Sunday, March 5, 2017

Recommended Reading on Civil War 2.0

On Thursday,  Tam posted a link to a very thought provoking and rather long piece on a blog I'd never heard of:  Days of Rage on Status 451.  The author pokes at many things going on that lead to the widely stated thought that we're in the low-intensity phase of the second civil war in our country. I haven't actually finished reading it, but I will when I'm done here.  The title, "Days of Rage" was the title of a book about the violence of the early '70s (for reasons that aren't clear to me, much of what people consider "the 60s" actually took place between '68 and '72).  “People have completely forgotten that in 1972 we had over nineteen hundred domestic bombings in the United States.” — Max Noel, FBI (ret.)

As I always do, I'm going to pull a few quotes here to whet your interest to go read it.
One thing that Burrough returns to in Days of Rage, over and over and over, is how forgotten so much of this stuff is. Puerto Rican separatists bombed NYC like 300 times, killed people, shot up Congress, tried to kill POTUS (Truman). Nobody remembers it.

Also, people don’t want to remember how much leftist violence was actively supported by mainstream leftist infrastructure. I’ll say this much for righty terrorist Eric Rudolph: the sonofabitch was caught dumpster-diving in a rare break from hiding in the woods. During his fugitive days, Weatherman’s Bill Ayers was on a nice houseboat paid for by radical lawyers.
...
You have to understand: in 1968, many radicals absolutely believed that the United States was getting ready to collapse. One Weatherman puts it: “We actually believed there was going to be a revolution. We believed 3rd World countries would rise up and cause crises that would bring down the industrialized West, and we believed it was going to happen tomorrow, or maybe the day after tomorrow, like 1976.”
...
The FBI was up SDS’s ass, and Weatherman’s. They harassed the core cadre. Beat them. Threatened them. This does not dissuade revolutionaries. Weatherman started doing crazy stuff with SDS: street brawls, public nudity, sexual orgies, ordering established couples to break up. If you think it sounds like a cult, you’re right. This is literally cult indoctrination stuff. They were remaking people, seeking the hardest of hardcore.
...
Institutions are one of two major assets that the Left has and the Right lacks. The other is Shock Troops.
...
My point is: did you notice the Left and the Right use fundamentally different tactics?

This is no accident. They’re different cultures. The Left and Right don’t just want different things. They also have different abilities, goals, resources, and senses of propriety. Meaning contemporary political violence from the Left and from the Right will look very different.
...
People tend to think that the Right will be an awesome, horrific force in political violence. The SPLC’s donations depend on that idea. Righties tell themselves that *of course* they’d win a war against Lefties. Tactical Deathbeast vs. Pajama Boy? No contest. Why, Righties have thought about what an effective domestic insurrection would look like. Righties have written books and manifestos!

It’s horseshit.

The truth: the Left is a lot more organized & prepared for violence than the Right is, and has the advantage of a mainstream more supportive of it.
The whole thing goes 48 screens on my desktop, here.  Column widths are about what I run (close to 100 characters per line).  On the other hand, it's rather interesting.  I was unaware that Puerto Rican separatists shot up congress in 1954 and tried to assassinate Harry Truman in 1950.  The same group was behind a wave of bombings in the '70s.  They were well trained, probably by Cuban intelligence, and well-disciplined bombers.  The biggest asset they had, like all leftist groups, was support from mainstream organizations.  Their biggest benefactor was the Episcopal church.  Heck, I was a young adult while this was going on, but reading it feels like reading somebody else's history.  It's not just that I was too busy trying to get into adulthood, and trying to get my life going; it's like a memory selectively destroyed by our culture.  The author talks about not remembering any of this, too.   

Final words to Status 451
There’s a famous case where a shadowy group was after a high-value, high-status target who used his considerable resources to retreat. The group couldn’t get to him. So they targeted everybody associated with him: Friends. Family. Staff. Lawyers. Sympathetic journalists. Eventually, that utter devastation of infrastructure led to the death of the high-value, high-status target, whose name was Pablo Escobar.

That’s what I’m really scared of. Killing like that, on repeat. It’s my nightmare scenario. I know it’s unlikely. But — and this is the stupidest part of this whole thing — after 2016, I’m a little superstitious, and I’m wary of omens.

The shadowy group that unleashed carnage on Pablo Escobar’s Institutions had a name.

They were known as Los Pepes.


14 comments:

  1. Food for thought, there.

    I'll go check it out whilst I munch on dinner....

    ReplyDelete
  2. I'd say that Kipling nailed how the right will eventually come around to violence in The Wrath of the Awakened Saxon.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. There's a place in there where he talks about possible scenarios and goes, "You do not want white people to riot. You Do Not. Want. White People. To Riot." I think that's what he's referring to.

      Delete
  3. Bingo. And he's right. There's a reason we were called "Berserkers".

    ReplyDelete
  4. The Left has Infrastructure. That's extremely valuable, especially in the opening stages. The Right has Independent Actors, which is a huge disadvantage, until things progress sufficiently (read: disrupted and chaotic enough) that Lone Wolves, or small bands of them, can effectively attack and destroy the Infrastructure.

    Lefties view Government as the enemy, but modern Government views Lefties as cousins; when the Lefties attack and start destroying Government, Government will be shocked and surprised.

    That's about the point where Rule #1 will be rewritten to read "There Are No Rules" and Independent Actors will have the upper hand, because lack of Infrastructure will, at that point, be an advantage; new definitions will be writen for "ruthlessness" and savagery" and the conflict won't end until there is nothing left to be in conflict over.

    No, you really don't want White People to Riot. It's been said when Blacks riot, cities burn, but when Whites riot, continents burn.

    ReplyDelete
  5. I'll say it again. If I were Trump I would be very careful. I could not have predicted JFK's assassination but this is different. The numbers and the power of those arrayed against Trump is incredible. If they fail to take him down by "Nixon'ing" him then they may be forced to do the unthinkable.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. If Trump is assassinated by the Left, those "Lone Wolves" spoken of above will take it upon themselves to bring the war home to those cretins.

      Delete
  6. Mark Bowdens book "Killing Pablo" is an excellent read on the rise and fall of Pablo Escobar. His lead in on the years of horrific civil war in Columbia are also illustrative. A lot of lessons to be learned there.
    BYT, I did not understand the implications of "Los Pepes"- although I did not read the entire article.
    Imagine the celebration in the street were Trump to fall. Like the muslims cheering on 9-11. It is unlikely such vindictiveness would go unanswered by the ones who mourned.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Pepe the frog is an internet meme, and trying to look up why it's meaningful to post here, I realized that I don't really understand it.

      Some people say it has bee co-opted by the "alt-right" white nationalists, some of the usual PSH (panty-shitting hysterical) groups say it's racist (isn't everything?), some people say it belongs to "normies" ("normal" people?? whatever that means), and some of it seems like it's written in foreign languages to me. Despite that, everyone seems to agree that Trump posted a cartoon of Pepe as himself, while one of his sons posted a picture of "The Deplorables" which included Pepe, but not as his dad. The picture seems to parody the movies The Expendables, so a meme referencing another meme. I've seen Pepe on Western Rifle Shooters, Gunslinger's Journal and some other liberty oriented web sites.

      So I'll paraphrase another movie, Blazing Saddles, and say, "Mongo is a simple man...". I don't understand all this stuff.

      Delete
  7. Until Dec.7 1941 America had one of the smallest army's on earth and was devoutly isolationist. By Dec 1943 we were killing enemy's world wide with an extermination machine that was unimaginable in 1941. We did it with white men that had no military training before boot camp (LESS than .0001% of the US military was "other races" or female) And WE CRUSHED every army of any nation we encountered, WORLD WIDE, in LESS than 3.5 years. From a standing start. The history of America is rife with spontaneous unpredicted uprisings that resulted in horrific bloodbaths. IF "white boys" ever give up on government and civilization you won't be able to count the dead.---Ray

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Do note that the hives will self-destruct on their own if their supply chains are impacted. Food, fuel, water, and power are imported from the surrounding flyover country by almost every hive in this nation. Crimp that supply chain, and bad things happen automatically. "Urban youfs" at their finest.

      Now the government has shown that they can pacify one hive at a time. Katrina. Sandy. They can probably stretch to handle a two-fer. But if four or more hives simultaneously get disruptions in their supplies, the government has NO WAY to stop the events that will unfold. Do note that the "urban youfs" tend to destroy whatever they can't immediately use. The hives will become unlivable within a week. And even those hives which have NOT experienced supply chain disruption will collapse. Hive dwellers luvs them some Big Government. And when the government shows its incompetence by the collapse of one or more major hives, the hive dwellers in the REST of the hives will panic and wipe out their resources, even if they HAVEN'T had any supply disruption whatsoever.

      Delete
    2. That's an important point, and it gets to the big advantage the lefties have: the article called it infrastructure, but I think of it as the long tail of logistics. They can support their shock troops, and every army "marches" on its stomach.

      The disruption will turn the cities into places no one wants to be, but if their logistics are good it won't affect the lefty fighters.

      What's that line? Small minds talk tactics, moderate minds talk strategy, and big minds talk logistics?

      Delete
    3. Except for the Communists, that logistics tail depends on the hives. And once the hives go bust, that logistics tail goes with them.

      Delete
  8. It is true that to piss off those who invented and built 98% of what we term "civilization" is a poor idea.
    Look at all the cool shit white guys invented- smokeless powder, dynamite, the machine gun, cell phones, poison gas, trains, thermonuclear weapons, take out fast food, open heart surgery, computers,etc.
    America's home hobbyists are potentially the most devastating resistance force in the history of the world, should they ever decide to apply themselves to destruction. Guys have CNC machine shops in their basements, bio-tech labs on the kitchen table, unfathomable computer wizard caves in the den. Do they REALLY want to piss off the sort of people who landed a rocket on a comet?

    ReplyDelete