Conquering, And to conquer (Antichrist Superstar, One.)

Two days past eighteen
He was waiting for the bus in his Army greens
Sat down in a booth in a cafe there
Gave his order to a girl with a bow in her hair
He's a little shy so she give him a smile
So he said would you mind sittin' down for a while
And talking to me, I'm feeling a little low
She said I'm off in an hour and I know where we can go
So they went down and they sat on the pier
He said I bet you got a boyfriend but I don't care
I got no one to send a letter to
Would you mind if I sent one back here to you
~Travelin' Soldier, The Chicks.

...

And I saw when the Lamb opened one of the seals, and I heard, as it were the noise of thunder, one of the four beasts saying, Come and see.
And I saw, and behold a white horse: and he that sat on him had a bow; and a crown was given unto him: and he went forth conquering, and to conquer. ~Revelation 6:1-2

Help me here.

I'm a United States Air Force security forces veteran.

I protested against the war in Iraq both during the run-up to it in 2002 and after it started in 2003.

You wanna talk about having an unpopular position? I was still a conservative and a Republican at the time. 

And yes, because you will ask, I voted for George W. Bush in 2004. I simply did not feel like John Kerry made his case all that well, and at the time that still mattered to me. It was a decision I spent the next four years regretting.

Thus, yes, I have ample experience at being both anti-war and on the wrong side of a goddamned issue. That said, how the fuck is it an "Anti-War movement" if it exists primarily to enable a genocidal war, the stated aim of which is to eradicate both the nation of Ukraine and its people and culture.

During the 2003 Spring semester I took a college course on nonviolence and nonviolent movements. Interestingly enough, I was not the only conservative or veteran who did so. Our professor was your basic crunchy hippie Northern Michigan liberal and there were, in point of fact, plenty of interesting and occasionally heated discussions in that class.

Interestingly enough, most of us thought at the time that Scott Ritter was one of the good guys.

Yet never once did I get, nor did anyone give, the impression that it was OK to throw other people under the Genocide bus in the name of "Peace." Actually enabling genocidal regimes and the "Z" War seems neither anti-war-itself nor peaceful.

Hell, my big paper for the end of the semester was on the various Resistance movements in Nazi-occupied Europe during WWII, with a focus on Denmark, the Netherlands, and Norway. My class presentation was about Martin Niemoller, and did not omit the fact that he was a WWI Imperial German Navy veteran.

When things get really bad, sometimes people have to make hard choices and moral compromises, yes.

Sometimes, good people do in fact make bad choices. That's not necessarily anything more than part of being human.

But when it comes to ethnic conflicts, genocide, and aggressive vs. defensive war...telling the people who are being attacked, who have literally been targeted for extermination by a Russian government completely willing to commit war crimes...whether it helps them achieve their objectives or not...is immoral and wrong. If you are not siding with those who are defending themselves, you're not actually anti-war, let alone non-violent.

You just don't want to be inconvenienced by the fight, that's all.

Brutality for its own sake doesn't bother you, as long as it's not you getting murdered or raped or your culture that some utterly immoral enemy wants to wipe out in pursuit of imperialist fantasies.

And that's another thing, these fucking people who keep pounding on the table saying "American Imperialism" is so bad...are just fine with Russian Imperialism, and indeed with themselves being vassals to the same.

You think your principles or your Self are too "good" to have to do what's right. You'd rather see a people who did nothing wrong be wiped out than abandon your conviction that "Liberal democracy is bad because it has the word liberal in it" or your irrational lingering affection for Communism, or whatever the fuck it is.

And when it comes to all this Tankie-ism, whether it comes from far-Right or far-Left, the underlying value seems to be that "America is bad" and that if Democrats are "For" something...even if it's the idea that America should defend itself and its allies and interests abroad...Republicans have to be loudly and performatively "Against" it.

And the people who mock the Left for thinking "Orange Man Bad" seem to have absolutely zero issues with thinking "KGB Man Good."

And yes, it's just about that lizard-brained stupid, too.

The truth is, these fucking people are holding up Russian flags and "Z" signs for the same damn reason they have an interest in Medieval Catholicism or New Apostolic Reformation Dominionism, or simple, base, dumb-ass secular Trumpism for that matter. It's the same reason a hell of a lot of their parents did a fuck-ton of drugs in the 1970's or "liked" Communism or got into the Jesus Movement when all that went south. 

It usually boils down to one of two streams of thought. Either they're simple, contrarian idiots who think it's cool to piss on whoever they think is the "Establishment" of the day...or the cruelty is the goddamn point and they think they've found a superior justification for being selfish assholes.

More to the point, all of these same assholes think the "Establishment" is people they don't like. And they think Donald Trump and/or Vladimir Putin or some random alt-Right Nazi has somehow given them the mandate to stick it to all those people while somehow claiming both the label of being oppressed and whatever Something Something Gazpacho they think the Left had in the 1960's, or stole from them when Obama got elected, or whatever.

Fuck, I don't know, it's all a big, contradictory mess. In many cases the same goddamn people who thought the Soviet Union was the Devil would bow down before the Hammer And Sickle today, basically because Vladimir Putin makes a big show of hating gay people.

Never mind that male homosexuality is just fine in Russian "Culture" as long as consent isn't a factor and it's some dude getting raped up the ass.

And they have absolutely no problem with Putin trying to bring the Soviet Union back, so long as he keeps hating gay people and today's neo-Communism and Re-Sovietized Russia don't include any of that inconvenient social justice stuff. They're just fine with Kim Jong Un's totalitarian North Korea or Putin's Russia or Xi's China, so long as the cruelty keeps flowing.

Indeed, they admire Communism and Socialism...so long as its primary focus is on hurting people and only one group gets to be the "Chosen Ones" or utter submission to some ideology is the only way to have a life.

They don't even care what the variables are so long as the "Wrong" people get hurt and the "Right" people get paid and the average people have no choice but to obey.

And it's for no better reason than these fucking people aspire to join the "Big Leagues" themselves and impose such a system on somebody, somewhere, as soon as they get done making money off riling up the mob. And they're mad because Bigo Barnett sitting at Pelosi's desk scratching his balls, Josh Hawley's raised fist, and the Q-Anon Shaman guy weren't the iconic Che Guevara-type images they feel that the Universe owes them, or something.

What's going on here is a lot of different things, but none of them are anti-war, or civilization or society for that matter. The only "Peace" they're interested in is the quiet of no one else being allowed to talk back to them. And that they get to do whatever they want.

The only thing that kind of shit guarantees is an even more bloody revolution against them later, and more wars in turn. 

These are people who want to claim the mantle of revolutionaries...but what they support is all the same shit that all those revolutions were against. They want to claim the mantle of the counterculture, but what they are is all the things that the counterculture was about countering.

The simple truth is, it's all about them. And they see guys like Putin and Trump not truly as the Alt-Christs they claim, but as vehicles for their own self-promotion...and if Ron DeSantis has anything on the other two, any real advantage, it's that he already understands this and is actively working to appeal to those people, knowing everybody else will eventually fall in line behind the meme-makers. 

These people would unleash all the torments of Revelation on the world, if it made them feel famous or "Own The Libs" for five minutes.

And don't you forget it.

Слава Україна!

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