Jim Hines and the narrative.

Jim Hines had a very long tweetstorm just before the Inauguration, based on his re reading of a book about 1968 called Days of Rage. The events he describes are beyond my experience: in 1972 I had just finished primary school. The New Zealand I lived in had its third Labour Government. By the end of the radical period he describes NZ had elected a fascist: Robert Muldoon.

I have always despised fascists, in part because I lived in a command and control state that was going bankrupt during my teenage and young adult years. By 1984, when the fourth Labour government under Lange took over, NZ had enough money for one more payroll payment to the state in the coffers.

We went full neo liberal and deregulated. Because we had to.

But Jim is correct in this: the radicals of that time in the US thought they would have a revolution, were violent, and were rewarded for it.

This is the difference between the hard Left & hard Right: you can be a violent leftist radical and go on to live a pretty kickass life. This is especially true if you’re a leftist of the credentialed class: Ph.D. or J.D.

The big three takeaways for me about Weatherman, when it comes to political violence in America as we might see it in 2016:

  • Radicalism can come from anywhere. The Weathermen weren’t oppressed, or poor, or anything like that. They were hard leftists. That’s it.
  • Sustained political violence is dependent on the willing cooperation of admirers and accomplices. The Left has these. The Right does not.
  • Not a violent issue, but a political one: ethnic issues involving access to power can both empower and derail radical movements.

Institutions are one of two major assets that the Left has and the Right lacks. The other is Shock Troops.

Institutions are organizations the Left controls that operate for the benefit of the Left’s people. The Right doesn’t really have these. As an example, there are occasional hard right lawyers, but so far as I know there is no such thing as the Reactionary Lawyers’ Guild.

The other thing that the Left has that the Right doesn’t are Shock Troops: unshameable actors.

Institutions and Shock Troops are important resources for the Left. They work together. The Left’s Institutions accept, cater to, train, and/or employ its people, including Shock Troops. And, in the cases of several Weathermen (and Davis), give them cushy jobs in their Shock-Troop retirement.

What happens when you have Shock Troops, but no, or few, or short-lived Institutions? That’s the story of black radicalism in the USA.

Jim Hines is doing us a service here. He is showing how the narrative works: it is a pincer movement. Some put on suits and do a Gramscian march through the institutions, subverting them. When you find that the medical council has decided social justice is its primary aim (as happened locally) you can see this. The justification is otherwise the radicals take over… and these are the people they support.

Street violence is therefore a feature, not a bug. Jim Hines sees the left as organized, disciplined, ready to fight, and seeing a body count as a good thing. The question is if this paradigm will work.

Vox Day comments, from experience of having people trying to disrupt gamer gate meetings.

This article, Days of Rage, goes into some detail concerning the political violence of the 1970s that is potentially relevant to today’s troubling environment, except for one thing. We are not our parents or our grandparents. We are not only willing to fight the Left, but are willing to fight them effectively, and within the constraints of the law, when they attack us. We are not unarmed and we are not unprepared. Far more of us have training and many vets even have combat experience. And there is absolutely nothing “Nazi” about self-defense.

Jim Hines notes that the left have practiced insurgency: he notes that the right have not practised civil counter insurgency, forgetting that there is an army of discharged soldiers who did precisely that in the sandbox. He ends with something sobering.

You do not want white people to riot. You Do Not. Want. White People. To Riot.

Nobody wants Civil War II. That doesn’t mean we won’t get it anyway.

I feel a little sick writing about this stuff. And a little stupid for talking about it. It sounds crazy in daylight. But every place I’ve been that had this happen thought it sounded crazy, too. And I have a bad feeling that right now what Americans want is to chop each other down like trees.

I think there is still goodwill. But it will end. And then the Saxon will hate. In the last Civil War, both sides killed so efficiently that regiments were stacked like cordwood. This time, your skin would be your uniform.

We need to rebuild the basic structures of our society, defence included. For the alternative is a chaos unimaginable.

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