Like most of the American geezers among Gates of Vienna’s readers, I can remember the “revolutionary” phase of the 1960s. It lasted from 1968 — the year of revolutions throughout the West — until about 1972. It petered out after Richard Nixon’s re-election, and the president’s resignation in 1974 provided a coda.
There was plenty of violence in those times — street riots, bombings, assassinations and attempted assassinations, the killing of police — but it seems to me that all that pales in comparison to what’s been going on in the USA for the last couple of years. Back then the violence never reached the well-organized intensity that the Antifas and BLM troops have been displaying recently. And the incidence of brutal action for its own sake — “revolution for the hell of it”, as Abbie Hoffman put it — seems to be more widespread these days.
For a few days after the November 8 election, mass demonstrations against the president-elect were organized in major cities. Most of you have probably seen videos of the miles-long ranks of parked buses in Chicago that carried the protesters to their mustering areas, and hauled them away again afterwards.
That was an expensive operation — it cost a lot of money to charter those buses and hire the drivers. And there were undoubtedly provisions for the demonstrators, plus printed signs and other paraphernalia. Someone paid for all that.
Which raises an obvious question: What if one or more of those deep-pocketed someones decided to forget the buses and snowflake signs, and instead started buying up automatic weapons from the cartels and handing them to the black-masked thugs of Antifa?
It would become a different sort of civil war at that point. And it wouldn’t be at all like the Civil War of 1861-1865, which was actually a sectional war between two distinct and geographically separate political entities. We haven’t seen this sort of civil war in the United States before. In order to get an idea of what it might be like, we’d have to look at the “Dirty War” in Argentina in the 1970s. Or maybe the war between the Freikorps and the Communists on the streets of Berlin and Munich in 1919 and 1920.
Mountain Guerrilla is a blog run by a man who goes by the nom de guerre of John Mosby. His post today, entitled “Skull-Stomping Sacred Cows: Reality Isn’t Nice. It’s a 2×4 to the Teeth”, discusses the emergence of a “hot” civil war at the hands of the black-masked progressives who have up until now been throwing firebombs, breaking plate-glass windows, and beating up supporters of Donald Trump. As far as he is concerned, the war has gotten pretty toasty already. Will the next phase be the emergence of disciplined Antifas carrying AK-47s to their street battles?
Mosby’s post is rife with non-PG language, so the brief excerpts below are just relevant segments that didn’t require much bowdlerizing. I recommend the entire piece — it provides much food for thought:
While not technically accurate, Fort Sumter was the first “official” battle of the War of Northern Aggression. It was the real opening of hostilities between the uniformed services of two distinct, autonomous governments. In the current conflict, the legitimate government of the United States is, at most, a bit player, thus far. The War of Northern Aggression, while labeled a civil war, was not. It was a conflict of conquest by a sovereign state, against a sovereign state, that had declared its independence, and been recognized as a sovereign state, in accordance with international law. None of that mattered of course, but the difference with the current conflict should be obvious.
This is an actual civil war, as in a conflict between ideologically-opposed factions within the civilian and political population of a country. Like real civil wars, it is not going to be pretty. It’s not going to be armies, in pretty uniforms, fighting pitched, conventional battles. It’s going to be a matter of assassination, sabotage, hit-and-run raids, targeting ideological leadership figures, enemy families, etc.
As Matt Bracken pointed out in a recent Facebook post himself, we’re looking at more of a Balkans and/or Argentine “Dirty War” conflict. People just haven’t accepted that, because it doesn’t fit their mental images of what “war,” even “guerrilla war” looks like. That, in turn, is because, even the most devout conversions to the “Church of the Anti-Media” in this country today, have a lifetime of conditioning to the media’s portrayal of what “reality” is. From what a “proper” war looks like, to what “collapse” looks like, to what “bad guys” look like.
We commonly jump to the idea of “well, George Soros is funding this [excrement], so it’ll cause a breakdown, and currency collapse, and he can make a fortune off it.” There’s probably a lot of truth to that. I don’t know Soros, so I can’t tell you what his ultimate goals and motivations are. I have however, met a lot of Leftists, both in the US and elsewhere, and I can tell you, they are not looking for a currency collapse, in order to get richer.
It’s easy to sit in your lounger, with your laptop across your knees, and pontificate on the false motivations of the Leftist activists. “Oh, they’re just attention whores!” “Oh, they just want their safe spaces!” “Oh, they’re just useful idiots being played.” “Oh, they’ll quit as soon as the money stops.” There’s a very real problem with that though, and it’s called underestimating your enemy. If you don’t believe that a dude who is out, in wintertime, in a protest/riot, and eating some riot cop’s baton, as he receives a solid washing with “hickory shampoo,” is not a dedicated True Believer, you’re deluding yourself.
If you think that some twenty-something kid, who just saw his buddy take a bean bag round from a PD riot gun, in the [genitals], and then ignored his friend’s screams, to continue advancing, is not dedicated, and a True Believer, you’re [vulgar intensifier] stupid.
If you think POTUS is going to magically save you? You’re dumb. Large urban areas and entire states are telling the federal government to go [perform an anatomically impossible act upon] itself on the immigration issue (and granted, the states are wrong on this one, but that doesn’t change the fact that this—as I mentioned, in detail, in Forging the Hero—is symptomatic of the collapse of the American Empire.) Things are not normal, and if you’re still stuck in your normalcy bias about “Make America Great Again,” you’re WAY behind the learning the curve.
And then there’s this:
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With the exception of the United States, Switzerland is the Western nation with the strongest tradition of gun rights. The Confoederatio Helvetica has survived for all these centuries by requiring universal military service, and by affirming the right of Swiss citizens to keep and bear arms.
