A link to a post (via LC & IB Mike) by a #NeverTrumper which is actually worth reading in full. He’s still wrong, but he’s certainly not frothing at the mouth and, we would add, quite reasonable when it comes down to it.
But he’s particularly wrong on this particular bit:
I get that you are sick of being stomped on for opposing the progressives’ attempts to engineer our society and control everything we think and say. But turning the tables and giving leftists a taste of their own vile medicine, while admittedly satisfying on a lizard-brain level, will not actually bring about constructive change. Remember the rider and the elephant? Bullying others inspires defensiveness. Worse, it destroys our ability to credibly defend genuinely liberal values. How can we ask for toleration without being willing to give it in return?
There are other ways to fight the left. We can be firm and unbending in confronting its fascism without being nasty.
No, there aren’t. And you can take this from a former communist, and you don’t get much more leftist than that. We believe our credentials are impeccable when it comes to that.
Communist agitators, or let’s just simplify it and call it leftist agitators, we’re all really part of one large dysfunctional family with numerous different names depending on which ones “sold” better at any given time, thrive on violence. And violence is the only way to fight back against us effectively. Playing “let’s not be beastly to the reds” doesn’t help even slightly, and knowing that it’s how the gentle idiots on the right prefer to “fight” is actually one of the most powerful weapons of the left.
Hitler, a rather famous leftist, wasn’t defeated by not being “nasty” to him and his hordes of murderous fanatics. As a matter of fact, being “nasty” to the poor socialist dear was what aborted his lame attempt at a coup back in his Munich days.
NOT being “nasty” to him was what brought him to power in 1933. You do the math. Sure, the inmates of Dachau might have prided themselves in their restraint later on while starving to death, but they were still inmates of Dachau. Some “victory” of civility over “nastiness” right there. Not that all of said inmates were much better, many of them being brutal thug leftists themselves, they just weren’t as good at it as their socialist brown shirted counterparts.
And believe me, we later leftists were taking notes very carefully while simultaneously vociferously denying that national socialists were socialists.
As a young communist, we learned a lot about how violence works and how to make it work even better. For us. For one thing, we were instructed very carefully to always make our “protests” and “demonstrations” violent by having “a few individuals not at all connected to the movement and therefore not at all representative of our legitimate grievances” (for later plausible deniability purposes, of course) start a provocation aimed at producing counterviolence from the provoked parties.
Step two was to make sure that all of the focus would be on the ones attacked rather than the ones (us) who started it, editing footage as necessary, so we could claim the martyrs’ crown for ourselves.
“Ah”, we hear you say, “but didn’t you just disprove your own words by saying that violence is exactly what the left wants? Wouldn’t playing “nice” thus be better?”
Sure. If you want to lose. Even as deranged leftists, we weren’t utterly delusional, nor suicidal. We knew full well what might happen if things got out of hand and were equally carefully instructed to fall back if we were getting our arses beaten. The objective was to get a few bloody scalps and t-shirts, then put out a load of propaganda and let the idiot and easily manipulable media do their thing.
As we said: We’d been taking notes. We knew full well that to ignite the powder keg too much would lead to Dachau or its modern equivalent.
Our entire plan and any hopes of success we might have were predicated on a few things:
1) Our opponents’ unwillingness to fight to the finish because that would be “nasty” and
2) Our reliance on the media’s sympathy to our cause, which meant that we could always count on them to paint the ones we’d provoked as the real perpetrators.
Sound familiar? Every single fight that has broken out at a Trump rally was instigated by leftist “protesters”, and every single press story about those incidents, on both left AND right, has been about how “those Trump supporters sure are a violent bunch, aren’t they?”
It worked like a charm. And it still does, thanks to the useful idiots perpetuating 1) and the media of this and other countries who are entirely in the pockets of the left, even more so than when we were a young communist idiot.
We had absolutely no plan short of a violent revolution for a situation in which our opponents took us up on our willingness to break skulls and started breaking ours with a ferocity equal to or stronger than ours, and we weren’t too sure about the revolution bit.
We weren’t ever, not even a tiny little bit, interested in compromise or “getting along.” Compromise would get us nowhere, and each and every fig leaf extended to us by the “right” was nothing but a sign of weakness to us, a great victory, and an encouragement to step up our “activism” further. Why back down when your enemy is busy retreating?
Our only fear was that the people that we were provoking constantly might, at some point, have had enough.
So no, Virginia, not being “nasty” is not a winning strategy against the left. The left picked the rules themselves. Let them die by them.
If they slap you, knife them in the groin. If they stab you, shoot them in the face. If they persecute you, round them up and ship them off in cattle cars. If they revolt, gun them down with machine guns.
Or lose to them. It’s your choice.
When we were a kid, in first or second grade we believe, the fourth and fifth graders had a ball bullying those in my age group. Now, we weren’t a timid kid, but we also knew that we didn’t stand a chance against the “big kids” for purely physiological reasons, and so did everybody else our age. Still, it couldn’t go on like that, so we hatched a plan. Within a few weeks, we’d organized a posse of “little kids” and we made an example of a couple of the “big kids”, and we didn’t “remonstrate” or “play nice” with them either. We beat them to a bloody pulp. Then we beat them some more. Then we stripped them and threw them into a thorn bush.
We were never bullied again.
Sure, that was “nasty” and certainly not the thing to do, going by current “right wing” philosophy, we should have taken our legitimate grievances to them and tried to iron out our differences, we’re sure.
But at least we had our lunch money and our bikes never had flat tires or missing parts. Unlike the “nice” kids, who must have been cyborgs who didn’t need to eat and seemed to be unable to find their possessions on a regular basis.
It might not have been “constructive change”, but at least it was change we could believe in. And live with.
Take from that what you will.
Thatisall.
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