by Lawrence Henry
Monday, September 18, 2000
http://www.americanpartisan.com/cols/henry/091800.htm
The other day, Rush Limbaugh took a phone call from a calm, reasonable-sounding man who said that there were some Americans who simply weren't going to stand for being steamrollered by liberalism any more, that they were prepared -- indeed, expected -- to have to fight an armed revolution to take their country back.
Rush gets calls like that periodically. As he always does, he asked the caller where the battles of this revolution would be fought, and how. This particular caller did not (as such callers usually do not) provide any clear answers, perhaps because he hadn't thought the subject through completely. But the man was right about one thing: There definitely are a number of people in the United States who are armed, ready, and waiting -- simply for some tipping point -- to start shooting.
They just don't call up talk shows and say so.
How many of them are there? Somewhere between 50,000 and a million. Enough to cause a whole lot of trouble. Yes, some of them nurture romantic dreams of fighting guerrilla battles in the mountains. Plenty of others -- enough -- know that won't work.
They know that revolutions are not won by pitched battles. They know that no insurrectionary force could stand up to the firepower of the United States military. No, instead, they have death lists. They plan assassinations. They know that some few -- perhaps a few thousand -- key people direct the legal, regulatory, and cultural movements they despise. And they have adopted a simple credo, one by one: "I'll get two of them before they get one of me."
This revolutionary cadre, entirely unorganized, simmering like an unfocused viral epidemic, occupies the core of a number of discontented populations. In the broadest sense, they constitute the armed wing of what political activist Grover Norquist called "the leave-us-alone coalition."
Make no mistake, the powers that be know this. And they're afraid. That fear lies behind the moves in the liberal establishment to outlaw home schooling, state by state; to oppose school vouchers, battleground by battleground (have to preserve that indoctrination); to create military-style law enforcement units in agencies like the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, and in Special Weapons and Tactical Squads (SWAT teams) of local police departments; to demoralize and weaken the military (which has a natural and historic affinity for patriotism and "leave us alone" sentiments); to hype up executive security forces; to confiscate guns; to hamstring free enterprise through lawsuits -- these and hundreds of other establishment efforts to consolidate dictatorial power.
These potential revolutionaries are resigned to being hated, demonized as nut cases, religious fanatics, gap-toothed idiots, yokels, and benighted, laughable fools. They know that a few deaths can make a big difference (look how badly the Republican party has missed Lee Atwater). They're resigned to forcing a national police action. They're willing, like classic Leninists, to provoke a crackdown simply to rouse revolutionary chaos.
As revolutionaries, these assassins-to-be also know that they probably cannot win their fight. High-profile killings will certainly be treated as terrorism by the government and the media, working in lockstep. Some assassinations will be covered up outright; the public will never know. The revolutionaries may be counting on sympathy from the military - even the desertion of some military units to the cause. More likely, a demoralized and emasculated military will not get involved in the fight at all.
But the revolutionaries don't care. At some key tipping point, they reason their lives are forfeit anyway: their country is gone, its principles and traditions raped, its institutions occupied by enemy forces. Change will be impossible by any legal means. Democracy will be dead.
That tipping point is very near.
