I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I've watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those ... moments will be lost in time, like tears...in rain. Time to die. ~Roy Batty, Blade Runner.
I woke up this morning, not feeling completely exhausted for the first time in several weeks, if not longer.
I also woke up to find that a military coup had taken place in Myanmar. The democratically-elected regime of Aung San Suu Kyi...itself no prize, but better than what they had before...was overthrown in a predawn operation by the Myanmar armed forces.
Imagine my surprise several hours later, when I found out that the Q-Anon nuts either think this is a good thing, or were somehow jealous that it happened there instead of here. Imagine my surprise when I found the supposed-conservatives cheering on the remnants of a Communist-inspired, supposedly-socialist military regime that was known in the conservative and Evangelical worlds primarily for its bloody persecution of Christians in general, and ethnic minorities that had adopted Christianity as a group in particular.
Imagine being so privileged that you think murderous militarism that may or may not have anything whatever to do with your personal political ideas would somehow break in your personal favor.
As opposed to what was a generic view on both the American Left and Right for basically decades that militarism and military coups (or at least, the ones we did not instigate) were generally bad, and those of any sort of Communist-flavored sort (like the 1962 Myanmar Coup that brought the military into direct power) were particularly bad.
I followed this stuff for decades, primarily via Fundamentalist Christian groups like Voice of the Martyrs and assorted other publications and sources in that same vein.
And now these goddamned morons are cheering on the people who were on the sharp and pointy end of doing the persecuting?
Color me irate.
Of course, these are the same people who ejaculated all over themselves when Trump was trying, on friendly terms, to cut a deal with
the Taliban. So I don't know why I would be surprised at this point but goddamn, I'm still fucking surprised.
And it's not like this is unknown, hell, Sly Stallone made a Rambo movie specifically about this situation ten years ago.
I guess these days the voice of the martyrs, like so many other things, goes completely unheard by these fucking people.
And yeah, they seem to have lost some people lately, but the vast majority of them are desperate to go right on unhearing.
Because for a lot of them it never was about Christianity, or conservatism.
People like Marjorie Taylor Greene have made that plain. They don't give a damn about conservatism.
It was always about getting power and trying to ratfuck their political opponents, real or imagined, and part of why so much of the Republican Party is imploding right now is the reality of what they've become is clashing so openly with what they were before, or at least spent decades saying they were.
I more or less saw this furball coming in 2008 and I got the fuck out, because I'm not cool with things like conspiracy theories and racism, and for multiple reasons I'm most especially not cool with conspiracy theories and racism being mixed with fascism because I fall into multiple groups...and to a greater or lesser degree always have...that always end up being the targets of fascism in the end.
But there's one aspect of that, that I'd like to point out in particular...because it's the one of those things about me that's more or less a constant even if the particular aspects of it have changed: I've always been a religious or spiritual person.
If you actually believe in religion or spirituality for what it is, what it means, instead of as a symbol of nationalism or tribalism or a thing to beat others about the head with, militaristic nuts be they Communist-inspired or radicalized into fascism are going to come after you, because if there's anything those who desire the worship of the government or of some kind of shitty cult of personality or political philosophy to achieve some kind of transcendent state cannot stand...it's actual worship of any actual belief or entity that might enable a person to transcend all this worldly stuff and even if it's only in one's mind, not be subject to their temporal power.
Some of these fucking people are
quite explicit in their hatred of the not-really modern idea that
you get to define yourself, as opposed to some kind of governmental or religious authority
defining you, even though it has always been so and the world has
always been rife with different streams of thought and there have
always been people who do so.
But it's funny how this kind of authoritarian horse shit always circles back around to the hatred of and persecution of most, if not all ethnic and religious minorities, because these fucking people don't just want to tell you what you can do, but even what kind of person you can physically be, because no matter how much power they have it's never enough, it will never be enough.
Because in the end, it's never about philosophy or politics or nation or tribe, it's always about them, it always traces back to some shitty leader, somewhere, who had too high of an opinion of themselves and got a bunch of feeble-minded idiots to sign onto that opinion and pretty soon, after awhile, people forget what the actual reason was or who the person really was who inspired this garbage and it becomes a self-justifying circle-jerk that exists solely to perpetuate itself as a self-justifying circle-jerk and pretty damned soon, evil becomes pretty damned banal. Not that long ago, I was looking up something else and I came across a picture of a bunch of Myanmar Navy officers meeting with US Navy officers on the deck of a US Navy amphibious assault ship, every last one of these dudes was the sort of bespectacled, portly little Asian guy most people would take for a college professor or a tech bro if he wasn't wearing a white naval dress uniform.
Just like Marjorie Taylor Greene, without the Congressional seat, is nothing more than a nutty right-wing Soccer Mom, or Madison Cawthorn is just some perverted shit-talking little ghoul who happened to end up disabled and used that to get sympathy. For that matter history is chock-full of shiftless losers who were nothing more than total failures in one form or another until they discovered demagoguery and got a bunch of stupid followers.
I fear...note I did not say hope...that the end of people like Donald Trump and Roger Stone signals the end of larger-than-life bullshitters as a focus of right-wing politics.
I fear it, because it signals the rise of a smaller, even meaner and much harder to contain self-radicalized era of those who don't know much of anything, and can't even bullshit all that well, but they were radicalized by some dumb shit they read on the internet and it doesn't matter if they can't find a place like Myanmar on a labeled map, tens of thousands of people who've never had to worry about anything that wasn't right in front of their nose, much less live under a murderous military regime, will see their opinion on the internet and think "Why couldn't that have been us?"
And they'll go right on thinking that until somebody in a uniform representing something else besides their particular brand of shitty politics shoves a gun in their face and tells them what to think, because nothing is real until it happens to them.
And then they'll claim persecution. Hell, they'll claim it for much less.
It's not just that those people cannot hear the voice of the martyrs, be they Christian or otherwise.
They can't hear anything else, either; Because they do not want to.
Listen up, America, if we do not stop elevating these fools to prominence or giving them a platform, eventually we're going to have to live in the world they want.
And they imagine the world they want as the killing fields of Khmer Rouge Cambodia, but with big box stores, a shopping mall and some lame ass sit-down restaurants. They are quite explicit that they want to watch people who they imagine are politically against them be killed, and watch it live on State TV.
And that there shouldn't be anything else to watch, either, because that's what they think righteousness is, guns and killing and marching soldiers and uniformed conformity and somebody else doing all the hard work and thinking and telling them what to do and who to be loyal to, because that's somehow easier than just living and figuring shit out for yourself, in their mind anyway. All the political and religious talk is nothing but bullshit to try to get them to that point.
If we don't drive these people from power...and keep them away from it...what happens elsewhere today might just be our tomorrow.
If you want a better country, you have to be a better citizen, and you have to do the work of life, and take the risks and face the consequences, ain't nobody going to do it for you and anybody tells you otherwise is either a fool or a liar. As Benjamin Franklin said, those who would trade liberty for security deserve neither.
Remember that, it's going to be on the test. It always has been before.
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