Believe, And Tremble (Scenes From A Cold Civil War, Three.)

The martyrs of history were not fools, and our honored dead who gave their lives to stop the advance of the Nazis didn't die in vain. Where, then, is the road to peace? Well, it's a simple answer after all. You and I have the courage to say to our enemies, "There is a price we will not pay." There is a point beyond which they must not advance. This is the meaning in the phrase of Barry Goldwater's "peace through strength." Winston Churchill said that "the destiny of man is not measured by material computation. When great forces are on the move in the world, we learn we are spirits — not animals." And he said, "There is something going on in time and space, and beyond time and space, which, whether we like it or not, spells duty. ~Ronald Reagan

...

And I stood upon the sand of the sea, and saw a beast rise up out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns, and upon his heads the name of blasphemy.

And the beast which I saw was like unto a leopard, and his feet were as the feet of a bear, and his mouth as the mouth of a lion: and the dragon gave him his power, and his seat, and great authority.
And I saw one of his heads as it were wounded to death; and his deadly wound was healed: and all the world wondered after the beast.

And they worshipped the dragon which gave power unto the beast: and they worshipped the beast, saying, Who is like unto the beast? who is able to make war with him?

And there was given unto him a mouth speaking great things and blasphemies; and power was given unto him to continue forty and two months.

And he opened his mouth in blasphemy against God, to blaspheme his name, and his tabernacle, and them that dwell in heaven.

And it was given unto him to make war with the saints, and to overcome them: and power was given him over all kindreds, and tongues, and nations.

And all that dwell upon the earth shall worship him, whose names are not written in the book of life of the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world.

If any man have an ear, let him hear.

He that leads into captivity shall go into captivity: he that kills with the sword must be killed with the sword. Here is the patience and the faith of the saints.

And I beheld another beast coming up out of the earth; and he had two horns like a lamb, and he speaks as a dragon.

And he exercises all the power of the first beast before him, and causes the earth and them which dwell therein to worship the first beast, whose deadly wound was healed.

And he doeth great wonders, so that he makes fire come down from heaven on the earth in the sight of men,

And deceive them that dwell on the earth by the means of those miracles which he had power to do in the sight of the beast; saying to them that dwell on the earth, that they should make an image to the beast, which had the wound by a sword, and did live.

And he had power to give life unto the image of the beast, that the image of the beast should both speak, and cause that as many as would not worship the image of the beast should be killed.

And he caused all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads:

And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.

Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six. ~Revelation 13, KJV

...

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows. ~George Orwell, 1984.

I keep seeing this shit. Republicans won't stop blowing the narcissist.

First, all these MAGA's and Republicans were flipping out about the new Superman movie...simply because it portrays Superman as he always has been portrayed, as the fundamental good guy...and obviously he's also not from around here.

Duh.

And I'll note that I've never freaking seen Superman played as a character without the most absolutely assiduously White Bread affect imaginable.

That's literally not the world Republicans actually want to live in, obviously.

I mean hell, now they're trying to cast Trump as some kind of Superman?

Fuck that. No.

It's that Superman is a good person and he's not actually from someplace like Dry Hump, Iowa that's apparently a problem all the sudden despite this being the character's bio since he was first created in the *Checks Notes* 1930's.

(With very little change in the character, as opposed to how many versions of Batman are there??)

Now I realize that the average common domestic Ferret, Mustela Potorious Furo, has more reading comprehension than the average Republican these days (ferrets being both illiterate and very ADHD as a rule) and the average deaf Blaze Ferret with Waardenburg Syndrome and a stripe down the top of their head has more ability or at least desire to listen to what other people are actually saying than some of these goddamned motherfucking Republicans...but Jesus Christ, come on!

These assholes' whole collective bit is that they appear to want to live in a nasty blood-soaked post-Apocalyptic hellhole of a world like that described by Cormac McCarthy in his novel The Road or at best Robert Kirkman's The Walking Dead simply because they feel that such a world might somehow justify their personal antisocial attitudes and shitty behavior.

These fucking people want to tear down our existing civilization without having much of anything to replace it with.

Never mind that the vast majority of These Fucking People aren't going to be the Warlord in such a situation. They're going to be the catamite strapped to the tailgate of the Warlord's Toyota Hilux technical truck waiting for the new Grand Warlord of McCook to come calling, or the harem girl awaiting his visitations in the back of a guarded semi-trailer...or vastly more likely the corpse riddled with 7.62x39mm bullets that's rotting in the sun and being pecked at by skinny vultures.

And they somehow think that they can, in such a scenario, both be the oppressors and claim some sort of reward they imagine people get for having been oppressed.

But the truth is actually worse. These shitheads entire fucking problem is simply that Other People Exist.

You can't live with that, you cannot reason with it, all you can do is fight against that shit!

These fucking people are very, very close to pushing America over the edge into a likely series of civil wars and revolutions. They think it'll be like the early days of the breakup of Yugoslavia before NATO came rolling in with massive USAF air support and they'll be murdering people to the tune of "Remove Kebab" while the United Nations peacekeepers stand by with their thumbs up their asses. 

It won't be like that. It won't go the way they think, but they don't fucking care.

These goddamn MAGA's don't care, so long as they think they're gonna get to have their boot on somebody else's throat before they die a horrible death their own damn selves.

I couldn't do it. 

This shit is evil and you know what? At this point, if there's a motherfucking Revolution, our government with its conduct since November in general (and January in particular) fucking deserves it.

If you wonder why I'm not objecting to my partner's recent idea to move here (even though we're both in Democratic states) it's honestly because I see our collective chances of survival as being better if we can watch each other's backs.

These fucking people don't give a shit if you're White.

They don't give a shit if you're Christian or Straight or any of the other bullshit they claim to valorize.

Both my partner and her kid are autistic and LGBT, I'm an agnostic disabled veteran who's been against Trump since I knew the man existed...and I'm pretty sure from some long-ago past experiences that some idiot religious nuts have me on a list somewhere, anyway.

Note I was a Christian when those incidents happened, but I didn't bow down to somebody's crazy Unga Bunga bullshit. That was enough for Those Fucking People to treat me as a literal enemy and I was forced at one point to physically defend myself.

None of the shit these assholes say can be trusted.

They don't want Believers in any real sense of what that word means. They don't want Citizens. To say they want slaves probably undersells it, the truth is these monsters want other people to be nothing more than dancing dolls for their narcissistic and perverse pleasures.

Seriously over 90% of the Latinos these motherfuckers are abusing are themselves Christian.

These fucking people say that they believe in Jesus.

But the truth is that the Bible says that the Devils believe in Jesus, too.

Believe, and Tremble.

Belief in God or Jesus or anything outside of the Self is not what these motherfuckers even want.

If you're not some fanatical Trump-worshiping Chud internet troll type who at least thinks they're gonna get wealth without work, current Republicans don't really want you alive, much less in America.

And I'm going to warn everybody...including Republicans here, by the way...that no matter how fucking evil and fascist and insane and violent y'all happen to get, there's gonna be somebody somewhere out there (probably a conspiracy theorist) for whom you can never, ever, go far enough.

And eventually somebody on your own "side" is going to turn on you, too.

Because that's what happens when one encourages inappropriate levels of religiosity, mob behavior, and paranoia and violent stupidity for the fun of it and then caps all that off by telling outright idiots that they don't even have to try to be good people or members of a society anymore.

And the truth is, what these assholes really want is to provoke anarchy and chaos and civilizational collapse in some kind of hope that they'll be able to carve their own little fiefdoms out of the resulting ashes.

Every last one of these motherfuckers thinks they're gonna be the Lord in his castle and the rest of the Republicans will be the serfs in their fields and everybody else will somehow just be dead.

They somehow think it's not the Mark Of The Beast when they do it and somehow they'll still get to claim the Lord Jesus Christ?

(And nobody else will.)

None of this works that way.

The enemy gets a vote, yo.

These fucking people want to turn our current state of cold civil war into a hot war for no better reason than they want to kill people.

Note: They do not care who those people are.

They will probably get what they want, and then regret it.

And if this blows up like I think it might, anybody in our government is gonna be targeted by the fucking nuts the same as anybody else...and Republicans will lose control of their mob and likely be the ones who get eaten by it first.

The people who survive are gonna be the people who are willing to work together to survive.

Freedom entails both collective responsibilities and individual rights.

Republicans want to have neither.

In fact, they are attempting to use a radicalized idea of individual rights (but only for rich white men) to simply beat everybody else's rights to death.

Yeah, like that historically hasn't worked out badly throughout history.

I'm a remind you (again) that there were 771 days between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Fall of the Soviet Union.

America is next unless somebody pulls a rabbit out of a hat or some shit.

You either believe in freedom or you don't.

And time's coming where you're going to have to choose which it is.

Choose wisely.

Слава Україна!

My black face fades,
hiding inside the black granite.
I said I wouldn't
dammit: No tears.
I'm stone. I'm flesh.
My clouded reflection eyes me
like a bird of prey, the profile of night slanted against morning.

I turn this way—the stone lets me go.
I turn that way—I'm inside
the Vietnam Veterans Memorial
again, depending on the light
to make a difference.
I go down the 58,022 names,
half-expecting to find
my own in letters like smoke.

I touch the name Andrew Johnson; I see the booby trap's white flash.
Names shimmer on a woman's blouse
but when she walks away
the names stay on the wall.

Brushstrokes flash, a red bird's
wings cutting across my stare.
The sky. A plane in the sky.
A white vet's image floats
closer to me, then his pale eyes
look through mine. I'm a window.
He's lost his right arm

inside the stone. In the black mirror
a woman’s trying to erase names:
No, she's brushing a boy's hair.
~Facing It, by Yusef Komunyakaa, US Army Veteran

Two

Yuri Orlov: [At Andrei's presidential compound showing the Liberian president a silver revolver pistol] The Glock is interesting. It is made of a polymer composite. Many of my clients feel that they can go through airport security without seeing a lot of bells and whistles. Personally, I do not recommend that. [Andrei chuckles glancing over at a guard flirting with a female staffer] On the other hand, if you are looking for traditional wheel gun, there is no substitute for six inches of muzzle energy of 357 mag I mean, of course, it will never jam. [Andrei shoots the guard flirting with the female staffer] WHY DID YOU DO THAT?!

Andrei Baptiste Sr.: [Aims gun at Yuri] WHAT DID YOU SAY?!

Yuri Orlov: Now, you gonna have to buy it! IT IS A USED GUN! How can I sell a used gun? [Takes pistol from Andrei with his son and bodyguards all aiming rifles at an entirely still business-focused Yuri]

Andrei Baptiste Sr.: A "used gun"? A "used gun"?! [Chuckles] That's a good one. You know? There is no discipline with the youth today. I tried to set an example, but it is difficult huh? Personally, I blame MTV. [Smiles and Yuri nods in acknowledgment] A "used gun"? [Chuckles heartily, gets up and extends hand for handshake] I think you and I, we can do business. ~From the film Lord Of War.