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Product Description
Patriots: Surviving the Coming Collapse is novel set in the near future that describes a full scale socioeconomic collapse. More than just an exciting read, it is packed with useful survival and preparedness tips. It was described by one reviewer
Product Details
- Amazon Sales Rank: #1517 in Books
- Published on: 2006-11-15
- Released on: 2006-11-15
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Binding: Paperback
- 384 pages
Customer Reviews
Good, But Too Late
This book was an interesting read. If I'd had the foresight to be born rich, and to have read the book ten years ago, it would be quite helpful in setting up a safe house in the country. Unfortunately, we are out of time. What with the corporate looters (AKA CEO's) having stolen what little money I had, it looks like I'll wind up on the "them" side of this book's "us vs. them" equation.
Fascinating and disturbing
As a piece of fiction, Patriots is pretty weak stuff. The plot-lines are simplistic, there's no characterization at all, and the exploration of disaster is superficial despite all the technical details Rawles scatters through the pages. The action is pure "Boy's Own" and wouldn't be out of place in a Victorian yarn. As a novel, in short, this book is a complete failure.
As an insight into the mind-set of survivalists, however, it's a gem. Unlike many survivalists, Rawles clearly knows his stuff. This part of the book will appeal to anyone who likes details, even when Rawles' opinions are wide of the mark. Who hasn't occasionally wondered what life would be like (assuming life continued at all) after the End of Civilization? Given that the vast majority of Americans (for this is a quintessentially American book) wouldn't make it past the first 30 days, how could survival of a few be ensured, and what would the resulting communities look like? In principle, this is a topic rich with possibilities. How would the survivors cope emotionally? What kinds of mind-set would emerge from the wreckage? Would re-building occur, and if so, how and when?
Well, we don't get much of that in this book. This is the male version of the soupy late-80s female romance genre with its endless lists of Hermes scarfs, Dolce-et-Gabana sunglasses, Molton Brown bath oils, etc. so we have plenty of itemization of firearms, ammunition, knives, and the life. Rawles is right enough of the time with his biases that his errors, when they present themselves, are forgivable. He's also strong on practical combat tactics - nothing too difficult for a reasonably motivated survivalist to master, yet reasonably effective. So we get the logistics of survival in this novel and as such it may be a useful primer for anyone who hasn't read widely or had military experience themselves.
Where this novel truly falls apart, however, is in its reliance on all the old paranoid fantasies of UN world domination, gold-standard currencies, big government interference in matters of weapon ownership, and all the rest of the paranoid clap-trap that seems to litter almost every survivalist tome. Survivalists seem to have developed the art of selective reading to a high pitch - focusing on preferred bits of the constitution, misunderstood fragments of economic theory garbled so badly as to be comical, and of course the Christian bible. Rawles regurgitates all this intellectual mush without criticism so we have to assume he's fully signed up to this delusional view of the world. So it is that the USA falls apart, only to have the United Nations turn up a handful of years later to impose world domination on the good Christian citizens who've managed to survive by dint of hard work and good shooting. I have no idea where this "Powerful UN" fantasy originated but it's so far from the truth as to be utterly laughable. And these standard paranoiac elements ultimately serve to undermine the book's residual credibility. While it's perfectly reasonable to observe that the Federal government is guilt of significant over-reach (as is indeed every government in the developed world) and is as corrupt and incompetent as anything in Italy, Greece, or South America, it's not enough to believe that civil society can successfully be constituted on the basis of "praise the lord and pass the ammo." Rawles is as naive about human nature as was Marx, and ironically makes many of the same errors. This is an Ayn Rand view of the world, and enough has been written on her total inability in both her personal and literary life to comprehend actual human behavior for us to know that any philosophy based on such cardboard-cut-out ideas is, to put it gently, highly implausible.
Equally problematic is the total absense of any examination of group dynamics. In the story, a group of survivalists hole up and stick together through the end of civilization. They live in one another's pockets for the better part of five years. Yet there's no tension, no emotional entanglements, nothing - quite amazing, especially since all but two of the protagonists are devoted Christians and there's a lot of empirical data to show that such groups, when placed under continuous stress, fragment over miniscule doctrinal differences. What we get in this book is basically the daily life of a platoon repeated endlessly. Only we know from available data that in the absence of an external and ultimate command structure, such small-scale units degenerate over time as personal factors come increasingly into play. Again, Rawles is betrayed by his total lack of comprehension of basic human dynamics. Which is a shame, because this could have been the most interesting part of the story.
In this novel, however, all the god-fearing folk are good hearted and all the heathens are communist baby-eating scum (I wish I was making this up, but the book goes well past the point of self-parody). Of course our good Christians are only too ready to blast away at such low-life and there's a satisfying body-count of the unholy. In reality we could expect to see groups of surviving fundamentalists blasting away at each other, each convinced of the purity of their cause and damning the others to eternal darkness. But there's no reality in this novel, and no moral or emotional dilemmas that can't be resolved with a good burst of fire from an assault rifle or shotgun. John Wayne would be proud.
On the plus side, Rawles has clearly thought through many of the logistical aspects of trying to survive the collapse of civilization. So in this regard the novel is an interesting exploration of "how to" and "what if." But it's such a complete failure in human terms that I found it a chore to read to the end. The people are one-dimensional and the situations are so childishly black-and-white that it's impossible to take seriously as a story. But it does provide a disturbing insight into the mentality of survivalists, even those as articulate and thoughtful as the author.
I learned something important from this book...
Great survival fiction, with a premise that's "lifted from today's headlines" as they say. Taking Tom Clancy a bit further, the author uses the events of the novel to teach post-collapse survival skills with details that will make you want to add the book to your reference library, not just your recreational bookshelf. But from the chapters of action and survival-scenario excitement I took a broader lesson; when times are really trying, good men must pull their moral values close around them.
In a lawless future, the protagonists are faced with bandits, foreign fighters, and even cannibals. But as the world around them goes off the deep end, the heroes in the book take their moral values to the heights. An example: when The Group defeats a band of two roving thieves, they confiscate the treasure that the bad guys had looted from other helpless citizens. The bounty consists of weapons, gold, food, and other necessary and valuable commodities. But since these items were stolen (probably from now-dead neighbors, there's really no way to tell the identity of the victims), the Group can't rightfully claim the property. That would be stealing, nearly as bad as if it had been them who had done the robbing. So instead they hold the goods in lockers to be doled out as charity to less fortunate, destitute passers by.
This, and many other examples in the well written book, made me reconsider the notion of moral absolutes in a world without laws, except the gun. It made me resolve to keep my own moral compass on the top of my disaster Go Bag. I hope you'll feel the same way after reading this book.
