sacohen's blog

Loose talk about Revolution is all over the internet and Right Wing media these days. From Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh to the coy secession talk of Texas Governor Rick Perry, the idea of armed resistance is being floated on a nearly daily basis ever since Barak Obama won the election. Militia groups, both “Patriot” groups and more sinister White Supremacist groups, are on the rise, and the Tea Party movement uses the symbolism of the revolutionary war in its banners and rhetoric. With all this apparent enthusiasm for killing one’s neighbors, one wonders what the chance of a revolution from the Right really is. In my opinion, it is zero.

By “revolution,” I mean an organized uprising by armed citizens against the Federal government, with the idea of fighting a protracted guerrilla war and defeating the government. I’m not referring to ethnic or religious conflicts, though those are elements of the mix here. In a country where arming yourself is as simple as going down to the corner store and plunking down a few hundred dollars for a 12 gauge shotgun or semi-automatic rifle, why do I doubt the possibility of Revolution from such an angry and seemingly motivated Right Wing?

Realize that there are strong disincentives to joining a revolution. Not only does one risk life and property, but the targets in a revolution tend not to be evil Wall Street bankers and crooked politicians. They tend to be policemen, soldiers, security guards and bystanders. Challenging an intact state with an elected government whose legitimacy is recognized by the vast majority of its citizens has very little possibility of gaining popular support.

That’s always the case, but there are other issues specific to the Right Wing.

The Right doesn’t do Revolution
History over the last hundred years doesn’t offer a single example of a Right wing revolution. The Right favors military coups and death squads. Hitler was voted into office and seized power in a coup. Mussolini seized power in a coup. Pinochet took control in a coup. Franco, arguably was part of a revolution, but this occurred after a failed Right-wing coup attempt and was against a government that was already deeply divided. While many of these groups had considerable popular support they were not popular insurrections. Even in Communist dictatorships, where the Right is out of power and would theoretically form the Resistance, organized opposition usually comes from the intelligentsia or from labor unions.

Of course, past performance is not an indicator of future results. But there are other ingredients missing from the revolutionary stew.

Yesterday, one of the posters on the discussion of Corporate Government on my previous blog asked me if I thought Dr. Paul was full of BS. She cited Dr. Paul's bulletin on the latest health care reform bill, pasted below.

Healthcare Reform is More Corporate Welfare by Dr. Ron Paul

"Last Wednesday the nation was riveted to the President’s speech on healthcare reform before Congress. While the President’s concern for the uninsured is no doubt sincere, his plan amounts to a magnanimous gift to the health insurance industry, despite any implications to the contrary.

A funny thing happened on the way to the Government takeover of health care. I realized that it had already happened.

While there is no shortage of venom heaped on Israel’s Gaza incursion, and plenty of chicken vs egg discussion of who started this mess, there is scant acknowledgement of one basic truth: that this war, with its civilian deaths and horrible infrastructure damage, is the desired outcome of carefully thought out strategies by both Hamas and the Israelis. The two sides are fighting two different wars, which happen to intersect in the streets and alleys of Gaza.

Hamas: The Picture War

In studying guerrilla groups and strategies for my novel, The Army of the Republic, it became apparent that guerrilla or terrorists groups are not usually fighting a war of conquest or military victory, but rather, a propaganda war, designed to discredit their enemy and to polarize the population. Hamas’ quixotic launching of rockets is decried either as the desperate gesture of a captive people or as the suicidal expression of hatred by irrational religious fanatics. In fact, it’s a pre-meditated strategy with defined political ends.

Hamas does not launch rockets because it hopes to defeat Israel militarily or to improve conditions in the Gaza Strip. It launches rockets for the purpose of provoking a reaction. Hamas is telling a story, and they are using bullets and bodies to tell that story. Their narrative is that Israelis are blood-thirsty child-killers who blow up mosques and schools, engaging in sadistic “collective punishment.” For this reason they intentionally store explosives in mosques and launch mortar rounds without regard to the civilian casualties that return fire will cause. With Israel blocking foreign journalists, Hamas controls the picture war. You will rarely see an image of a Hamas militant holding a weapon or launching a rocket. Instead, the media is full of images of dead and bleeding children, the blame for which falls heavily on the Israelis, especially in the Arab world. We may know it’s a complex situation, but a horrific image of a dead child provokes revulsion towards whoever fired the shot. In the war between words and pictures, pictures usually win.

I’m sitting at a restaurant in Shanghai staring with great reservation at the creature on the plate in front of me. It looks very much like the biggest slug you’ve ever seen, except slugs are in your garden, not bathed in a orange-brown sauce and waiting for you to eat them. It’s a Sea Cucumber, the kind of expensive dish served up at Chinese banquets to honor and flatter the guests, and 8 of these little creatures have been sacrificed tonight on the altar of turbo-capitalism that my Chinese friends Selena and Peter have invited me to worship at tonight.

PART I: The Communist Business Environment

by Stuart Archer Cohen

We all complain about politics, but have you ever wondered what makes a person pick up a gun and start violently resisting the government? That was one of the questions I wanted to answer when I started writing The Army of the Republic.

Some of the factors that make fertile ground are already well-known: an elite intent on keeping and expanding its privileges, a State that refuses to incorporate or entertain alternative ideas, an economy where downward mobility has become the new rule. But those factors have existed in many countries without sparking violent resistance. Why, I wondered, did people in one country organize and fight, while others suffered on in silence?

It wasn’t an answer I could find in the United States. In spite of our long, sad history of state violence against minorities, we Americans have tended to work things out relatively peacefully in the last 140 years. Compared to Argentina’s 30,000 disappearances, or the hundreds of thousands killed in El Salvador, Guatemala and Columbia, our record for settling our differences in the last century is pretty good.

So, when I decided to set my book about urban guerrillas in the United States, I had to look elsewhere to try to understand why people resort to violent struggle, especially in modern times.

A friend of mine spent many years in the security business doing contract work for the CIA, some of which involved killing people. My friend had a long history in the hard side of human interactions, much of it in the murky moral regions inhabited typically by soldiers, spies and public defenders with guilty clients. This was not a man who could afford to spend too much energy on moral issues: there was a job to do, and once he embarked on it, the elements of right and wrong only got in the way. However, he was a wise student in human motivation.