10-14-2020, 12:00 PM
(10-14-2020, 09:33 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:(10-14-2020, 09:07 AM)David Horn Wrote: I wonder how many other of these militia groups have or had similar plans? More important: were they coordinating or acting alone?
If they are smart, they are acting alone. Their basic problem is how to get enough people to do something significant without attracting so many people that odds are there is an informant among them. Thus far, they have not solved this problem well. In plots that went as planned like OKC and the Boston Marathon bombing, they solved the problem by only a few people knowing there was a conspiracy going on before it happened. In general, they have not.
From the Gunpowder Plot to this one, most conspiracies lack the discipline to succeed at their objective. The Lincoln plot succeeded only in the tragic death of precisely the man to fully redeem a nation recently rifted; the only participant who seemed to know what he was doing was John Wilkes Booth. The rest of the participants were schmucks who failed in their appointed tasks. There have been coups, but many of those ended up replacing one tyrant with another or replacing a shaky democracy with a brutal new order (Bolshevik "revolution, overthrow of Salvador Allende). Of course, I wish that the July 20 plot had succeeded, and it came close because the conspirators generally knew what they were doing but also knew that one thing (death or isolation of Hitler) was necessary. Even then, the plotter charged with capturing the communication nexus for the Third Reich didn't cut the wires to Josef Goebbels' telephone.
You have seen the images of the conspirators this time, and probably those who plotted against Abraham Lincoln. Do those people look like the sorts that you would want on an effort that requires extreme discipline and dedication? To be sure, appearance isn't everything.
Quote:Other than a few groups such as the Proud Boys, most of the militia are focused more on the Second Amendment than racism. At least they are not traveling much to urban turf to instigate. There could be some more groups who believe saving lives is an affront to freedom, but most don't see that as excusing violent means?
Violence against lawful government is anti-democratic to the extent that the government has the hallmarks of legitimacy resulting from a free and fair election, action within the constraints of some Constitution, and adherence to the rule of law. If the system is the Third Reich, then of course a violent overthrow is all that can redeem the nation under the rule of a tyrant. The State of Michigan is obviously nothing like Nazi Germany.
Quote:The AP just put out a piece on sunset towns or grey towns where groups of racists gather to exclude minorities. Black people know which towns are problematic and avoid them, but white people remain ignorant enough of them to think they don't exist. But such towns are a different problem. They defend in their own way a particular area rather than moving where the minorities are more numerous.
Few white people recognize how insidious the people supposedly defending them from minorities (as David DuKKKe put it in one interview, some black man entering your white daughter's precious... enough said) are. Truth be told, immigrants are attracted to the places with the vibrant economies and not to communities of unmitigated failure.
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.