The Problem of Projection: Why the Security State Fears Patriots
In my last article I pointed out how lucky we are to have such a stupid enemy. While every Islamic attack is a horror for those who are targeted, on an existential level they’re nothing but blips on the radar; bee stings and car crashes remain the larger threat. The ineffectiveness of your average Muslim is as laughable as their false prophet squatting to pee like a girl.
I say we are lucky, because our civilization’s infrastructure is incredibly vulnerable. If these terrorists had half a brain they could have shut the whole country down a dozen times over. Thankfully, they don’t. Like most regressed pedophiles, they seek out immediate sensual experiences. Blowing up an electrical substation doesn’t excite them; but killing three people with a machete does.
Those in the patriot movements, on the other hand – those who served in the military, and who actually know how to employ rifles and explosives properly – if one of them decided to take down America? If a dozen of them decided to team up? The country wouldn’t stand a chance.
An officer with the S.W.A.T. Team once confided in me that their biggest worry was having an ex-military guy go crazy (not “go terrorist”, mind you, just “go crazy”). Their tactics are aimed at druggies and gangbangers, not soldiers, and even a broken-down veteran-turned-crackhead could easily take out half their team before they managed to put him down. The “crazy soldier” is a legitimate concern for Police Officers, because he actually exists. The stresses of the military life – as well as the stresses of post-military life – can overwhelm some, causing them to snap. Usually this results in a tragic suicide; sometimes a murder-suicide; once in a blue moon it’s something even worse.
But no matter how bad it gets – no matter how violent and crazy a PTSD addled veteran gets – it will never turn into political terrorism. It’s simply not in a soldier’s character. A veteran might be furious with a particular government agency, with a particular judge, with a particular organization or a particular person – but he will never turn against America.
Allow me to personalize this for a moment. I enjoy riding in my Sports car; blowing up a pipeline would take that away from me. I enjoy the wealth of information that the internet offers; attacking one of its nodes would deny me all of that free literature. Air-conditioning makes the summer heat bearable; what profit would there be in me disabling the electrical grid? Of course, these are merely luxuries, and given that I strive to be a man of principle, I would be willing to forego any one of them for a higher cause – but what are these principles that I, and other veterans, are so willing to sacrifice for?
Our principles are civilization itself. We enjoy luxuries as the just fruit of a just civilization – but we love civilization for its own sake.
A soldier does not place his frail body in harms way for the sake of pay, or adventure, or even for the accrued social status – there are easier routes to all of these! No more does the patriot spend his time, and risk his good name, standing up for a cause in which he believes; adventure and profit may exist, but the true reward is in living in accord with his values. The patriot is a man who struggles against the flaws of our civilization: unjust laws, corruption in the body politic, gangsterism and depravity amongst the general population. The patriot feels called upon to resist these forces, but by which methods can he do so, if he loves the civilization itself? The tactics of the terrorist are denied to him.
Some patriots – those who are hot tempered, those who lack forethought – might occasionally lash out against a particular entity which they view as symbolic of the widespread flaws. Thomas Ball might self-immolate in front of the family courthouse; Joseph Stack might fly his plane into an IRS building which he believes to be empty. These men, driven mad by grief, might lash out at the forces in the world which have wronged them – but take note that, however criminal they might be, they do not lash out at the civilization itself.
AfOR notes this in a recent article:
The human mind is a wonderful and interesting thing, and no matter how stone cold and comitted and elite and amazing you are, unless you are a suicide bomber (just another tool) the facts are that a part of your mind is going to plan on the aftermath, and having a way of continuing life as normally as possible.
We had *lots* of IRA spectaculars here in the UK back in the day, and they all targeted high profile targets, hotels with politicians in, financial buildings, you know the sort of thing, because that is the sort of thing you do, when you are expecting to go on living in that same country with few changes .
If you did NOT mind changes, or if you were a foreigner so the changes would not affect you, you would not target any of these things, you’d take your 1,000 lb of ANFO and target infrastructure, whether it be an electricity substation, a major road or rail bridge, a water pumping station, and so on.
We see the proof of this every time one power attacks shit in a foreign country, it is *always* infrastructure that is targeted, it is *never* “spectaculars” like hotels full of politicians or financial buildings.
The violence exhibited by such individuals comes entirely from their disaffection, not their political beliefs. Ultimately they are no different than a workplace shooter, or a jealous ex-lover. They are common criminals and nothing more, pitiable despite their monstrosity, and the source of their crime is a proximate cause within their own lives, rather than their membership in any sort of patriotic organization. If anything, the patriot groups would reduce these instances of disaffected violence. They would spot the early warning signs, and intervene before one of their members turned to madness.
Fight Club‘s Project Mayhem is nought but a juvenile fantasy of destruction for its own sake; even within the narrative itself the supernatural agency of Tyler Durden is needed for the group to ever form. The reality is that testosterone-fuelled brotherhoods are never nihilistic. They may be proto-nationalistic, as in the case of criminal gangs who seek out their own advancement at the cost of society at large – or they may be fully nationalistic, as is the case with patriots and constitutionalists – but they are never nihilistically destructive in the mien of foreign suicide bombers.
So why is it that certain security agencies display so much concern over these up-jumped gun clubs, filled with law abiding patriots who love the land they live on? It’s because they project their own disloyalty onto the members themselves.
Right-wing rebels are anything but; even the American revolution wasn’t truly a rebellion, since the war was waged by the very individuals who were responsible for maintaining the infrastructure. It wasn’t anti-social; it was anti-imperial; it did not celebrate chaos for chaos’ sake, but rather rejected the unjust control being levied by outsiders upon the natural social order. As Ann Barnhardt points out in her article So When Do We Start Shootin’?:
First, the founders of the American Republic did in fact do what I referenced as a current impossibility earlier. Namely, they FIRST established a replacement government so that there would be no absence of government, no state of anarchy. As St. Thomas teaches, it is gravely, gravely sinful to take up arms against a tyrant without first providing for a replacement government. If a people simply liquidate a tyrannical oligarchy (because there is in actuality no such thing as a pure tyranny consisting of one man – even the most powerful tyrants are still undergirded and enabled by an oligarch class) without providing for the replacement, the result of the state of anarchy will be the ascendancy of an even worse tyrant. Anarchy, by definition, enables the biggest psychopath thug to take control. Anarchy, therefore, is an always-fleeting interstitial period between a bad government and an even worse government.
Contrast this to left-wing revolutionaries. The French didn’t seek out a better form of justice in 1789; they merely wanted to kill the Aristocracy out of jealousy. Lenin didn’t care about the Russian peasants; if destroying the Czar meant plunging them into starvation, then so be it. Saul Alinsky is equally unconcerned with his revolution’s fallout; the misery spread by his tactics is a feature, not a bug, since it drives more to his cause; and Obama’s mentor Bill Ayers gave no thought to law and order when he blew up a police station as part of the Weatherman Underground.
Earlier I wrote that testosterone-fuelled organizations are never nihilistic; it is only amongst the testosterone-deficient left that nihilism prevails.
Right-wing patriots are – hypothetically – a greater threat than all the Muslim terrorists combined… but in reality they’re no threat at all. If they shared the same nihilism as their left-wing counterparts, they’d be deadly: they wouldn’t settle for merely attacking abortion clinics – they’d be blowing up hospitals and train stations, and counting all the innocents as acceptable losses! If they shared the same viciousness as the leftists, then civilization wouldn’t last a day.
Who knows why they haven’t done it already… thinks the effeminate coward, surely that’s what they must be planning!
The left-wing security agent is void of any love of his country. He understands the motives of the Weather Underground, but not the faith of Mother Theresa (Caretaker of a hospice? More like sadist, who enjoyed watching others die!). He presumes that all other groups are as empty as he is, and are merely jealous of his position; that the common cause of the Tea Party is not a love of justice and freedom, but a hatred of X, whoever or whatever that might be. He himself still seethes as the High School jocks and their imagined bullying; surely, the jocks hated him because he was so much “smarter” than they were.
His petty little mind can’t tell the difference between those who arm themselves to fight the forces who would destroy civilization; and those who arm themselves to murder innocents. Because as far as he is concerned – only one of those two groups actually exists.
Beware the sad and pathetic; for they are also vicious and venomous.
ͼ-Ѻ-ͽ
In the interest of thoroughness, I should say that there’s another possible explanation for the hostility we see. But that would an international villain of James Bond proportions, and wilful subversion of justice within the system itself. Nothing but a conspiracy theory, if you ask me.
I’ve wondered about this myself. Even the most weathered and suicidal men still care about those who could possibly be hurt in their wake, especially if they care at all about the concept of someone being a fellow “American”.
Patriots who have decided to act in violence at targets don’t want to destroy the system and bring it down, they want to reform and/or restore it’s glory – specifically the ideal that America once represented.
Consider the revolutionaries of 1848 across Europe. Anyone who wasn’t with them was against them. The mobs didn’t care about who got in their way. The system had to fall and it had to fall immediately.
The goal of the revolutionaries was the same goal of the Bolsheviks – immediate destruction because reform wasn’t enough. Everything had to be wiped from the foundation. This is why the French Revolutionary ideologues started a new calendar. It’s why progressives always want to wipe out the old completely and start anew because of the hold of the past, tradition, and the lessons of history.
There is a book called “Fire In The Minds Of Men” which was written by the former Librarian Of Congress, James Billington and he documents the foment that had its roots in the French Revolution. While the revolution was a failure demonstrated by Napoleon’s rise to power, Philippe Buonarroti was able to document the revolution and form a guidebook to make sure it would spread across Europe – “History of Babeuf’s ‘Conspiracy of Equals’ ”
He would inspire Blanqui, Marx, etc.
Even Timothy McVeigh was principled in his bombing of the Federal Building in Oklahoma. He stated that he had some regrets that children had died and that he would have chosen a different target had he known there were children.
He stated as much for pragmatic reasons like: dead children demonize your cause, but also because he wasn’t looking to kill children, he was looking to strike back at a federal government he had seen becoming far too willing to murder innocent people, as in the cases of Ruby Ridge and Waco Texas.
Definitely a patriot. He could have easily done far worse had he truly wanted anarchy and chaos.
What you are missing is the depersonalization that can occur when these things are orchestrated from one broad group to another. Part of the reason an islamic jihadist can so easily blow up dozens up people is because they see those people as completely and entirely separate – others. Your “patriots” on the other hand are a part of the society they want to protect. They may pit themselves against parts of that society they feel are unjust or have a corrupting influence, but their hatred isn’t directed at society at large.
However, you make the mistake of pretending that this blinding hatred can’t extend to innocents by painting with a broad brush. Always remember your humanity (and their humanity). Kant, for instance, believed it was wrong to take human life – that it was the ultimate evil… except where someone has already taken human life, and he advocated for the death penalty. I’m ambiguous about the death penalty in the legal system due to issues with false accusation, and to a lesser extent due to the incredibly expensive process that is “death row” (which rivals life imprisonment for costs – so you’re not saving anything). But I believe the intention is right. You need to acknowledge the sanctity of human life and be willing to protect it. That’s what keeps you human.