Es Kommt

h/t WRSA

CA at WRSA and I have some back-and-forth over the import, and possible flaws of a recent VDH essay, this one from the ChicagoTribune.

Ignoring the point/counter-point (for which, go there and read it all), I think there's a bigger issue in play.

“Will America keep dividing and soon resort to open violence, as happened in 1861? Or will Americans reunite and bind up our wounds, as we did following the upheavals of the 1930s Great Depression or after the protests of the 1960s? 

The answer lies within each of us. 

 Every day we will either treat each other as fellow Americans, with far more uniting than dividing us, or we will continue on the present path that eventually ends in something like a hate-filled Iraq, Rwanda or the Balkans.”

Hanson has correctly described a binary outcome:
Either the lunacy will stop, or the country will rend itself.

Either/or.

1, or 0.

And he described it, not to put too fine a point on it, in exactly the terms put forward by Matt Bracken years since:

Bracken:
“Bosnia, times Rwanda”
Hanson:
“we will continue on the present path that eventually ends in something like a hate-filled Iraq, Rwanda or the Balkans.”

Hanson is not an instigator, he’s a historian.
He’s showing, with painful precision, that following the edge of this straight-ruler to its logical end leads to flying off a cliff into an abyss at speed, unless people see that inevitable denouement, and decide within themselves to turn away.

He argues absolutely nothing for or against either selection, for anyone, on any side.
Societies commit suicide all the time in world history, a fact of which he is well aware.
{cf.: SAfrica, Venezuela, Argentina, North Korea, Somalia, Yemen, Syria, Germany, Britain, Sweden, France, etc. ad infinitum, just this week alone…}

He’s simply posting a road sign marking a fork in the road ahead, and noting that taking the left side leads off the cliff, because the bridge is out.

Which path anyone chooses is a function of whether or not one has shit for brains, or whether, contrary to most of human history, one chooses to use actual brains.

In short, like the consummate professor he has been for decades, he’s teaching you how to think, and not what to think. Because he knows he’s not going to overcome a lifetime of stupid in someone’s life with just one essay, nor is he going to hand out the answers to the test just to ensure you can pass.
What one’s adversary chooses is similarly a mystery, which is why intelligence analysts worthy of the name are limited to looking at capabilities, and trying to discern intentions.

Because the enemy gets a vote.

The guy just said, in precise and intellectually defensible terms, that Matt Bracken’s description is one of two possible outcomes of this society, given current course and speed.

Not being a shit-for-brains drunken train engineer, and heading right off that bridge, instead of switching tracks or stopping the train, may be inferred from recourse to common sense and self-interest, but Hanson makes no such assumptions.

He’s simply and impartially noting what’s ahead.

Again, Hanson is not suggesting anything; he’s stating with mathematical precision that either things will be done differently, or there will be a conflagration. He is mathematically correct and precise in this formulation.

Having laid out the consequences, I don’t think he’s in denial about the current state of affairs at all.
When one guy, or five guys on the ‘net say “Civil War”, it may be just Tulipomania. When everyone is starting to sound like a chorus, including Stanford historians, there is beginning to be something to it.
Not everyone gets this revelation at the same time, nor with the same reliability as this guy:

Best line in the movie: “Those 5000 ships you say they haven’t got?? Well, they’ve got them!"

The problem with that in a practical sense is that it’s not a simple unilateral formula; it’s a complex one.

The simple (and incorrectly stated) version is

“If bunnies and unicorns, then rainbows.”

What Hanson actually said is

 

"If D plus R equals 1, normal. If D plus R is less than 1, cataclysm."

And without explaining further, or assigning values to D and R, we can probably agree that variable D in this case has been working very hard to achieve -300M, because it wants cataclysm, while if asked, they would say the exact same thing of R, because “subhuman Nazi -ists and -phobes.”
It is a logical conclusion that regardless of which statement of variable values is correct, the end sum is identical in either case.

Hanson is telling you the product (just as Matt Bracken has).
You may be worried about plugging in the variables.
You may even have them precisely correct, but the greater point is that it's immaterial.

When you put enough U-235 in close proximity (64kg, in point of historical fact), you achieve a predictable result:

In the grand scheme of things, yes, it matters in the vernacular of 1945 that "Japs are Japs" – sneaky, underhanded, backstabbing murderous pigs, "and Yanks are Yanks" – aggrieved, patient, but ultimately intolerant of being wronged; but not so much if you’re just the guy trying to push his cart of wares across the bridge that day at Ground Zero when the gadget goes off.

And unlike Hiroshima 73 years ago last month, it won’t go off 8000 miles away from home. It’ll be happening on your block, and mine.

So then what was suggested was adding a line about “redrawing borders”.
Srsly?

How did that work in Yugoslavia?
Iraq?
How about Rwanda, or anywhere in Africa, in all of history, inclusive?

This isn’t a red v. blue classic set-piece battle, because your town, your block, your apartment building, and in some cases your own bedroom are purple.

That’s going to be Stalingrad, not Waterloo.
Hue, not Gettysburg.
Not Hatfields & McCoys, but rather War Of The Roses.
(Pop quiz: Anyone here remember how that one ended?? Go look; I'll wait. That's where this is headed.)

How about a scene you might be more familiar with:
House to house, door to door, room to room, war to the knife, knife to the hilt, and then hand-to-hand.
Ain’t nobody likes that scene:

That stuff gives you nightmares that last for decades.

That’s why the coming sportiness in Califrutopia is going to be biblical: the state, even now, with illegal inundation and cuckservative flight, is still only 58-42. Even in the “blue hive” areas.

That’s a recipe for motherf**king BOSNIA, Man!

Texas: same thing.
Florida: same thing.
Coast-to-coast, wall to wall.

Great Holy Flying Spaghetti Monster, the demographic data is such that, if only millenials voted (like they will in a few short years) we couldn’t hold a single state but UTAH.

And that’s where we’re headed at bullet-train speed every day.

So the question isn’t why.

We know why.

The follow on, which is none of Hanson’s bailiwick to prescribe is

A) WTF are you (for all values of you) doing to plug the holes through which you’re being demographically supplanted, and have been for more than a generation?

B) What are you doing to flip blue chips to red ones, a la #Walkaway, passing on values, and inculcating them to the maturing hordes who’ve been scrubbed and formatted, and left with nothing of substance upon which to live their lives?
(Tammy Bruce pointed out “It’s easy for us. They have to cover all the windows top to bottom and keep their people in total darkness all the time; we just have to poke the tiniest of pinpricks of sunlight in, and their whole plan crumbles.”)
Every one you turn now, you don’t have to shoot in the face then.
It’s a zero-sum problem, and the consequences of planting acorns now could yield a forest in the future.
{cf.: The Starfish Story and my namesake’s favorite about a slave named Androcles}

C) If/when A and B fail, locally or overall, what provision have you made for Afterwards? In a P-A-C-E way? For all the “B”s?

(As noted herein :

“Bases.
Bangsticks.
Bullets.
Beans.
Band-aids.
Blades.
Bullion.
Battalions:
Bunches of ball-breaking bastards to batter and bash the bunch of bumbling buffoons on your borders.
That would be a Band of Brothers.”)

If you ain’t got such, you ain’t got much.
Because Es kommt.

That’s why “jaw, jaw, jaw, is better than war, war, war.”
It’s why “There never was a good war, or a bad peace.”
It’s why “It is good that war is so terrible, or else we would grow too fond of it.”
And because every day from now until it comes “is another day to sharpen our hatchets.”

I don’t think CA and I disagree on any of that.

As range coaches are wont to say:
“No blood, no harm; no harm, no foul.
Just take your time, and don’t make it a habit.”

And remember:
“A small band of committed men can change the world: it’s the only thing that ever has.”