So, lets say we get to August or some summer month, and 4,000,000 people are protesting right out front the white house.
Do they send in the tanks? Do they kill 1,000,000 people? Would republican civilians see empathy for the dead americans who were democrats? Or would it unite the nation like 9/11 did, except this time against the government?
Would the United States, under normal circumstances, in the era of cellphones and cameras?
No.
Would Trump?
I don’t think theres a single thing that Trump wouldnt do, he is such a infantile, reactionary, egomaniacable manbaby that I can see him doing literally anything, if it makes him feel powerful or if he thinks it’d give him some kind of edge/opportunity.
The false flag, the event, the whatever you want to call it is on the way.
In 1970, the National Guard opened fire on a crowd of peaceful, unarmed students, killing four and wounding nine more. A Gallup poll conducted a week after the shooting found that 58% of Americans blamed the students for the massacre, with only 11% blaming the guardsmen. Many students who were present at the massacre were shunned by their own families, some were even disowned, and some were told that even more students should have been killed to teach them a lesson.
The students, for their part, couldn’t even comprehend what was happening at first. Many of them thought the soldiers’ weapons were loaded with blanks, that they were just trying to intimidate them. After the massacre, many of the students wanted to reassemble and continue peacefully demonstrating, in defiance of the guard. One of the professors convinced them to disperse, by shouting at them that all of them would be killed.
How was it possible for the public to see it that way? Because of how the media spun it. Even before the massacre, they were saying that the protests were full of “outside agitators” and claiming that they had been doing things like lacing the water supply with LSD. Of course, it eventually “came out” that these claims were complete bullshit based on nothing. So, once the moment had passed, they quietly printed retractions.
All that shit still happens today. It happens every single time a cop murders someone, whether it’s Renee Good or George Floyd. The right wingers immediately start digging for any possible way to spin it and if they can’t then they simply lie, and if the lie falls apart it doesn’t matter, by that point people will have forgotten and moved on.
Yes they will kill you. They’ll put people down like dogs and worry about how to justify it later. People want to believe the world is just, and that often means blaming the victim. They’ll do it and they’ll get away with it too.
Buy a gun.
Lol buying a gun won’t fix anything. You need to train with it and connect with other people who know how to use guns (and who can get other resources for you) or well, Luigi Mangione can tell you the other option.
Just consuming gun won’t fix anything.
My question is, why do authoritarians try so hard to disarm a populace then? It seems every person thinks we’ll have a large formation of troops fighting it out and not turn this into any number of guerilla resistance movements against the USA and other countries throughout time.
There’s 1.5 guns per person in the USA, but we also have the largest prison population per capita in the world.
I can’t name an authoritarian that started by disarming people. My guess would be there comes a point where disarming the populace happens in authoritarian process as part of “disarming the enemy”. When the enemy is the public, you disarm all of them.
So succesful authoritarians eventually just reach the point where the public is the enemy. They either get there by killing people or imprisoning them or starving them.
In the US they’re making housing unaffordable. You sell your gun to pay rent, problem solved for the wealthy. There’s much higher death rates for homeless people. There have been a number of stats that say the US has similar death rates to societies in civil wars.
If guns were used as a solution I think we’d see more sherriffs and deputies being shot during evictions.
How do you train with a gun if you don’t have one?
You can get a gun without buying it. Luigi mangione allegedly bought about half a gun
Personally, I would rather not walk around with an object that would land me in prison if it were discovered.
Where I live first infraction for a ghost gun is a fine so prison seems a bit dramatic.
Not everyone lives where you live. If I’m giving advice on the internet, where people live in many different locales, I think “buy a gun” is better advice than “3D print a gun.” Especially considering that 3D printed guns require more technical knowledge to put together and there’s potential for misfires or even injuries if you don’t know what you’re doing. Not to mention the cost of the 3D printer in the first place.
You want to go that route, by all means, knock yourself out. But it feels like you’re picking a pointless fight over this.
I don’t think playing right into the arms industry’s bosom is good advice unless you’re serious about actually training and organizing around using a gun.
Owning a gun doesn’t fix anything, hell using a gun doesn’t fix anything. There’s no guarantee when/if shit gets stupid you’ll even be able to get enough ammo for the thing (let alone the issues with caching a large amount of ammo).
The only way guns are going to matter in a realistic sense is if people are afraid to shoot you because they’ll get shot. If there’s actually some kind of civil war you’ll get guns an ammo from the army.
I’ve always just gone to the range with my friends who have guns. I’m not going to give the gun industry here a dime they don’t need.
You had me right up to the last word.
That nonviolent shit will get you killed.
Tell that to Alex Pretti
The guy who got killed doing nonviolent shit?
Are you suggesting he should have used the gun that he had on him?
Yes, there’s a chance he’d still be alive today if he did so, and there’d be at least one fewer fascist.
There’s a chance he would have died in a hail of gunfire, and probably gotten a lot of innocent bystanders killed as well, and a certainty that if he had survived, he would have gone to jail for the rest of his life. I don’t know what the solution is to the problems my country is facing right now, but I know for a fact that what you’re suggesting is not the solution.
I’m suggesting that if it were me, and I was gonna go down either way, I’d rather die knowing that I helped rid the world of at least one of those rat bastards.
I see we’ve got a badass on our hands.
LOL. Being armed is not a violent act.
That was partially just a result of the NG having rifles but not the less than lethal tear gas and stuff now.
Everyone calls it the Kent State shootings but all the shootings actually happened on the campus and none in the actual university.
Campus is the grounds and buildings of a university or college. If it’s on the campus it’s in the university.
It’s a sarcastic reference to communists correctly pointing out that the deaths on June 4th, 1989 were in and around Beijing, not on Tian’anmen square itself. It’s a comment intentionally undermining how communists are dispelling Red Scare mythos.
They weren’t being sarcastic, meaningless semantics is their MO
Fair enough.
This is the endgame Moscow wants: Balkanization and destabilization.
America failed itself, and Putin loves to add more gasoline to the fire. Either that country must save itself, or the rest of the world experience the unimaginable once the collapse is completed.
All the things that were said the USSR would do, we did unironically.
Friendly reminder that Boris Yeltsin shelled Parliament back in 1993
You guys are gonna blame leftists and/or Putin all the way to prison, aren’t you? What’s happening now is purely American, baby, and non-whites have been subjected to it for hundreds of years.
Sarcasm aside, you really don’t need to look much further than American literacy rates and money in politics to see how we got here. Bonus points if you look into FPTP and gerrymandering. Of course it’s much easier to be intellectually lazy and just say “this is all Putin’s fault. Just wait till the miderms”.
edit: geopolitics- yea, the US did this to itself (but a few people made a lot of money!!).
Capitalism
Bananas.
Honestly though, we did it to them first with the Soviet union. It may have toppled by itself but we were DESPERATELY funding and fomenting the same shit in the Soviet union for decades.
It worked.
Now it’s working here.
If you stand up against this, everyone on every other side tries to tear you down as a traitor to their own cause(s).
There is no winning in the middle anymore.
Imagine a scenario where an American government deployed armed soldiers into the center of a city to suppress a civilian revolt against the government.
A thing that has never happened before.
We’re rounding people up into interment camps. We’re way past tank man.
…ok, but you do realize what hspprned the 2 days prior to tank man, right?
Short of sending an M1 Abrams, they’ve thrown everything at us along with the kitchen sink.
We’re way past Tank Man. Also, they already sent in the tanks. The police have riot vehicles which are typically repurposed military tanks.
I don’t think you understand how bad it is in the US right now.
There has never been anything like this in this country since WWII and even then the Japanese labor camps were leaps better than alligator alcatraz.
Dude… Just no. They have not thrown the kitchen sink at us. Tear gas, unconstitutional arrests, even shooting people in isolated incidents is not even fucking close to how bad it could get. Short of sending an M1 Abrams? How about just unloading full auto rifles into a crowd? How about taking out targets with predator drones? FFS, they only just started deploying LRAD.
Things can, and very well may, get so, so, SO much worse even before tanks start rolling in the streets.
This isn’t Iran.
If they could have done all that by now they would have.
It would be fairly difficult to convince any military branch or even police force to open fire on its own protesting citizens. There is a reason why we have three branches of government and Congress and a Senate.
That’s not to say I’m not downplaying it. It’s still really bad out there.
Ice is the new age Gestapo.
Is the issue tanks ? Because the National Guard has killed people during Vietnam.
Right?
So many people are ignorant of history. I had someone in another thread screaming at me how this is all because of 2001. As if this stuff didn’t happen before then.
Everybody keeps expecting civil war when what we’re likely going to get is akin to “the troubles” of Northern Ireland. Prolonged, indefinite, bloody, insurgency. Bombings. Assassinations. More heavyhanded fascist paramilitary actions. Blood and chaos.
I agree. To have civil war you need multiple opposing armed forces of somewhat similar military strength. I don’t really see that happening because of the purges of military leadership but an insurgency is very possible.
Agreed, civil war will only happen if states bands together and starts fighting each other or the federal armed forces.
What we’ve seen so far has been almost too small to be called skirmishes. The intensity and size of the confrontations will likely increase, but it won’t be civil war.
Even if states band together who they gonna send? Police side with ice. Military sides with ice. Maybe you get the state national guard and some reservists but you’d need the guard to effectively mutiny and hope they follow the state instead of the fed. Realistically there’s no way organized fighting occurs. It’s just going to be police and military killing protesters with an occasional guerilla strike against them.
Yep, there is no organization capable of staging armed opposition to the government. A series of mass shootings and maybe some explosives is all we are going to get.
Given the number of incidents, I wouldn’t be shocked if historians decide later we are already living through it. Political assasinations in Minnesota, the attempted murder of pelosi’s husband, attempted trump shooter, charkie Kirk, the car bomb in Memphis that didn’t go off a few years ago. The United Healthcare CEO hit. Attempted kidnapping of Gretchen Whitmer.
There is plenty of violence to go around, but nothing that would rise to civil war.
I have imagined a scenario where a debt crisis degrades the capacity of the federal government and polarization leaves citizens and national guard more loyal to their state than the federal government, but we are a long way away from that.
i mean i only have a minor in history and have been saying this since steve scalise got shot but go off queen
At the end of the day, the die hard MAGA folks are a quarter of the country. The stuff they’re doing is wildly unpopular. At some point you have to fight for democracy. It is worth dying for. It is worth killing for. If we have to go through a troubles, so be it. Frankly, this probably isn’t going to end until we start seeing a whole lot of dead Evangelical Christians. The Christian nationalists are so used to being able to violently oppress and persecute everyone else. They don’t realize that their own lives and freedoms can be just as easily destroyed.
We already are in a civil war. One portion of the population has declared war on everyone else, hell bent on forcing their evil beliefs on everyone else. They do so in the confidence that they themselves will never face persecution, the loss of their rights, or a threat of violence. White Evangelical Christians are way too fucking comfortable.
Honestly, a troubles might be the best thing to knock some sense into these fuckers. Once the retaliatory killings start and their churches start getting torched, maybe it will finally get through their thick skulls that if you want to live in a democracy, you have to be willing to respect other people’s choices and let them live their own fucking lives.
The troubles ended because both sides felt threatened. No one felt safe. This encouraged everyone to come to the table. Right now one side feels invincible. They believe they can act with complete impunity against the rest of the population. So far, we’re all just holding our punches and trying not to escalate things, but these fuckers just keep pushing. Something will have to give.
Mutual bloody violence is a superior option to one-sided bloody violence, which is the situation we have now.
Incredibly fucked up to think there’s any upside to the troubles. Typical clueless yank energy.
As someone who lived through the Troubles, there were clearly upsides vs the country we had before.
The civil rights movement grew at a pace, the police service was completely revamped, and cross community relations improved dramatically. Most importantly, we largely stopped killing each other.
There was nothing good in the Troubles, but what came out of it was undoubtedly better than what had been there before.
We then ask was this due to the troubles, or was it a progression held back by the troubles.
Incredibly absurd perspective. It’s like a US southerner saying “There were no upsides to the civil war”, and then someone points at the federal abolishment of slavery, and you respond “oh yeah well the question now is did the civil war prevent the south from releasing their slaves from captivity?”
Like, I’m trying to use less hateful language, but I really don’t know what the fuck else to say to you other than point out the fact that you… well, like, some people just need someone to grab their heads and shake them really hard for a while. That’s you.
It was deeply rooted systemic shitting on that was going nowhere.
lol, next you’ll wonder if India is better off today for having overthrown the brits, too.
fucking yes, they were a bunch of sadistic fucks destroying everything they could in the name of profit.
the worst descendants of those sick fucks got shunned to america, for being too fucking crazy. they eventually schismed into what is now known as american protestants/various other brands of fundamentalist christians
protestants, all evangelical christians really, fundamentally do not respect consent. they have tied their own supposed eternal salvation onto the idea that they must “save” everyone else by spreading the Good Word by any means necessary…desperate people like that are not stable.
Would it have been better if there was violence, but only one side was violent?
Peace happens when both sides have a motive to achieve peace. You cannot have a peace treaty when only one side is willing to use force.
Three sides were using force. The republicans and unionists were mainly occupied with using violence against their own people suspected of “disloyalty”. As usual, regular people were the big losers.
Incredibly fucked up to think there’s no upside to fighting imperialism. Typical clueless Brit energy.
People forget that labor unions were a major factor in Tiananmen Square, US labor unions are not a credible threat to take over so don’t need to be put down as brutally.
They don’t bother with such things, America uses other means to squash such protests long before organization.
The means of organizing (the internet) is also the surveillance state. “grass roots” organizing has been dead for a very long time.
See the Patriot Act and history of CIA for further details. Recommend “Legacy of Ashes” by former CIA spook regarding history since 1950s or so. The people in charge then have been replaced by far worse, worse every term.
We only know a tiny bit, and what we do know is truly staggering and frankly when I’ve repeated actual facts online I’ve been told I’m a conspiracy theorist and booted, so I’ll skip that part. The truth sounds ridiculous.
This is all publicly available information, they don’t even bother hiding it any longer.
Fun (?) Fact: Trump is actually a fan of the massacre:
Then they were vicious, they were horrible, but they put it down with strength," he said.
“That shows you the power of strength. Our country is right now perceived as weak… as being spit on by the rest of the world.”
America bombed its own city 40’ish years ago, and the entire country just moved on without a care. And about 60 years before that, almost forty city blocks were razed to the ground because the inhabitants were black.
Yes, they 100% could risk it. America is an extremely propagandized country, with patriotism on the right reaching jingoistic levels.
What was the name of the event where the US bombed itself 40’ish years ago?
The MOVE bombing in Philadelphia. Also against black people, by the way.
Thank you! Im gonna research it now!
“Would republican civilians see empathy for the dead americans who were democrats?”
You mean a couple hundred paid agitators that were bussed up from asylums in south America?
Because that’s the story your average republican voters would believe. I know it’s a bit hyperbolic but some of the shit I’ve heard them say about Mrs Good, and in general about the current protests leads me to feel that there is no limit to the lies an average republican voter is willing to suck down.
All that said I do not believe the military would follow those orders, but I’m not sure they would interfere if the DOJ started killing protesters in front of them.
They 100% believe all the protesters are bussed in with pallets of bricks waiting for them. My co workers 100% believe this.
Its fucking sickening. And they all have kids, teaching them all this fox news hate and racism daily.
Sometimes I truly just want to leave here.
Well they certainly could go much much worse. The regime and their base are so far from anything being based in reality I don’t think anyone can truly be certain where this will go.
And you can just read about early ish days fascism in Germany and see how that meshes with this Regime and it’s historical context. In no particular order :
- Legislature ineffective and captured/ aligned
- Judiciary captured /placed
- Executive controlled (by proxy)
- Intimidation / Terror Squad
- Industry leaders largely aligned
- Populous tired and under economical hardship
- Extreme militarization
- Strong and largely aligned surveillance system
- Scapegoating / internal Enemy phantasms
- History of ineffective Governance / Corruption
- Generally unrepresentative and unstable Political System
- Moderate / Ineffective International push-back
- Unpredictable and Hostile foreign Policy
There are also lines that haven’t been crossed yet but there are not a lot before we get to the really Bad ones. So yes Large scale incarceration and killing against internal resistance, or simply against the ‘racialized other’ are maybe already the next steps if MAGA(and the reaction to it) keeps on this trek.
There could be some kind of thing to fan the flames and lead into the big Bads including probably some external War as well.
Or there could be circumstances that stop this insanity before we get there. But holy hell Americans are way to chill about all of this currently and MAGA certainly won’t stop until they are made to stumble and fall. Could be self inflicted of course but if the pressure is higher the chance of a fumble goes way up. So every resistance is worth the attempt at this point, and if the ship can still be pulled around there have to be real consequences otherwise it’s just gonna be this again on a few decade cycle. I mean this shit is already worrying over here and in Germany well we seem to rhyme politically with the US of ten or so years ago so …
For me this certainly is Fascist and we all should know how that goes if it truly gets to go.
We did already, when MacArthur razed the Bonus Army. FDR was elected the next election and bought some guillotine insurance in the form of taxes and social programs.
Do they send in the tanks?
You don’t use tanks in a city. You use machine guns.
Do they kill 1,000,000 people?
If they can, probably
Would republican civilians see empathy for the dead americans who were democrats?
Ask yourself how many people in the US showed empathy for the Gazans.
Or would it unite the nation like 9/11 did, except this time against the government?
Lol no, the US is a terminally propagandised country. Iraq has WMDs, Venezuela has drugs, free healthcare is bad somehow, Israel is not genociding the Palestinians, etc. etc.
Free healthcare is bad because of taxes.
Idk why Americans are culturally allergic to paying taxes.
I can only assume it stems from the revolutionary motto of “No taxation without representation”, which permanently affixed the idea in everyone’s head that taxes were inherently bad.
And nobody within a 30 mile radius of me understands how a fucking tax bracket works. /Hyperbole
america is a silly place
If you really wanted to use the military, you would just drop anti personnel cluster bombs. That would do any crowd in.
