On Domestic Unrest

I’ve written about domestic unrest before. It was a major theme of Lex Talionis. It underlies much of the situation in the Maelstrom Rising series. And here it is, raising its ugly head again.

Inciting incidents are hard to pin down. Many have been lies. In some cases, an actual death was twisted to make the dead man a martyr. In this case, it appears that a genuine act of police brutality (almost universally condemned, with the accused cop having been arrested and charged, then the charges upgraded) has been used as the inciting incident. This is not a Reichstag Fire, or a Mukden Incident. A genuine crime was committed.

However, while it might not have been as quick as the mob would have liked, it was being dealt with within the system. So, why the outrage?

Because it is useful. It has become apparent over the last few weeks that the Minneapolis Police Department desperately needs reform. It has little to do with race; a woman was murdered by a police officer from his car while she stepped out onto her front porch in her bathrobe, after she had called 911. A quick viewing of a video of Minneapolis cops in riot gear, shooting paintballs at bystanders on their porch in a quiet neighborhood, when those people didn’t immediately go inside when ordered to further reveals a police force that has some serious problems.

But that is an issue for the City of Minneapolis and the State of Minnesota. Why did cities nationwide suddenly erupt into flames?

Because it’s not about the incident. The incident is just an excuse.

Many fingers have been pointed in many directions as to who turned peaceful–if slightly misguided–demonstrations into violent riots. The media has been pointing to their favorite boogeyman, the white supremacist. The right has pointed to Antifa. The left has pointed to the Russians, the right to China.

The truth is most likely that they’re all right. But the biggest drivers here are not the white supremacists, or even the Russians or Chinese.

There will be those who will accuse me of a political bias in blaming Antifa. And as a single boogeyman, I’m not. While there’s a lot of misinformation about the group out there, it’s not just homegrown. Ask any European. They’ve experienced these groups before.

The hard Left has its own tactics, and that makes them identifiable. Felix Rex on YouTube has a pretty good breakdown:

There’s another identifier that struck me while watching this unfold. It’s a hallmark of Red terrorism that was part and parcel of the violence in the ’70s and ’80s, coming from the likes of the Red Army Faction, Action Directe, the Red Brigades, etc.

The purpose of much of the random violence was specifically to elicit a heavy-handed response from the target state, in order to force the kind of oppression that they claimed to be resisting. To force a divide between the people and their government, isolating each and allowing an overthrow, after which the terrorists would be in charge. This has sort of gotten lost in discussions of terrorism over the last twenty years, because jihadi terrorism has a somewhat different character. It’s still there, especially during the occupation of Iraq, but it gets obfuscated with the cultish bloodthirst to brutalize the kufar.

Since the riots can pretty easily be shown to have little to nothing to do with what they claim, then this becomes a similar thing. Driving a wedge through society, in an attempt at revolutionary overthrow.

We have a problem with that term: “revolution.” It’s been romanticized on Right and Left (for wildly different aims, but still romanticized) for a very long time. Some of that has to do with our national mythology about the Revolutionary War. Some of it has to do with movements that predate that war. Some of it (particularly on the Left) has everything to do with Communist subversion.

This guy usually talks about the video game industry, but he’s got some very good points in this video:

Make no mistake; this is an attempt to burn down society in order to replace it with something that will be unrecognizable. Most of the people rioting and looting aren’t even thinking about it. They are what Lenin called “Useful Idiots.” They have been primed by years and years of propaganda and manipulation, highlighting any outrage that could fuel unrest. In some cases, that might have been simply for the mercenary motivation of driving ratings or web traffic. In some cases, the unrest was always the point.

Many of those driving the attempt to tear down everything because of a single documented act of injustice are harboring a delusion that they will be able to create a utopia from the ashes, no matter how many lives have to be destroyed in the process. The others driving it, many of whom do not live in the United States, are unconcerned with the destruction, because the destruction of their strategic rival from within is the point.

Because the destruction is not going to be fixed overnight. Neighborhoods that have been ground zero for riots do not recover. Especially when local grocery stores and other infrastructure have been looted and burned. The people who live in the cities that are burning will suffer for a long time.

Which has been the goal all along.