Tag: Antifa

Setting the revanchist table

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Were BLM to apply its revisionist purges to the Democrats’ pseudo-history, they would be forced to abandon the Party:
Democrats: The Missing Years

That those Democrat sins are long past is an untenable objection for the statue topplers, 1619 Project acolytes, POC supremacists, and Democrat mayors in the plantation cities.

In any case, sins are still being committed.
Joe Biden: The New George Wallace

Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day be day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except the endless present in which the party is always right…

Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past…

All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.

– George Orwell

Washington D.C. riot

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I have seen a couple of comments today of the form, “Now, at least, the Left is condemning riots.” I doubt the people who express this sentiment do so unironically.

I’m sure they are aware that while the opportunity to condemn BLAMTIFA looting, arson, and murder has been available for months; it elicited only condonation from Democrats. That violence is not suddenly on the table.

No, The Left sees a different opportunity – legislation. Some ill-advised people protesting election fraud have handed Pelosi and Schumer the keys to the Black Maria with “Do SOMETHiNG!” stenciled on the side.

The legislative response from our newly minted Big Left General Government will turn out worse than their CCP virus policies. Always looking for excuses to expand their takedown of the Constitution, the identity essentialists faction of State Control are aroused and enabled.

Rules for Radicals v1.0

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A friend sent the the first quote following the other day as a post topic, and I’ve added another from the same source:

“Undermine the enemy first, then his army will fall to you. Subvert him, attack his morale, strike at his economy, corrupt his leaders, sow internal discord. Destroy him.”

“All warfare is based on deception. Hence, when we are able to attack, we must seem unable; when using our forces, we must appear inactive; when we are near, we must make the enemy believe we are far away; when far away, we must make him believe we are near.”

― Sun Tzu

For the Chinese, The Art of War remains current doctrine. But it is more than an ancient (~5th century BC) Chinese military treatise on strategy and tactics.

Consider it as Rules for Radicals v1.0. Saul Alinsky wasn’t such an original thinker. His major contribution (maybe V1.05?) was no more than an amoral gloss: Glorifying personal mendacity, celebrating corrupt nihilism, and justifying individual persecution by the mob.

“War” does make for a much punchier title than “Business, Sports, Politics, Strategy, Tactics, and Life in General.” But, Sun Tzu’s advice is often general. With Alinsky’s help it applies to American Leftist academicians and authoritarian politicians as much as to the present day Chinese People’s Liberation Army; and to our SJW Community Organizers as much as to the Russian CyberKommand. Even though they all are enemies.

If you’ve been paying even slight attention, you easily can supply many recent examples of the Chinese Communist Party’s deceitful undermining of the United States. The list includes attempts at subversion, demoralization, economic disruption, corruption of high officials, and sowing of internal discord. That would be in line with Sun Tzu’s advice. I hope we’re doing it to them. But their Fifth Column is much better than ours.

That is, the Chinese have had a lot of help with their efforts. While we can draw parallels to Art of War, more damage results from domestic application of Rules for Radicals. As a few of Alinsky’s aphorisms will illustrate:

“The enemy properly goaded and guided in his reaction will be your major strength.”

“The organizer’s first job is to create the issues or problems… The organizer must first rub raw the resentments of the people of the community; fan the latent hostilities of many of the people to the point of overt expression.”

“Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it. Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions.”

“Human beings do not like to look squarely into the face of tragedy. Gloom is unpopular.”

“A Marxist begins with his prime truth that all evils are caused by the exploitation of the proletariat by the capitalists. From this he logically proceeds to the revolution to end capitalism…”

“To say that corrupt means corrupt the ends is to believe in the immaculate conception of ends and principles.”

“Accuse the other side of that of which you are guilty.”

“They have the guns and therefore we are for peace and for reformation through the ballot. When we have the guns then it will be through the bullet.”

“Always remember the first rule of power tactics; power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.”

And my favorite – which you never hear – in these days of BLAMTIFA and ‘gender’ chaos:

“The fact that people are poor or discriminated against doesn’t necessarily endow them with any special qualities of justice, nobility, charity or compassion.”

Anything strike you about Alinsky’s advice and current events?

Mask mandates? Lockdowns? Riots, looting and arson unopposed by civic leaders? Pronoun wars? Cancel culture? Election fraud? Destruction of small business? Dollar gutting multi-trillion dollar pipe dreams? Self-debasement of our media? Objections to “Wuhan Virus” as racist?

Further reading:

“In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is…in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.”

– Theodore Dalrymple

“The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were- cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?”

-George Orwell, 1984

We’ll let Sun Tzu have the final word:

“The greatest victory is that which requires no battle.”

Slouching toward ochlocracy

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Michael Yon

On the ground in in Atlanta.

“One day there will be a medal: “I was alive in 2020.” And we will look at each other knowingly. All the wisdom we gained in 2020. To prepare us for 2021. And then we will look back at 2020, and remember how 2020 was the easy, predictable year.”

Many pictures of BLM, ANTIFA and Trump supporters with commentary.

Cell phones and cell groups

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Idea: A belief, option, or doctrine; a characteristic or controlling principle.
Organization: A group of persons associated together for a common purpose and having a set of rules which specify the relations of the individual members to the whole group, and to non-group members.

With that, we can parse Joe Biden’s advice not to worry about unorganized ideas:
“Antifa is an idea, not an organization.“.

So, what did Mr. Biden mean? It seems clear he was trying to minimize growing national disquiet over Antifa’s America-threatening ideas: Antipathy to free speech, contempt for free markets, abhorrence of private property, hatred for the Constitution, and disdain for the rule of law. Biden’s statement is an acknowledgment that Antifa ideas are threats (which he didn’t denounce, either, you’ll note), and the implication that violence, arson, and murder in the name of those ideas isn’t a problem because they aren’t co-ordinated.

Mr. Biden to the contrary notwithstanding, there is ample evidence of organization in Antifa’s implementation of a totalitarian agenda.

Even the New York Times gets it:
The Truth About Today’s Anarchists

[D]ocuments the “systematic, online mobilization of violence that was planned, coordinated (in real time) and celebrated by explicitly violent anarcho-socialist networks that rode on the coattails of peaceful protest,” according to its co-author Pamela Paresky…

“The ability to continue to spread and to eventually bring more violence, including a violent insurgency, relies on the ability to hide in plain sight — to be confused with legitimate protests, and for media and the public to minimize the threat,” Dr. Paresky told me.

As in, “It’s just an idea.”

That idea helps them hide in plain sight. I’m so old, I remember when “Communist cell” was much the same thing.

Then, there’s a Rutgers study with the page heading, NETWORK-ENABLED ANARCHY ● A CONTAGION AND IDEOLOGY REPORT: A fact check on Mr. Biden’s disingenuous and ignorant effort. Emphasis mine:

“Three tactics characteristic of extremist online communities have allowed them to become influential in recent years: 1) they use memes as propaganda [1], 2) they employ sophisticated communication networks for both planning and recruiting, making use of both fringe and private, online forums [2], and 3) they organize militias, and inspire lone wolf actors for violent action [3, 4].

On social media, memes—images, videos, and/or slogans—permit extremists to plant hateful [5], antisemitic [6] and/or revolutionary [7] ideas in the public eye. Often, they are disguised with humor or through using coded language, and originate in online forums [5, 6]. The somewhat private nature of these forums allows extremist groups to use them to shield themselves from view while sharing extremist ideas and coordinating action. [8]. Finally, many extremist movements, from radical Jihadi to libertarian-anarchists, now use social media memes and other propaganda to recruit for militias with apocalyptic and revolutionary ideology (such as global Jihad or apocalyptic confrontations with police) [3, 9]. Organized violent networks that support these ideas generate both lone-wolf [10] and cell-like [11] attacks against law enforcement and the general public.

During opportune moments of vulnerability, these groups take advantage of social unrest over major events such as the Covid lockdowns and George Floyd’s killing. The target of much of the recent outrage in these events has been the most visible institutional manifestation of state authority and raw power: the police [4].”

Rutgers tells us there are such groups on the Left and the Right, but the examples are almost all on the Left. And the congruency of lockdown protests with Floyd events suffers from the fact that there have been no murders, looting, or arson in any lockdown protests.

Finally, here’s an inside look at Antifa organization.
The Conservative Trans Woman Who Went Undercover With Antifa in Portland

“There are different types of bloc organization styles. The building block of antifa is what’s called an affinity group, people you live and work with and trust and know in real life. All the planning is done within that closed bloc, and they don’t let everyone know [what they’re going to do]. I didn’t know that they were going to burn the Portland Police Association when I joined. What they did was put a call out that said, “Anyone show up in black that night at this place, and you can join the action.”

That’s called a semi-open bloc. The planning is done within the closed group, but anyone who’s dressed in black can come join the action. If you know what you’re looking for, you can spot affinity groups that are working together. One thing they’ll do sometimes is have written agreements with other protest organizations that aren’t in black bloc. I know of one from Berkeley that illustrates this: “We agree that to not take pictures of anyone in antifa.” It will say that literally in writing, so everyone’s working together. It’s like a combined arms type thing, almost like the military. They work together and are mutually reinforcing…

I describe it as an open-source networked insurgency. They were incredibly efficient. They hit a target and vanished into the city and got away. Basically, they’re like skirmishers: They come in, they attack the cops, they get out.

Antifa goes for a certain type of violence, a mid-level violence. Most people aren’t practiced in violence, and what they’ll do is, they’ll either back down or they’ll overreact. Antifa basically as a group does the equivalent of just pushing someone on the shoulder, and again, and again…

It’s really interesting. I did a breakdown of the Grant Park video, the tech they had. And that was freaking incredibly sophisticated. This is Grant Park in Chicago, when they attacked the statue and put like 49 police officers in the hospital. [Tonight] was so much like this, in terms of operational sophistication, how coordinated everything was.

Let me explain that a little more. People keep looking for a chain of command, and you don’t necessarily need that, as long as everyone understands a basic level of instruction it works…

[The media] play these little word games, “Oh, antifa doesn’t exist.” Yes and no. It’s not an organization where you have to sign up for a membership. It’s one of those things where it’s just a loose-knit network of people.”

Just an idea?
Antifa is a set of ideas in the same way the Democratic Party is a set of ideas. Antifa’s doctrine is just more narrowly focused. They don’t pay lip service to the Constitution, but both organizations would like Article V repealed and replaced with a popular vote Constitutional Amendment process; of which the first results would be repeal of the Second, Ninth and Tenth Amendments.

Not an organization?
Antifa is an organization, it just doesn’t have an official leader, like the Democratic Party.

Antifa, moreover, is an organization whose members received bail money from Biden and Harris staffers. Antifa is an idea supported by Democrat officials like Ted Wheeler, Jenny Durkan, Keith Ellison, Jay Inslee, John Thompson (the MN state District 67 rep), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, and Ayanna Pressley. To name a few.

Antifa is the meme that ties anarchists together. That is, the organizing principle for overthrowing the Constitution.

Pimplandia

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“Being lectured by Democrats about how to handle judicial nominations is like an arsonist advising the Fire Department.”
– Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC)

Or like hiring a whoremaster who trafficked in minor girls at a salary of $150,000 to advise Portland on how to reform the Police Department. The HR department must have liked his resume.

Portland has already disbanded the Portland PD’s Gun Violence Reduction Team, with predictable results. And 911 calls, if answered at all, are pushing a 2 hour response time.

“a tyranny of the entitled masses”

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The Tyranny of Fragility: How Alexis De Tocqueville Foretold the Rise of Victimhood Culture

Tocqueville had direct knowledge of the Revolution of 1789. He would recognize BLM, Antifa, and a host of Democrats providing tacit support as modern Jacobins. The fate of Robespierre is not probably entirely lost on Harris, Pelosi, and Schumer, but they just can’t resist the opportunity to loose the useful idiots. Including Biden. On whom it probably is lost.

Tocqueville explains the otherwise surprising number of BLAMTIFA riot arrests of young women: Pampered, privileged, and white. Clara Kraebber, Alexandria Lyons, and Margaret Aislinn Channon are poster children for reflected victimhood virtue. The guys are just there because these are the only women who are attracted to them. Evidence? Look at the mugshots. See also.