I grew up in the 60’s and 70’s so of course I heard the talk from left wing radicals. There was a revolution coming, they said. A revolution that was going to overthrow capitalism, because capitalism was exploiting the people so bad, they said. A few of the morons even tried to start the revolution — see Weathermen, The.
It didn’t come. It didn’t come because by and large, people don’t like violence. You have a small core of sociopaths, about 10%, who like violence, who engage in violence willingly and without remorse. The rest can be trained to commit violence (like many soldiers) but are not, by nature, sociopaths — they don’t like violence and they commit violence because that’s what they’re trained to do, but not what they would do if there were other options.
So now you hear about things like the Bundy Ranch clusterfuck (I say clusterfuck because the way to deal with someone like Bundy is to freeze his bank accounts and confiscate his titles and confiscate his money at the auction house at the time he auctions off his cattle, not try to deal with him like they did), and of course this situation in Pennsylvania where Eric Frein killed two cops, and the other situation in Northern California where a dude and his wife killed two cops, and now you got right wingers nodding their heads wisely and saying, “Yep, the anti-government revolution is coming”.
Yeah, the right wing anti-government revolution is coming. Just like it did when Timothy McVeigh blew up the Oklahoma City courthouse in 1996 and turned 99 government employees into pink mist along with 69 other people. Yeah, that started the revolution alright, didn’t it? I mean, it worked so well that President Bill Clinton introduced the Patriot Act. He didn’t get some of it passed because of Republican opposition (that needed another set of buildings brought down on Republican watch), but yeah, that terrorist violence against the government really worked well, didn’t it? (Sarcasm intended). Crap, Frein isn’t even the first anti-government cop killer to go on a rampage killing cops. Bucky Phillips did it close to a decade ago.
And what’s the public response to killings like this? Well, simple: increased support for the government. Remember H.L. Mencken’s guide to practical politics: “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” If the hobgoblins are real — are so real that they would even kill cops, cops who scare most of the public, and thus are by definition are even scarier than cops — their first response is to support the cops. And that’s what the public opinion surveys show — in the aftermath of cop killings, the overwhelming public response is increased support for cops. As you would expect, since violence scares the shit out of 90% of the population, and thus anybody committing violence — and furthermore, so violent that they’d commit it against cops — is by definition scarier than shit.
So the right wingers really think this is the opening round of an anti-government revolution? As someone who’s been there, seen that, I gotta wonder how much LSD these dudes did back in the day, ’cause all that revolutionary violence from the anti-capitalist left sure worked well, didn’t it? All I can figure is that they’re locked in an echo chamber patting each other on the back, and haven’t the slightest idea what effect these actions have on people outside their bubble chamber. ‘Cause what they seem to believe is happening isn’t happening at all with folks I see around me, who are just regular people with families and friends who care more about their families and friends being safe than about ideological bullshit. When there’s violence, and that violence is associated with an ideology, that ideology is going to take a hit with them. And if the right wingers think more bullets are going to change that, they’re so full of shit they need to be declared a toxic waste dump site and taken to the nearest sanitary landfill. Just sayin’.
– Badtux the Snarky Penguin
What they’re hoping for is a sort of revolutionary positive feedback loop, with a cycle of violence and repression that eventually leads to enough people being pissed off at the government to join them. They’re thinking of either the Revolutionary War or the Civil War as role models.
Problem there, of course, was that in both wars of rebellion, it was the rich leading the way. It was the rich merchants who were losing money because of British tax and trade policies. It was the rich who owned plantations that were worth squat without slaves.
This time around, the 1% is on the side of government. Because they’ve pretty much bought it from top to bottom.
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Back in the 60’s one of my best friends in High School was a self styled revolutionary. He kept asking about what I was going to do when the revolution was happening. Poor shmuck, last I saw he had been busted with the weatherman for guns and explosives and was going in for 15 years if I remember right. I never saw how “we” were going to fight the “man”.
What I just can’t accept now is that if you are of color or a ‘young-un’ you can expect serious time for being “revolutionary” but if you are white and preferably an ‘old’ then you can get away with all kinds of anti government stuff.
Bundy in particular sticks as having got away with thumbing his nose at the cops . In my day the National F’in Guard would have been knocking at his door.
It’s never been right and it’s more visible than ever.
w3ski
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And, Yes he did take a lot of LSD and yes, people like the weathermen made a Lot of heat for every group with any kind of “free thought”.
Better now
w3ski
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If these rightwing anti-government nuts had half a brain, they would see how the Republican party has manipulated them and used them to gain more political power and build the size and power of government.
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That is an interesting observation. I had not put it together that way before. Of course we know about government spies infiltrating left-wing organizations and urging them to violence in order to discredit their causes, several such agents have been “outed” by the left-wing media in the past, but why wouldn’t they be doing the same to right-wing organizations too? And what better way to discredit anti-government causes than to urge anti-government zealots to violence?
– Badtux the Thinking-in-progress Penguin
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Jerry, why restrict it to the Rethuglicans? I suggest, rather, that persons within the government started directing infiltration of “subversive” bodies in about the 1890’s…Workers Parties, Socialists, Communists, etc. The groups changed, but the strategy remained. Somewhere along the line, the infiltrators were moved to a more prominent roles in directing activities, leading the groups into trouble (not saying they wouldn’t have gone there, but…).
I have wondered for a long time if the ALF (Animal Liberation Front, PETA for sociopaths) and the ELF (Earth Liberation Front, Euro-Greens with severe PMS and guns) weren’t effectively destroyed in the 90’s by such an infiltration. Now we have the FBI leading young Muslims by the hand into terrorist plots…who know what else is being done. The fact that there was basically no change in Government behavior between the Bush and Obama administrations suggests inertia in the bureaucracy beyond what had been the norm in the 20th century.
So we have the US proceeding happily via the path of Rome as we slide gently into Empire from Republic.Meanwhile, in Europe the rise of the Nationalist parties (UKIP, National Front and such) is much more pronounced. So why do we have a lack of a Nationalist Party (the TEA Party is trying and dying)? It’s actually pretty simply, the melting pot in the US is still working, while in Europe, the foreigners are not integrated to any great extent.
It’s easy to get Texans to yell about securing the border, but when they look outside and see Jose (legal) and his crew (all speak only Spanish, you decide the odds) mowing the yard for about three-quarters of what college student Joe will do it for, and in half the time and probably better, they don’t feel so sure. Then Maria (probably legal, speaks some English, but works really hard) and her “sister” Marisol (no habla ingles) show up to clean, working for half the price (cash only) of a maid service, they like the way things are. The same applies for Green party support and other things, ‘Mericans are too comfortable and happy for the Government to keep things in line. Expect the TEA Party to fade away after the 2016 election, and US democracy is already gone (Citizens United, et. al.) in all but name.
So Government of the people, by the Government, for the Government is here to stay.
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Except that the government is still elected by the majority of voters in elections, and we have the ready-built mechanisms for revolution happen four years. It doesn’t happen because the majority of people are apathetic and generally content. If the majority of people suddenly become energized and upset, their first thought is to vote out the current government via the ballot box — *not* take up guns and start shooting people.
One worrisome trend is the slide into a police state, where the police dictate policy and the politicians mostly stay on the side lines. But again, this is happening because the majority of people aren’t concerned about it. If they do become concerned about it, their first inclination is not going to take up guns — their first inclination is going to be to vote in pols who promise to change it.
Remember, democracy is 990 sheep and 10 wolves deciding what’s for dinner (yes, that’s the typical predator-prey ratio, there’s generally at least 99 prey animals for each predator animal). So the wolves are tired of eating grass. But good luck getting the sheep to vote on mutton for dinner, no matter how much the wolf whines and moans that it’s not fair that he has to eat grass instead of what he was born to eat. And violence by a wolf against sheep isn’t going to convince the sheep to vote for mutton for dinner either, it’s going to convince them to hire other wolves to put down the violent wolf. The only way the wolves are going to get mutton for dinner is if they manage to overthrow democracy. That’s it.
-BT
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Not to mention too many of the anti-government types are such dimwits they couldn’t organize a Boy Scout jamboree, much less a revolution.
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Well, Bundy managed to organize his bunch well enough to scare the crap out of a bunch of BLM employees. But that was just putting out a call for like-minded idiots, not anything that would ever topple the government. Like Bukko said above, they would have called out the National Guard — with loaded rifles like at Kent State — to deal with that back in the 1960’s. Bundy’s lucky he was dealing with Obama and not Nixon or Ike.
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Me thinks the government has gotten too big to fail.
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Yeah, that boat left the dock back in 1861-1865, the last time a buncha right wing nutters really did try a revolution. By the end of that one 20% of the white male population of the American South was either dead or disabled and most of the South was smoking ruins. Yeah, that worked out well, didn’t it?
– Badtux the Snarky Penguin
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And the North ended the war with a lot more industry and railroads.
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Maha, of Mahablog, speaks of a “Bigger A-Hole Theory”; namely that in any political dispute, the side that looks like the bigger a-hole loses the vital spectator vote.
And as for revolution, no-one should trust it or war.
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I still say you are all wrong on the color issue, unless you have green skin.
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