reflectivepundit

A Likely Blue Print for the Horrific Invasion of the Capitol

By Brigitte L. Nacos

“Despite all the noise and smoke and wreckage caused by our attack on the Capitol, only 61 persons were killed… But the real value of all our attacks today lies in the psychological impact,    not in the immediate casualties…More important, though, is what we taught politicians and the bureaucrats. They learned this afternoon that not one of them is beyond our reach…All the    armed guards and bulletproof limousines in America cannot guarantee their safety…”

The above sentences in “The Turner Diaries” describe the beginning of a catastrophic global race war that American White Supremacists  and their counterparts in Europe fought and won within eleven months by the destruction of democratic systems, non-Whites, and "hostile" Whites in order to establish a pure White empire.  

Written in the late 1970s by William Pierce, founder of the neo-Nazi National Alliance, under the pseudonym Andrew Macdonald, the “novel” became a bestseller among militia circles in the 1990s. For Timothy McVeigh the book was a blue print for planning and carrying out the Oklahoma City Bombing in 1995 that killed 168 persons and injured many more.

It has been suggested that ISIS may have influenced the playbook of the organized elements that stormed and invaded the Capitol last week. While that might be the case with respect to certain aspects, for example, ISIS’s savvy exploitation of social media platforms, Pierce’s gruesome prescriptions contain more clues for the present state of mind of organized White Supremacy/neo-Nazi groups and their plans for their short- and long-term objectives.

One of the main differences between ISIS and the various White Supremacy and neo-Nazi groups in the United States has been their unwillingness or inability to unite. The “Unite the Right” demonstrations in Charlottesville, Virginia, in the summer of 2017 were an effort of “alt-right” ideologists to pull the groups together. It failed.

But President Trump whose starring role in the racist anti-Obama birther conspiracy theory years ago and the anti-immigrant policies as president managed to become the idol behind whom White Supremacy groups finally united. The thousands of men and women whose violence shocked the nation as they forced their ways into the halls of the Congress the other day were united in responding to Mr. Trump’s calls to come to Washington and march to the Capitol in order to prevent the “enemy” from taking the non-existing election victory and the presidency away from Trump and them.

Although indicating that he would march with them, the President retreated to the White House. In that he followed the script of other violent movements’ leaders. Hitler and Mussolini never fought along their parties’ brown and black shirts in the streets; bin Laden and al-Baghdadi did not carry out acts of violence they propagated.

Even after four years of the Trumpian war against the intelligence, law enforcement, and homeland security communities some institutional memory still exists in the FBI and other security agencies. Some FBI agents, for sure, remember that “The Turner Diaries” motivated McVeigh and guided his logistical planning. For them and their colleagues it might be worthwhile to read or reread the “novel” as blue print for further violence.

Trump and the Madman Theory: A Madman Without a Theory

 By Brigitte L. Nacos

In his book “The Madman Theory: Trump Takes on the World” Jim Sciutto applies President Nixon’s so-called “Madman Theory” to President Trump. But whereas Richard Nixon and his National Security Adviser/Secretary of State Henry Kissinger had some, however crazy plan as they tried to convince adversaries of a president mad enough to resort to weapons of mass destruction to get concessions, Trump and his advisers never had a plan.

Now, after four crazy years, there is still a madman, a would-be tyrant and his hardcore followers trying to overthrow America’s more than 200-year-old democracy. What we have witnessed during the last four years and especially since Trump’s electoral defeat two months ago has been a huge step away from democratic principles—most of all the acceptance of election results by winners and losers in the pluralist system of governing.

As I watched FOX New last night at a time when Georgia’s election returns indicated a possible double win for the Democratic Party in the run-off for seats in the U.S. Senate, I heard hysterical outcries about those two “communists” ahead of their patriotic opponents. Given the long-used labels “communists” and “socialists” attached to “extreme liberals” by Trump and his propagandists, the time has come to call the Trumpian fascist movement no longer benignly “conservative” or “the conservative right,” they are in reality autocrats and, yes, they are fascists trampling on the rule of law.

At the end of his book “The Anatomy of Fascism” Robert O. Paxton details what he calls the “mobilizing passions” of fascism, among them,

• the belief that one’s group is a victim, a sentiment that justifies any action, without any legal or moral limits, against its enemies, both internal and external;

• the need for authority by natural chiefs (always male), culminating in a national chieftain who alone is capable of incarnating the group’s historical destiny;

• the beauty of violence and the efficacy of will, when they are devoted to the group’s success.

We see these fascist mobilizing passions at play right now at work in Washington, D.C. and around the country with the President of the United States Donald Trump in the starring role. We see these fascist mobilizing passions in the two chambers of Congress where too many GOP Senators and Representatives violate the oaths they swear to the U.S. Constitution. And we see these fascist mobilizing passions in the social media posts of online fascists who are devoted to and courted by their Dear Leader.

In two weeks, there will be a changing of the guards in Washington. Joe Biden will become U.S. President, and Kamala Harris will become U.S. Vice-President.

But to assume that the fascist passions will evaporate once Biden and Harris move into the White House would be naïve. The Madman without Theory will not go quietly into a post-presidential life.

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I wrote the above post a few hours before Trump's fanatic followers unleashed terror in the halls of the U.S. Congress. While the violence did not surprise me at all, I watched in amazement the thin or non-existent law enforcement presence in and around Capitol Hill. Assuming that the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, and other agencies kept track of violent online extremist communities, law enforcement was fully aware that many fanatic Trump followers heard their idol's call to come to Washington and fight for his second term. Whereas overwhelming military and police might threatened peaceful "Black Lives Matter" demonstrators in the capital last year, the White Supremacists, typically insisting on their right to wear arms, met no serious resistance as they entered through doors and windows into congressional buildings.

After inciting and watching the seditious horror show for hours Donald Trump finally asked his terrorist followers to "go home" assuring them that he loved them...