The Context of Violence

Yeah, yeah, when you have to resort to nuance you've already lost, but still, the point has to be made.

The Rude Pundit applies context:

'Cause, see, whenever anyone tries to make some kind of moral equivalence between the actions of leftist protesters in the 1960s and 1970s and those of the teabaggers (or, indeed, the militia movement), they are forgetting context. And context, as we know, will take your sad little rhetorical point and spank its ass until it begs context to stop.

Listen, children: In that time way back when, people were protesting things like the Vietnam War, which was killing hundreds of Americans a month, the invasion of Cambodia, and the ongoing FBI crackdown against radical groups in America, especially civil rights organizations like the Black Panthers. The violence, including the firebombing of buildings, was being carried out by those most directly affected by the actions of the government. If you were a college student-aged male (or older), then the threat of the draft hung over you. To oversimplify here: you could be forced to go and fight a war you knew was useless. And if you refused, you faced arrest or self-imposed exile. You could attempt "conscientious objector" status, but that was hard to come by.

Now, you got that? The federal government could seize you and make you kill people under a pretense of "defense" in a conflict that had long ago been revealed to be based on lies and with no effect on the safety of America. How do you think citizens should react to that? How would people react today if Obama had a draft? Like good patriots marching off to battle? And while we say that violence is never justified, well, shit, at least in this case it was in reaction to actual violent actions by the government. It was, to say the least, about life and death.

Most of the leftist groups that engaged in violence targeted property, not people. Indeed, the accidental deaths of people caused violence as a tactic to be discredited. In the end, after the Vietnam War, it was only splinter groups of assholes, like the Symbionese Liberation Army, who still adhered to any notion that violence was necessary or effective.

What exactly are today's violent protesters angry about? A mandate that all people in this country legally must buy health insurance? That those who can't afford it will get subsidies from the government? Really? Tell you what: in a few years, if anyone dies because of this bill, you can throw some bricks. Otherwise, shut the fuck up and wheel yourselves back home. Stop being easily manipulated tools. And talk to someone who was at Kent State before you jump on the fascism express.

More extreme, and therefore more worrisome, are the genuinely scary nutzoids, the God and guns set, like the Hutaree militia in Michigan, who were getting themselves good and ready for Armageddon, or the idiots who make Wal-Mart richer by stocking up on rifles before Obama takes them away. No action that the Weather Underground ever undertook approaches the amount of evil in a single hair on Timothy McVeigh's rotting head. Like millennialists and survivalists, they are fighting phantoms, finding evidence like ghost hunters who see a reflected light as a spirit's orb or some such shit. All lies and delusions.

You see, if you're gonna be violent, if you're gonna commit crimes as protests, at least do it because something real is occurring. Like, you know, vast numbers of young Americans coming home in body bags. Not because some redneck jerk-off or some power-hungry bitch with Bump Ups in her hair told you they can predict the future.

However, once again, the trap of moral equivalency has been set. Using leftist violence that occurred 40 years ago to excuse violence today is about as bullshit an excuse as saying that it's not so bad that you killed that hobo because Jeffrey Dahmer used to fuck the corpses of his victims.