Forever War (American Revelation VII, Part Three.)

Another head hangs lowly
Child is slowly taken
And the violence caused such silence
Who are we mistaken?

But you see, it's not me, it's not my family
In your head, in your head they are fighting
With their tanks, and their bombs, and their bombs, and their guns
In your head, in your head they are crying

In your head, in your head
Zombie, zombie, zombie-ie-ie
What's in your head? In your head?
Zombie, zombie, zombie-ie-ie-ie, oh

~Zombie, The Cranberries

I saw this on Twitter the other night.

Jim Wright of Stonekettle Station Retweeted it and said "Bet you $5 she has 'Love Jesus' in her profile" and sure enough, she did.

Hate has no home here.

Fairly anodyne statement, right? Most people, on the face of it, will agree that it is wrong to hate.

Yet the first thing one of the I Heart Jesus people thinks when they see it is "I hate your sign."

Now, on a personal level I've never been particularly fond of these kinds of signs. No one should be hateful and as I was taught it, certain things should go without saying. 

The only problem with that is, eventually if enough people don't say it, it has to start being said again after awhile, and it's funny how it's the conservatives and the "I Heart Jesus" people who made it that way. It's like all that talk about reverence for revealed truth and the wisdom of our ancestors, not to mention decent behavior, was all bullshit.

No, actually, with the current crowd it's not like that. It is that.

They hate you and me, and pretty much everybody else who isn't them, or effectively adopted into grace by them. You too can become part of the club, you just have to say the right words (and for the record, no, those words aren't some Christian confession) in the right code, just ask Donald Trump. Hell, hate the right people and there will be people who will make up the statements of faith for you and then make a pile of money off of writing books about it. People bent and twisted the Word beyond all recognition, lied and just plain made shit up trying to convince themselves that Donald Trump was a religious man, only to have Trump himself virtually ignore their efforts, so then they rationalized even more, and I'm here to tell you the situation has not improved. In point of fact, it really looks like Jesus has been replaced, at least in these people's minds, by Trump.

The only problem with that is that Trump is just a man, and theologically in Christian terms, Man cannot save Man.

Agnostic that I am, but one with a background in this stuff I feel comfortable in saying that according to these people's own rules...they're going to hell. More to the point, they're the people who are most responsible for this.

And no one cares less about that than they do. The cruelty is the point, even among themselves.

It's really starting to feel, to me, like these fucking people don't care if they "win."

Or rather, like some Takfiri Muslim screaming "Allah Akbar!" as the bombs fall around him...their cultural win conditions are no simply longer the same as ours.

Winning isn't really the point, that's why even in 2017 at the height of their power these people quite literally kept acting like aggrieved losers, ever unreasonable and unsatisfied. Simply winning wasn't enough because it wasn't even the goal, not as we understand it. But on the other hand, because they never acted or looked like winners, they really were never accepted as such and a hell of a lot of people simply ignored them or moved forward anyway.

In one sense, it's a long con. To imply an end to their "Holy and righteous struggle" would imply that eventually the checks would stop coming and these motherfuckers would have to get real jobs. As long as they can block or stall change, make everyone's life harder and find a way to blame somebody else while getting paid for it all, they'll do that and call it a win.

Fascism, hegemony, hell, even Christian End Times Prophecy or social conservative Culture War narratives imply some sort of "Win" or at least an end-state or an Eschaton that must be Immanentized, at which point it's at least theoretically game over.

That's not what these people want. Call it the Cold War narrative if you want, but of course the Cold War eventually ended. Perhaps the Neoconservative "Forever War" of the US slouching from conflict to conflict might work a little better...but for multiple reasons it doesn't really work for me. Among other things, even that has rules.

I prefer the analogy of 'The Troubles' in Northern Ireland. From the late 1960's until 1998 the Irish Republican Army and assorted other groups waged an insurgent war of shootings and terrorist attacks against the British Army and assorted Ulster Loyalist paramilitaries until eventually the costs and lack of public support led the British to negotiate with the IRA resulting in the Good Friday Agreement, and peace.

Except...a much lower-grade insurgency has continued since and now Northern Ireland appears to be headed for The Troubles 2.0 except this time it's the Ulster Loyalists committing terrorist attacks and rioting because while the majority of these assholes voted Leave in the Brexit referendum (although Northern Ireland itself collectively voted Remain) the end product wasn't quite Brexit-y enough for them, because of course Brexit itself was never the point, asserting dominance over their Catholic neighbors was what they wanted, and they didn't get that.

So, their next step is violent conflict. I suspect it's going to be much the same here, peace lines and snipers and walls, Continuing insurgencies, Easter peace agreements, and soldiers in the streets. That's what the Bad-faith Right wants, and unfortunately we as a country have a history of giving these assholes at least some of what they want, eventually.

This time, we should not, and it's really that simple.

Part Two.