09-11-2020, 10:03 PM
(09-10-2020, 04:44 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: Where the violence comes from depends a lot on whose ox is being gored, so to speak. It depends on which party controls the state. Right now the right-wing is still in power, and is stoking racism, and that allows racist cops to kill and maim black folks, which means that BLM and antifa rise up, and leads to occasional riots (aided by rightwing provocateurs hoping for a fascist reaction, which Trump supplies).
But if Biden wins, and a Democratic Party regime continues in power (in spite of Biden having picked the wrong VP), and the needed legislation to curb gun violence is passed, then the gun nuts may be the major source of the violence, stoked by the other right-wing obsessions over xenophobia, white identity culture, christian fundamentalism/anti-feminism and anti-abortion, tea-party style opposition to taxes and pro neo-liberal entitlement, etc. The militias then could be the major source of violence, and would be suppressed by the liberal state, just the reverse of a reactionary state suppressing antifa and BLM riots.
On the whole we Americans, center-right to center-left, loathe political violence here or overseas. There have been people who failed to recognize this, and such has proved catastrophic to their causes or to themselves personally. The bombings and execution-style slayings by the KKK likely hastened the success of the Civil Rights movement, and even if foreigners did the violence to foreigners, as with Kristallnacht or with the Anfal campaign (the gassing of Kurds in Iraq, such bode ill for the images of Adolf Hitler and Saddam Hussein.
Reactionaries are wise to stick to stupid expressions such as "The Zoo has an African Lion..." well, we know the rest. There are people still stupid enough to fall for those.
It is still possible that well-endowed heels will fund violent attacks upon the Left when the ballot no longer serves them. Private, politicized militias responsible to no legitimate authority are a bane to democracy; in case anyone thinks this strictly a right-wing phenomenon, the Commie coup in Czechoslovakia in 1948 occurred in part due to well-armed, highly-politicized, Commie militias that made resistance pointless.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.