The War On Stupidity (Presumed Part One, Updated.)

Look at your young men fighting
Look at your women crying
Look at your young men dying
The way they've always done before

Look at the hate we're breeding
Look at the fear we're feeding
Look at the lives we're leading
The way we've always done before

My hands are tied
The billions shift from side to side
And the wars go on with brainwashed pride
For the love of God and our human rights
And all these things are swept aside
By bloody hands time can't deny
And are washed away by your genocideAnd history hides the lies of our civil wars. ~Guns & Roses, Civil War

I woke up this morning, to find "Civil War" trending on Twitter. Naturally,. given our current season of stupidity, the cause of this appears to be none other than the President of the United States. At this point, judging from his own elevated levels of unhinged panic over the past several days since the House announced an official impeachment inquiry, I cannot help but think the man is guilty of something. Innocent people do not do shit like this. Sane people do not make such madly contradictory statements, and people who give even the slightest of a shit about civilization do not use their high office to try to urge their followers to go to war against the rest of us.

We need to get this guy out of there. Trump has got to go. It's going to come down to every person having to answer the question for themselves, which do they love more, America or Donald Trump?

Civilization.
Electricity.
Flush toilets.
The internet.
The medication Mom needs to live.
Your pets not ending up on the dinner table.

Or That fucking guy.

I mean, I'm reasonably set here, I might be old and beat up, but I have survival skills, I have guns, I know how to hunt and defend myself. Hell, when the power goes out I could shoot a couple of deer, process them, and then charge my neighbors for dinner and a show because while ferrets are too small to eat, they're entertaining to watch and when you're the only guy in the neighborhood with something along those lines that's not a bad spot to be in.

But ya know, I really don't want to live that way. And you don't either.

For one thing it's finally starting to get cold out. My arthritic limbs very much appreciate the capability to turn the heat on and not having to go outside to poop in a hole in the yard.

Yeah, I used to be a conservative, but I never bought into the Right's "When civilization collapses all we'll need are our guns and the Bible" primitivism, which also began to be in vogue in the 1990's.

But then maybe that's because I followed the events in the former Yugoslavia throughout the early to mid-1990's, I personally knew people who'd been over there. Had things worked out a little differently I might have been one of those people. I have friends who were part of supporting Operation Deliberate Force, the bombing campaign that forced the Bosnian Serb government to the negotiating table. I was one of the people who watched the Rwandan genocide unfold and raged about the rest of the world not doing anything about it.

The no-fly zones, half-ass negotiations, reliance on air operations and United Nations efforts and the various indifferent "solutions" imposed on complex, thorny situations by assorted globalized elites that typified U.S. foreign policy in the 1990's enraged me. They too often solved only the immediate problem, forcing people to stop shooting at each other, and all too often enabled bad actors to either remain in power or escape and go on the run.

Consider the case of Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb leader...who despite being wanted for war crimes, was not arrested until 2008. In the intervening time between 1995 and 2008 he worked as a New Age "Alternative Medicine" woo woo doctor, he traveled around Europe under a variety of aliases, lived in Austria for awhile, and he even attended Association Football matches in Italy under yet another alias.

When I found all that out, I hit the roof, especially given my conservative Christian views at the time that a lot of this stuff was going on, the big-bad uber-nationalist ended up as nothing more than a New Age quack selling herbal remedies and shit.

And yet...the Far-Right still sings songs about him. In the meme-happy current paradigm the 4-Chan idiots and White Supremacists got a big laugh about the Christchurch Mosque shooter playing "Remove Kebab" (a 1990's Bosnian Serb army marching song about Karazdic) while he killed people with a gun marked up with the names of anti-Christian murderers of Muslims and battles won by nominally "Christian" anti-Islamic forces and various killers of the right-wing's "enemies" and live-streamed it.

No, I do not consider mass murderers to be Christian, whatever they may call themselves. You do not get to break God's commandments on a massive scale and get to call yourself a Believer.

And before he embraced New Age quackery as a way to survive, Oh yes, Karadzic styled himself a Christian Crusader against the Ottoman Hordes, oh yes, he did.

The internet Nazis are just as bad, if not worse.

These people still celebrate a man responsible for over 100,000 deaths, who made refugees of hundreds of thousands more...enough so that there's several credit unions in Iowa that have Bosnian as a language option on their phone banking system because a lot of refugees were settled there. Think about that for a second.

And because America has people who idolize the asshole who turned those people into refugees the first time, they could become refugees again.

I can remember when Christians and conservatives and Republicans were opposed to ethnic cleansing, hatred, murder, nationalism and war...when we were in favor of civilization even if we didn't always agree with everything that went on in it...because I was one at the time.

Granted, whatever their supposed background or education or training, a lot of these fucking people that are setting themselves up to be on the other side are just idiots.

Not just idiots, but idiots who don't care if they look like deranged idiots. Too many of these people seem happy to make an ass of themselves out of desire to show their dedication to....whatever.

I'm not sure that's as much of a plus as some people make it out to be. I'd rather that my enemies are intelligent enough to respect things like international law and the Uniform Code of Military Justice or some equivalent, and I'm not quite sure that the average Trump Supporter, whatever military background they may claim, is intelligent enough or simply cares enough about things that they wouldn't commit war crimes. Plenty of evil is being done, or will be, by people who explicitly know better or who at least should.

And that's what happens when capitalism allows a cottage industry to spring up and then fester, that all it does is peddle atavistic fears and hatreds.

And I guarantee you that internet nihilism will make things much, much worse. By the time the Internet really got to be a thing, the Bosnian War was almost over. By the time "Remove Kebab" was being celebrated on the internet, Radovan Karadzic was hiding out in Vienna selling herbal remedies for impotence.

If we have an equivalent to the Srebrenica Massacre it's going to be live-streamed by dumb shit white guys who talk about their weapons as if the damned things are their girlfriends. Think about that for a second. And I guarantee you the "Conservatives" will be hella mad when the various social media companies don't let them livestream that shit or turn the feeds over to the FBI or the NATO peacekeeping forces or the United Nations. Because of course, in this day and age the last thing such people are ever going to think is that they shouldn't have killed those people in the first place.

And I guarantee you that there will be plenty of indifference on the part of those on the other side, including plenty of supposed liberals, who don't live in places that are under the guns of enemy forces, and who have working food distribution networks and internet service and power grids.

Because it's already there, privileged white liberals aren't the ones whose families are being broken up, whose kids are being locked in cages, and far too many of them seem oblivious even to the incompetence of their previous leaders that directly contributed to this situation. Yes, triumphalism by your own side can and will make this whole situation worse just as much as incompetence on the other side will, and for the same damned reasons. People who not just should know better but who explicitly do according to their own backgrounds or job descriptions will do wrong or make mistakes, and people will die because of it.

And if you don't think the callousness to let them die exists on both sides, you absolutely have another thing coming.

Hell, I worry that if the right-wingers do decide their best bet is to break off a piece of America for themselves, that once the borders firm up and the fighting stops, liberals and more than a few of whatever conservatives don't go over to the other side will be more than content to adopt the 1990's methodology of sternly-worded letters, no fly zones, air campaigns and expanded refugee quotas.

That is, so long as the fighting stays in Alabama and Mississippi and the rural areas of Louisiana and Texas and doesn't affect the tourist-y parts of Florida and the hellscape these idiots turn Kentucky and Tennessee and West Virginia into doesn't start polluting eastern rivers. I'm likewise sure that talking heads will opine endlessly about the Carolinas and Georgia being turned into a war zone...but ya know, that's going to be hard on the people who actually live there.

I'll ask again, how in the hell did we ever get to the point where we place such a low value on the lives of others?

And if you don't think the right-wingers will learn those limits and be utterly tyrannical within them as well as seek to expand them, I'd recommend giving AM talk radio a listen or slogging through 4Chan for a couple of hours, then apply that unfortunate Gnosis to your mental image of how these fools will run an occupied zone.

And oh, yes, there will be plenty of refugees, non-Christians, the wrong Christians, people of Color, LGBT folks, the wrong kinds of white people, and if these people's patterns are consistent an awful lot of them before too long will be conservative white people who supported the bad guys at first. Do I think liberals who are willing to write off Florida are going to maintain their current tolerance for refugees when those refugees are from Florida? Sorry to say so, but I don't. There will be plenty of iniquity and intolerance on our own side. And that's before we even give any thought to the bad guys.

Why do I say that? Because we've spent three years now watching what happens when we as a people give power to those who cannot or will not deal with the world on an equal basis. Say what you will about the George H.W. Bush or Clinton administrations, they were trying to deal with a particularly shitty reality in a manner mostly consistent with international law while shedding as little blood as possible because they, unlike a younger me, were fully cognizant of what happens when you introduce heavily armed force as a tool to pacify a country already riven with conflict and genocidal hatred where people are shooting at each other already.

For reasons both good and bad, my younger more idealistic self disagreed with both sides of that coin. The difference is that neither George H.W. Bush nor Bill Clinton was an idiot or a homicidal maniac or a childish narcissist obsessed with brutality and displays of power, and for the record even Radovan Karadzic and Slobodan Milosevic seemed to have the sense not to blab about what they were doing live on CNN and to at least kind of try to hide the shit they were responsible for or their involvement in it.

Do I think that Donald Trump or his enablers do? No, I don't. I think "Conservatives" and wealthy are fully capable of letting this motherfucker burn down America and split the country and fully willing to deal with years or decades of conflict so long as they get to keep the level of power they think they're entitled to at least somewhere. Hell, I think they'll fund both sides and I think our military-industrial complex will arm and support both sides...and do so as openly as they are allowed...simply because in some people's debased minds War = Profit.

And for the same reason, the media will lavish glory on both sides, show us the courage of resistance movements, the horror of the battlefield, the gravitas of war-crimes trials, the pomp and circumstance of the founding of new nations...all while deftly avoiding the truth that none of this shit needed to or should have ever happened in the first place.

Obviously, somebody has figured out that there's more money for them in the dismemberment of America and some kind of restarting of the Cold War than in the global order and free trade of the 1990's and the first decade and a half of the 2000's.

The difference is that this Cold War has a good chance of having an Inner-American border rather than an Inner German one and the Walls of this conflict will be through, or around Atlanta and Dallas and Houston and Orlando and the armed clashes won't be in the Mediterranean or the Persian Gulf or the mountains of Afghanistan...they'll be in the Black Rock Desert in Nevada, on Lake Michigan and in the rolling hills of western Maryland.

The next Operation Earnest Will might just be in the Gulf Of Mexico, trying to prevent the Russians from smuggling weapons into Mobile. At least if an Arleigh Burke-class Destroyer hits a mine, they can probably make it to Pascagoula under their own power...assuming the shipyard there remains in allied hands.

And oh yes, there will be blood.

It's very simple, really, we can either stop this shit now, with Impeachment and the force of law and by showing up at the ballot box next November in numbers great enough that the normal Republican fuckery doesn't work, or I've just laid out probably decades of our future in a few paragraphs.

And if you think you, or your ego, or your "masculinity" or whatever you want to call it will benefit, the answer is no.

That's the trouble with America, everybody thinks when things go to hell they're going to be John McClane. Trouble is you;re far more likely, best case, to be the cop whose car gets hit by a falling corpse or the SWAT guys in the APC that come up against terrorists with rocket launchers...or the shitty salesman who thinks he can bluff his way out of this mess.

People forget that even John McCalane wasn't really John McClane.

It's really that simple.

We can stop this mess. We'd best do so, and as soon as possible.

If we impeach the motherfucker, the same things may happen, but the assholes will have less power and the crisis will be easier to deal with.

This all could've been avoided in 2016, but we declined to take that option.

Think about that.

Maybe we can call this one the Global War on Stupidity. Slap the Mad Magazine kid on the medal, or something.

Update:

Just in case YOU didn't think Trump was serious...well, somebody else does and is trying to gin up his own people to act accordingly.

Never forget that the goal of these people is to kill Americans, period.

And once the shooting starts, they are not going to stop and ask you what your political orientation is before they open fire...because they don't really believe in all that. What they believe in is the gun, and the dick, and they don't see a lot of difference between the two, to be honest.