Cloud Cuckoo Landmines 4

4 comments

1. George Smith

   August 1, 2012 at 10:42 am

   What a lot of people don’t understand is how deeply buried and old this is in the literature of American extremism. In fact, the literature — the books and pamphlets spun off things like the Poor Man’s James Bond, which came from a survivalist/extremist — are primarily about how to build bigger and bigger improvised weapons, from landmines to incendiaries, to hand grenades. All manner of boobytraps as well as a healthy desire to acquire assault weapons. And this goes back to at least the Eighties with the pamphlets bearing names like “The Weaponeer” and being sold at gun shows. So there is this significant demographic in American culture, a bright seam of people who are not at all like you and me, who really feel it is their right to have these things. And initially, a lot of it was and is inspired by hate fiction like the Turner Diaries, the book that is the basis for all books on the tyrannical government turning on ‘the people’ and the ‘people’ rising up to destroy it along with all the blacks, browns, homos, Jews, and elites. However, there has also been an evolution here, one the people who just come to this seem to miss. And it lies in an end-of-days outlook, manifested in the survivalist/prepper crazies that the US will fail catastrophically. In this case, they’re not worried about fighting the government, which they feel will be part of the collapse. They want the heavy weaponry to fight off the blacks, the browns, the yellows, the gays, the liberals and the elites who won’t have prepared, and will be coming to their bug out bunker/redoubt to take their stuff. So this has been evolving over forty years and now it’s mainstream, partly as what’s considered reasonable thought, partly cynically exploited for entertainment value. How did this happen? Extremely poor government and economy, national decline. The people into this aren’t completely nuts. They know something has gone very wrong and have been offered no solutions by their leaders, just more rake-off. So they have put their own conspiracy ideas together and the result is this toxic extremist brew, now right in the center of our discourse. 

    
2. Frank

   August 1, 2012 at 12:02 pm

   Goes back further thna the 80s.  Direct ideological descendants of the Klan.  Daniel Bell analyzed it quite well 60 years ago.

    
3. George Smith

   August 1, 2012 at 12:58 pm

   And so he did. The FBI took up action against the labor movements in this country, assuming them all to be part of the Communist Party, crushing them. On the other hand, Johnson had to order the FBI into the south to get after the Klan. However, the central problem remains. It’s antithetical to a working democracy and the longer it stays visible and powerful in the mainstream, the worse things will get. This is also another part of what’s so offensive about Mitt Romney. The extremists in the GOP detest him but couldn’t stop him from being the nominee, so they will vote for him. In the meantime he runs a campaign that panders straight to them, I believe, figuring that it’s this extremist part of the polity, plus a mass of really uninformed people, who think it’s great that he insults Palestinians, and also the Brits, and everyone else, as long as it’s not them, because they feel good about the animus.  

    
4. Frank

   August 1, 2012 at 4:06 pm

   I studied this stuff in college in one of my 400-level sociology classes.  Even wrote a paper on it.

   In preparing for the paper, I visited Bob Jones U.  What a long strange trip that was.