By DOUG SHAVER
August 22, 2020
The Battle of Portland continues.
The mainstream media continue to assure us that it's just a protracted protest against racial injustice and police brutality. They also report occasional incidents of violence and property damage, which the police consider acts of rioting, as if they were both regrettable and unrelated. They must be unrelated, we're supposed to think, because they manage to find a few of the protest's supporters who denounce the rioting and plead for it to stop.
There is an adage about war being diplomacy by other means. Our nation is now engaged in civil war by other means. Diplomacy was abandoned a long time ago, but conventional warfare is not perceived by either side as an option. Not yet. We do have a president who won't rule it out, but it wouldn't matter if he did. The outcome of this conflict will not be for him to decide. The social forces in play are beyond the control of any individual.
This is not a protest. It is an attempted revolution, an effort to replace the existing government with a different government. It is not a petition for redress of grievances. It is a demand that the grievances be settled to the petitioners' satisfaction, and the petitioners will not negotiate the terms of the settlement. They say they just want to be heard, to get the attention of the ruling classes. But not really. They believe they should become the ruling class, the only ruling class, and nothing less will appease them.
And who is this "they"? For now, it's a coalition of sorts, united mainly by commitment to a leftist dogma of Western civilization's moral depravity, a dogma apparently based in various components of an academic philosophy called critical theory. And most people in the coalition have no idea what is really going on. They don't think they're trying to overthrow anything except ignorance. They believe they are participating in a reformation, not a revolution. The handful of people they are following don't care what those reformers believe, as long as they keep doing what they're doing in order to continue eroding what little remains of Enlightenment values.
Am I calling them useful idiots? Well, I don't think they're idiots. I do think they're woefully uninformed, but I don't see how they can be faulted, either. They can't be blamed for the quality of the schools they were educated in during their formative years or for the content of whatever news sources they have relied on to stay informed of current events.
For that matter, I'm not interested in blaming anyone in particular. We need to fix this problem before worrying about who if anyone caused it, but that means first we have to identify the problem. The real problem.
Next: Revolutions and civil wars
(This page last updated on August 22, 2020.)