Should We Be Worried About an American Invasion of...America?
Quite possibly, if present trends continue.
In yesterday’s post, I warned against how certain elements of the establishment’s post-Capitol Insurrection were taking shape. No less an august military personage than retired Army General Stanley McChrystal, former head of Joint Special Operations Command in Iraq and the commander of all U.S. and allied troops fighting the Taliban and al-Qaida in Afghanistan, told reporters that America was in the throes of a nationwide violent insurgency, one that bore all the hallmarks of the forces he battled in the Middle East and Central Asia.
“I did see a similar dynamic in the evolution of al-Qaida in Iraq, where a whole generation of angry Arab youth with very poor prospects followed a powerful leader who promised to take them back in time to a better place, and he led them to embrace an ideology that justified their violence. This is now happening in America,” he said.
Much of the rest of the article went on to posit that Trump had in fact “united the Right”: a coalition of Nazis and neo-Confederates and anti-feminists and Q Anon loons. It was stated that these Fascists had infiltrated law enforcement and the military, and indeed, a few cops and active duty military personnel (or at least one reservist I know of) were rounded up, but there numbers were far smaller than the number of realtors snared in the dragnet. Seriously — this was an insurrection of the petit bourgeois: realtors, small-town shysters, jake-leg Evangelical preachers, and HVAC shop owners and such.
Anyway, worse still, the article posited, these American Fascists were joining forces with like-minded Fascists in Canada and Europe — notably a group called the Nordic Front, which FBI analyst Ali Soufan had been declared a “threat to America” by the National Security Council.
Googling this group redirects you to something called the Nordic Resistance Movement, a Scandinavian confederation of Fascists.
Among their more recent depredations:
Sweden: On 19 April 2018, fireworks were thrown at the U.S. embassy in Stockholm during a protest against the bombing of Syria. One NRM man was arrested. The same month a member was arrested for plotting to assassinate journalists. Police confiscated a shotgun from the man. On 6 July 2018, members of the NRM assaulted two pro-Israel activists in Gotland.
Norway: They are organized in four subchapters (or nests) in Norway. In 2014 Norwegian police confiscated illegal submachine guns and automatic rifles from a member. In 2019, another member was arrested after hijacking an ambulance, trying to ram a police car and driving into a crowd. Inside the ambulance the police discovered a shotgun and Uzi submachine gun.
Iceland: There have been a few newspaper articles on ties of the movement to Iceland, and it has a website under Icelandic domain. In September 2019 between 10 and 15 Swedish members of the Nordic Resistance Movement staged an event at Lækjartorg in Reykjavík where they spread flyers and promoted the organisation. The event sparked an anti-nazi demonstration a few days later which drew an estimated crowd of 200 participants.
Okay, I’ve no doubt these people are nasty pieces of work, but I think we can withstand firecracker attacks, flyering campaigns, and lone actors attacking cop cars with ambulances. Soufan, the FBI analyst, seems to think otherwise:
“If the Nordic Front is a threat to the U.S., that means they have some connection to activities here. There are also [right-wing] extremist groups in Canada designated as terrorist organizations by our ‘Five Eyes’ allies, but they still operate with impunity here in the United States. That has to stop.”
Sure, yeah, but this importation of Nordic hate seems a wee bit overblown. (Throughout the article, violent Trumpist extremism was couched as very much a White People Problem; ignored, I think at all of our peril, was the fact that America is proving a Land of Opportunity for Asian-American and Latin American Fascists as well — see Ted Cruz, Nick Fuentes, Enrqiue Tarrio, and Tam Pham, the Vietnamese-American Houston cop busted for storming the Capitol.)
McChrystal went on to say the problem was far worse than most Americans knew, and that the only solution was to spy on, censor, and (when necessary) jail (and unsaid but implicit) kill these homegrown insurgents.
And, he added, that probably won’t work:
“As this extremist movement comes under increasing pressure from law enforcement in the coming days and weeks, its members will likely retreat into tighter and tighter cells for security, and that will make them more professional, and those cells will become echo chambers that incubate even more radical thinking along the lines of armed insurrection,” he said. “So even if Trump exits the scene, the radical movement he helped create has its own momentum and cohesion now, and they may find they don’t need Trump anymore. They can just wait for another charismatic leader to appear. So the fabric of something very dangerous has been woven, and it’s further along than most Americans care to admit.”
So what then is to be done?
The interview offers no solutions, so please forgive me if I fear that we will do as we have always done when faced with such a quandary — see such dark chapters from domestic American history as “The Negro Problem” and “The Drug War.”
Meaning attack the symptoms while only exacerbating the causes, thereby lining the pockets of those at the top while the rest of us languish in unnecessary poverty and misery, and with no real intention of accomplishing an unattainable goal. (“Indian Removal” doesn’t quite fit, as there was a clear-cut goal there, one that was for all intents and purposes achieved to our satisfaction.)
See also such more recent chapters in American history on the foreign stage, i.e. the wars without end in Iraq and Afghanistan. Decades in, do we even know what the endgame was, if ever we did to begin with?
And what is the endgame here of combating this New American Violent Insurgency? Gulags and reeducation camps? Guerrilla warfare in the wilds of Appalachia and the Dakotas? Fascist bombing and mass shooting campaigns of “libtard” targets like music festivals, college campuses, government buildings and so on, with subsequent crackdowns that would, by necessity, I’m afraid, shred the Constitution?
All of which would, of course, keep those Defense and militarized Law Enforcement dollars rolling in. Will the police be able to contend with an insurgency as large as the one McChrystal portrays? And with drones and mechanized warfare rendering boots on foreign grounds obsolete, there has to be some justification for boots on the ground somewhere, right? What about right here at home, where at least we speak the language and understand the culture? And can count on support of maybe most of the population in some or all of the country?
I didn’t realize it at the time, but just as I was beginning to entertain these dark thoughts yesterday, it was 59 years to the day after a certain fellow who knew well of what he spoke had this to say on his departure from the Oval Office:
A vital element in keeping the peace is our military establishment. Our arms must be mighty, ready for instant action, so that no potential aggressor may be tempted to risk his own destruction...
This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence—economic, political, even spiritual—is felt in every city, every statehouse, every office of the federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society. In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military–industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists, and will persist.
We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals so that security and liberty may prosper together.
I really wish ol’ Dwight had kept up this line of patter in his dotage, but he had golf to play and rocking chairs to sit in and Mamie to discuss Reader’s Digest Condensed Classics with, but we can’t say the man didn’t warn us. He took the speech’s title to heart, sadly — Farewell Address to the Nation.
And even as his words still echoed in the Halls of Power, they were being actively ignored as we blundered our way into the quagmire of Vietnam. “Yeah,” the smart set in the Pentagon seemed to think. “What did that old codger know about modern-day warfare? And Vietnam? They might have licked those candy-ass French boys, but wait until they see what we’ve got in store…”
And so millions died there and 60,000 or so here, the nation was riven by generational conflict on an unprecedented scale, and trillions vanished into the maw of that military industrial complex. Our defeat there chastened us only briefly; Reagan resurrected the beast tentatively with his practice run in Grenada, and after a setback at the Marine barracks in Beirut, we were off to the races again: Panama, Iraq I, Afghanistan, Iraq II, and here we are now, kind of admitting there’s not much more to be done there, and that wars with China or Russia might not be advisable.
Or even Iran, so…
Who wants some?
Paranoia? Tin foil hat? Maybe. I hope to fuck I’m wrong. But articles like that, coming from Pentagon mouthpieces on the order of McChrystal, saying things like he said about violent insurgencies farther along than we know and no solutions other than crackdowns and mass arrests offer me little hope that we will be seeing any kind of Peace Dividend from this administration.
Ah yes, the Peace Dividend…remember that concept? When the Berlin Wall fell and Communism went into retreat? We were supposed to be on the precipice of a Golden Age of domestic spending on things like education and infrastructure, but Poppy Bush had other plans and so ginned up a war in the Middle East, and then expanded it into this bogus War of Civilizations against Global Islam instead. Honestly, I think the Pentagon is just bored with it at this point. We could fight it forever and ever but yeah, I think it’s gotten tedious, especially now that they are no longer venturing out much beyond the perimeter of fortified bases. There’s a generation of gung-ho young officers and enlisted who’ve yet to fire a shot in anger, and they want to earn their spurs.
Again, I hope I’m wrong. I really don’t want to be right. And this is not to be read as a prediction, but advice, a warning, words of caution. Watch the official rhetoric in the news. Beware the demonization of the “enemy within.” It’s already out there, and it will increase with each incident perpetrated by disaffected Trumpalos, and sadly, there will be more.
And of course those people will have to be punished, but if we really want to stamp out this problem, we will reallocate our tax dollars toward bettering the lives of all Americans rather than blow it on jailing and killing the minority desperate and angry enough to wage war at home.
Carrot and stick, people. Carrot and stick.
Voltaire ArouetOnce your faith, sir, persuades you to believe what your intelligence declares to be absurd, beware lest you likewise sacrifice your reason in the conduct of your life. In days gone by, there were people who said to us: “You believe in incomprehensible, contradictory and impossible things because we have commanded you to; now then, commit unjust acts because we likewise order you to do so.” Nothing could be more convincing. Certainly any one who has the power to make you believe absurdities has the power to make you commit injustices. If you do not use the intelligence with which God endowed your mind to resist believing impossibilities, you will not be able to use the sense of injustice which God planted in your heart to resist a command to do evil. Once a single faculty of your soul has been tyrannized, all the other faculties will submit to the same fate. This has been the cause of all the religious crimes that have flooded the earth.
– Voltaire Arouet (1694-1778)
Is this quotation insightful, though-provoking, useful? Click on a star to rate it!
Average rating 3 / 5. Vote count: 2