By Nathan Barton

And so it begins…

“Bikers for Trump Arizona” in a Facebook posting, announced that their members will be in Phoenix at a pro-Trump rally to defend the rally against planned AntiFa “counter-protesters.”  An e-mail posted by them provided graphic images of past violence against Trump supporters and others by groups claiming to be “anti-fascist” (AntiFa) and other Progressive and (neo) Liberal organizers and groups and individuals.

In discussions with family and friends, we’ve talked a lot about what the events of the last year-plus are most reminiscent of. Is it Boston in the early 1770s?  Or Paris and other French cities as the French Revolution started its progress towards the radical Jacobin nightmare of which the bloody terror was just a part?  Or Petrograd and Moscow as the seemingly republican revolution became the bloody October Revolution and Russian Civil War?  Or perhaps late Weimar Germany, as international socialists clashed with national socialists for the fate of belittled and humiliated post-Great War Germany.

Or is it the first stages of Bloody Kansas in 1859 and 1860?

Whatever we want to compare it to, none of these are comparisons anyone (at least anyone rational) should want to apply.  Because they all ended in disasters for liberty – they all ended, in the long run, with lost liberty, more tyranny, more troubles.  Yes, even Boston in 1773 and 1774 – just look at Boston of 2017.  (Admittedly, it was not as bad for “four score” or so years – although if you talk to the corn-farmers and distillers of western Pennsylvania a decade-plus later, you’ll hear a much different story.)

Several people have pointed out that we are in the first stages of a civil war – not a war between the States as in 1861-65, but a war between different elements of society and different claimants to the power of the state.  The illicit and immoral power of the state.  The power which the state only has by rebelling against God and the natural order, and stealing it from individuals and families.

More than once I’ve heard expressed the desire that we could simply push the various “alt-right” and AntiFa and all the other groups into a nice little Coventry of their own and let them scream and fight (and kill) each other there, while the rest of us go about our lives.  It would be nice.  But I fear, by the time we count noses, that we who want to live free and peaceful lives, might be the ones inside the fence.

Because the simple truth is that both sides in Charlottesville and Berkeley and Chapel Hill and Houston and Phoenix are pretty much the SAME side. The side that says that some men can lord it over other men. The side that says that human government is, if not a completely good thing, a tolerable thing. The side that says might (including the might of numbers) makes right.  If I were to abuse the English language the way many people do, I could scream that both sides in these clashes are “fascists” who not only believe (with Mao) that political power comes from the end of a gun (or a bully’s fists or a jack-booted thug’s club).  They believe that political power – that violence – SHOULD be used to prevent people who disagree with them from doing anything.  That power should be used to punish those who do things that they do not like. Whether it is something that they say, or what they do NOT say (when they refuse to endorse whatever fad is current).  Or something that they do (or don’t do).

None of these people – and the majority of the nation that support the two opposing sides – want liberty.  They WANT security (for their own side, at least).  They WANT to be told what to do (by the “leaders” of their side and on certain things).  They WANT to have the authorities crack down on large segments of society – just as long as their own segment is not suppressed as much.

The majority of “Americans” (and it is horrible to apply that word to these people) do not WANT to live in liberty.  They do NOT want freedom.  There are many different things that they do want, but not these that.  They are the exact opposite what the Founding Fathers tried to establish; liberty and freedom for thirteen newly-independent small nations.

And if we are not careful and do not plan and prepare carefully, they will drag the rest of us into the abyss with them.  The few of us, American and others, who want to live in liberty; who were taught (or taught ourselves) how to be free and responsible and independent.  The few of us who have taught our children (or our children by adoption) how to live free.

I’ll be optimistic and say that, when push comes to shove, we will number as high as one in ten who want to and can live free.  That is 30 million of us in the Fifty States, and maybe 600 million worldwide (although I admit that sounds extremely high, probably because societies like the Ummah (the Islamic world) and mainstream Chinese society and societies with Iberian heritage are much less likely to have even 10% – maybe one in twenty).  So, are there 300 million people worldwide – in North America, Oceania, Europe, Russia, India, and Africa – capable of living in liberty and able to fight for that right? I don’t know.  And I don’t know how many of the 30 million in the Fifty States (and a dozen provinces) or the 300 million worldwide will survive the coming Collapse.

But I do intend that my sons and their families (now or future) are some of that number.  Because I am sick and tired of the world and our society being ruined by the likes of those in Charlottesville and Phoenix – and especially DC and NYC and LA – and Paris, Berlin, London, Rome, and Peking and all the rest.

Enough is enough.

(PS: A civil war can still be the result of mass hysteria, which is what we are seeing right now.  As we could point out was the case with the War of Northern Aggression (in a future commentary).)