Tag: Civil War

Guest Contributor – ArthurinCali – 17FEB2023 – Civil War Battlefield Musings

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We took a family vacation in the early 90s and drove from East Texas all the way to Nashville. At the time, it felt like we stopped at every Civil War battlefield (twice) along the way. Seeing the meadows and rolling hills with cannons and other historical relics was a powerful sight. Imagining the sounds and smells of gunfire, the bravery and fear of the battles is a humbling moment. I recall a story about a Union guard talking to a Confederate soldier from a Tennessee unit who had been captured and noticing the young man’s ill-fitted clothes and general state of shoddy equipment. He (paraphrasing) asked, “Why are you fighting? You don’t appear to have a major stake in this war.” The young man replied, “Because you’re here.” A few years ago I took an interest in researching my family ancestry and found cousins from Tennessee who served in the CSA. They were mountain folk who didn’t have slaves, a plantation, or much of anything else to their name, but I can imagine them giving the Union soldier the same reasoning for taking up arms.

While the current age we live in likes to take American history and ‘Disneyfy’ it into simplistic caricatures of a good/evil binary, the complexities and nuance remains, especially for the War of Northern Aggression. The current charge that history is not being fully taught is correct, but for different reasons than the detractors point out. All they want is history taught in a manner to ensure those who have been deemed the personification of evil stay that way. This isn’t relegated to only American history, but Western Civilization overall. This is how society has arrived to the asinine conclusions that only Europeans conquered and enslaved other peoples throughout world history. It doesn’t acknowledge the reality that human nature hasn’t aged – that all of humanity contains the ability for committing depravities against their fellow man, while also being able to show empathy and compassion at other times.

Binary America

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America is two almost opposite nations occupying the same geographic space.  Red America is a nation that mostly believes in the civic nationalism that was the official narrative of the United States up until the end of World War II.

Blue America is Woke America.  It rejects, almost compulsively, everything that defines Red America.  This goes so far as to reject normal human biology and common-sense rules of societal survival such as that career criminals must be prevented from continuously harming other citizens.

And in addition to this polar opposite contrast between these two outlooks on life, the two nations are extremely closely balanced in numbers.  So much so that neither nation has been able to dominate over the checks and balances of the American constitutional system and impose its will permanently on the other.

This situation has led to extreme animosity against the opposing citizens by each group.  It is beginning to border on what some have called a cold civil war.  It’s not clear whether a resolution of this struggle for control of the country will happen in the foreseeable future.  If it does, it may involve an actual civil war so bloody and destructive as not to be contemplated.

The idea of the country splitting in two parts by one side declaring its independence seems like a recipe for the nightmare civil war scenario that so many people imagine.  I have been thinking of a different plan to mediate the problem.  Let’s call it a patchwork solution.

Each state has to decide which of the two nations it belongs to.  Once the states have formed these two groups each group will sit down and work out the laws that would pertain to the Blue Nation or the Red Nation.  The two groups would also sit down and work out what functions both nations agree that they could share under an umbrella of cooperation.  Maybe the post office, maybe the military (maybe not), maybe highways and airports, maybe the monetary system (maybe not).

Then the two nations would work to allow citizens to migrate between the two areas for an extended period of time in order to accommodate the separation.  And both nations would bend over backwards to minimize the financial impact to the immigrants.  I could see real estate transactions being facilitated by the states so that no one would be stranded or made destitute.  After the period of immigration, the two countries would be governed by the new laws that each nation had chosen.

And everyone would get what they say they want.  Blue America would be a social justice wonderland.  There would be no police.  There would be no gasoline, heating oil or nuclear power.  So mostly people would be like they were before the introduction of electricity and the automobile.  Everyone would have their own pronouns and white people would be hounded to their graves for being white.

Red America would be … America.  Which, if you think about it, would be basically Heaven.

I’ve been trying to figure out what could be said against this.  From the Blue America side, they would have to be tricked into this by convincing them that they would be far better off without all those terrible rednecks that they mock and hate so much.  This will be a monumental job.  Possibly if things continue to go sideways the way they have for the last two years, it may become an easier sell.

What makes it such a difficult sell is that deep down most of the Left knows that without normal people they could never afford the enormous dysfunction that their unrealistic model of human behavior creates.  And if actually forced to pick between the two Americas millions of Leftists would try to sneak into Red America.  This would require some sort of evaluation process to try and weed out the Leftists.

Maybe the rules of Red America would dissuade the Leftists from coming but somehow, I doubt it.  So, forcing everyone to conform to these basic rules would be a good way to discourage wolves in sheep’s clothing.

What would be important during the formation of Red America is to make the rules irrevocable so that if a particular state changes its mind about certain laws that state would have to leave the group and either go it alone or ask for reintegration with Blue America.  In fact, the law allowing secession is an important change from the current American Constitution.  Constraining states to follow laws they don’t believe in is what has gotten us into the situation we’re in now.

So, there’s my mad plan.  Sure, there are all kinds of objections to making this happen but it’s my vision of what might prevent a war.  What do you think?

 

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What Will the Revolution Look Like?

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Civil War, Great Divorce, Loosened Federalism, The Big Crack Up, Bill of Rights Sanctuary States?  I hear so many people talk about the changes that are coming.  But nothing I read seems at all specific about what will happen and how it will end up.  And there’s nothing surprising about it.  It’s because nobody really knows what will happen.  So, what do we know?

I think one thing that is crystal clear is that the most progressive 30% of the country despises the most conservative 30% of the country.  And at this point, vice versa.  We also know that the 40% left over in the squishy middle are hopeless idiots that ricochet back and forth from election to election.  Because of this no hope exists that we’ll be able to resolve the differences between the Left and Right through the election process at the federal level.  But we do know that the elites control all the institutions that dictate how we live our lives; the schools, the colleges, big business, the media, etc.

The only way forward that I can see that will move things forward is for the states to put together an agenda of changes that they will drive within their boundaries and change the way life is lived by their citizens.  This is in line with what Ron DeSantis is doing in Florida.  He is working with his legislature to defend his citizens from being forced by the federal government to surrender their freedoms.  He has outlawed mask mandates and vaccine mandates and that has been a boon for his state.

But what needs to be done is for the Red States to organize and go after other obnoxious targets.  For instance, almost every college in America is a bastion of woke ideology where normal young people are brainwashed and bludgeoned by Leftist professors and administrators.  Why?  Florida has an enormous number of colleges, about one hundred and thirty of them, and there are millions of students.  Why shouldn’t there be a bill of rights for college students?  The state could regulate the misbehavior of administrators and professors by bringing fines and even jail time in cases where the civil rights of non-leftists are being attacked.  And since these schools are in fact large scale conspiracies of Leftist propaganda, I could see organized crime laws being used to threaten them with a permanent shut down.  That would be something to see.  And beyond that even their use of affirmative action could be attacked at the state level.

I’m aware that the feds would try to intervene.  And that’s where this would have to break new ground.  The states would have to resist any attempts by the feds to intervene.  Not caving to the Justice Department; this would be the revolution.  It’s never been done, except by the Left.  Look at sanctuary cities, marijuana laws.  These are examples of states saying no to the federal law.  This is what the revolution would have to be.

And it’s not just restricted to colleges.  The states can take control of the public schools, the welfare programs, corporate policies on affirmative action, tech companies discriminating against conservatives, obscenity laws, even things as controversial as gay marriage and adoption.  All these parts of life can be addressed by governors and legislatures.  And these things would be wildly popular.  They could even use referendums to gauge the relative popularity of different problems and use this information to decide which initiatives to address first.

Controlling the federal government is still something we can attempt to do.  But in the meantime, waiting for this to happen is a mistake.  The states will have to lead the way and free their people.  That is the revolution we are waiting for.

When Does the Break Occur?

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When I was just a young kid, I started reading science fiction.  And why not?  Science fiction was all about rocket ships and there were real rocket ships going into real space right before my eyes.  And one of my favorite authors was Robert Heinlein.  He wrote all about the early days of man’s conquest of the universe.  And he built his own fictional universe with a “Future History” timeline that talked about how all this progress would effect mankind.  And one of the things he “predicted” was “The Crazy Years.”  These were tucked into the 1960’s and would involve the breakdown of social mores and widespread confusion and anti-social trends.  Reading it makes it sound very much like what the actual sixties were like.  And the prediction was that this breakdown of societal stability would lead to wars and revolution and dictatorships to address the lack of order.  By the 1980’s I was feeling bad for old Pops Heinlein when we didn’t fall into chaos.  After all Ronald Reagan had reestablished order on the shining city on a hill.

Well, time has shown me that I was too impatient.  I didn’t wait long enough for the end of the Crazy Years.  And who better to officiate at the climax of the Crazy Years than a dementia patient?  Good Old Joe Biden.  Joe has taken it upon himself to finish off the American republic for good and all.  He’s not working around the edges like his boy Obama.  No, he’s got his knife right at the throat and is just waiting to have Congress put the bowl out to catch the blood so they can pass it over to their vampires to gorge on.

But the Future History timeline also showed that eventually the Crazy Years would be ended by serious men.  They would organize and topple the insane governments that allowed their people to be victimized by the insane and the lawless.  Usually in Heinlein’s stories they would be military or former military men.  Only after order was restored would civilian government be restored.  But even then, things wouldn’t go back to the way they had been.  A lesson had been learned.

So, I have two questions.

  • How long, if ever, will it take for men to emerge who will say this has gone far enough and we’re going to fix this?
  • Will any changes be put in place to prevent the madness from coming back?

I’ve been trying to answer these hypothetical questions.  Probably it’s just a fantasy with little or no science to it.  But it makes me feel better to think I’m at least looking ahead.  If I was going to guess I’d say that it will happen in some area of the country where the proportion of normal people is still fairly high.  And how it will happen is that some city in this healthy area will start causing serious damage to the people in the suburbs and rural areas.  After that, the state government will try to address this situation and the federal government will try to prevent them.  And that’s where the flashpoint will occur.  If the state gets Washington to back down that will set the pattern for greater and greater state autonomy and less and less power by Washington.  And once the other Red States see this, they will follow suit.  That will be the tipping point to changing what is happening across the country.  New laws will be made to address the underlying causes of the instability and lawlessness and at some point, the Red States and the Blue States will have to recognize and formalize the changes to the way they interact.

But if the federal government crushes the state’s attempt to end urban lawlessness, then it will take a much longer time for vigilantes to start self-policing their local areas.  It will be a grassroots movement and it will be fought by the FBI investigating disappearances of known felons who went too far out of their home turf and just vanished.

Now, how long will it take to reach these places?  For something to be done by the states, that could happen tomorrow.  Let’s say anytime in the next few years.  For grassroots vigilantism to become a widespread phenomenon, I guess it depends on how violent the attacks become.  But I’d say it might take five or ten years for people to get desperate enough to stake their lives on it.  These are just guesses.

As for my second question, what changes will be put in place in a new national government.  I would say that the biggest changes would be mandatory gun ownership, codified right to state secession from the Union and permanent migrant control policies.  If I were to add anything to these three things, I’d add outlaw affirmative action and female suffrage and restore an all-normal male armed forces and finally start taxing companies based on what percentage of their workforce is in the United States.

So, the bad news is, unless some governor successfully backs the federal government down on the lawlessness they’ve unleashed, it could take a decade for a grassroots vigilantism movement to mature into something powerful enough to take hold and move us toward the restoration of order.

So, there’s my crack at being a right-wing Nostradamus.  In most of Heinlein’s books revolts went along with a lot of bloody battles.  And there was no guarantee that outside forces wouldn’t lob in some nukes to make it interesting.  But I gave you my best shot.  What’s your thoughts?

Is the Left Ready for Civil War?

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I used to think that the Left was in over their heads and were letting themselves be panicked into allowing their crazier allies run wild during the Trump administration in order to discredit him.  I’m no longer sure.  I’ve been thinking about whether maybe they want to push this thing to martial law and go all the way to a permanent coup.

They keep using the FBI to criminalize dissent and they are now unphased by the permanent anarchy in places like Portland and Chicago.  Maybe they intend to harass normal people endlessly until in desperation they turn to force to protect themselves and use this as an excuse to declare martial law.  I hadn’t considered this seriously before but now I did.  After all, even a half-assed US military is equipped with weapons that no private group or even a state militia could deal with.  Drones and tanks and attack helicopters don’t have to be controlled by the best and brightest to win the day.  I know this sound like lunacy but I would have said that about locking down the planet to deal with a bioweapon that when looked at objectively doesn’t exactly look like an extinction event.

Well, maybe it’s true.  Maybe they’d like to provoke a serious reaction.  They keep trying to gin up a militia attack on themselves.  They let antifa and BLM torture normal people at every turn.  It’s a cinch they want to use these things to go after gun rights and tighten the surveillance state powers they already have.

For the sake of argument let’s say that they’ve calculated the results of a martial law takeover and are now willing to change the government into a permanent autocracy and forego the charade of elections.  Should that make us change the way we act?  Should we be walking on eggshells to avoid giving them an excuse?  I don’t think so.

My way of thinking about it is that if they did decide to take over, they could easily manufacture whatever kind of incident they think they need to do it.  With complete control of all communications and the press they already can tell whatever story they want to.  In fact, they already do.  So, I don’t think they need any help.

But after a little thought I’ve decided they won’t do it.  But neither is this a panicky accident.  I think the threat is what they want to use.  They’ll attack individuals and they will use lawfare and they will ratchet up the controls to almost any lengths short of actually declaring a coup.  I think intimidation and psyops are what they think are their strong suit.  And with the antifa and BLM benefitting from selective enforcement of the law the damage they can do to their enemies is pretty impressive.

So, I don’t think the Left is prepared for war.  I think they know that if the armed forces were seen to be unleashed against the civilian population it would have a delegitimizing effect on their regime both nationally and internationally.  As it is Joe Biden has become a figure of ridicule.  The chants at football games and the general mockery he is receiving by anyone not completely in the tank for the Dems shows that the credibility of his administration has already been eroded.  It won’t take many more failures to convince the majority of Americans that his regime is a failure.

So, if the Left has a policy of rattling sabers but stopping short of actual war what should our policy be?  Well, I guess that depends on what we are trying to do.  If we still have a hope of regaining control of the federal government then the plan is to disassemble the deep state.  Fire an enormous percentage of the management of the intelligence bureaus and start pulling back their authority to intimidate Americans.

If we don’t have hope of getting the federal government back under control, we will need to start building up the autonomy and strength of the red states and coordinate their actions to resist tyrannical actions by the federal government.

Another Day in the Maelström

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“And all this time,

in travail, sobbing, gaining on the current,

we rowed into the strait—Skylla to port

and on our starboard beam Kharybdis, dire

gorge of the salt sea tide. By heaven! when she

vomited, all the sea was like a cauldron

seething over intense fire, when the mixture

suddenly heaves and rises.

 

The shot spume

soared to the landside heights, and fell like rain.

But when she swallowed the sea water down

we saw the funnel of the maelstrom, heard

the rock bellowing all around, and dark

sand raged on the bottom far below.

My men all blanched against the gloom, our eyes

were fixed upon that yawning mouth in fear

of being devoured.”

(THE ODYSSEY by Homer;  Translated by Robert Fitzgerald;  Book Twelve, lines 280 – 290)

 

 “In five minutes the whole sea, as far as Vurrgh, was lashed into ungovernable fury; but it was between Moskoe and the coast that the main uproar held its sway. Here the vast bed of the waters, seamed and scarred into a thousand conflicting channels, burst suddenly into phrensied convulsion — heaving, boiling, hissing — gyrating in gigantic and innumerable vortices, and all whirling and plunging on to the eastward with a rapidity which water never elsewhere assumes except in precipitous descents.

  In a few minutes more, there came over the scene another radical alteration. The general surface grew somewhat more smooth, and the whirlpools, one by one, disappeared, while prodigious streaks of foam became apparent where none had been seen before. These streaks, at length, spreading out to a great distance, and entering into combination, took unto themselves the gyratory motion of the subsided vortices, and seemed to form the germ of another more vast. Suddenly — very suddenly — this assumed a distinct and definite existence, in a circle of more than a mile in diameter. The edge of the whirl was represented by a broad belt of gleaming spray ;  but no particle of this slipped into the mouth of the terrific funnel, whose interior, as far as the eye could fathom it, was a smooth, shining, and jet-black wall of water, inclined to the horizon at an angle of some forty-five degrees, speeding dizzily round and round with a swaying and sweltering motion, and sending forth to the winds an appalling voice, half shriek, half roar, such as not even the mighty cataract of Niagara ever lifts up in its agony to Heaven.

    The mountain trembled to its very base, and the rock rocked. I threw myself upon my face, and clung to the scant herbage in an excess of nervous agitation.

    “This,” said I at length, to the old man — “this can be nothing else than the great whirlpool of the Maelström.””

(A Descent Into The Maelstrom by Edgar Allan Poe)

 

The folks in the dissident right and more and more even normies like myself talk about the chaotic world that the Left has generated as Clown World or The Narrative or whatever term of unreality we can summon to describe this never-ending crisis that they’ve created and we live in.  And it is this.  It is a vertigo inducing environment that just keeps getting weirder and weirder and worse and worse.  Logically I know that there will be a bottom but what I haven’t thought too much about is how bad that bottom will be.  But I ‘ve been starting to do just that.  I look at the players that have been creating these conditions and I think they are willing to go a lot further with this stuff.

Back at the end of Obama’s second term he organized the beginning of BLM by instructing the Justice Department to both intimidate city police forces and empower street thugs by selectively enforcing federal laws.  Four years later we had the George Floyd riots as the next larger wave of this kind of federally sponsored street violence.  My guess is that the next wave will occur after the mid-term elections.  And I don’t think it matters whether the Democrats or the Republicans win.  Biden or Harris’s Justice Department will still be calling the shots and they will be looking to beat down the people living within their power.  One caveat, it’s possible it won’t wait for the end of 2022.  If Biden continues to lose power and fails to move his legislative objectives, I could see the powers that be deciding to flex their muscles sooner.

The question then is how bad could that get?  What I’m thinking is that street violence will be used as an excuse to push those stalled objectives.  They’ll use it to get slavery reparations, redistribution through confiscation of 401K accounts and other outrages.  They also want to pack the Supreme Court to allow some extremely unconstitutional actions.  Those probably include gun seizure and curtailment of freedom of speech.

Am I painting an overly grim picture?  Maybe.  But I no longer think of any of these things as unthinkable.  The people in Obama’s circle are as revolutionary as Lenin or Stalin were.  And a lot of the Republicans are less than impressive.  So far, no heroes have emerged to push back against the coordinated strength of the Left.  If our enemies hadn’t become so transparently devoted to destroying our world it would be even harder to rally the Right.  Very few useful people can have missed what’s going on.  But that being said our backs are pretty tightly up against the wall.  There is precious little time to reverse these things.  If we don’t change course, we will hit bottom.  And after that there won’t be much left.

And that’s the metaphor of the maelström.  If you get sucked down into Charybdis and dragged across the rocks on the bottom there won’t be much left.  It would be better to steer toward Scylla.  She’ll take a few lives but the ship will survive.  I’ll leave it to the readers to figure which course of ours is which.

Codevilla Proposes a Plan for Avoiding a Civil War – Federalism

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Anthony Codevilla lays out how he sees restoring a way of life would have to take place in the United States.  And he clearly says that neither side is going to convince the other side to go along with it.  But he thinks the only way to avoid actual warfare is for the two sides to separate along regional or even local areas and ignore each other.  In this way the larger country can still cooperate on things like roads and armed forces without having to completely split the country in two.

It’s very long but worth reading if you enjoy an historian’s recapping of the historical precedence for re-establishing a conquered nation.  He goes into the way he thinks a national leader has to act to have this movement succeed.  And he does say that a strong leader will be necessary.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ZMan Claims Collapse of Social Trust Will Mean Societal Collapse Soon

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ZMan walks us through the institutions that have burned through their social trust and then finishes by saying that the American Empire will soon have its collapse like the Soviet Union.

I think he makes a lot of good points.  But it’s not clear to me that any systemic collapse is likely to happen anytime soon.  And the reason for that is a collapse doesn’t occur until some external event intrudes.  So, when will that happen?  Well, it could happen tomorrow or it could be a decade.  Now, I don’t think it will be a decade, in fact I could see something happening within three or four years but I wouldn’t even think of saying it’s going to happen on such and such a day.  I think a good trick would be to try to guess what the external triggering event is likely to be.  An easy guess is a financial collapse.  The result of some kind of stagflation or very high unemployment might be enough to destabilize the political situation.  But if we are talking about a societal collapse like the Soviet collapse it would be important to know what the US military would do in the case of essentially an insurrection.  And that will completely depend on who is in the military at the time.

It’s fun to imagine a scenario that will end the Left’s hold on power.  But trying to predict its occurrence against a calendar is maybe too difficult to try at this time.

 

 

Putting Things in Perspective – Part 2 – Civil War Analogy

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After discussing the Revolutionary War last time, the next major historical comparison I’d like to look at is the one comparing our situation to the mid-nineteenth century American Civil War.  In this comparison the Left is equated with the historical “North” and the Right with the “South.”

We’ll start with things that do align in this comparison.  The cultural and intellectual elites of the Abolitionist Movement do line up well with the modern Left.  In fact, there is probably a decent number among today’s Woke Left that are direct descendants from the Abolitionists themselves.  And certain historians believe that the culture of New England and its exports to areas like the Great Lakes area and the Pacific Coast states have preserved the viewpoint and authority of the nineteenth century elites from that region of the country.  From that point of view there is a certain direct analogy between the Northern Abolitionist Leadership and the Modern Left.

But let’s look at some of the other factors.  First of all, let’s look at the driving force of the cause.  The Abolitionists wanted to end slavery.  It’s hard to over stress just how popular this cause was.  It was evident to even many Southerners that slavery was an evil that could not be justified by its benefits to the economy.  For a country whose whole existence is expressed in the single word freedom, slavery is anathema.  Therefore, the moral underpinnings of the Civil War were very powerful.  Certainly, the Southern States were able to muster a justification for the practice of slavery but at no time did this justification convince anyone outside of the South and not even everyone inside.  So, the abolition of slavery was a cause that resonated broadly around the United States outside of the Deep South.

But look at the current agenda of the Woke Left.  It is a rag tag grab bag of radical ideas and identity politics grievances that isn’t even rationally self-consistent.  Feminism and even lesbian feminism are at odds with transgender “rights.”  And the BLM agenda of eliminating the police won’t stand scrutiny by other communities like Asians and Hispanics now that they see that it equates to wholesale criminal anarchy.  It is far from certain that even in the “Blue States” that the whole agenda of the radical Left is entirely acceptable.  This is a major difference between the Civil War situation.  The Left’s agenda today is far less popular than the abolition of slavery was back then.

The next consideration is the location of each “side.”  The Confederacy was never able to convince even some of the slave states to join in its revolt.  The border states Kentucky, Missouri and Maryland never seceded.  And even an area of Virginia refused to join and “seceded” from Virginia to become West Virginia and remain with the Union.  Inside the free states there weren’t any large areas that would have joined the South or opposed the abolition of slavery for the most part.

But look at today.  Instead, the Red and Blue States are only an indicator of the majority status of each side in a state.  But geographically we can see that this is really a city versus countryside polarization.  The cities in the Red States are full of Leftists for the most part and even deep Blue States like California and New York have rural areas that are completely red.  This definitely helps our side.  These concentrated populations of Leftists work well when you want to cheat during an election but it doesn’t help much when you are trying to control a population that is diffused over thousands of square miles in some cases.  Controlling the back country especially when it is adjacent to a Red State may turn out to be an impossible job.

And finally in the 1860’s the slave states were so afraid of a Republican holding the White House that they seceded before Lincoln could even assemble his government.  We’ve seen two truly woke administration already.  Obama and now Biden.  And Biden is using all the force of the federal government to destroy our way of life.  But what it seems to show is that determined state leaders can use the state laws to combat these Woke orders and possibly nullify their effects without having to leave the Union.  This is still a preliminary evaluation but I think it is worth seeing if the lessons learned from Sanctuary Cities can be applied to other issues like Second Amendment Rights and First Amendment Freedoms.

So, from the point of view comparison, it seems to me that our side is significantly better off in the present situation than the South was during the Civil War.  And that is definitely a thing to be happy about.

Putting Things in Perspective – Part 1 – Revolutionary War Analogy

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When people on our side talk about what’s going on today, they sometimes make analogies to historical situations.  The circumstances in 5th Century BC Athens, Late Republican Rome, the American Revolutionary War, the American Civil War and even Stalinist Russia are all used as analogies for our present-day situation.  But in order to be helpful it’s just as important to understand clearly how our situation differs from these analogies.  Otherwise, decisions will be made based on faulty thinking.

I don’t intend to make an exhaustive comparison between our situation and all these others but I would like to make a few points that I think are useful.

The first comparison I’d like to make is to the American Revolution.  The point of comparison is that in each case there is a side that is chafing under misrule and denial of freedoms.  And especially since these freedoms were specifically enshrined in the Bill of Rights, we look at our situation and feel that maybe the same remedy applies to us.  But let’s look at how our situation differs.

When the Americans kicked the British out of Boston, they were able to make it stick.  England was thousands of miles away across an ocean.  Boston was a port town that possessed a shipbuilding industry and a well-established economy that drew on a well settled countryside that had been growing and expanding for over a hundred and fifty years.  And the outcome of the French and Indian War meant that the American Colonials understood the power of their own military forces versus what troops the British were willing to commit.  And their participation in these earlier wars had made the settlers less dependent on the British for military aid.  Finally, New England was far from an inviting place for the British to fight a war.  The cold snowy winters and forested landscape would provide enormous logistical problems to an occupying army.  That explains why Boston was free of British encroachment throughout the war.  The British probably assumed that they would be able to hold onto at least some areas of the colonies after a protracted war but the Americans also knew that once some areas, like New England, were free of the British, over time the cost of holding onto the others would become increasingly expensive.  So, for the colonists it was a war of wills with time on their side.

Now look at our situation.  Our enemies have reinforced possession of both coasts of the United States including the national capitol and all the major ports except on the Gulf of Mexico.  They have at least as many citizens on their side as we do and they also own the banking system and many of the largest manufacturing corporations.  They also control the communication companies and currently command the military apparatus and all the intelligence services.  They are not going away.  To imagine that we can free ourselves from their grasp quickly and easily is delusional.  They will use all available means to maintain control over the institutions that define life in the United States.  The Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare systems are as fundamental to normal life in the Red States as they are to the Blue.  The banking system is so important to the commercial life of the country that it is hard to see how we would ever disentangle ourselves from it.  But if we were to try to separate from the Blue States, that’s exactly what we would have to do.

So, in the sense that our enemy is not half a world away and not limited as to how much military might it can dedicate to a war, we are much worse off than the colonists.  But in terms of what kind of war we can fight we have much more flexibility and therein lies our best hope.  We do not have to put troops in the field.  We are looking to win hearts and minds and demoralize our enemies.  In that sense what we are attempting is a lot more like what Gandhi and the Indians did to force the British to abandon their Indian Empire.  We are working to destroy the legitimacy of the Progressives’ right to abrogate the constitutional freedoms we have been deprived of.

The specifics of this kind of strategy are figuring out what tactics add cost and misery to the lives of your opponents.  And these tactics will have to change whenever and wherever conditions change.  This type of war is completely familiar to the Left.  This is the Alinsky playbook.  They have used it to dismantle every organization and power structure in this country and make them their own.  We will have to do the same thing in reverse.

In a way our ability to use the Alinsky rules will actually be easier than what the Left originally did in the sixties.  If we can coordinate with Red State governments and protect the protestors from the federal agencies then it should be possible to neutralize federal control over large swaths of the country and return normalcy to those areas.  For instance, suppose Dementia Joe gets the Supreme Court to legitimize gun grabbing.  A countermeasure might be for the governor of a Red State to deputize the whole population as peace officers and allow them ownership of assault rifles as a perk of that office.  Another example, if banks start de-platforming the deplorables the states could punish those banks until they stop.  And if that fails the state can form a bank that can take the place of these enemy institutions.

So, whereas the analogy of our situation to the Revolutionary War is not particularly helpful the common underlying problem in both cases does still have real world solutions.  Just different ones.

Putting Things in Perspective – Part 2 – Civil War Analogy