Read a f****** history book. Read a recent history book. The U.S. had thousands of domestic bombings per year in the early 1970s. This is what happens when citizens decide en masse that their political system is corrupt, racist, and unresponsive.
‘The people out of power have only just begun to flex their dissatisfaction. The day will come, sooner that you all think, when Trump administration officials will look back fondly on the time when all they had to worry about was getting hollered at at a Mexican restaurant.
Hamilton Nolan
June 25, 2018
This Is Just the Beginning
[There may be interesting times ahead. I was asked last Monday if I thought there would be a civil war in our country soon. I told them, “No. At least not one like the previous one with two or more militaries and visible government support on each side.”
However, Jim Goad does point out:
Third of Americans see a new US Civil War likely soon. As it stands currently: North 1, South 0. https://t.co/v8EtMgxgTz
In the following thread Jordenius @Jordenius offered a correction of:
Republicans 1, Democrats 0.
Which, for some reason, in my mind, made it more real and likely to occur.
But when I think about it I still don’t think it will be military v. military. It will be left wing terrorists against the existing governments and hapless individuals caught in the middle. Which means the left wing terrorists will not have broad public support and will for the most part lose. It might play out similar to how it did in the 1970s.—Joe]
The good ole Lefties are also going to encounter a significantly armed population. I expect that more than a few may welcome the police rather than experiencing justice by the people.
If you take it back to the US Revolutionary War, it’s:
Pro-rule-of-law, Pro-representation, Pro-liberty, Pro-rights: 2+
Pro-“keep the rabble in line”: 0
The USRevWar wasn’t anti-monarchy. It wasn’t necessarily about taxes, either. It was about taxes that the colonists didn’t have a say in imposing those taxes. It was about unaccountable officers showing up and throwing their weight around. When they objected, their own legislative bodies were dissolved, local courts abolished and redcoats billeted under their roofs. If the Crown and Parliment had recognized in the Americas the rights under Magna Carta that Englishmen were due, we’d probably still have Queen Lizzie-Two as our head of state. Also, there would be no separate Canada and WW1 and WW2 would have been quite different.
The pro-communist radicals didn’t win in the 70s because they were not pro-rights, pro-liberty, pro-rule-of-law. They were pro-communism and the imposition of the total power of the state. Their typical plan of causing trouble and undermining faith in the established government works great when the established government is another totalitarian regime. What’s the problem with exchanging one type of boot on your neck for another, right? The bombs and disruption plan doesn’t work so well when the government system is limited and the people are sovereign.
Looping back to 2A topics, however, that line of thinking brings me to an interesting place. If your government is 100% in charge of keeping you safe, and you may not do anything yourself, then if there is a terrorist bombing campaign that the government can’t stop, the government is weakened and therefore ripe to be overthrown. On the other hand, if the people are ultimately responsible for their own defense, and the militia is well-regulated to be a rapid reaction reserve force officered by individuals elected by the people, and the government’s role is to train, equip and organize that militia and get out of the way, then a terrorist campaign is less likely to work to sway the people to overthrow their government because the people have their own power to resist and thus the terrorists are attacking THEM.
I wouldn’t exactly call the civil war a war for liberty or representation. The civil war eliminated states rights and enabled the north to use the feds as a means of controlling and stealing from the south.
Well, to describe the abolition of slavery as a more complete implementation of the promises made in the Constitution, in that sense, it was an expansion of liberty.
As for everything else… yeah, we lost important precedents, and everything got complicated.
Maybe we’d have been better off without the 3/5 compromise, took the slave-owner’s position of full accounting, then out-industrialed them and made them pay the full freight of their inefficient slave population in terms of contributing to the federal coffers. Remember that before the 16th amendment, both representation in Congress and the required proportional funding of the federal government was tied to census figures. Equal representation for equal contribution, state-by-state. Oh, well. Should’ve, would’ve, could’ve.
Tirno, it’s very clear from the history that abolition was not the purpose of the Civil War. It was made part of the argument late in the course of the war (by the Emancipation Proclamation, which brought abolition but only to the South). But at first it had nothing to do with that subject, and Lincoln made his lack of interest in abolition quite clear on various occasions.
The notion of the civil war being about slavery is true from the perspective of the South. They were convinced that the Republicans would either immediately abolish slavery or would prevent its spread into the territories setting the stage for later abolition. There have been a lot of attempts to say otherwise but they fail to convince me. From the perspective of the North, however, it was not about slavery. Not only can you cite Lincoln but abolition was a minority opinion in the North with probably half the abolitionists being squishes. So it was about secession but why did the North care so much. I tend to think it was more about the West and not wanting to let another country control the Mississippi and half control the Ohio which were the great avenues of commerce of the time. Predictions are hard especially about the future and the key failures here were how tough (600,000 dead and wrecking half the country) it would be to subdue the South and failure to foresee how important railroads would become and how fast.
The 60’s and 70’s radicals never got wide support from any group and spent most of their time arguing or snitching on each other.
Only the Puerto Rican separatist had staying power.
Rich white kids playing Che does not make a revolution.
There might be another civil war, but if so, it isn’t going to be anything like the last one, with organized armies fighting pitched battles against each other, supported and controlled by stable governments. Whichever force ends up controlling the artillery, tanks, jets, drones, etc will have such an overwhelming advantage in pitched battles that whoever is against them would never bother to fight that way.
And that’s a bad thing, because now there’s no way to cleanly end the war.
If it happens, I think it would be a steady escalation of the type of conflict we have now. Lots of secretive groups with a wide variety of actual beliefs and associations. Once in a while they get into fights on the streets, usually with non-lethal weapons. More often, they carry out their own operations, do something attention-getting and disruptive, then disappear before anyone can really react. Both those operations and the street brawls could become more and more violent, escalating to assassinations. If it gets bad enough, the Government, regardless of which side is in charge, will have to either crack down way hard, or become irrelevant.
What is the relationship between fire bombs and penis size?
I knew some of the wannabes that thought a revolution was necessary in the 60’s. One of them even got arrested for raiding a classified research center near CU. He was a member of the SDS – Students for a Democratic Society (radical political organization of the 1960s). Nixon took the sails out of the movements by doing away with the draft. Unfortunately, I also knew other students who signed up for service but reported to other countries instead – a lifelong sentence. And others that were drafted – one happy go lucky guy got himself kicked out basic. He was a mess after that and committed suicide a few years later.
I agree with you that they did not have widespread support, and most students just found that life after college got in the way of revolutionary ideals. My wife’s first reaction to the idea of a leftist revolution today is how can they fight a war since many (most) don’t believe in guns? That was not generally true in the 60’s. It was where can we get them? And how can we make Molotov cocktails and bombs?
“The people out of power have only just begun to flex their dissatisfaction.”
Actually, the people out of power conclusively expressed their dissatisfaction with the status quo on 08 November 2016. Hammy simply refuses to accept that reality.
ETA: I’m not surprised that Hammy refuses to accept reality, since collectivists tend to believe that history eternally begins one second ago.