End Of History (Scenes From The Culture War V.)

From Stettin on the Baltic to Varna on the Black Sea, the regimes planted by totalitarianism have had more than thirty years to establish their legitimacy. But none — not one regime — has yet been able to risk free elections. Regimes planted by bayonets do not take root....If history teaches anything, it teaches self-delusion in the face of unpleasant facts is folly....Our military strength is a prerequisite to peace, but let it be clear we maintain this strength in the hope it will never be used, for the ultimate determinant in the struggle that's now going on in the world will not be bombs and rockets but a test of wills and ideas, a trial of spiritual resolve, the values we hold, the beliefs we cherish, the ideals to which we are dedicated. ~Ronald Reagan

Goddamn it.

I'm getting tired of repeating myself.

Communism hasn't been a thing since 1989.

It's 2021.

Even the Chinese, Cubans and Vietnamese aren't Communists anymore. More to the point, Communism hasn't really been much of a thing in the United States since the 1930's...and that's not because of anything conservatives or Republicans did. It's because the Soviet Communist Party allied with Nazi Germany in the late 1930's and abandoned, for a time, ideas like improving race relations and supporting workers. So most of the membership of Communist Party USA simply up and left, by their own choice. Why? Because this is America, even if you are a Communist.

More to the point, the reason Communism fell (aside from the fact that it didn't work, of course) was that American Republicans increased defense spending and pursued a more aggressive foreign policy in the 1980's. This forced the Soviets to try to keep up, and their economy couldn't handle the strain. Throw in the war in Afghanistan, domestic problems and unrest and there you have it. Gorbachev pursued a liberalization of Soviet policies, and Reagan and Bush 41 alike pushed for reductions in the number of nuclear weapons and for peace while making a solid public case for liberal democracy.

And the Soviet people...and eventually the governments of the Union's constituent republics...listened.

The first MacDonald's opened in Moscow in 1991. Clown shoes went where boots on the ground never would have gone. We won. Hell, by 1989 we fucking knew we were winning...and the fucking Communists knew they were on the ropes. I remember, I was there. Hell, I came home one evening and turned on the TV and watched ordinary Germans taking sledgehammers to the Berlin Wall while eating a pepperoni pizza.

In a day, *I* went from my future being "Probable death in a nuclear war" to it looking as if I might live to see a much more positive sort of end to history.

But Marjorie Taylor Greene and her ilk want to throw away that history...that amazing, glorious history and the hope for the future that it brought, that I fucking lived through. The triumph of Capitalism over Communism, Peace over War, and liberal democracy over statist authoritarianism.

Because for her, and for most modern Republicans, it never was about any of that, ever. Greene is my age and lived through all the same shit I did. She just doesn't care.

Throw in a side of ethnic cleansing and cruelty-as-spectacle, and a lot of these people would be all in, for no other reason.

Because to modern Republicans, statist authoritarianism, something very like Soviet Communism, and wars are just fine as hell...so long as they get to be the ones in charge. They don't give a damn if they have to split the country and found some sort of Banana Confederacy and subject us all to right-wing insurgency and a Second Civil War...and probable forever-war vs. their allied authoritarian countries also...to fucking have it, either.

Not that I think any of These Fucking People could or would run any of this shit competently. Or even run it at all.

Their Banana Confederacy would probably be a modern day version of Cuba in the Cold War, subsidized by the Russians but probably, in all honesty...run by them as well. While the Banana Confederacy's legislature spent it's time banning CRT and homosexuality and declaring ever-more restrictive versions of Christianity the State Religion...fighting a Culture War cage match against their own imaginations. The new Inner American Border would likely see its walls manned by token Banana Confederate border guards but they'd be commanded by Russians, with Russian troops with AK-74's and T-80 tanks and shit a few Klicks behind the line. And while the Banana Confederate President did drugs and said dumb shit, his clique of unofficially official Russian advisors would likely make all the real decisions.

That there'd be other Americans with M-16's and Bradley infantry fighting vehicles and M1A1 Abrams tanks and drones patrolling the skies and satellites reading the Banana Confederacy's fucking newspapers while the US Coast Guard and US Navy made life damned interesting (and short) for their maritime trade...and mind you, we'd likely be stuck fighting the Russians and God only knows who else at the same time...a conflict in which lots of people on both sides would certainly die...isn't something these idiots think about...or would care about if they did.

Because they think death and destruction and the end of their own country will somehow bring meaning to their lives.

That's how little they care for anyone else.

Hell, turning their domestic partisan fantasies into some sort of global conflict with Russia and some of the other members of Authoritarianism, Inc. vs. the EU, the Islamic world, what's left of the United States and probably China and India (for the sole reason that these people don't think a non-white country should be a superpower) is exactly what the fuck these people want.

Their vision of the world is far more based on The Turner Diaries than even Atlas Shrugged anymore.

Except that it's somehow even more stupid than that.

These people see themselves as the Organization from the Turner Diaries (or Kurt Schlicter's fan-fiction thereof) but the truth is they're a lot more "Harris and Proctor from the Police Academy movies" complete with using excessive force not only on the wrong person, but on some unsuspecting civilian who's just trying to do their job.

And they're surprised when they get busted for it. 

In fact they see themselves as "Righteous Christians" and anything they do as thus justified. They see "Consequences for their own actions" as some kind of Woke New World Order Persecution, which justifies absolutely anything they do, in their own minds. And they absolutely refuse to understand that the First Amendment to the US Constitution already defines the USA as an "Atheist State" and always has.

Even their religion is based on hate and selfishness.

If that combination of paranoia, self-righteousness and stupidity is not a recipe for horror I don't know what is.

I mean, fuck, these people are angry, conspiratorial, violent and stupid. If there's a worse combination of traits out there for an adult human being, I sure haven't found it.

These people think (or say they think) they're going to go out and fight imaginary Communists, when the truth is that they're going to go out and fight their fellow Americans who are different from them in some way, and when they do it's likely to fizzle out into a right-wing insurgency but still, thousands will die, millions will be displaced, and a hell of a lot of bad people in the world will try and take advantage.

Don't think they won't, either.

They've done it already, in public, during four years of Trump.

And Trump said "Thank you, Comrade, may I have another?"

And the mob roared its approval.

And some people want to be taken advantage of, so long as they get their ears scratched by the proper Deceiver, because just like the Bible says, these people have itching ears.

They want to be taken advantage of.

Or people wouldn't put shit like this out there.

And Marjorie Taylor Greene and her fellow Redcaps are fine with letting themselves and their followers be somebody's bitch.

In fact, if it feeds into their collective death wish and persecution fantasies or might upset some hypothetical liberal somewhere, they think "So much the better for us!"

Just like those incompetent French Generals who damned near handed their own country over to the Germans in August and early September of 1914 before the fighting spirit of the enlisted soldiers and a few officers who could pull their heads out of their asses saved everybody's bacon in the battle of the Marne, where Paris taxis drove rifle sections straight from the train stations to the front.

But they don't want courage or guts or national spirit to save the day. These fucking people want [their version of] Jesus to show up, murder everybody else who's not like them, and then they get to go to heaven but nobody else does...while the world we live in gets destroyed basically for nothing.

"Conservatives" want to lose, on purpose, because they think then their "God" will save them...and more importantly not save any of us.

Heaven isn't heaven if everybody gets to go. America isn't America if people they don't like get to live here and everybody gets a slice.

And don't misunderstand this one bit. It's the idea of death and destruction and disease, and of America being turned into some kind of dystopian Third World hellhole...while they get to watch from their guarded gated communities...that is what these fucking people really worship.

It's really all about Eugenics and Social Darwinism.

That's the only "gods" these fucking people care about.

And these people are learning right now, the hard way, that the current American system...hell, the American system as it's been since America was America...isn't going to give them that.

And they see everything from COVID-19 to Donald Trump to the possibility of a civil war as some kind of magic trick to turn things in the direction that they think they want.

Even though a hell of a lot of them wouldn't make it in their own imagined world. They too desire an end of history. Why? Because "Fuck You, That's Why."

And that's all there is to it. There's no deeper meaning, no other reason. The cruelty is the point.

But ya know, the rest of us don't have to roll over for this bullshit.

So don't.

Part IV

If we lose freedom here, there is no place to escape to. This is the last stand on Earth. And this idea that government is beholden to the people, that it has no other source of power except to sovereign people, is still the newest and most unique idea in all the long history of man's relation to man. This is the issue of this election. Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves. ~Ronald Reagan

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