From today's germinal post over at Forward Observer:
"Here’s the key thing about our future conflict: it won’t be a conventional war. We’re not talking about tanks in the streets or bombing insurgents into submission. The combatants of tomorrow won’t take part in pitched battles of maneuver warfare, but they’ll engage in what we’re already seeing:RTWT.
In other words, our war includes all the activities below the threshold of conventional war, but above routine, peaceful competition."
- political warfare
- economic warfare
- information operations/propaganda
- cultural/class war
- sporadic political violence
Von Clausewitz famously wrote,
"War is a continuation of politics, by other means"
The reverse is also true:
Politics is a continuation of war, by other means.
As polarization, public revulsion, and loss after loss at the ballot box closes off the Left's political options, (and given that they aren't the most rational, stable, and patient bunch to begin with), they have and will continue to push beyond mere political solutions, and use the means noted to wage the multi-front war they seem to desire from deep down inside.
As we learned from Guido the Killer Pimp in Risky Business, "In a sluggish economy, never, ever f--- with another man's livelihood..."
The Left will ignore that lesson, due to hubris, delusion and unmitigated stupid, and there will be pushback.
Unrest turns to boycotts turns to strikes turns to bombings turns to leg- and head-breakers, and that's here, in the United States, in still-living memory. (Knowing L.A. history pretty well, even for one of the few actual natives in that town, I was one day nonetheless rather astonished to find myself standing in front of, while on a film shoot in the Hollywood Forever Cemetery on the backside of Paramount Studios' lot, a memorial crypt from the 1910 L.A. Times bombing, committed by leftist union thugs, with all the names of the 21 victims buried there on the large monument. Over a hundred more were injured by the blast. Anti-union Publisher Harrison Gray Otis used to carry a pistol everywhere and every day, because he needed it. Now the communists run the L.A. Times, and they all hate guns, editorially, and love leftists. That's another topic. But the Left's tactics haven't changed much in a hundred years, have they?)
But we don't teach history any more.
Ignorance, stupidity, delusion, and gullibility will be the midwives that bring about the birth of a hot war with multiple loci from those different asymmetrical warfare approaches, rather than a great classic conflict. And no one will be more surprised when it gets away from them, both by incompetence and malign design, than the Left.
Agitation turns to shouting turns to shoving turns to punching turns to shooting.
It's true when psychotic patients escalate in the hospital, it's true during police confrontations, and it's true in mob actions. Except in the last case, with less reason or accountability, once groups descend to mob mentality. People that start out from a basis of irrationality and incivility don't give birth to calm, considerate discussions of issues.
We're already regularly at Stage 4 and occasionally Stage 5 in that continuum, above.
People who've experienced it describe personal financial disaster as happening "Slowly at first, and then all at once." The meltdown of society probably isn't going to be a Pearl Harbor or 9/11 sort of moment. It's going to be the more frequent, shorter, and sharper escalations, leading to greater amounts of violence, until suddenly anything, everywhere, turns into maximum meltdown.
At that point, I suspect the biggest crowds with diversity will be the worst, and the places with near-parity the likeliest flashpoints, i.e. all the places where big red areas rub up against those little blue islands on the political maps, or those closest to a true 50/50 split. Mostly- and all-red or all-blue spots probably won't be as bad, though woe to those in the minority in either case.
Matt Bracken's "Bosnia times Rwanda" quote applies.
Those are the political fault lines I see.
Zip codes, neighborhoods, blocks, streets, house-by-house, and door-to-door.
That red-yellow-green-blue map may become a lot more important, at least in the faultline areas.
Just like the no-go areas in Eurostan, it always takes a certain amount of diversity to make a mob, and then it just wants a leader or three, a push, and a spark.
It might be in five years, or five minutes.
But don't think for one minute that it cannot happen here, or that it magically won't.
The main mystery now is when, not whether.
5 comments:
The radical left doesn’t seem to have any sense about how dangerous the activities they are engaging in can be when you push the wrong person too far. Or maybe they do and believe that the unpleasantness won’t touch them. They are fools.
Another important point is that each side will wage a war of assassination of the other side's leaders. That's how you fight an asymmetrical internal get together.
I think I've said something like this before, but I've never been that sanguine about Americans finally taking up arms against the Left. Maybe that's because I haven't grown up in military/gun owner circles and don't fully understand the readiness of those who have. But for the short term at least, I think the networking and the will for an extended conflict, like what Matt Bracken and others have portrayed, is lacking. The fact that so many of our "conservative" leaders are desperate to kowtow to Schumer Pelosi et al. at the first opportunity doesn't help.
That's just my interpretation of what I see around me, though. I don't have all the data or the best vantage point, so I could very easily be wrong.
"The fact that so many of our "conservative" leaders are desperate to kowtow to Schumer Pelosi et al. at the first opportunity doesn't help."
You don't think some judicious culling of those sheep would stiffen the spines of the remaining GOPe when things get sporty? History says this will happen as a normal course of events. It becomes a case of playing to win, or you're not playing.
@Brent
The problem with that clever plan is that in about a week, they have no leaders left at all, because we're better marksmen. In a far more gentlemanly time, even the Nazis never considered trying that, and while the Brits did manage to snuff out Heydrick, it was essentially a one-off, against the alternative in his case of nothing to lose, and ultimately while that helped a small bit in Bohemia and Moravia, it just put Herr Eichmann in charge of overseeing the Final Solution. No one wants to be fighting a leaderless mob, ultimately. We could have nuked Tokyo back in the day, but then who would remain to sign the instruments of surrender?
@T-Rav
No one sane on our side (and everyone isn't, sadly) wants armed open conflict, least of all this author. But ultimately, that's a bilateral deal, and the Left isn't even that sane. They don't just want it and fantasize about it frequently and publicly, they brag and gloat about unleashing it. Our side understands that as a precursor to it actually breaking out, because we, unlike they, understand human nature and the behavior of flawed human beings. They think they'll open the ball and "that will show us". Look at how they've thought everything they've done since Nov 9, 2016 - the bonafide World's Greatest Succession Of Failure Strategies, would "show us" that they were right, and we were all wrong, and Trump would miraculously not be POTUS anymore. This level of magical thinking, coupled with their actual adult abilities, is the equivalent of handing live hand grenades to toddlers. Both comedy and pathos will inevitably ensue.
As one of my drill instructors cautioned my group: "I see a baby, I'ma throw a grenade at the baby. If da baby blow up twice, da baby was booby-trapped."
It was hilarious, and totally contrary to the letter and spirit of Marquis of Queensbury concept of "The Laws Of Land Warfare" amidst a rather grim period of basic training, but the lesson that sometimes even babies can be lethal, and what happens after that is just tough nails, was nonetheless one of the grimmest reality impressed upon us about the truth of war: you get the conflict you get, not the one you imagine, and then you do what has to be done to survive and win it.
Our would-be and now disdained and mostly discarded "leadership" of milquetoasts is the reason the Left is such a problem in the first place, and also the reason Trump is the president now. Had they manfully opposed utter nonsense when it was far cheaper and easier to do so, they would not now find themselves in the role of political appendix, and about to be removed like a wayward and infected organ.
And when conflict, near inevitably, breaks out, they will be overtaken by events, overruled, the lucky ones simply voted out, the hangers-on even bum-rushed and whacked over the head, and it'll be nothing but wartime consiglieres after that until happier times.
Observe the derangement and fall of former icons like George Will et al for how that works out in reality. Once a voice of deep-running reason, now an aging and senile embarrassment to everything he once stood for, a caricature in utter foolishness and petulance, and a short step from non-existence. Only the leftards propping him up as a shill gives him even a soapbox at the present time, and he's considered a sad reminder of no one as much as Neville Chamberlain, who fails to understand that it's 1940, and he was as wrong as wrong could be, not about everything, but only everything about the most important thing.
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