Have We Tilted Or Is The Country Out Of Plumb?

     I’m going to do a naughty thing today, Gentle Reader; I’m going to consciously, deliberately, and with malice aforethought “bury the lede.” (And if that isn’t the splittest split infinitive you’ve ever encountered in your reading days, gimme a sec and I’ll concoct a worse one.) But I promise that you’ll never be in any doubt about what I’m saying.

---

     An hour or so later the bodies were gone, and Kragar was sitting in the living room with me while I gradually stopped trembling. "Right in my house, Kragar," I said for about the ninth time.
     "I know, boss," he said.
     "You don't do that."
     Aibynn was in his room, drumming, he said, to pull himself back together. Kragar said, "I know why they did, though."
     "What do you mean?"
     "Remember a few weeks ago? Didn't you go busting into someone's house to get information from him?"
     I took a very deep breath. "Yes," I said.
     "There you have it. You broke the rules, they broke the rules. That's how it works, Vlad."
     "I should have known."
     "Yeah."

     [Steven Brust, Phoenix]

     The game is its set of rules. Indeed, a system of any sort is identical to its rules: whatever laws (and the penalties specified for breaking them) regulate its participants. That applies with especially relevant force to a political system and the society that has grown along with it.

     If a group of participants is permitted to break the rules without suffering the prescribed penalties, that group has a killing edge over the others in the system. “The rule of law,” about which so much – some of it cogent, much of it nonsense – has been said and written in recent years, is nothing but an observation of that immutable fact.

     Once one side has declared itself above the rules, the game is over. There may be a new game coming, but the old one is over. The rules that had governed the proceedings up to then are no longer relevant. Indeed, for any group of participants in the old game to act as if its rules were still in force would doom them to disaster.

     This “should” be “obvious.” Yet there are many who refuse to see it. The consequences for the American political system have already been dire. Present trends continuing, we’re heading into either a dictatorship or a Second Civil War.

---

     The recent Trump rally in Minneapolis was followed by an eruption of AntiFa violence against persons and property. The local police did essentially nothing to prevent or quell it. Apparently the Minneapolis powers-that-be approved of the assaults and their consequences. That would be consistent with Mayor Jacob Frey’s attempts to keep the rally from being held at all.

     What are the probable consequences of this event? Isn’t AntiFa likely to conclude that its violence against peaceable Americans is politically profitable? Isn’t it likely to do more of it?

     If you can reach any other conclusion, Gentle Reader, you must tell me how you got there, in great and gruesome detail.

     There’s been at least one such event – a free-speech rally in Boston, if memory serves – at which the AntiFa thugs were counterattacked and put to flight. I recall seeing an AntiFa video on YouTube, in which one of their spokesmen, a bosomy gal who goes by “Quinn,” lamented that it had been allowed to occur! Imagine that!

     Now imagine what would become of AntiFa were its every attempt to terrorize peaceable Americans met in such a fashion.

---

     There are groups that claim to be dedicated to the defense of the Republic and the principles of the Founding. They go by various names – Oath Keepers and Proud Boys come to mind at once – and have often volunteered to provide security for upcoming pro-free-speech events. Yet they haven’t been in evidence at most such gatherings. I don’t know why.

     Whether AntiFa or its affiliates would even show up at a rally with ample security for its attendees is open to question. But for its members to face the prospect of having the shit beaten out of them for daring to assault a rallygoer seems to me to be a formidable deterrent to such activity. Were activity of that sort to occur anyway, at least there would be forces present to “level the playing field”...or better.

     Just now, a documentary about clinical psychologist and university professor Jordan Peterson, a rising star in contemporary sociopolitical commentary, is being suppressed through threats of violence. Whether the provision of security by Oath Keepers or the like could counter such threats is unclear. However, the aspect of the matter that stuns me is the reaction to that suggestion: those who have the most to lose in this contretemps have rejected it as unthinkable. They’d rather surrender preemptively.

     To surrender in the face of an amorphous threat from an anonymous source is cowardice of the purest kind. It’s a declaration of spinelessness: the way of the worm.

---

     A great part of the widespread unwillingness to face down AntiFa and similar violence-inclined groups arises from the notion that “it’s the police’s job.” The police? Really? Has no one noticed that the police credo in this Year of Our Lord 2019 is “all that matters is to go home safe at end of shift” -- ? Has no one noticed that municipal governments seem to be quite all right with that?

     The police, wherever this sort of confrontation has occurred, have been maneuvered out of the contest. For whatever reason, they have permitted the assaults: they’ve imposed neither constraints nor consequences on the AntiFa terrorists. AntiFa’s weapons of choice – balloons filled with acid, “milkshakes” filled with caustics, and the like – don’t look enough like weapons to compel a police reaction. Laws against concealing one’s face in public are freely flouted, permitting the black-clad terrorists to make positive identification difficult, thus averting retribution. As for the physical assaults, the police can’t intervene in those; they might get hurt!

     One side has declared itself above the rules we expected to protect us. The “forces of order” have absented themselves from the fray. The question has been called. We face a choice between the loss of the rights to freedom of expression and assembly, or street warfare between AntiFa and whatever defenders of freedom yet remain.

     The game as Americans once understood it is over.

---

     And now comes the “lede:”

     I’ve been seeing things like “Kill them before they kill us.” And no, not just in comments on this blog.

     I’m as guilty as the next guy (and the next guy is Bob the Registered) of demanding heads on pikes, or of posting helicopters with “Go be a commie somewhere else.”

     And that’s okay. It’s probably horrifying for the left, but so is everything we say and do. So much triggering becomes silly. Boy who cried wolf and all that.

     But the thing is, we too are in our groups, and it’s easier to start tilting. And not notice. We’ve been under stress for a long time. All of us. And we’re looking at the left and seeing their flaunting of the laws and established procedure. And yes, yes, I do believe them when they say they want to kill us. I believe them even more when they say they wish we’d all die, because frankly most of their threats to kill us are like the crazy guy who followed me around downtown yelling he was going to kill me with his snake (yes, he had one. No, not poisonous or large enough to squeeze to death.) Until I got tired and told him I was going to do something anatomically improbable to him with my knife. And then he backed away from me so fast he almost fell.

     Most of the left has a lot of aggression and given complete safety to express it will in the manner of undisciplined toddlers (and a few psychopaths.) But yes, there are the few psychopaths who are legitimate threats (a lot of them in politics.) I’m not discounting that.

     Or that in certain times, in certain places, you might have to defend yourself/ves.

     At this point I will not attend anything that’s likely to attract antifa without being armed. And since firearms are a problem at most rallies, I’ll have to take knifes or maces. But frankly I can’t understand people who don’t. (Yes, metal detectors, but there are ways.)

     And yeah, I’m not going to tell anyone it’s evil if one of the antifa kiddies ends up looking for his kidneys on the floor because he messed with the wrong old guy or girl. Mostly because, though many of them are misguided or mentally ill, they did put themselves in arms way and you can’t give a sanity test to every attacker. (Nor should you.)

     Yes, there will need to be a lot of self-defense to stop them thinking they’re immune.

     Indeed. But it’s not quite enough.

     While Sarah cautions her readers against overreacting, there must be consequences for those who order the police to stand down in the face of AntiFa-type assaults: the authorities to whom those “forces of order” supposedly answer. Those consequences “should” be enforced by the justice system – but the justice system is a reactive organ; it requires stimulus from complainants. A city mayor who instructs the police not to intervene in public violence is guilty of malfeasance and must be compelled to face a jury...but that won’t happen unless someone signs a complaint and pressures the district attorney to act. Hopefully lots of someones.

     What if the courts refuse the complaint? What if the D.A.’s office refuses to impanel a grand jury and pursue justice?

     Then not only is the game over; the balloon has gone up. The American experiment has ended. But maybe we’re not quite there yet. Maybe.

     We won’t know until force is met with force and malfeasance is compelled to face justice.

Quickies: Laughter Is The Best Tactic

     A few Gentle Readers have made note of the new “Monopoly: Socialism” game Hasbro has introduced as a parody of the original. It does look wildly funny, especially as Hasbro has accurately caught the essence of both socialism and the socialist promoter. But what a lot of younger folks don’t realize is that this isn’t the first of its kind.

     The first “socialism game” was meant seriously.

     Some years ago there was a university professor named Bertell Ollman. Ollman was a socialist. He sought tirelessly for ways to promote the socialist ideology...and eventually happened upon the idea of representing it in a game. He designed a game board and some rules, persuaded some like-minded friends to try it out with him, and decided to give it a go in the marketplace. He titled it “Class Struggle,” borrowed heavily to produce and distribute it, and sent it forth.

     “Class Struggle,” to put it gently, didn’t find many takers. It lost Ollman a lot of money. But he did write a book about his experiences: a moderately funny book, in its wrongheaded way. You can still get it at Amazon, if you’re interested.

     There are socialists who can have failure take them by their ideology’s throat and half-strangle them, and still never give it up. There are socialists who’ll claim that the failures of socialism throughout history “weren’t real socialism.” And there are socialists who’ll blame every failure of a socialist program on “enemies” determined to “sabotage” their noble ideal.

     Hasbro has the right idea: Make fun of them. And note: the Left is completely humorless. Thus, they regard any jape at them as a lethal attack, which reinforces the public’s perception of them as humorless scolds who merely want to control all our lives.

     “The devil...the prowde spirit...cannot endure to be mocked.” – Saint Thomas More

Conquest By Insisting

     There are days it’s all just too terribly clear. Consider this recent piece from Glenn Reynolds. It’s short; please read it all. But I will quote the part that got my engine turning over:

     It’s like stupid and crazy people have too much power to set agendas nowadays.

     As our beloved Instapundit himself might say: Heh. Indeed.

---

     Most people are at least somewhat confrontation-averse. Confrontation is unpleasant; if there’s a less-unpleasant alternative that doesn’t cost a lot, we’re likely to take it. But recently, it would appear that that tendency has gotten out of control. It seems that to far too many Americans, confrontation is now the greatest of all evils; they’re willing to sacrifice anything and everything rather than to be forced into it.

     The attitude expressed by their practice of preemptive surrender is that “There’s nothing worth fighting over.” Nothing, capital N. Even Gahan Wilson had some trouble with that one:

     Frederik Pohl and Cyril M. Kornbluth had a bit of fun with that one in their novel Wolfbane:

     Some men think by poking problems apart; some think by laying facts side by side to compare. Tropile’s thinking was neither of these, but a species of judo. He conceded to his opponent such things as Strength, Armor, Resource. He didn’t need these things for himself; to every contest, the opponent brought enough of them to satisfy two....
     He walked to the door and shouted to Citizen Harmane: “Keeper! I must see my wife! Have her brought to me!”
     It was impossible for the Keeper to refuse. He called gently: “I will invite the Citizeness,” and toddled away....
     Tropile turned to Citizen Boyne. “Citizen,” he said persuasively, “since your death poem is ready and mine is not, will you be gracious enough to go first when they—when they come?”
     Citizen Boyne looked temperately at his cellmate and made the Quirked Smile.
     “You see?” he said. “Wolf.”
     And that was true. But what was also true was that Boyne couldn’t and didn’t refuse.

     Now watch as Tropile engineers an escape from his death-row cell, simply by making demands of his gaoler:

     Tropile said harshly: “I wish to see the new sun from the street....”
     The Keeper stammeringly said: “May I—may I let you see the new sun from the corridor?...” The keeper had never since babyhood given a flat no to anybody about anything. No Citizen had. A flat no led to anger, strong words—perhaps even hurt feelings. The only flat no conceivable was the enormous flat no of an amok....
     “That will do for a start,” Tropile snarled. “Open, man, open! Don’t make me wait!”
     the Keeper reeled and unlatched the door to the corridor.
     “Now the street!”
     “I can’t!” burst in an anguished cry from the Keeper. He buried his face in his hands and began to sob, hopelessly incapacitated....Whimperingly, the Keeper flung the keys at Tropile and tottered brokenly away.

     Imagine engineering a jailbreak merely by making demands of a gaoler unable to refuse you! That’s only the most absurd consequence of an avoid-confrontation-at-all-costs mentality.

---

     The irrational, the crazed, and the self-deifiers are getting away with everything short of murder — and don’t expect the “everything short of” part to remain as it is, friends — because the persons at the levers of society’s power have become too confrontation-averse to refuse them anything. It’s in the nature of things, as I’ve written on other occasions, that success breeds emulation – that others watching this process will draw the lesson and decide to “get on the gravy train” while it’s still running and there’s room to board.

     We are witnessing the open, unresisted conquest of all our institutions and customs by madmen, employing the unprecedented tactic of insisting — by a horde capable of doing nothing else. Some angry group of useless bloody loonies mounts a “protest,” and an important component of American life, perhaps an individual right, gives way and is demolished. Someone engages an ethics-challenged lawyer to threaten a lawsuit on some absurd pretext, and a major corporation immediately bends the knee to lunacy. Someone feels “offended,” or “unsafe,” or “discriminated against,” and innumerable others are immediately compelled to alter their longstanding practices and preferences and conform.

     Yes, they’re mad. Completely bonkers. Off the wall. Froot Loop City. But are we the putatively sane any less mad for having accommodated them?

     Think about it.

Assertions Of Ownership

     Have you ever thought about what it means to own something? I’ve written about the criteria involved in a just claim of ownership, and the rights associated with it as well. However, those essays were about the ownership of items of tangible property, whether real or movable. (This one, which addresses whether a private citizen should be allowed to own a weapon of mass destruction, provides a good summary.)

     But what does it mean to “own” an issue?

     Have you ever heard a claim of that sort, Gentle Reader? I have, and not just once. Such claims nearly always come from the Left, which has claimed to “own” the issues of race relations, women's rights, the environment, war and peace, and several other subjects of general discussion.

     Just in case you aren’t wearing your Galactic Intellect Enterprises^® Left-Liberal Decoder Ring, here’s the translation: When a leftist says “We own [insert issue here],” he really means “Don’t you filthy conservatives dare to disagree with my wholly arbitrary and largely unsupported statements on this subject.” It’s arrogant and childish, of course, but that’s the Left for you.

     What troubles me is the way we in the Right habitually allow them to get away with it.

---

     Quite a number of years ago, long before I elected to self-publish my fiction, I sent a copy of On Broken Wings to a distant friend for her comments. She was impressed by it, and asked if she could submit it to the weekly book discussion club she attended. Of course I said yes. I had no idea what would happen next.

     Two of the members of that club were lesbians. There are homosexual characters, and one bisexual character, in my novel. That alone was enough to enrage the lesbians in my friend’s club. They deemed it unacceptable that a nasty old heterosexual man – good heavens, he’s a Catholic! — should dare to write about homosexuals or bisexuals in any context. They condemned On Broken Wings, a novel that’s garnered effulgent praise from readers all over the English-speaking world, for that reason and no other.

     I shrugged it off. However, recently I’ve received similar statements of condemnation about Innocents. The phenomenon of claims to “own” some issue is plainly alive and kicking, as if my Gentle Readers couldn’t tell from contemporary fusillades over race, sex, et cetera.

---

     SMITH: Mr. Vidal, wasn’t it a provocative act to try to raise the Vietcong flag in the park in the film we just saw? Wouldn’t that invite—raising the Nazi flag during World War II would have had similar consequences.
     VIDAL: You must realize what some of the political issues are here. There are many people in the United States who happen to believe that the United States policy is wrong in Vietnam and the Vietcong are correct in wanting to organize their own country in their own way politically. This happens to be pretty much the opinion of Western Europe and many other parts of the world. If it is a novelty in Chicago, that is too bad, but I assume that the point of the American democracy—
     BUCKLEY: (interrupting): —and some people were pro-Nazi—
     VIDAL: —is you can express any view you want—
     BUCKLEY: —and some people were pro-Nazi—
     VIDAL: Shut up a minute!
     BUCKLEY: No, I won’t. Some people were pro-Nazi and, and the answer is they were well treated by people who ostracized them. And I’m for ostracizing people who egg on other people to shoot American Marines and American soldiers. I know you don’t care—
     VIDAL (loftily): As far as I’m concerned, the only pro- or crypto-Nazi I can think of is yourself. Failing that—
     SMITH: Let’s, let’s not call names—
     VIDAL: Failing that, I can only say that—
     BUCKLEY (snarling, teeth bared): Now listen, you queer, stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I’ll sock you in your goddam face, and you’ll stay plastered.
     SMITH: Gentlemen!

     [From a televised 1968 exchange over the Vietnam War between Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley]

     It’s my practice to take a strong line with leftists, regardless of the subject. They dislike that, and do their best to shout me down. As it happens, I can’t be shouted down; I have a bull elephant roar that causes cancer in laboratory rats and kills canaries outright. Beyond that, I usually possess the evidence required to support my stances. They don’t.

     The Left’s claims to “own” an issue are attempts to preclude rational examination of it for precisely that reason. As Victor Marguerite once wrote, “The Fascists cannot argue, so they kill.” But of course! If you can’t prevail by the rules of reasoned discussion, abandon the rules. Prevail by intimidation or coercion. That’s what would-be totalitarians have done throughout history.

     While the Left hasn’t yet resorted to murder on any noticeable scale, the threshold for that sort of “response” is drawing near. My reason for saying so is simple: things have been going very poorly for left-wing policies and left-wing regimes, and far too well under the Trump Administration.

     When the evidence cannot be hidden or disputed – when it becomes all too clear, as Margaret Thatcher so memorably put it, that “the facts of life are conservative” — the Left becomes violent. It’s their eternal fallback position. And we in the Right cannot allow ourselves to be dismissive or passive about it.

---

     Conservatives have a tendency to dismiss rhetorical strokes that imply or suggest violence. Consider Terry McAuliffe’s recent verbal offer of violence toward President Trump. That sort of thing usually gets nothing more than a dismissive laugh from us. I contend that the time for flippancy about such statements has passed.

     We’re already being assaulted in both public and private places. Our habit of ignoring violent rhetoric, or waving is aside as unimportant, might be part of the reason.

     Expressions of anger and outrage, at the very least, are appropriate toward the persons who make such remarks. More extreme responses might be even better, depending on the context and the persons involved. Unfortunately, an invitation to an exchange of pistol fire in the pre-dawn light is no longer legal in most states, though some jurisdictions might be willing to look aside.

     There comes a time when gentlemanly decorum must give way to doubled fists. To refrain from doing so encourages the brutes and bullies that have never observed the constraints of civilized discourse. It doesn’t “take two to fight,” contrary assertions from empty-headed peaceniks notwithstanding; it only takes one. What takes two is making peace. Moreover, the requirements are often unpleasant:

     “Peace means something different from ‘not fighting’. Those aren’t peace advocates, they’re ‘stop fighting’ advocates. Peace is an active and complex thing and sometimes fighting is part of what it takes to get it.” – fantasy writer Jo Walton

     Verbum sat sapienti.

Left-Wing Muscle Part 3: All Surface, All The Time

     When I first sat down to Cyclops to compose my tirade for the day, I had a number of topics jostling one another for head space. Any one of them would have sufficed for a decent essay, if not a standout that would echo down the centuries. But at every stop on my cerebral trolley a tremor beneath the surface suggested that I should keep going, that there’s a larger theme that deserves to be addressed for more than any of the quotidian displacements in our shared American reality.

     And at 5:22 AM EST on this tenth day of January in the year of Our Lord 2018, I found it.

---

     First, have a memorable characterization of one of the most significant (if long-forgotten) figures of the early Twentieth Century: Czar Nicholas II of the Russian Empire:

     “This insane regime,” its ablest defender, Count Witte, the premier of 1903-06, called it, “this tangle of cowardice, blindness, craftiness, and stupidity.” The regime was ruled from the top by a sovereign who had but one idea of government—to preserve intact the absolute monarchy bequeathed to him by his father—and who, lacking the intellect, energy, or training for his job, fell back on personal favorites, whim, simple mulishness, and other devices of the empty-headed autocrat. His father, Alexander III, who deliberately intended to keep his son uneducated in statecraft until the age of thirty, miscalculated his own life expectancy and died with Nicholas was twenty-six. The new Czar, [in 1914] now forty-six, had learned nothing in the interval, and the impression of imperturbability he conveyed was in reality apathy—the indifference of a mind so shallow as to be all surface. When a telegram was brought to him announcing the annihilation of the Russian fleet at Tsushima, he read it, stuffed it in his pocket, and continued playing tennis. When the premier, Kokovtsov, returning from Berlin in November 1913, gave the Czar a personal report on German preparations for war, Nicholas listened to him with his usual unwavering gaze, “looking straight into my eyes.” After a long pause, when the premier had finished, “as if waking from a reverie,” he said gravely, “God’s will be done.” In fact, Kokotsov concluded, he was simply bored. [Barbara Tuchman, The Guns of August]

     Devastating, eh? Now, there are alternate characterizations of Nicholas II as not having been quite that vacuous, but let’s imagine for the moment that Tuchman was correct. What does it mean for a man in a position of authority to have a mind “so shallow as to be all surface” when applied to specifics?

     Would he strive to foresee the consequences of decisions?
     Would he be attentive to the implications of observed facts?
     Would he be alert to the use of rhetoric in place of evidence and reason?
     Would he permit himself to be swayed by personal affections, loyalties, and debts?
     In weighing competing arguments, would he strive to include the full range of factors that had led to their espousers’ adoption?

     I get five “Hell, no!” answers to those questions. I hope you do as well.

---

     I’d like to believe that I think deeply about the issues I confront. (Note the phrasing: I’d like to believe it. It might not be so, but it’s “pretty to think so.”) But I find it difficult to believe that various public figures ever think about anything beyond their personal ambitions and – possibly – their carnal appetites. That makes it difficult if not impossible to respect them.

     Mind you, a man with a single, all-encompassing priority can nevertheless be interesting. Some of history’s great conquerors, who cared for nothing but the glory of battlefield victory, are interesting in that way. But the eagle’s-eye perspective cannot help but assess them as without depth, monochromatic of aspect, obsessives incapable of non-trivial adjustments of their sails: in a word, shallow.

     A man with many seeming interests can nevertheless lack depth. Like several of the caesars of the Roman Empire, Czar Nicholas II is recorded as having indulged a relatively wide spectrum of personal interests and tastes. But all of those interests and tastes pertained to momentary diversions and gratifications. He seemed to possess not merely a lack of interest in serious thought but an actual aversion to it. He held sober ponderings at bay by whatever means were to hand. It’s easy to see how a Grigori Rasputin could become the de facto power behind such a throne.

     Depth of mind, the antithesis of shallowness, depends upon thought. It doesn’t need to be broad. It can explore subjects one by one. But it must eschew the various displacers of thought so often used to prevent thought.

     Think “Four legs good, two legs bad,” and you’ll see where I’m headed with this.

---

     One of the most striking passages in Atlas Shrugged arrived when Floyd Ferris stated baldly to Hank Rearden that “There’s no way to rule innocent men.” This is incontestable. But there’s a layer beneath the surface of that observation: The innocent man must know himself to be innocent. That requires comprehension of the requirements of innocents: in other words, hard thought.

     A man who keeps his word, meets his obligations, and treats others as he himself wants to be treated qualifies as an innocent man. But to grasp that, he must understand rights and responsibilities, whence they arise, and how they must be respected. The implications are staggering, this one above all others:

If you wish to subjugate a man mentally, you must occlude his understanding of rights and responsibilities.

     I’ve come to see that goal as the focus of left-wing activism in our time. The Left’s deliberate distortion and destruction of fundamental concepts such as rights is aimed directly at that end. Leftists’ tactics are replete with illustrations:

• Emotive rhetoric to becloud the issues;
• The inculcation of hatred as a unifying force;
• Group pressures, intimidation, and threats of exclusion;
• Ferocity toward any figure that attempts to reintroduce thought.

     Those tactics have succeeded in discouraging a great many Americans from actually thinking about politics and public policy. Yet they are surface tactics. They act upon the target’s unthinking fears: first, of others’ opinion of him; second, of what they might do about him. As virtually everyone prizes the good opinions of others and fears that he’ll suffer should he lose it, we’re all at least potentially vulnerable.

     The great mass of left-wing activists have never seriously pondered these tactics and found them good on rational grounds. They’ve adopted them because figures placed high in their esteem have used them, and have encouraged their use.

     It’s a good bet that those highly-placed figures know exactly what they’re about.

---

     During a recent appearance on Tucker Carlson’s show, Mark Steyn delivered the assessment that the Left has made normal politics impossible. He had in mind the Left’s relentless demonizations of political opponents: e.g., Hitler comparisons. He noted that those demonizations characterized the Left’s treatment of all three Republican presidents since Reagan. Yet a sober mind would find far more differences than similarities between the Bushes and Donald J. Trump. If Bush the Elder, so plainly a mild-mannered, Big Government-friendly chief executive, is as bad as Hitler, how could the comparison have significance when applied to anyone else? Surely if Bush the Elder is / was Hitler, we all are.

     (Let’s pause here for a brief, hollow laugh over how many of Hitler’s policies the Left actually seeks to impose on us. By my assessment that’s virtually all of them except for the Holocaust and Festung Europa — and they might yet get to those.)

     But the great mass of left-wing activists don’t think about such tactics; they merely employ them. Their leaders approve. More, their emotional content makes them feel righteous, warriors for “social justice.” And of course they provide a rationale for any vile-but-effective measure they might think of for silencing or intimidating the opposition. Punching a Nazi is always chic.

     It’s all surface. It all floats upon the uppermost layer of human emotions. Not one particle of it is ever pondered in the light of evidence or reason...except among the pinnacle layer, the strategists and tacticians who formulate “talking points” and disseminate approved rhetorical tools.

---

     These thoughts coalesced after I’d read this brief post from Ace:

     As Sexton says, neatly, the Democrats' claims of vague concern about Bill Clinton are merely a "social justice accounting gimmick" to balance the books for their big Ad Buys against Trump and other Republicans.

     The backdrop for this is, of course, the torrent of accusations of sexual misconduct that have been aimed at prominent leftists in recent days, especially those in journalism and the entertainment industry. The accusations have been so powerfully one-sided that the Left’s strategists have had to confront their duplicity about one of their best-loved: notorious philanderer and former President Bill Clinton. Some mea culpa gesture was required of them if they were to keep up their drumbeat about the Right’s “war on women.” There were other factors involved as well – the need to force Hillary Clinton out of the public eye comes to mind – but their principal concern was the surface power of the flood of accusations of sexual abuse. That’s a hot button for nearly everyone; we react to it without thinking. If they were to get past the issue, they had to show at least a token contrition and regret for having shielded someone. Bill Clinton is now far enough in the past to be safely used in that fashion.

     All surface, all the time. Don’t encourage thought; evoke emotion, the more violent the better. Get them to envy and hate; they’re the gateways to all other evils. No need to worry that it might be turned back on us. Our adversaries are too rational, and too gentlemanly, ever to think of doing so. And if it works, we can cash it in for absolute power. A populace deeply conditioned to respond to surface-power appeals will be unable to reason out why we shouldn’t be allowed to do whatever we please...including to them.

     Yes, you may well shudder.

     Orthodoxy is unconsciousness – George Orwell, 1984

More Fun With Hugo Part 2: Infiltration Tactics

     I am endlessly fascinated by how long it took for Mankind to unearth certain key discoveries. Most illuminating of all are the conceptual breakthroughs: the discoveries that pointed toward new methods of analysis and the structuring of information.

     A student of warfare can get a lot of mileage out of World War I in particular. The wealth of discoveries and developments that emerged from that conflict could keep a scholar occupied lifelong. The Entente Powers concentrated on new weaponry. The Triple Alliance, in which the German Empire was the senior partner, produced new military tactics and techniques. Among the latter group, most intriguing to me was the development of infiltration tactics.

     To many who “grew up” with more recent warfare, infiltration tactics seem a “but of course” matter, a minor aspect of pure ground warfare that “should have been obvious” and is no longer really important in the three-dimensional wars of today. Yet the utility and potency of infiltration wasn’t obvious until the German General Staff hit upon it. Until then, the prevailing method of ground warfare was to hurl one’s main force against the enemy’s main force in pursuit of a unitary, hopefully decisive battle. Even in the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Century, a period in which the West invested great intellectual energy in virtually every field, that pattern of tactical thought held sway among the majority of military planners. It took the special trials of World War I, whose lineaments were drawn by the trench, the pillbox, the barbed wire fence, and the medium machine gun, to jolt military thinkers out of that rut.

     Infiltration tactics have become equally important to our sociopolitical milieu.

---

     “Of all the musts and must-nots of warfare, this one is paramount: you must conceal your motives. Unless he is insignificant in comparison to you, once your opponent knows your motives, he’ll be able to defeat you. He’ll probably even have a choice of ways to do it.
     “You must move heaven and earth, if necessary, to discover your opponent’s motives. His tactics will be determined by them. If his motives change, his tactics will follow. There lies your opportunity, if you can get him to adopt tactics unsuitable to the conflict. Of course, he could try to do the same to you.”
     “What’s the countermeasure?”
     “Constancy. Refusal to let yourself be diverted. Of course, that can be a trap, too. Motive is partly determined by objectives. If your adversary’s situation changes but his objectives remain the same, he could find himself committed to paying an exorbitant price for something that’s become worthless.”
     “And that’s the time to stop playing with his head?”
     His grin was ice-cold. “You have a gift.”

     [From On Broken Wings.]

     The late Florence King wrote scathingly on several occasions that the typical American’s paramount motive is to be thought of as “a nice guy.” Miss King was anything but “nice.” She reveled in causticity; it was her signature trait. And whether you liked it or not, she maintained that attitude unflinchingly. It protected her from what she most disliked: insincere and unwelcome attempts at intimacy.

     Miss King had had an important insight:

If your paramount motive is that others should think of you as “a nice guy,”
anyone who wants them has got you by the balls.

     Your priority on his good opinion of you gives him an infiltration point by which he can steer your decision making. That insight shines a blinding light upon our sociopolitical and cultural milieu.

     Consider just one current political contretemps in this light: the “DREAMers.” The “conventional” Right is having a terrible time dealing with these illegal aliens for a single reason: Being thought of as nice guys is our highest priority. We want that even more than we want to solve our problems with illegal immigration. But nice guys don’t hurl poor helpless children and teens, here illegally but through no fault of their own, out into the cold, dark Mexican night. That’s not nice. And that’s what the Left and its media handmaidens have hammered us on. They’ve succeeded to the point that even President Trump, for whom illegal immigration was the campaign issue, is now willing to consider amnesty for the “DREAMers” if in exchange Congress will fund the construction of the border wall.

     An overriding need to be thought of as a nice guy has provided the Left with inroads into many institutions. Nice guys, they tell us, wouldn’t deny women membership in all-male clubs. They wouldn’t deny scruffy welfare families, HUD-facilitated loan in hand, membership in their cooperatives. They wouldn’t deny homosexuals the privilege of becoming Cub Scout troop leaders. They wouldn’t deny atheists entrance into Bible study groups. They wouldn’t deny left-liberals admission to conservatives’ associations.

     Herein lies a great part of the reason for Robert Conquest’s Second Law of Politics: The Right wants much too badly to be thought of as “nice guys” by its mortal enemies. It’s the infiltration route of the Left’s wettest wet dreams, and they’ve used it to the hilt.

---

     In a recent piece on Facebook about “integration” and “white flight,” SF / military writer Tom Kratman makes some pointed observations:

     To a comment on Dave Nalle's page, to the effect that:

     Leslie McClinton Don’t forget black people bring crime and white flight.

     I answer:

     What actually seems to happen is more complex, begins far more hopefully and innocently, but is not much different in its effects.

     It begins with high quality black family X. The patriarch of the clan looks around his neighborhood - let us call it "Neighborhood A" - and sees liberalism, liberalism in all its drug peddling, street corner prostituting, crack house rotting, gang banging, and underperforming school glory - a place also replete with feral teens who need a good dose of hanging - and says something to the effect of, "Mama, we need to get the kids out of here." Unfortunately, he very rarely understands that it is liberalism he's seeing, a blind spot largely arising from his perception that liberalism and liberals have helped him and his.

     So they look around and try to find a place with no gang bangers, no street whores, no crack houses, no drug peddling (at least not out in the open), and better schools. And better still, the teens are relatively civilized. The place they find is almost invariably lily white. Yeah, life's not fair.

     So they find an address for sale they like and can afford in Neighborhood B and they move to it. Unfortunately, the address is all they will ever have in more than an extremely transitory way.

     As we continue, keep the following in mind: Integration is the name of the phenomenon we observe in the very brief interval between the first black family moving into a neighborhood and the last white family moving out.

     Now let us consider the plight of White Family Y. They are aware of several incontrovertible facts. 1) The neighborhood - A - the Xs came from is a hell hole. 2) This whole integration things been tried hundreds - maybe thousands - of times over the last fifty years and it always works out the same: White families run, progressively lower quality black families move into the empty spaces, house's prices drop to what people are willing to pay, and they're not willing to pay much for a piece of what the future surely holds in store, and, at breakneck speed, all the Bs come to look like As. 3) He cannot trust his white neighbors not to run.

     3 is important for two reasons. One is that it is not necessarily or even obviously true that he's running from the black Xs, but that he cannot trust whites. The other is that it is hard to accuse him of racism when what he's fleeing is precisely what patriarch X was fleeing. If X isn't a racist for fleeing it, neither is Y for fleeing the same thing. They're both fleeing liberalism, actually, though Y is likely more conscious of it. Indeed, if Y is showing any racism, it's in judging the other whites, though since he is judging them accurately...

     Note that X is going to lose his investment just as much as Y will, if Y can't escape early enough, but that escape for X is tougher for several reasons.

     The sad part, the really sad part, was that it wasn't necessary, could we have simply rid ourselves of the unbefuckinglievably stupid and doctrinaire liberals who started things and set the pattern that Y, quite correctly, sees. Three things were necessary to successful integration in housing. One is distasteful, to be sure, but still necessary. This was to not only legislate to open up housing, but also to legislate a maximum percentage of integrated housing. In other words, "Relax, Y, the law mandates this percentage of blacks will be allowed into B, and as soon as that is reached no more will be permitted." Sounds racist, I am sure, but can it be as racist as suckering X into buying a house at top dollar that will become nearly worthless within a few years?

     The second part was to guarantee to Y and all the other whites, "You will not lose money. We will assess your homes and guarantee to buy them from you for at least that much, adjusted for inflation, when you are ready to sell. So relax, you don't need to get into a race with the neighbors."

     The third was to guarantee much better police protection and general law enforcement in Neighborhood B for at least 25 years, even to include street patrolmen.

     Of course it's too late now. That's the really remarkable thing about liberalism, it not only turns every bit of gold it touches to shit, the change is permanent.

     [Emphases in the above added by FWP.]

     Now, Tom is not your humble Curmudgeon. He’s not a racist; I am. And where he sees liberalism as the driver, I see room for a hefty admixture of racial differences and black racial solidarity:

• American blacks are considerably less inclined toward law-abiding behavior than are whites.
• American blacks are more inclined than whites to shield their youngsters from the consequences of their actions.
• Teenage American blacks have been steeped in potent cultural pathologies:
  • A carefully nurtured sense of “oppression” by “whitey;”
  • Resentment of their white peers;
  • “Thug culture:” Rap, hip-hop, the “gangsta” ethic.

     Blend those things with the terrible, ravening desire of so many whites to be thought of as “nice guys” even by those who hate them, and with the gleeful willingness of the Left to use the pathological behaviors it encourages among young blacks as weapons against American norms and standards, and you have a perfect set of drivers and predictors for the phenomenon Henry Davenport has termed “chasing down the last white person.”

     That infiltration route is fifty miles wide...and we built and paved it ourselves.

---

     In case you’re been wondering, I started off on this course because of lingering thoughts from yesterday and a related emission from writer Larry Correia:

     If you are an author with the wrong politics, and you are at a con surrounded by social justice warriors who love to make up accusations, you would be a fool not to keep witnesses around.

     Is Jon [Del Arroz] annoying? Eh, I’ve talked to him about his tactics for activism. We’ve got some disagreements. Different strokes for different folks.

     But banning a guy for being annoying? Have you ever been to a scifi convention? But they can’t come out and say he has the wrong politics and his activism bothers them, so instead, as usual they make up some crap about feeling “unsafe” and “harassment”. Which is funny, because with SJWs harassment is a one way street. And they can harass the shit out of anyone who disagrees with them. And if you don’t like it here is your official WorldCon wooden anus.

     The sense I get from what I’ve read about this is that Jon Del Arroz would like to do to Worldcon what SJW infiltrators started doing to it long ago: i.e., he’d like to counter-infiltrate in the hope that he could start a process that would restore it to its original fun-and-entertainment roots. If I’m correct about that, it’s a laudable motive. It’s also doomed, for a simple reason:

The Left feels no need to have us in the Right think of them as “nice guys.”

     They would never allow us the infiltration route we’ve allowed them.

     It’s becoming ever more important that we in the Right admit to ourselves that “traditional” political interchange and interplay, in which one grants the benevolence and sincerity of one’s opponent, are deader than Carthage. It was already moribund in the Sixties, when “Point/Counterpoint’s” Jack Kilpatrick would offer a reasoned argument for some conservative position and the hysterical Shana Alexander would reply with denunciations and slanders. The first step is allowing ourselves to see and think of the Left as our mortal enemies and the mortal enemies of what we hold dear: to take at face value their most strident condemnations of whites, of capitalism, of Christianity, and of America, and to infer their motives accurately and without flinching. From that, all else will follow.

Asymmetric Warfare: Some Thoughts

     It’s everywhere these days. It colors many aspects of our world, yet it often goes unnoticed. And it has some valuable lessons for us.

---

     Something deep and primitive in the human psyche urges us to go head-to-head against the enemy, whoever he is. When the fight-or-flight reflex kicks in, he who chooses to fight almost always goes straight at his opponent, even if the opponent is much larger, stronger, and better equipped. And in most such cases of unequal ability and / or equipment, we may celebrate the little guy’s courage, but seldom award him a victor’s laurels.

     We learn slowly, but we learn. It might have taken millennia and losses innumerable, but eventually, military tacticians learned not to pit strength against strength: to look for and assault weak points at which they might create breakthroughs. That development was one of the few intellectual advances from World War I.

     Yet the primal urge to go straight at ‘em remains powerful. Consider these two passages from On Broken Wings. In the first, Louis is training Christine to fight:

     “Combat is about advantages and how fast you can use them. Everyone has both strengths and weaknesses: you, me, those creeps who came here for you. You never pit strength against strength. You always look for weakness. If you can concentrate your strength against your opponent's weakness before he does the same to you, you have the advantage, and you win. Otherwise, you lose.”
     “You make it sound like a game.”
     “It is a game. There are no rules, and the stakes are your life, but aside from that...”

     In the second, later passage, Christine has just seen her lover murdered before her eyes:

     Her new love stared sightlessly up at her. She crouched over him, felt for his pulse, found none, and began to scream.
     It was a scream of loss and pain, but it was more. Rage swelled within her, pure and lethal, until her universe could hold nothing else.
     It was the call of a predator who has summoned all his powers and challenges his enemy to come forth from the forest to meet him in a final trial of strength and ferocity. It echoed from the buildings and gathered itself to pound against the dome of the sky. It foretold a great battle and a river of blood. It promised death and destruction in a universal tongue. No creature that heard that howl could do other than flee.

     This brilliant, superlative fighter, a supreme master of the arts of combat who’d been trained by the greatest warriors in human history can think of nothing but plunging straight at the biker gang she thinks responsible for the murder. She would have done it, too, if she hadn’t been delayed long enough to receive some all-important counsel from one of her teachers. That’s how basic the go straight at ‘em impulse is.

---

     Great fury tends to neutralize the higher reasoning centers. When that happens, the go straight at ‘em impulse will be unchecked. Only if the raging one is fortunate enough to be delayed, such that his rationality can return before he does something rash, will deeper analysis of the tactical situation prevail.

     Occasionally, a government will incorporate enough delaying mechanisms to enforce the return to cool reasoning in the aftermath of an attack. Black Tuesday, September 11, 2001, illustrates how important such a delay can be. Had the United States been under the rule of an absolute hegemon, he might well have lashed out at the entire Islamic world with nuclear weapons. If you were alive and awake when the 9/11 atrocities occurred, that might have been your immediate impulse as well. (Yes, it was mine.) It certainly would have been emotionally satisfying, but whether it would have been the best choice of responses is doubtful.

     Among the terrors of today is the potential for an unanticipated, unannounced attack by a weapon of mass destruction. Had the 9/11 atrocity in Manhattan been committed with a nuclear weapon, President Bush would have had a harder time resisting the impulse to bathe the entire Muslim Middle East in nuclear fire. He might have resisted or been restrained nonetheless, but the impulse would have been near to overwhelming. The magnitude of the sense of violation matters.

     If you’ve read Freedom’s Scion and Freedom’s Fury, reflect on how fortunate it was for the Loioc that Althea Morelon wasn’t carrying a planet-buster when she was attacked with the nanites the Loioc used to render their men non-sentient. Put yourself in her place, and load a couple of notional planet-killing weapons into the hold of Liberty’s Torch. (The starship, not the website.) Would you have been able to resist the genocidal urge?

---

     It’s my hope, as an amateur of strategic thinking, that Mankind will learn more and better techniques in asymmetric warfare as we progress. We need them. Consider, if you will, the ravagings Muslim terrorists are inflicting upon the peoples of Europe. The Islamic campaign to conquer Europe has two principal prongs:

• Terrorist strikes;
• Reproduction.

     Clearly, the First World cannot and must not attempt to use those tactics in response. Neither would it suffice to deploy any other conventional law-enforcement or military tactic. The nations of Europe must develop a new tactic with which to reply: something just as asymmetric to the Muslim invaders’ tactics as the invaders’ ploys are to conventional nation-against-nation warfare.

     I cannot foresee that tactic. It probably won’t be military, though that’s not guaranteed. It might be economic; it might be religious or philosophical; or it might be something wholly outside historical experience. But the necessity is plain.

     The inverse of go straight at ‘em is hit ‘em where they ain’t. The First World’s military strategists and tacticians have grasped that. The time has come for the rest of our institutions to follow suit.

---

     If you’d like to supplement the rather somber article above with a little levity, consider this: I got the impulse to write about the topic from reading this article. Enjoy your laughter, to be sure, but reflect on the commonality of the principles, as well.

What Will It Take?

     “The news is all bad, but it’s good for a laugh.” – Tom Paxton, “Jimmy Newman”

     How strange, to be quoting an old communist peacenik at the opening of a column he’d surely despise! But then again, the “W” in my name – the middle initial, for those too crippled by arthritis or gout to run their thumbs along the words as they read – is generally taken to stand for weird. I suppose I’ve earned the reputation.

     There’s no point to following “the news” any longer. “The news” is in your backyard. At least, it had better be...and you had better be alert to it.

---

     The day before Election Day, I wrote and posted this:

A tactic that succeeds will be repeated, intensified, and emulated.

     Violence is increasing because it gets the violent ones what they want. Remember what I said in large font at the outset: A tactic that succeeds will be repeated, intensified, and emulated. Violence is apparently working for those who employ it. That is, its practitioners’ gains outweigh its costs and risks.

     Violence didn’t always succeed. Sixty years ago, it was common for an assault that took place before onlookers to be answered by counter-violence and the placement of the attacker in a jail cell: not always, but often enough, and with consequences severe enough, to hold occasions of violence to a socially endurable level. For various reasons that is no longer the case, while the prospective gains from violence remain what they were.

     Violence works whenever it’s not met by a swift defense and appropriate retribution. It worked for Lenin’s Bolsheviks and Hitler’s Brown Shirts. The lesson is not lost on those who mastermind American politics.

     I shan’t minimize the immense significance of what occurred on November 8, 2016. It might have indicated a mass awakening to the danger the Republic faced. But we still face that danger. Our nation’s internal enemies have merely resorted to more violent tactics...and those tactics are working.

---

     Today at Free North Carolina, we have this:

     Americans agree with President Donald Trump's defense of Confederate monuments, and few think getting rid of the statues will lessen racial tensions, a new poll shows. The Rasmussen Reports survey released Monday found 50 percent of registered voters agree with Trump's tweet it is "sad to see the history and culture of our great country being ripped apart with the removal of our beautiful statues and monuments."

     As this is from Brock Townsend, in whom my trust is unbounded and for whom I have limitless admiration, I’m sure it’s absolutely correct. I didn’t even bother to check the links. Feel free to do so if you’re more inclined to be skeptical.

     No, my problem is with the significance of the findings. A majority of those surveyed are on the president’s side of this contretemps. Perhaps the majority is even larger than the survey suggests. (Is Richard Dawson still around? Perhaps appropriately large cash prizes would help us to find out.) Yet the monuments continue to be destroyed – in some cases, by municipal or state governments. Why?

     It’s actually quite simple:

A mobilized, militant minority always beats a passive majority.

     That’s how the Nazis took Germany. It’s how Lenin and his confreres took Russia. Why would anyone think that “it can’t happen here” -- ? Especially over something with as little immediate impact on most Americans’ lives as historical monuments?

     Do you want those monuments to stay up, Gentle Reader? Very good; I thought you might. So what are you going to do about it? Other than email your Congressman, that is.

---

     The monuments under attack are, of course, only symptomatic in the larger scheme of things. The Left’s whole effort is aimed at detaching the young from the history of these United States, especially its founding principles, its seminal struggles, and the words and characters of those who articulated them.

     The “Antifa” and “Black Bloc” thugs attacking peaceable patriotic gatherings have the same end in view. There’s no way to separate a people from its history if they’re allowed to talk about it, or any element of it...especially the Founders’ emphasis on freedom of expression.

     They who believe it’s sufficient to be prepared to defend themselves are sadly mistaken. No one has ever won a war by doing nothing but playing defense. The Right must seize the initiative – go on the attack.

     The notion horrifies many decent persons. Yet it is so. Two questions then arise:

• What will finally make us rise to the occasion, if anything?
• When and where will it arrive?

---

     It is not enough to stay abreast of the news and deplore the trends in progress. It is not enough to speak out against them. It is not enough to attend a rally or two in defense of freedom of expression or the preservation of historic monuments. It is not even enough to attend such rallies armed and ready for the eruption of violence. Those are all defensive measures: necessary but sadly insufficient.

     The one and only remedy is to go on the offensive.

     The first, absolutely indispensable step is infiltrating the opposition. We must learn the individual identities of those who gather to suppress us, and we must pursue them individually, just as they strive to pursue us. If they have gatherings, some of ours must be present. If they don’t, we must tap their communications and monitor them ceaselessly. The information we can gather that way is beyond price.

     Once we know who they are, it’s a short step from there to learning where they will be. That gives us what we’ll need for what must follow: charges, against both the individuals and the groups, of conspiring to violate others’ civil rights. That’s a federal criminal charge that can’t be dismissed. According to our family lawyer, a police commander who tells his subordinates to disregard such complaints is himself guilty of misfeasance – for instructing his men to commit nonfeasance — so make sure all such complaints are properly witnessed.

     Even if those charged ultimately escape prison sentences, they’ll suffer from the experience of having to defend themselves against the charges. As the saying goes, “the process is the punishment.” It might be enough to deter them all by itself.

     If the so-called forces of order prove unwilling to do their sworn duty, then it will be time to discuss more direct measures. But we’re more likely to reach that point if we continue to be passive before the assaults upon us.

---

     Sound harsh? Scary? After all, you wouldn’t like to be spied upon or hounded into court to defend yourself against the weight of the criminal law. But what they’ve been doing to us is far worse...and as I wrote above, it’s getting them what they want, so we can’t expect it to stop.

     I know, I know: Who bells the cat? Obviously I can’t, being old and too well known from my writings. But some of my readers, at least, are less conspicuous.

     Nothing else will suffice to stem the tide before actual blood is shed, so give it some thought.

     UPDATE: To the pseudonymous fellow who wrote to call me a “stupid mutt:” My dear sir, if a Martian were to find the two of us standing side by side, he would undoubtedly conclude that you are a member of some much lower species...a houseplant, perhaps. Have a nice life.