[Ruy Dias de Bivar]

***.... hippies in the 1960s who set up communes..... and the survivalists in the 1990s who were hoping to escape the dictates of ........... secular and oppressive government.***

Nonsense. The hippies were not survivalists. they wanted a place for Sex and drugs. Their communes did not last long.

SURVIVALISTS started under the gross incompetence of the Jimmy Carter administration when it was found survival would be every man for himself. Mel Tappan’s books and articles in GUNS and AMMO became popular at that time.

This is when assault style rifles became really popular and the survivalist books by Kurt Saxon were selling out.

Survivalism waned for a time under Reagan, then revived with the Y2K nonsense.

Now it is back again with the gross incompetence of Obama.

I’ve been in survivalist mode since 1960. I had hand written notebooks on survival and wood craft since I first found a copy of Ellsworth Jaegar’s book WILDWOOD WISDOM, which was the FIRST hardcover book I ever bought.

[elcid1970]

I was just a kid in 1960 but I remember well the fallout shelter craze, CONELRAD, and the ethical debate over the problem of unprepared neighbors. Your perspective shows that survival preparation is nothing new.

Since we go back that far, you must be familiar with Pat Frank’s “Alas Babylon” and the survival manual he wrote later. Also at the time Earl Stanley Gardner of Perry Mason fame published “How to Survive” in several issues of Field & Stream magazine. His favorite survival firearm was a .22 caliber handgun.

My favorite Pat Frank quote: “The day may come when a pound of tobacco is worth more than a pound of gold.”

[rickomatic]

Store what you eat, and eat what you store.
Prepare for when times get tough, or even if they don’t.
Words of wisdom from Jack Spirko of “The Survival Podcast”

[wardaddy]

Their communes did not last long.

a few did...but not many...one is pretty close(25 miles) to where I live...Gaskin's Farm, near Hohenwald TN strange progression from an exodus of Haight hippies to now all sorts of Whole Earth Catalog stuff...some not so bad...they take in all pregnant women for instance and they used to offer refuge to LSD casualties

[reformedliberal]

Nonsense. The hippies were not survivalists. they wanted a place for Sex and drugs. Their communes did not last long.

---

Even a cursory examination of the 60’s communes shows that they were founded on redistributionist principles. They failed because it was impossible to get more than 1 or 2 people, usually trustafarians or university professors, to work and contribute actual cash to the enterprise. The rest found a million excuses to not do the dishes,weed the garden or even clean the dwellings. More time was spent on meetings than anything else. The end game in all communes was a recruitment drive, looking for more poor suckers to come and do the scut work. A common trope of the times was :”I have more important things to do than work.”