Summary: As the middle class slowly erodes away, we support our elites by becoming even weaker. Race riots help our rulers in so many ways. Stoking fears in the lower middle class (making them more loyal), exacerbating ancient hatreds (fragmented), and arousing dreams of the great day when they set the nation on fire — usually starting with their own neighborhoods (fantasy rather than organizing). What signal might mark the beginning of a serious threat to our elites’ power? Such as the use of 4th Generation Warfare?
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As inequality grows and social mobility falls, the people on the lower rungs of the social ladder lose hope. Our elites have spend decades preparing for this, bulking up the police and reducing the legal shackles limiting their actions.
A powerful description of the result: “America Is Not For Black People“, Greg Howard, The Concourse, 13 August 2014 — Excerpt:
Michael Brown is not special. In all its specificity, the 18-year old’s death remains just the most recent example of police officers killing unarmed black men.
Part of the reason we’re seeing so many black men killed is that police officers are now best understood less as members of communities, dedicated to keeping peace within them, than as domestic soldiers. The drug war has long functioned as a full-employment act for arms dealers looking to sell every town and village in the country on the need for military-grade hardware, and 9/11 made things vastly worse, with local police departments throughout America grabbing for cash to better defend against any and all terrorist threats. War had reached our shores, we were told, and police officers needed weaponry to fight it.
Officers have tanks now. They have drones. They have automatic rifles, and planes, and helicopters, and they go through military-style boot camp training. It’s a constant complaint from what remains of this country’s civil liberties caucus. Just this last June, the ACLU issued a report on how police departments now possess arsenals in need of a use. Few paid attention, as usually happens.
The worst part of outfitting our police officers as soldiers has been psychological. Give a man access to drones, tanks, and body armor, and he’ll reasonably think that his job isn’t simply to maintain peace, but to eradicate danger. Instead of protecting and serving, police are searching and destroying.
If officers are soldiers, it follows that the neighborhoods they patrol are battlefields. And if they’re working battlefields, it follows that the population is the enemy. And because of correlations, rooted in historical injustice, between crime and income and income and race, the enemy population will consist largely of people of color, and especially of black men. Throughout the country, police officers are capturing, imprisoning, and killing black males at a ridiculous clip, waging a very literal war on people like Michael Brown.
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… To ascribe this entirely to contempt for black men is to miss an essential variable, though — a very real, American fear of them. They — we — are inexplicably seen as a millions-strong army of potential killers, capable and cold enough that any single one could be a threat to a trained police officer in a bulletproof vest. There are reasons why white gun’s rights activists can walk into a Chipotle restaurant with assault rifles and be seen as gauche nuisances while unarmed black men are killed for reaching for their wallets or cell phones, or carrying children’s toys.
The plight of the underclass, disproportionately Black and Hispanic, will grow worse as the erosion of the middle class continues, as it puts even greater pressure on those less well off. So what happens next? More riots, probably. More and stronger response by the security services (formerly known as “law enforcement”), certainly. Peasants protests, proles venting pressure, keeping the inner party members scared and loyal to the regime.
The wild cards are leadership — and 4GW
The wild card is, always, leadership. The tools of 4GW lie in the open, ready for any group desperate, motivated, and disciplined enough to wield them with their terrible political force. How will we know when this happens? We will see more stories like this:
Sunday was Brown’s vigil, and several hundred people congregated in Ferguson. They began to march toward the Ferguson police station in protest. Police met them in full riot gear, with rifles, shields, helmets, dogs, and gas masks. Protesters yelled, “No justice, no peace!” They called the police murderers. They raised their hands in mock surrender, saying, “Don’t shoot, I’m unarmed.”
But they will not contain this:
And then the protest turned violent, as some citizens began to break into, loot, and set fire to storefronts in their own community.
The absence of this element will make the wise among our elites tremble. All large-scale violence is political in nature, but it’s seldom effectively political. 4GW is the difference between Yasser Arafat and Gandhi, between the Palestinians’ struggle against Israel and the Vietnamese victory against the French and Americans. For insurgents 4GW is the difference between victory and defeat.
There are as yet no signs 4GW has come to America. But the preconditions are there. The books are available for anyone to read. Our foes in other lands have demonstrated its effectiveness. The underclasses lack only competent leaders.
Note: about labels
As Chet Richards and others have said, 4th Generation Warfare is a misleading label, somewhat like the Holy Roman Empire (neither Holy, Roman, nor an Empire). But it’s the most established term for the dominate form of violent conflict in our age, and is so used here.
For More Information
(a) Posts about the events in Ferguson, MO:
- Our elites smile at events in Ferguson, MO. They’ll cry if it pushes Blacks to try 4GW., 14 August 2014
- Will the Ferguson protest force development of African-American leaders?, 15 August 2014
- Why America has militarized its police and crushes protests, 16 August 2014
- The protesters at Ferguson might have won, but choose to lose, 18 August 2014
- Events from Ferguson explain why we are weak, 19 August 2014
(b) Posts about 4GW:
- A solution to 4GW — the introduction
- Why We Lose at 4GW — The 2 kinds of insurgencies
- About Fourth Generation Infections – Chet Richards explains the nature of outlaw organizations in the 21st century
- The War Nerd shows how simple 4GW theory can be
- 28 Articles: a guide to a successful insurgency against America
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