Domestic Terrorism, Race War or Civil War

"Hate has no place in our country, and we're going to take care of it."

Donald Trump after giving condolences to shooting victims and their families on August 4^th. Seriously!

The interesting feature of modern warfare is what we euphemistically call “asymmetrical combat.” Stateless warriors, hit and run targets, focused on imploding political systems, instilling fear to provoke reactions and recruit additional adherents, and assemblages of those led by maniacal leaders – charismatic slogan-driven militants with fire in their eyes and hate in their hearts – joined by pop-up lone-wolves acting on their own in seeming synchronicity with a perceived greater movement. Hating minorities, blaming them for the ills of a nation, is hardly new. Every demagogue, every rising autocrat, throughout history has built and consolidated his (yup “his”) power based on targeting hapless others as the bane of their nations’ everyman.

Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Mao, Castro, Khomeini, Assad, bin Laden, Al Baghdadi, Ghaddafi come to mind as those who began as outcasts and rose through blame and violence to positions of power. Others hold their power through violence and blame. Putin, Maduro, Burma’s (Myanmar’s) generals, African strongmen, etc., etc. There always has to be a “good us” vs a “bad them.” Winners and losers. No consensus. One group must dominate another, one group accorded “legitimacy” while another is “unpatriotic” and the “root of the problem.” Blame.

Unification is the enemy for these autocrats. They rely dramatically on a divide and conquer strategy, fall quickly when their populace stabilizes and finds accommodation through compromise and consensus. They simply cannot thrive in a true, balanced and functional democracy. Without severe polarization, forcing people to pick sides with zeal and commitment, they cannot survive or hold power. Roping in the military or police power helps as does delegitimizing aspects of their own governments, structures they are committed to take down anyway, that could serve as barriers to their ascendency and retention of power.

Until the most modern era, nascent dissents were forced into clandestine meetings – rife with risk as informants could easily penetrate these organizations. Then came the Internet and smart phones. Social media dominated. So many websites. So many ways to reach the disenfranchised, loners seeking vindication. Automated targeting – bots – made the task of identifying and reaching those vulnerable to the message easy to find, easy to target.

And for those violently inclined in the past, almost uniformly relegated to explosives vs guns. After all, explosives can be manufactured from the simplest components, even ordinary fertilizer can be rigged to detonate, and industrial dynamite easy to come by. Regime changes loosed all manner of military-grade explosives, even chemical and biological weapons (and a few lose nukes), and the arms market flourished, for the right price, for AK-47s and RPG launchers. Then came AR-15s and their ilk.

Identifying minorities is relatively easy. Ethic names, choice of dress, a tendency to live in like-minded communities, race or skin color, language, places of worship, place of birth or a willingness to stand out as a spokesperson for the relevant minority group. Once identified, shifting blame and building moral outrage is easy. In times of destabilizing change – where globalization and automation are totally reprioritizing job-skill-values more than at any other time in human history – those left behind or being left behind are desperately seeking simple lifelines to return to what their life assumptions had always been.

Think of a farmer in the deep South in the 1860s being told that he (yes, “he”) would no longer have the use of exceptionally cheap slave labor to earn a living. He was ready to fight and die rather than accept the change. We don’t have slavery today, but the economic/work displacement is just as severe. The patterns of generations of labor, from great grandfather, to grandfather, to father to son, are now broken by modernity.

For who say that Donald Trump is a racist, they really cannot make that statement without the deepest psychoanalysis of the President himself. He may actually be deeply “un-racist.” What he is, whatever his true beliefs might be, is willing to exploit racism to exacerbate a vast political divide, extreme polarization, in order to maintain political power. Throwing in statistics on GDP (an average number boosted by rich people making much more) and unemployment (excluding those who cannot find any work and have given up or those severely under-employed) provides an argument for his reelection, but the immutability of this base constituency.

Muslim Americans, inner-city African Americans living in violence well-below the poverty line and undocumented Hispanic immigrants have not remotely cost jobs or decimated the U.S. economy, quite the opposite. But they fit the bill as perfect targets.

“Socialism” – particularly as that word is callously misused – can be used to tear apart the opposition, at least in this country. Paying for healthcare for all is done in every other developed country on earth, except the United States. Simply put, it’s hard to argue that the United States cannot replicate a viable universal healthcare system when the entire developed world has been operating with such systems for years. Environmental protection is not a Chinese hoax… those wildfires, tropical storms, droughts and flooding… consistently rising temperatures… have the most consistent direct relationship to increases in greenhouse gasses.

The United States is the only developed country on earth with virtually the same number of guns in private hands as it has people. More assault weapons in private hands than the entire population of many European nations. And a clear and oft-repeated justification for allowing such assault weapons to proliferate (by no means constitutionally protected) as a check on a government that might veer too far away from “core American values.”

Donald Trump is acutely aware of this sentiment. He has delegitimized the mainstream press, his own intelligence agencies, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Environment Protection Agency. He is sworn to take down these institutions and to the maximum extent possible, replace them with Trump-supporting alternatives. But taking extreme positions, finding hidden enemies, amplifies that required political divisiveness and justifies extreme measures.

Since 9/11/01, the tsunami of mass killings in the United States has been deeply and fundamentally driven by what we euphemistically call “domestic terrorists,” a label that is never used by Donald Trump. His explanation is to ignore the patterns of rising mass shootings, almost all with those legitimate military grade assault weapons, and label each as a deranged psychopath acting from some form of mental illness. There may even be a ring of truth to the required mental aberration to implement a mass killing. But that so many mass murderers are clearly linked either as unambiguous supporters of the President or passionately committed to the annihilation of those ethnic and racial targets who are the unambiguous targets of Donald Trump’s blame game… suggests that what is really happening is an acting out of Trump’s deepest message. “Good people” on both sides.

With the ascendency of Donald Trump came an acceleration, a spike, in hate crimes, hate speech and related domestic terrorism. There are more semi-automatic weapons in circulation today than at any other time in our nation’s history. El Paso, August 3^rd. 20 murdered, 26 injured by a white supremacist hell-bent on carrying out his president’s subliminal message. Dayton, August 4^th, 9 dead, 27 injured. Two days. So what is really happening here? Domestic terrorism or a slow explosion of a civil war? Joe Biden, old Joe Biden, had said what many Americans – right, left and center – intuitively already think. The United States as we know it will not survive a second Trump term. Enough blame on those with mental illness. Enough of those “our thoughts and prayers are with the families of the victims.” Enough! The hate you give…

              I’m Peter Dekom, and sometimes the acceleration of what might otherwise pass for random… is no longer random.