The Truth is Out There…
I dunno quite what to make of this depiction of a possible future. I wish I could post this as a Sunday Silly, but this article has the appropriate bona-fides in place.
A retired Army colonel and a professor of history at the University of Kansas have co-written an article instructing the U.S. Army how to properly destroy “…extremist militia [insurgents] motivated by the goals of the ‘tea party’ movement.” (1)
Colonel Kevin Benson, who teaches modern warfare to soldiers at the University of Foreign Military and Cultural Studies at Ft. Leavenworth and Associate Professor Jennifer Weber have created a scenario in which activists under the influence of that apogee of American terrorism—Tea Party members—“…take over the government of Darlington, South Carolina, occupying City Hall, disbanding the city council, and placing the mayor under house arrest.” (1)
Lookit folks I am paranoid by any definition, but…. There is a thread here worthy of note.
Category: Geezer Alert!
The scenario sounds plausible—if one is a lefty who thinks that terrorists are to be understood but American citizens who cherish the Constitution and expect its provisions to be followed and enforced are the real enemy. Weber is a former journalist and “political aide” who is an associate professor at the University of Kansas and is or was a co-director of the school’s Seminar on Peace, War, and Global Change. Their collaborative piece of fiction includes this gem:
“If we face a period of persistent global conflict as outlined in successive National Security Strategy documents, then Army officers are professionally obligated to consider the conduct of operations on U.S. soil.”
I see. Prepare to shoot your fellow Americans.
Well Ponz…Even paranoid people have enemies…just sayin’.
…As I live about 30 miles from Darlington and have visited there many times, allow me to assure you that the last thing that’s ever likely to happen is that its citizens allow ANYBODY to take the place over.
Now – all kidding aside – if one reads TFA, the author picked Darlington because it’s close to two major interstates and close to several major military bases, all of which were necessary to make the author’s points about conducting these kinds of operations. But, as 2-17 Air Cav points out, it’s interesting that the only bad guys the author could find are derived from people who want to enforce the Constitution, not overthrow it.
Mike
Oh, deary me. Well, I followed the link to the Forbes article about the list of (several hundred) words used by DHS to monitor social networking sites for terrorist activities.
Since it’s rather large, I won’t drop it in here, but it definitely shows a far more paranoid mindset than anyone here can possibly imagine, including you, Zero…especially since the DHS is not very well liked and certainly considered 98% incompetent in its operation and management.
I have never understood how leftists can be considered liberal, because liberal means freedom, and everything about this smacks of exactly the opposite. But then, I’m not worried about losing my job to a popularity contest, either.
@4. “But then, I’m not worried about losing my job to a popularity contest, either.” I agree and would add that you are likely not attempting to ingratiate yourself to lefties in academia for job preservation or tenure.
I’m surprised that you guys can’t see this coming. Those law-breaking Tea Parties all across the country. With their all white, middle-aged faces just screaming to overthrow the black President and instill a more appropriate color in the White House. I mean, look at how many public areas and public buildings they have occupied to get their illegal message out…
Oh, wait. Wrong group. The only people I have seen “take over” a public delegation was the Labor Unions and Occupy Wall Street… both poster children of the Administration.
When the Unions had their rally at the Lincoln Memorial, it took three weeks to fully clean the area… including requiring a contractor to remove trash piled in alcoves within the WWII Memorial.
When Glenn Beck held his Restoring Honor event, attended by Tea Parties and others of their ilk, the grounds were left cleaner than it was before they arrived. There were also some people who had attempted to sabotage… wait, no, FIX the filtration system on the Reflecting Pool (but were told by union workers that they didn’t have the authority to do that).
In my opinion, it is more likely that a group would use the Occupy movement to begin an insurgency to take over public buildings (already happened), to cause civil unrest (already happened), to sway the political mindset to one that allows laws to be broken for the “greater good” (already happened), and to ultimately seek legitimacy to spread its message to those unable to defend themselves from its ideals (already happened with all the teachers taking their school children to the demonstrations).
How many shootings/murders/rapes/assaults were there at Tea Party demonstrations? Okay, now how many were there at Occupy and Union rallies? Oh, I forgot, the media said that those people were just using the rally for their personal agenda and as a cover…
I weep for this country if we have another four years with the same leadership and injustice for all.
Take a stiff drink, send anyone with sensitive ears well out of earshot, go to this website and start reading.
http://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/full-spectrum-operations-in-the-homeland-a-%E2%80%9Cvision%E2%80%9D-of-the-future
Well, get ready for four more years of hell and the shambles that lies beyond. This COL certainly holds us in utter contempt and is clearly in it for himself.
I think that some of this stuff is designed to evoke a response – one that can be collected, analyzed, and used.
A dangerous and changed world that we live in.
So we’re going to spend the entire evening being paranoid? Okay. When I was still in the workaday world, sometimes I’d come home in the evening, call a friend of mine, groan and moan about my job for about five minutes, listen to similar stories from my friend, and before we hung up, one or the other of us, and sometimes both of us, would say “I hope the CIA is listening to this because (so-and-so, pick someone in government) is an asshole!”, and then we’d hang up. No one ever came by my house and arrested me. D’you want to get really paranoid? Try reading “The Handmaid’s Tale”. And while you’re at it, watch the original version of “The Manchurian Candidate”. Those ought to scare the crap out of you. Change is meant to wake us up out of whatever complacency we descend into. We all value our freedom, but we take it for granted until or unless it’s threatened in some way. Find someone who was subjected to Joe McCarthy’s idiocy when he was the Chairman of the House Un-American Activities committee. He was on a serious roll there, until Edward R. Murrow exposed his ludicrous antics (and drunkenness) by appearing live on TV. I’m not saying there is nothing to it, or that we should be complacent about anything, but this is, after all, The Year of Big Changes of all kinds, and it’s no fun. Change is threatening. It’s shit and it hurts, because it rattles us awake. It shakes us out of our sleepy, cozy, comfy state, where everything is fine, it’s just fine, and we have to fix things. I’d like to wake up some morning and find that the morons who want to kill us off because we exist have been smacked flat by a very large and nasty rock from outer space. I’d like to find that the world I grew up in is back in place. But none of that is going to happen and we can’t afford to be complacent any more, because the minute we are, someone is going… Read more »
How the hell did they figure out my plan? OK … back to the drawing board!
Odd how “paranoid” is reflexively linked with Joseph McCarthy. He wasn’t paranoid – he was right, no matter how much agitprop communist-sympathizer Edward R. Murrow spun for useful idiots to consume. The same technique that is actively shaping the next generation’s view of the Constitution, individual freedoms, and responsible citizenship. “Tea Party”= Mean – Old – Country Club White Folks – Bitter – Incapable of Change – etc.
Paranoid? No.
Okay, so its alright when they are pretending “extremist tea party” scenarios.
However, when its “extremist muslim” then someone loses his job…
Ah, but you missed the point, Rik. Joe McCarthy never actually caught or exposed anyone who was actually a pinko Commie sympathizer. He used ridiculous methods to incriminate people who had done nothing wrong, and ruined their lives. He was on the same asinine power trip that is underway in the current administration, but they follow a different trail.
The list of key words being used by DHS to monitor social networking sites, and published by Forbes, is long and meaningless. It includes such innocuous words as ice, Cain and Abel, worm, snow, wildfire, southwest, failure, sick, initiative, exercise, breach, and crash. None of these have any significance to anyone except the dipsticks in DHS, and I can use every one of them in a few sentences that have no meaning, other than as part of a story, as in:
I was out walking my dogs, Cain and Abel, after a heavy snow that had left ice an inch thick on the roads. The trees were so burdened with ice that they were in danger of breaching my roof and crashing through it, but I needed the exercise and took the initiative to go outside on the southwest path that goes through the woods like a skinny worm. After the wildfire last summer, the trees had thinned out and looked sick, a failure of the weather.
See? Twist something, the way McCarthy did, and you make a mountain out of a mudpuddle.
Paranoia can exist on both sides of the fence. You don’t have to lean one way or the other to catch it.
Got your back, guys. There’s a whole mess of TEA Party supporters who are lawyers, and, unlike the current President and US Attorney General, some of us can even spell “Posse Comitatus.”
Don’t get me wrong. This President and this Attorney General are perfectly comfortable violating any US law. We have the dead mexicans and the dead US ambassador to prove it, not to mention all those bankrupt “green energy” companies.
That’s why we have elections every two years in this country. Our system is set up so that when one branch or the other of government is polluted by poor-quality or dishonest people in high public office, the others may become aware of the situation, and have the wherewithal resist bad policy.
And, assuming Barack Obama wins the election, he will be impeached. There are ongoing investigations of the “Fast & Furious,” and “Solyndra” and Libya scandals, any one of which is on its own sufficient to bring down a US President.
I fully expect that impeachment will not be necessary. I have been pleasantly surprised by the quality of the candidates selected the by the Republican Party, and so, apparently have a lot of other disaffected Democrats.
I’m freaking out man…
I wonder how many actual terrorist attacks have originated from the Tea Party? That is a rhetorical question. I think we all know the number is around 0…now occupy that is another question.
Now I am not too worried about something like this it is kinda silly. Honestly, planning for this is actually kinda more daunting that planning for dealing with Occupy schmucks. Hell they are a lot easier to deal with. I think it has been easily demonstrated how to flush them out.
Oh FFS…COL POG is a fuckstick of the highest degree. I just got home and am having a free tall ones so I’m not going to point out all the logical and tactical flaws in his BS. but trust me, they are BEYOND numerous.
What an asshat…
*few
I just want to point out that a list like DHS’s “Keywords” is an inspiration to commit extreme satire, especially since keyword is incorrect — it’s two words: key word.
Geez-o Pete, these people are so dumb, they make cotton balls look smart. “Ice” is a key word?
Kind of like how liberals say that everything is a “code word” for something racist! <—notice the exclamation mark.
Hey the libs already have the media and educational system under control, once they get the military and law enforcement they have it all.
@14. It is not out of realistic concern that what the Kernel (no mistake) and the Ass.Professor ()again, no mistake) wrote may actually come to pass. It is that their fiction and the repeated slandering of the Tea Party portrays its members as lawless lunatics. This pleases the lefties and creates the ridulous impression in others that the Tea Party is a threat. Indeed, it is a threat–but not to anyone who puts the rule of law before the wants of men.
“ridulous?” No ridiculous? Yes. More joe.
All this sounds like a page right out of Obummers manifesto, but in order for him to do such a thing he’d have to get the Armed Forces on his side.
That will never happen, he may have Dempsey kissing his ass , but the rank and file hate his guts.
Maybe his “civilian security force ” that he talked about in 08 would be his ready reaction force ? lol !
Another thing to consider, Zero, and the rest of you, before you get too paranoid, is that the this negative image of the Tea Party has been wholly created by the liberal lapdog media, a media which the American people are believing less with every passing month.
It used to be that folks thought you paranoid if you called the media biased; that is assuredly no longer the case. With the way the media so blatantly refused to investigate Obama in 2008 to the way they are so openly supporting him in this election, larger and larger numbers of the people are finally coming to realize the truth of what some of us have been saying for so long, the liberal media are our enemy.
No one understands better than the military how the media almost never gets the story straight and no one in the military should ever believe the media to be their friend. I would wager that almost the entire military officer corps views the media with great suspicion if not outright loathing.
Put it in the form of a syllogism:
The Tea Party has been cast as an evil force by the liberal media;
The military can neither trust nor believe the liberal media;
Therefore, the military does not believe the Tea Party is an evil force.