Special to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

I’m not a stranger to political violence.  And I have no interest in it.

Sometimes I feel like I must be, for sure that my life is a novel, and a very well foreshadowed one at that.

Black September and the Munich massacre which marred the first time I was aware of the Olympic games (which provided something to watch on TV through the first dreary summer when my brother went away with friends and I was left to my own devices for amusement) foreshadowed September Eleven.  And I’m hoping very hard that my youth of turning a corner and finding yourself in the middle of a melee, of bomb threats and attacks on insufficiently supportive establishments, of riots and party headquarters burning is not a foreshadowing for the next few years.  Because I’m old, I’m tired, and I can’t be having with that.

Yeah, Maxine Waters is not only crazier than a shithouse rat, she’s also at best reality-adjacent.  Anyone who has had the dubious pleasure of listening to her questioning someone or expounding on something knows that the world inside her head has only a casual resemblance to the real one.  And that she’s got parallel and irrational images of how the world works, which make no sense to anyone with even a modicum of attachment to oh, physics, history or psychology.

But then… but then there are the people who elected her.  And the people who seem to be doing their best to follow her directive to harass and attack anyone who is in the administration or even voted for it and to attack ICE agents.

There have been a bunch of unreported incidents by ANTIFA which is named in the best tradition of the Deutsche Demokratische Republik (German Democratic Republic: three words, three lies, as it was more Soviet than anything, democracy meant that everyone voted in unison for the approved party, and it was not a republic but a dictatorship.) At least the supposedly anti-fascist Antifa only has two words to lie with.  But that a group of street thugs who beat up everyone who agrees with them and who block access to legitimate businesses and try to keep speakers from the public that they don’t want the public to hear can call themselves ANTI fascist with a straight face is one of the great ironies of our time.  I’m waiting for them to start wearing brown shirts and burning books, while still screaming the Nazis are those innocent people they beat up.  Then they will have gone their length.

And everyone is hardening their defenses.  Everyone.  Yes, even minor players.

So what gives?  What are they doing?  And more importantly, what DO they think they’re doing.

What we’re seeing is the run up to World War One, this time in one society.

We’ve had almost 100 years of (uneasy, true) peace, while the sides drifted further and further apart.  As in the run up to WWI there was a surface narrative of peace and harmony.  In the same way that German youth and young Englishmen visited each other’s countries on vacation, and read the same books, for the last 70 years of our uneasy cold civil war, there was a surface peace and understanding.

The problem is that it was never true.  In the same way that behind the scenes England was growing a greater and more cohesive empire and freezing out Germany, the left had taken all the means of mass communication.  What a friend calls the Mass-communication-entertainment industrial complex was taken, and taken early and slowly ratcheted left until the “consensus reality” was left.

Those of us who disagreed; those of us with a different vision of the world and different thoughts on history (or, hell, science, or psychology, or … anything) were frozen out.  We didn’t exist.  What “everyone knew” was left.  And most of us were so isolated, we might not believe the left in our field of expertise, but would accept the consensus reality in other things.

But because there was no check on it, it was all the left’s version all the way, and because the left’s way of interpreting things is a complete internally consistent (used to be) hermetically sealed system that allows no dissenting though in (which is why it fills mass graves every time) their complete dominance of every narrative medium from movies to paintings, to school books, education, books written for entertainment and even songs, left them free to tilt ever more and more away from reality.

This is the only state of affairs that allowed party conversation and polite social chatter about what a moron Ronald Reagan was even while he was, in action, upending every shibboleth of the left previously accepted world wide: things like controlled prices and salaries, the primacy of unions, etc.

If Europe had been half awake and not listened to our journalists (a wholly-owned subsidiary of the left) but had instead looked at the economy taking off, or the Soviet Union folding like a cheap suit, they would be in much better shape now than they are.  But they didn’t because the disease was more advanced there, and the tradition of listening to credentialed people is much stronger there. Still and all even here the industrial narrative complex kept the idea that Reagan’s economy was a result of Carter’s actions (a narrative so laughable it could only be maintained by an all prevalent and massive top-down media) green enough that Obama was elected.

But by the time of Obama, they couldn’t burnish the narrative enough to make him seem like a great president.  Nor could they sell us into Summer of Recovery xn even though they are still trying. They kept just enough cred, and burned it all—and all the fraud apparatus too—to elect Obama a second time.  Which was stupid, because it only increased people’s disgust. Because the world had changed.

Like the pre-WWI generals locked in their war rooms and referencing the same old books, they planned the upcoming victory, unaware that technology and the world were making it impossible.

While the left not only filled every nook and cranny of twentieth century “narrative industries” to the point the only way a conservative could work in one of those was under deep, deep cover, the engineers made the internet.

The left didn’t even know it really had any serious opposition left.  You can’t blame them too much. Even those of us who were very opposed and very disgusted kept it polite in public and treated them as retarded children who couldn’t take opposition.

Would it have made any difference if we’d talked back, say 30 years ago?

I doubt it.

You see, leftism is as much as anything else a religion.  The crazy Marx with his vision of the future created an entire narrative from paradise (pre-capitalism, i.e. it never existed, guys, not even as apes.  Apes, as we now know, trade) through fall into capitalism to eventual paradise again, where the New Man (what used to be called the Soviet Man) will be so altruistic and communally oriented that a government isn’t needed.  (Like the peace of Islam, there’s only one way to obtain that, and no.  Just no.  Worldwide species extinction is as fantastical as the idea of that primordial paradise.  Humans are humans, and someone will survive.  I’m just not interested in letting them send us back ten thousand years.)

You hear it in the talk of the left—particularly the rather intellectually inbred fourth generation, who ate the pap the older people fed them and never had an original thought in their lives—stuff like calling us “reactionaries” (when they’re the ones in power, and have been for a long time, and the ones knee-jerk reacting) and talking about “the future” as belonging utterly to them, and the arrow of history, as though history were the chart in their book, with an arrow beneath.

Their faith doesn’t align particularly well with reality.  For instance there’s the whole thing of them talking about us—always—as though we were the ones in power, when they have all the gatekeeping positions and all the contacts.

This dissonance has required them to make up invisible monsters that give us all the power: Patriarchy (a laughable idiocy in America and weak everywhere in the west.  While they refuse to see it in the Middle East and Latin America where it actually exists in spades.) Micro aggressions.  White privilege (which is so strong that it gives an edge to concentration camp survivors.)

All the while they refuse to admit the real privilege: Leftist privilege.  The fastest way to rise in the narrative fields is to be lefter-than-thou.  Because they’re in charge and that’s how the system is setup, so they can stay in charge.

Unfortunately this has created their isolation.  You see, every song, every movie, ever history book, every fictional book, assures them they’ll win.  They know that “the people united shall never be defeated.”  They also know that though held back by patriarchy, racism, sexism and all the micro aggressions, the people really are with them.  HAVE TO BE, because they’re ideology of the future, and history’s arrow points to their paradise.  Every book, movie, etc. says so either subtly or openly.  So they KNOW.  Everybody knows.

Only lately they’ve been suffering injuries to their world view.  It started with Trump’s election.  Or rather it didn’t, but that was the one strong enough to hit them in the face.  The rest hadn’t made it past the faith.

They’ve tried to deny it and invalidate it by every means possible.  The crazy Russia thing is more an attempt to restore their certainty and peace of mind than anything else.

But reality keeps hitting them in the face.  The #metoo thing designed to get Trump (who they’re still sure is some sort of uber-rapist, despite all evidence to the contrary.  Sure, a philanderer but a much cleaner one than Clinton and certainly consensual.  However awkward, his definition of hypergamy in females is right.  Turns out if you’re rich enough, a large number of women will really let you grab them by anything.) ended up hitting a lot of their own icons and then went out of control showing the vapid idiocy of current feminists.

They bring out the whole made up (in the sense the worst stuff happened under Obama) outrage over “children in cages” and the narrative doesn’t take.  Not amid the people who don’t do social media.  (It might in fact have hardened them against the left.)  They tried the Russia thing, but it’s coming apart in their hands. They lift every minor victory up as transformative.  They keep waiting for the mass arrests and concentration camps to show that Trump is just like Hitler, while instead the great goof galumphs around getting the economy to actually recover and thereby exposing all of Obama’s venal incompetence for the world to see.  And he’s doing better in foreign relations than the holy doctrine of apologizing to them little brownz people which should have worked, it should.

They’re going insane.  It’s not just their dominance (and it is that too.  All the celebrities went all in for Hillary and they still failed.)  It’s their world view, their sanity, their certainties about the world they live in.  They’re sure there’s some clever and dirty trick being pulled that makes their stuff not work and the “stupid” non Marxist stuff work.  There has to be.  Otherwise they’d be wrong.

It is into this soil that crazy Maxine (I first typed it Marxine) Water’s exortation to violence has fallen.

And it’s taking hold, because well… violence is the obvious response to the unbearable internal pressures.  Win or lose, a real fight is something they can grasp.  And then, you know, all their training and entertainment and the smartest people on their side KNOW they’ll win easily.

So Occupy Wall Street failed.  Their attempt to “start the seed” to show the “oppressed” it was time to rise up didn’t make it.  It must have been that they weren’t loud enough.  So now they have the antifa, to show the oppressed that they can break heads, and it’s the time for revolution.

Among my crazier left contacts—and there’s a lot of them.  I work in science fiction—“revolution” has become a more popular word than ever since the sixties.

They know they can win.  They have all the plans. They want this war to start already.

And our side?  Oh, heavens.  How many of us have daydreamed about a second American Revolution? The saner of us confined it to our dreams and fiction, but there’s a reason The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is my favorite Heinlein, and I’m aware of it.

Now it looks like the two sides have had enough of talking and that “the blood on the streets” will be impossible to avoid.

Will our side win?  Possibly.  Even likely, given that we have most veterans with us.  Will it be a good thing?

At this point the world of Starship Troopers is a best case scenario after the confrontation.  And it wasn’t … precisely… a free world.  Stable sure, but not the same way we’ve enjoyed it the last hundred years or so.

The worst case scenario looks like all those things that the left keeps accusing us of being:a world in which what you can do, think and be is determined by your circumstances at birth.  A world in which the eccentric, the Odd, the creative is very hemmed in.  A world none of us wants.

And possibly the most likely one, since the people who will get at the head of the movement have a good chance of being types attracted to absolute power, and also, frankly, not only they but us (those who survive) will emerge on the other side of this will be—justifiably—suspicious of the left and every cause and group they championed and sanctified.  And we’ll be angry.  Really angry.  Blinding fury doesn’t begin to describe it.

In this moment of silence, before we all go over the trench and the shooting starts, there’s time to stop.  My inner sensors tell me the conflagration is somewhere between two months and a year away (it’s unlikely to happen in winter.  But it could surprise me.  My guess is if their blue wave fizzles, they’ll go truly, bizarrely insane.)

There’s still time to turn back, to re-examine assumptions, to realize that maybe they don’t have the mass of the people with them, and that this will end badly for everyone, but particularly for them.

But of course, I can’t reach them, and the ones who do skim this blog only do it till offended.

So, here we are.  It could go off any minute.  Do we have any real coffee left, not that chicory stuff?  And does anyone want a last cigarette?

I can hear the cannons in the distance.

 

Reprinted from According to Hoyt Posted on June 27, 2018.