Politics

To those of you who want a civil war, I say to you: you have no idea what you’re asking for. The causalities of war are high. You do realize that being the most moral or righteous does not in any way guarantee victory? There is literally no justice in war, only souls convinced of their rigorousness with promise of nobility. It is vanity to see glory in war. It is hubris exemplified! No American is asking for the war you want. No minority gives a shit about your white guilt. No looter studies the theory of stealing for its socioeconomic ends. And who are you fighting? Despite the stagecraft of the divisiveness of our government, they are unified in holding the nation they control and have the backing of a military who would slaughter any opposition. The people in our nation with the majority of the firearms would not be fighting against them.

“War is hell,” is the understatement of the century. It is the disillusion of any hope. It is soldiers running over children in Iraq, because if they stopped, their vehicles would be overturned by improvised bombs. It is families devastated by the ideology of might. The spoils of war can be seen every day when you open your wallet, and find that it is filled with oil and blood.

Destruction

The riots affect people’s lives. To those claiming that the destruction of property doesn’t equivocate to the loss of life, I say to you the riots in my own city of Chicago led to the deadliest weekend of the year, with 82 people shot and 22 fatalities¹. The looting has destroyed many small businesses. To those who say, “They have insurance,” it is inexcusable to justify the criminal destruction of property with such shallow pittance. Insurance companies are for profit businesses that will attempt to pay out the minimum during this crisis. In past riots, many businesses simply took their insurance money, if they even had any, and closed out, leaving empty commercial districts in their wake. Parts of Chicago never truly recovered from the riots in 1968, and are being ravaged again by the current looting².

I’ve often heard people quoting Martin Luther King when he said, “Riots are the language of the unheard.” To use this quote out of context is to ignore the fact that King condemned the violence.

“But it is not enough for me to stand before you tonight and condemn riots. It would be morally irresponsible for me to do that without, at the same time, condemning the contingent, intolerable conditions that exist in our society. These conditions are the things that cause individuals to feel that they have no other alternative than to engage in violent rebellions to get attention. And I must say tonight that a riot is the language of the unheard.” -Dr. Martin Luther King Jr³

The Normalization of Violence

After the 2016 elections, many people on the far left believed we were heading towards a world of fascism. In 2017, a Berkeley professor assaulted someone with a bike lock, and was given three years probation for assault with a deadly weapon⁴. A Virginia man who was convicted of punching a protest organizer in Charlottesville was given a $1 fine⁵. The normalization and rationalization of violence, when the cause is considered to be on the progressive left, greatly troubles me. I see the current justification for violence, as a righteous cause against oppression, to be irresponsible, shortsighted and foolish.

Those who justify this type of violence are living in the myth of catharsis. Releasing ones anger does not calm one down. In studies where subjects were raised to anger, and then allowed to break anything they wanted in a room filled with glass objects, the destruction made them angrier. Subjects who were told to sit calmly in a room, found their anger subsided⁶. Justifying and promoting destruction does not cause rage to burn out. It only adds fuel to the fires of fear and suffering.

Don’t Pick Up Any Bricks

There are bricks being left in pallets across America.

source 1 source 2 source 3

With construction being one of the few essential jobs still continuing, maybe it’s just coincidence, or maybe someone wants this to happen. Operation Mockingbird is not a conspiracy theory. It’s a fact that the United States government has repeatedly used propaganda and controlled the narrative against its own people. Tom O’Neill’s recent book on Charles Manson documents how Manson was likely a part of the MK Ultra program, and programmed via drugs and psychological manipulation to commit his many crimes⁷. Cities like St. Louis have massive problems with brick theft⁸, and bricks are rarely left out by construction companies or contractors. It’s not unreasonable to assume that entities may be encouraging these riots to a political end.

The Riots

Walking around the streets in Chicago, and watching videos others have posted, I will say there were a lot of white people and a lot of black people. If one thing can be said, it was probably one of the most diverse mobs in any race riot.

A number of people walked around and took photos, myself included. I am not proud of contributing to this new spectacle of chaos. Documenting the riot felt exploitative.

The great irony is that those who claimed we were moving towards fascism, have had their most extremists elements cause violence and destruction that has directly lead to the deployment of National Guard troops. They have brought fascism to a country they wanted to save from it.

I truly believe our media is manipulating us. The following segment shows the same words repeated on different local and national networks across the country. Could this be laziness? Are editors simply copying and pasting the lines from press releases? Possibly. Yet we know that America has a vast domestic spying program, and that the CIA has manipulated our media in the past. It is certainty not out of the realm of possibility that our media is no where near as free as people believe it is.

It is a very real possibility elements with the Federal and State governments are secretly funding the groups, possibly without their knowledge, that they are simultaneously condemning and labeling as terrorist organizations. It is likely we are being baited and manipulated into a chaos that results in the destruction of neighborhoods for the poor and working class, while benefiting the current ruling political class.

“Okay guys, one more thing, this summer when you’re being inundated with all this American bicentennial Fourth Of July brouhaha, don’t forget what you’re celebrating, and that’s the fact that a bunch of slave-owning, aristocratic, white males didn’t want to pay their taxes.” -Dazed and Confused (Film 1993)

War never serves the people who are convinced to fight. We try to dress up our military with nobility, but soldiers rarely fight for freedom, they fight for the causes of those with the slickest tongues and more bombastic speeches.

War

The opening paragraphs of this post were a response to a very close friend who told me she has been hoping for a civil war for over four years. My parents grew up during The Partition, after the fall of the British Raj in India. My mother’s family fled their home, and returned to find it looted. My father’s family attempted to stay in what’s now Pakistan, but as conditions worsened, my grandmother and grandfather decided to leave. They left on foot, because they were told the trains were being stopped, and the passengers were being robbed and murdered. My grandfather was robbed along the way, and he was latter stabbed by three men who wanted to take the house they had been squatting.

To those on both the left and the right who are crying out for war, you do not know what you are asking for. I leave you with a few quotes from a man who begged a nation not to destroy itself, before American’s last tragic self-inflicted gunshot wound.

“I am tired and sick of war. Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, for vengeance, for desolation. War is hell. … You people of the South don’t know what you are doing. This country will be drenched in blood, and God only knows how it will end. It is all folly, madness, a crime against civilization! You people speak so lightly of war; you don’t know what you’re talking about. War is a terrible thing! … War is cruelty. There is no use trying to reform it. The crueler it is, the sooner it will be over.” -William T. Sherman⁹