chance to sow propaganda about controlling “British” territory.) As rumours swirled about evacuations, Dame Sibyl took the ferry to Guernsey to see how the second biggest Channel Island was preparing.The air was thick with panic. There were lines everywhere: Lines at stores as people frantically bought suitcases, lines at the bank as people attempted to withdraw money, lines at the dock as people pushed onto boats bound for England. Possessed by the chaos, islanders buried heirlooms in their gardens. Hundreds of expectant evacuees swarmed the veterinary clinic in an attempt to put their beloved pets to sleep.The Channel Islands, the Dame soon learned, would be demilitarised—they weren’t even going to put up a fight. In just one week, approximately 17,000 people would evacuate Guernsey alone. The commotion appalled Dame Sibyl so deeply that, on the trip back to Sark, she “made up my mind how best I could protect my own people.”According to old Norman Law, Sark’s tenants were sworn to protect the island from foreign invaders—in fact, custom required each landowner to own a musket—but that old precept felt laughably anachronistic in the face of a Nazi invasion. (In 1887, a journalist had described Sark’s so-called militia as little more than “seven dozen pairs of boots.”)LUCAS REILLYBut Dame Sibyl worried that Sark could crumble if too many people evacuated the island. The gist of feudalism, after all, is that it's self-sufficient: If everybody on Sark stuck together, the Dame reasoned, life could go on.Shortly after returning from Guernsey, she called a meeting and told the inhabitants that she had decided to stay—and asked the islanders to remain as well.“I am not promising you that it will be easy,” she told them. “We may be hungry but we will always have our cattle and crops, our gardens, a few pigs, our sheep and rabbits.”The Dame understood that not everybody might sign on and promised to arrange for anybody's departure, if they so wished.Of those born on Sark, not one person left.Just one week after the Channel Islands were officially demilitarised, three German military planes barrelled over Sark, hurtled toward Guernsey, and bombed that island's capital of St. Peter Port. Thirty-eight civilians died. Dame Sibyl watched as the planes arced over the Channel and aimed for her home. Bullets pelted Sark's harbours, but nobody was hurt.The following day, the telephone line connecting Sark and Guernsey fell silent. Three days after that, on July 3, 1940, a lifeboat arrived at Sark’s main harbor. The Germans had arrived—and the Dame made her first move in a subtle game of political one-upmanship.Sark’s coastline is foreboding. In the Middle Ages, pirates and privateers would circle the island's bluffs looking for a place to dock, only to declare it unreachable. Today, visitors can be carried up a steep lane by a tractor-pulled wagon affectionately named the “Toast Rack.” In Dame Sibyl’s day, horses lugged the passengers up. But not on the day the Nazis arrived. Dame Sibyl resolved that she would not go to meet the Germans; they would come to her—and they would walk.As the Nazi officers hiked, Dame Sibyl waited in her royal residence, a stone mansion known as La Seigneurie, and talked strategy with her husband, Bob. “Let’s take a leaf out of Mussolini's book,” she told him. They placed two chairs behind a desk at the far end of the drawing room, which would force the officers to walk the whole length of the room. It was a small power move, but they needed every trick they could muster. The Dame advised her maid to announce the Germans as if they were any other villager.CHRIS JACKSON, GETTY IMAGESDame Sibyl later wrote in her autobiography, The Dame of Sark, that she was “determined that this island, at least, should show a front of firmness and dignity and give the impression that we were taking everything in our stride in the firm conviction that we would make the best of a bad time which we were convinced would not endure long.”When the Germans arrived, the officers wiped their boots on the doormat outside. Dame Sibyl glanced at her husband with relief. Just from the sound of their feet, she could tell that the men about to enter her house were aristocrats—the way they wiped their boots was a sign of respect.As luck would have it, the Channel Islands attracted a disproportionate number of Germany’s uniformed aristocrats. The islands were a relatively safe spot for Germany’s most privileged soldiers, who were naturally attracted to staying in a bygone place where inheritance still equaled influence. “That the German nobles would have felt a particular affinity with a place where pre-modern feudal rule was still partially intact is an inescapable conclusion,” Paul Sanders wrote in The British Channel IslandsUnder German Occupation.This arrangement, however, would play into Dame Sibyl’s hands.The maid announced the men’s arrival. Two officers, draped in dark green, introduced themselves and told Dame Sibyl that they had come to establish some rules. There would be a curfew at 11 p.m.; no groups larger than five were allowed in the streets; all pubs were to be closed; all arms were to be confiscated; and no boats were allowed to leave the harbour.Hearing this, Dame Sibyl nodded: Bitte hinsetzen, she said, asking them to sit. She continued speaking in German: "I will see that these orders are obeyed."There was a moment of stunned silence. The German officers, dumbfounded by the Dame’s command of their language, were immediately flustered.“You do not appear to be in the least afraid,” one officer said.Without hesitation, Dame Sibyl replied tartly, “Is there any reason why I should be afraid of German officers?”This, after all, was her island.For the past 400 years, the Isle of Sark had been ruled by a "Lord of the Manor" called a Seigneur or Dame, who pledges allegiance to, and rents the island from, the King or Queen of England. The Seigneur or Dame holds the island in perpetual fief, and rents out 40 parcels, or tenements, to 40 different residents called tenants, who can rent pieces of each parcel to lower-ranked islanders. For centuries, these 40 landowners made up the island’s parliament, called Chief Pleas, with the Seigneur or Dame presiding as a quasi-dictator."It may seem undemocratic that most members hold their seats by right of property," Deputy John La Trobe Bateman told National Geographic in 1971, "but we are perhaps the world's best-represented community. With our population of 575, we have one legislator for every 11 people."HULTON ARCHIVE, GETTY IMAGESAs the island's leader, Dame Sibyl’s job came with privileges that would have made Hitler drool. According to the original Letters Patent, she controlled:"All of its rights, members, liberties and appurtenances, and all and singular castles, fortresses, houses, buildings, structures ruined with their fragments, lands, meadows, pastures, commons, wastes, woods, waters watercourses, ponds, fees, rents reversions, services ... vicarages, chapels or churches, and also all manner of tithes, oblations, fruits, inventions, mines, quarries, ports, shores, rocks, wrecks of the sea, shipwrecks, farms, fee farms, knight’s fees, wards, marriages ... fugitives or pirates, or felons de se, out-laws, of persons put exigent, and the forfeited or confiscated goods of persons condemned or convinced any other way whatsoever; also all forfeitures, paunages, free warrens, courts leet, views of frankpledge, assize and assay of bread, wine and beer; all fairs, markets, customs, rights of tolls, jurisdictions, liberties, immunities, exemptions, franchises, privileges, commodities, profits, emoluments, and all of the Queen’s heredits..."And so on.And none of that counted the specific privileges afforded to Dame Sibyl by ancient Norman common law. When a property was sold, she was entitled to one-thirteenth of the purchase price, called a la troisieme. For every chimney, she was entitled to a tax paid in chickens. For every harvest, she was owed a tenth sheaf of corn, apples, flax, hemp, or beans. She claimed ownership of every bit of flotsam and jetsam that washed ashore. Only she could keep pigeons or an unspayed dog. (Dame Sibyl’s was named Maxine.) She also had to pay the Queen for the privilege of running the island. But since the figure was never adjusted for inflation after being set in the 16th century, the cost to rule Sark was just £1.79.The islanders were also subjected to a buffet of centuries-old common laws. There was, of course, the rule on muskets. Divorce was illegal. Government officials were required to juggle multiple jobs (with the constable running double-duty as the island's chief beetle inspector). Tenants were required to spend two unpaid days a year repairing the island's roads. Most amusingly, if an islander ever felt that he or she was wronged by a neighbour, they could drop to their knees and recite the Clameur de Haro, an ancient injunction that involves yelling, “Haro! Haro! Haro! À l'aide, mon Prince, on me fait tort!” followed by the Lord’s Prayer in French. Legally, the offender had to report to the constable.To say the least, Sark’s residents have never been keen about outsiders barging in and trying to change their way of life. One time during Dame Sibyl’s reign, the island hired a new doctor who brought a car, insisting it was vital for medical emergencies. Islanders and the Chief Pleas treated the offense with the kind of hellfire one might expect of a murder trial. They determined that the car could stay—but only if it were drawn by a horse.“That’s just the way Sark has always been,” Margaret Langlois, a resident for the past 27 years, explains. “The attitude here is: If you don’t like it, you know where the boat is.”The Dame’s complete control over the happenings in Sark wasn’t her only power over the Germans. Her name was in the Almanach de Gotha, a German directory that listed all of Europe’s most important royals and nobility—a who’s who of the continent’s aristocrats.“She was aristocratic and came to understand that the Germans in command were also aristocratic,” Sark’s current Seigneur, Christopher Beaumont, tells Mental Floss. “They connected on that level. And it would allow conversations to go on that probably couldn’t have happened had their statuses been different.”From her opening interaction, Dame Sibyl immediately realised that any fantasies about armed insurrection would be useless. Rather, her greatest weapon would be decorum. For the rest of the war, she put on an air of exceedingly stuffy social graces. She would never approach a German, but expect him to approach her. Before allowing a Nazi to take a seat in her home, she reportedly demanded that he bow and kiss her hand.As she’d later write in The Dame of Sark, “The stiff German formality worked in my favour because it showed the Germans that I expected to be treated in my home with the rigid etiquette to which they were accustomed in their own country.” These social conventions successfully eroded her new visitors’ confidence and gave her the upper hand when they began mulling policies that threatened her people’s lives.At first, Dame Sibyl found small ways to get under the occupiers' skin. In her sitting room, she deliberately placed anti-fascist books at eye-level. Sometimes she’d innocently ask the soldiers why they were taking so long to conquer Russia. She regularly fired shots at the Nazi sense of ethnic superiority with backhanded compliments. (When she learned that the Germans had bought all the tweed in Guernsey and were planning to ship it to Britain for tailoring, she told them: “No one can deny that English and Scotch tweeds are the best in the world ... or that London tailors are vastly superior to those in any other country.”)Dame Sibyl knew that, in aristocratic circles, the artifice of polite conversation meant everything—and her words could work like a psychological water torture experiment. Each little statement was harmless alone, but over the course of weeks and months, these constant drops of rhetorical acid helped her assert dominance and compelled many German officers to drop their guard. As she'd write, “In the course of polite conversation I was often able to acquire useful information which would not otherwise have been available."Sark's residents followed the Dame's lead. When the Germans tried to implement a bureaucracy that threatened the island's feudal self-sufficiency—demanding that fishermen only go out to sea from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., accompanied by an armed guard—they responded with their own subtle shows of disrespect. Sometimes fishermen "forgot" to appear at the docks during the approved fishing times, leaving their German chaperones waiting alone at the harbour. Other times, fishermen deliberately steered into giant swells, soaking the landlubbing Nazis and making them seasick. Even the children played tricks, stringing invisible wires across the road to trip Germans riding bicycles.LUCAS REILLYBut war, of course, is more than a game of pranks. All of Sark’s radios would eventually be confiscated, leaving most residents clueless as to what was happening off the island. Dame Sibyl, for instance, had a hazy idea that the Luftwaffe were bombing London, but she didn’t know about the bombings in Bristol, Birmingham, or Belfast.She also didn’t know that her eldest son, Buster, was long dead—killed during the blitz of Liverpool.By summer 1941, as more enemy troops moved onto the Channel Islands, the Germans started hoarding a disproportionate amount of the island’s produce. Sark's islanders began to suffer. The Sarkese began making “tobacco” from dried clover and fruit leaves; “tea” with dried peapods steeped in hot water; “coffee” with grated barley, dried sugar beet, and parsnips. Every meal included lobster. “When lobster is the main dish day after day, month in month out, let me assure you that you become heartily sick of the sight of it,” Dame Sibyl wrote.The Dame fought these restrictions with a healthy dose of do-you-know-who-I-am? To get what she wanted, she schmoozed with the aristocratic officers: Colonel Graf von Schmettow, Commander-in-Chief of the Channel Islands, who was friends with Germany’s exiled Kaiser; Freiherr von Aufsess, the Chief of Civil Administration, who was indirectly connected to the Dame through a marriage of cousins; Prince Oettingen, the Kommandant of Civil Administration, who shared mutual friends with the Dame back in Germany. Whenever troops on Sark gave Dame Sibyl gruff, she simply went over their heads to these “friends.”“If the lower classes made any attempt to bully me or my people I knew full well that neither they nor I would show any sign of cringing,” she wrote. She was able to end a handful of disputes by simply asking: Who is your superior?“Because the social conventions were so strong, she was treated with much more deference than we would get treated with now,” Seigneur Beaumont says.Weaponizing etiquette truly had its charms. When von Schmettow’s son died on the Russian front, Dame Sibyl sent him a sympathy card, a gesture Von Schmettow never forgot. So later, when Sark risked being slapped with steeper rations, von Schmettow fought the cuts on the Dame’s behalf. And when Sark’s German doctor was murdered by a fellow German soldier, the Dame’s relationship with Prince Oettingen ensured that the island received a replacement immediately. “She essentially used social protocol to broker deals,” Beaumont says.Some policies, however, were beyond Dame Sibyl’s control. "Natural factors limit the number of people who can live on Sark," Beaumont says. "If we've got close to 1000 people here, we could start running out of water." In October 1941, 300 German soldiers were sent to the island, putting a significant strain on the island's resources.Things got worse as the war heated up. The following year, British commandos raided Sark, killing two German officers and taking one prisoner. The Germans retaliated, placing barbed wire around Sark’s perimeter and laying more than 13,000 landmines, which made it impossible for the islanders to launch their fishing boats, collect the gorse they needed for fuel, or gather seaweed they used for fertilising fields. Soon, rabbits discovered that the minefields were a great place to breed—and the island's crops were decimated by the ensuing bunny boom.Then Germany decided to deport all of Sark’s British citizens.According to some accounts, Dame Sibyl convinced the Germans that most of Sark’s people were, in fact, not British, but Channel Islanders. This little game of semantics appears to have worked: Of the 400 islanders, the list of deportees was reduced to just 11 people.In February 1943, a more indiscriminate round of deportations was ordered by the Nazi brass in Berlin. Two additional roundups targeted 50 people, including Dame Sibyl’s husband Bob, an American citizen, who was sent to Laufen prison camp in France. (Bob maintained his resistance in prison: He smoked a pipe during the daily parade; stood at ease when he was called to attention; and snuck secret doses of liquor.)It's difficult to quantify how well Dame Sibyl's networking had helped in reducing the number of deportations. We do know, however, that Prince Oettingen, who considered the Dame a friend, was so outspoken in his opposition to the deportations that he was eventually removed from his post.Now alone, Dame Sibyl doubled down on her attempts to make the occupiers feel like incompetent fools. One of the most amusing stories occurred during the spring of 1943. At the time, Sark’s Guernsey cattle were still producing half a pint of milk per head, which the island’s farmers secretly skimmed before handing over to the Germans. When the Germans complained to Dame Sibyl that they couldn't make butter with the milk, she showed up to their headquarters dressed in traditional butter-churning overalls and proceeded to give such a confusing and patronizing lecture on the art of butter-making that they were too embarrassed to ever complain again.For the rest of the war, the Germans were left scratching their heads in bewilderment as they tried making butter from skim milk.In the early morning hours of June 6, 1944, Dame Sibyl groggily woke to the rumble of bombers flying overhead and the thundering of heavy guns off the French coast. Later that morning, as she drank a cup of what could euphemistically be called coffee, the island’s German doctor visited and, in hushed tones, told her that the Allies had invaded Normandy.All the ships and planes had bypassed the Channel Islands.KEYSTONE, GETTY IMAGESAs Allied troops pressed into France, island life turned bleak. Winston Churchill refused to send any food to the Channel Islands, insisting that Germany was responsible for providing sustenance to lands it occupied. But the Germans didn’t provide for the people of Sark—the people of Sark provided for the Germans. Feudalism, the Dame learned, didn't work smoothly when hundreds of moochers were hoarding all the provisions.Indeed, by winter, even the Germans were feeling pinched. Chickens, pigs, cats, and dogs started disappearing. The Germans demanded that all of Sark’s stored grain, plus 90 percent of all potatoes, be funneled into their coffers.For the Dame, this crossed a line. Instead of complying, she helped launch a clandestine operation to steal back what was, according to feudal law, rightfully hers. One evening, as the Germans were preoccupied with their dinner, the Dame and a crew of conspirators stole a half-ton of wheat from the village hall, which they hid in her barn. Meanwhile, they secretly hoarded potatoes under a trap door in her drawing room. The loot was secretly distributed in to residents in rations.The months crawled until Hitler finally died. On May 8, 1945, the commanding Germans demanded that Dame Sibyl hand over Sark’s cattle and 200 tons of timber for fuel. Instead, she flew the British and American flags from her tower and joined the islanders as they lit a bonfire in celebration.By this point, there were 275 German soldiers stationed on Sark, but after the arrival—and departure—of the British liberation team, Dame Sibyl had become their commander. As she began giving orders, a British officer observed that she acted, "more forceful than any army officer and more than equal to any German Kommandant."First, the Dame demanded they establish a telephone line connecting her house to Guernsey. Then she ordered the Germans to return all the confiscated wireless radios and to remove all 13,500 landmines. She insisted that each prisoner repeat her commands and relished hearing the soldiers say: “Zu Befehl, Gnädige Frau”—"At your command, madam."Over the coming months, German POWs completed a series of construction projects, building a protected concrete path over a narrow isthmus connecting the southern half of the island; repairing and redecorating the homes they had occupied; and resurfacing the island’s roads. They also removed rusty roll-bombs dangling from wires over Sark’s harbors.One day, Dame Sibyl received a call from Sark’s ex-Kommandant informing her that one of those bombs had exploded. Two German prisoners were killed.In that moment, the courtly facade of manners the Dame had maintained so firmly for five years finally crumbled. She said what was exactly on her mind.“Ach, So?”For much of the war, Sark’s people resented Dame Sibyl for asking them to stay. That changed when they learned about the neighboring island of Alderney.Similar to Sark in size and culture, Alderney was completely evacuated days after the bombing of Guernsey—and the Nazis went on to destroy it. They dismantled Alderney’s homes for firewood. They constructed ugly concrete fortifications, bunkers, air raid shelters, and gun emplacements and built two work camps and two concentration camps. They killed the last Alderney cow, rendering the unique breed—which only lived on the island—extinct. The occupation had a similar effect on the island’s unique dialect, Auregnais: The displacement of Alderney’s people killed the language.After the war, Alderney was rebuilt from scratch, and most returning residents abandoned any relics of old Norman politics. Today, Alderney has recovered—but it is relatively dense with cars and homes. (Despite being the same size as Sark, it’s home to five times as many people.) The island is still beautiful, but the old-world culture and atmosphere that made it unique has disappeared.Had Sark’s people left, the island may have suffered a similar fate.BUNDESARCHIV, WIKIMEDIA COMMONS // CC-BY-SA 3.0 GERMANYThat’s not to say Sark hasn't changed. Today, the chimney tax is gone. (Dame Sibyl got annoyed when islanders began paying with their wimpiest chickens.) Few, if any, of the old grain-based tithes are collected, and the island’s agricultural industry has dwindled to favor tourism. The stringent rules on divorce have been modernized and the island’s language, Serquais, is down to its last five speakers. Most drastically, in 2008, Sark’s feudal politics was abolished in favor of democracy, a decision that stripped the landowning class—and all future seigneurs and dames—of their power.The feudal system of land tenure, however, remains intact. There is still no freehold on Sark, which ensures that the 40 tenements retain their quaint, rural charm. The seigneur, who occupies a more ceremonial role, remains the island’s chief tenant, with perpetual fief owed to the Queen. (The method of payment, however, has been modernized; today, Seigneur Christopher Beaumont—Dame Sibyl’s great grandson—pays Queen Elizabeth II £1.79 through an online bank transfer.) And some of the old Norman laws are still enforced: The Seigneur still owns all of the island’s pigeons.Whatever charm Sark has retained, much of it is owed to Dame Sibyl. Every deported islander would survive the war, and nearly all of them would return to Sark, where the Dame's steadfast leadership brought the island back to its old routines. The return of normalcy could be seen most clearly through the prism of local politics, where, once again, the quaintest moves to modernize were treated with unbridled hysteria.Take when an aging Dame Sibyl, battling arthritis and a bum hip, decided to bring an electric mobility scooter onto Sark. It might as well have been Watergate.But Dame Sybil won that battle, too. What had been true during the German occupation remained true later. As she put it: “I usually got my way.”All credit goes to LUCAS REILLYHow the World’s Only Feudal Lord Outclassed the Nazis to Save Her People