People need to be taught by cops, with tazers and billy clubs, pepper spray and tear gas, rubber bullets and lead. By bailiffs and homelessness, hunger and fear, humiliation and misery, and by the loss of their dreams.
The political system is broken, the legal system is a farce. The descent into violence is inevitable in most developed and many undeveloped nations, because the rich and powerful do what they can, steal what they will, for they know no one can, or will, stop them.
You know the JFK quote, or you should.
Petro
I couldn’t imagine even a President who could pronounce such a truism without fatal political consequences, if not worse, today.
Another sad indicator on the trajectory of the “free” world.
Greg T
The John F. Kennedy quote:
” Those who make peaceful evolution impossible, make violent revolution inevitable. ”
People will catch on eventually, after they have lost everything and have no hope of redress under the current system.
Notorious P.A.T.
Don’t forget Churchill:
“You can always count on Americans to do the right thing after they’ve tried everything else.”
Jack Olson
Mr. Welsh, in the 1960’s and since then I have heard a great deal of this “violent revolution is inevitable” talk. Unfortunately, a handful of nut cases like the Symbionese Liberation Army, the Weathermen, the Manson Family, the Black Liberation Army, the Zebra killers, the Baader-Meinhof gang and the FALN took that nonsense seriously and murdered dozens of people because of it. More recently, the Montana Freemen and individual nut jobs like Ted Kaczynski and Timothy McVeigh committed murders under the influence of revolutionary delusions. The Rev. Jim Jones persuaded hundreds of Americans to move to Jonestown and to poison themselves en masse by convincing them of a mythical government persecution.
You say that “people need to be taught” by government oppression although you don’t say what lesson. Don’t you realize that people learn what they want to learn, not what parlor pinks like you or phony revolutionaries like Bill Ayers want them to? But, if it were possible for a man to learn against his will, I suggest you learn that lunatics will latch on to revolutionary fantasies like yours to excuse terrible acts.
Ian Welsh
Things are, objectively, a lot worse than in the late 60s for a lot of young people.
Sometimes revolution is justified, Jack. Your founders thought so, anyway. Revolutions are ugly, and horrible things happen during them. The Revolutionary War was full of atrocities, collective and individual. Most people don’t really know what “tar and feathering” means. I’d cut my own throat if I could rather than be tar-and-feathered.
But people are dying now. People are becoming homeless. People are going without pain relief and medicine. Massive numbers of people are in jail for, let us be honest, no good reason.
There will be more violence, there will be more crazies. The next person to attack something like the FRC may be more successful. So be it. If the powers that be don’t want it to happen, they should stop taking 93% of all gains for themselves. Anything I do, or say, is pissing in the wind compared to that, and compared to routine police brutality.
Will people like me inspire the next McVeigh? Maybe. But maybe we’ll inspire the next Washington.
To say that people must put up with any amount of abuse and never resort to violence is to say that the very foundation of your own country was illegitimate and is to excuse all the horrible things happening today. It is precisely because the oligarchs do not believe that there will be a revolution, that the threat of it is credible, that they do the things they do.
stp479
The rich live by this mantra: More Than Enough is a Good Place to Start.
Ché Pasa
Whose violence and whose insurrection?
For some time now, the only armed insurrectionists active in the Free World have been among the movement rightist/fascists. Violence against the People is coming — relentlessly — from the state, its agents, and all those Lone Gunmen who like to shoot up shopping malls, movie theaters and houses of worship.
The remnants of a genuine left — as opposed to its ersatz mainstream “left” — is not engaged in armed insurrection. The loss of civil liberties or economic security does not trigger rebellion on the left or right for more than a very brief period because it is so easy to buy off anyone who rises to leadership of revolts against the loss of something. If buying them off somehow fails, there’s always the convenient assassination or “suicide.”
No, what triggers an effective rebellion or revolution is the notion that there is something to gain from taking the risk, not simply some status quo ante to hold onto. Deprivation, suffering, and brutalization are matters of endurance and survival which people adapt to remarkably well. They may protest or briefly rebel, but almost always they will submit to deprivation and worse.
StewartM
Jack Olsen:
The 1960s? Despite its problems, it was almost a paradise compared for Americans, at least, compared to what most live in today. *That* is why the numbers of 1960s rebels were small.
StewartM
eclecticdog
McVeigh had moral support from Gore Vidal and Joe Bageant, who both understood his motives and thought it coincided with their thoughts and writings on the direction the US was going.
Youth is another necessary component of revolution. Europe, the US, Japan are pretty long in the tooth demographically. Maybe us old farts will just die off and the young can denounce the debts and start fixing the messes we’ve left.
Celsius 233
eclecticdog
August 21, 2012
McVeigh had moral support from Gore Vidal and Joe Bageant, who both understood his motives and thought it coincided with their thoughts and writings on the direction the US was going.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
That’s quite a statement; understanding is not support, moral or otherwise.
Petro
I’d like to second that – such a sentiment is used to silence compassionate analysis (e.g., the blowback that spawned 9/11). That said, I don’t know if eclecticdog meant it in quite that way…
Jtuck
StewartM. I am guessing you didn’t live through that, or read the chapters in the history book closely …