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.

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     “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.

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     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.

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     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.