Government sponsorship of violence against opponents or complacency
in the face of incitement to violence is a powerful tool of political
repression. Regimes such as Cuba, Venezuela, Iran, Nicaragua, China, and other
tyrannies have used such tactics to great effect. When mobs attack
anti-government demonstrators, for example, the police either disappear or
stand by watching. In American cities run by Democrats and on the U.S. college
and university campuses, the authorities increasingly have been standing by as
radicals do the dirty work of beating up or silencing conservatives.
In
societies riven by mutual hate, the people who control the police and public
communications make all the difference. When they maintain impartiality, as did
Germany’s Weimar government while the Nazis and Communists struggled for primacy,
partisan warfare tends to be resolved politically—though the results are harsh.
When societal hatred or the partiality of authorities results in deaths,
long-smoldering cold civil war can blaze into holocaust.
We
Americans are now facing the danger of a civil war thus ignited. We do not
think of civil war this way because our Civil War from 1861 to 1865 was less a
conflict within society than it was a highly organized war between states. That
war notwithstanding, personal friendships and mutual esteem persisted on both
sides, such as that between Ulysses S. Grant and prominent Confederate General
James Longstreet.
What
we face now is worse.
What’s Typical in Civil Wars?
Classic civil wars, from Thucydides’ account of the Corcyrean revolution of 431 B.C. to the Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939, tend to be far more bitterly murderous than anything that has yet happened in America. These wars ignite when public power abets—or is perceived as having abetted—violence in longstanding social struggles, when authorities treat opponents as outside the protection of the laws, or when they criminalize political differences outright.
Classic civil wars, from Thucydides’ account of the Corcyrean revolution of 431 B.C. to the Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939, tend to be far more bitterly murderous than anything that has yet happened in America. These wars ignite when public power abets—or is perceived as having abetted—violence in longstanding social struggles, when authorities treat opponents as outside the protection of the laws, or when they criminalize political differences outright.
The
authorities also bear most of the responsibility for piling up and drying the
partisan fuel that they then ignite. Thucydides tells us that the Corcyrean
parties’ adherence to the Peloponnesian War’s opposing sides simply sharpened
their long simmering conflict. It mattered little which of the two first
refused to accept losing a vote in the city assembly and accused the winners of
improprieties. Reciprocally, they heated their cold civil war until one side
shed blood. The spiral of violence then accelerated, and the city essentially
depopulated itself.
In
1920s Spain, the newly formed Communist Party, the socialists, anarchists, and
various regional separatists spurred each other’s hostility toward the
country’s Catholic, royalist population. Where the Left won local elections in
May 1931, mobs of its supporters ravaged churches, raped nuns, and beat
conservatives with impunity. As leftist violence spread to the rest of the
country after the June national elections, conservative localities retaliated,
and the army began to plot against the republic.
The
Spanish government turned conservative in 1934. That led to the “popular front”
alliance, consisting primarily of radicals, which narrowly won the 1936
elections. In the aftermath, a militant leftist squad leader was killed. As the
police searched for the killer, one of their entourage murdered the country’s
leading conservative politician, Jose Calvo Sotelo. The army struck back. The
atrocities committed by ordinary people on ordinary people dwarfed the armies’
horrors. “Viva la muerte,” long live death, is the ensuing war’s most memorable
saying.
Suborning Violence
It all starts with getting people accustomed to hating each other. And that starts at the top.
It all starts with getting people accustomed to hating each other. And that starts at the top.
Saying
hateful things about one’s opponents is a time-tested way of stoking
supporters’ enthusiasm, of building support for one’s own side. But when blood
is spilled, someone, then everyone else, tends to use it as a pretext for
inciting more violence. That’s the meaning of blood-feud.
The
story of the contemporary American Left’s sponsorship of hate and violence
begins around 1964, when the Democratic Party chose to abandon the Southern
constituencies that had been its mainstay since the time of Jefferson and
Jackson. In less than a decade, the party found itself increasingly dependent
on gaining super-majorities among blacks, upscale liberals, and constituencies
of resentment in general—and hence on stoking their hate.
For
the past half century, America’s political history has been driven by the
Democratic Party’s effort to fire up these constituencies by denigrating the
rest of America. As elements of cynical calculation melded into self-images of
righteous entitlement to rule inferiors, the boundaries between the party and
the constituencies’ most radical parts have eroded.
In
the 21st century’s second decade, explicit statements by the party’s principal
figures—President Obama, Hillary Clinton, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, to name only a few—have led their epigones in power
as well as millions of followers to think and act as if conservatives were
simply on a lower level of humanity, and should have their faces rubbed in
their own inferiority. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo simply declared that
pro-lifers and other conservatives have no place in his state.
As
the media amplified and cheered such guidance from on high, it would be
surprising if many ordinary followers have not concluded that harassing if not
harming conservatives in restaurants, airports, as well as in their public
functions is not just permissible but praiseworthy, and if
thousands of persons who exercise power over cities, towns and schools have not
concluded that facilitating such harassment and harm is their duty.
Police
in leftist jurisdictions have stood aside as violent groups disrupted the 2016
Republican presidential campaign and the 2017 presidential inauguration in
Washington, D.C., as racial mobs have ravaged malls and shut down major roads,
as conservatives have been attacked physically as they tried to speak or merely
observed. The media have basically justified the violence. The other side has
done nothing comparable—yet.
But
since the ruling class’s condemnations of conservatives as racists,
environmental criminals, and would-be terrorists are becoming well-nigh
universal, the probability of deadly attacks on conservatives, of intolerable
convictions or absolutions, and assassinations, rises to certainty. So does
corresponding demand for protection and revenge.
It
would be surprising were political words from on high not to be among the
factors that trigger mentally ill persons to act out their fantasies. Although
the number of mass shootings in America has declined in recent decades, the role
of politics in the killers’ derangement seems to have increased. In the closest
call yet, a few months after the 2017 inaugural, a Democratic Party activist
who had supported Bernie Sanders and regularly posted violent rants against
President Trump on social media opened fire on Republican congressmen
practicing for a baseball game, nearly killing Representative Steve Scalise
(R-La.). The ruling class rushed to exonerate itself.
The
ruling class’s provocative bias has been on display subsequent to the most
recent outrages by mental cases—22 killed in El Paso, Texas, and nine in
Dayton, Ohio—the first by someone who mixed anti-immigration rantings with
radical environmentalism, the second by a purebred leftist. The bodies were
still warm as Democratic presidential candidates vied to indict President
Trump, his supporters and, yes, white men in general, for membership in
(nonexistent) murderous white supremacist organizations. The fact that many of
the denouncers are white men only underlined their short-term political
calculations. The congressman representing El Paso and its sheriff told
President Trump to stay out of their city. Dayton’s mayor said the same thing.
Who can enforce dicta of that sort?
What
should happen, what can happen, when the real, existing violent organizations
of the Left—Antifa and the several radical black organizations—try to exclude
or to punish? Several cities—Portland, Oregon and Charlottesville, Virginia
among them—have had their streets taken over. What happens when these
organizations organize mobs to harass their least favorite people? What happens
when some of them wind up dead?
At
a certain point, the other side shoots back. Here as elsewhere, the several
police forces may be expected to split and take opposite sides. Then the army’s
special forces become the arbiters, and the war rages.
We
know that our ruling class having largely made government into a partisan
thing, America has crossed the threshold of revolution. While we have no way of
knowing what lies ahead, we know that the spiral of political violence has
already taken its first fateful turns, and that the logic of our partisan
ruling class is pushing for more.
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