“Atlanta is burning!”
As a History Teacher, when I hear these words I think of the destruction wrought by General William Tecumseh Sherman on his famous march to the sea in 1864. Practicing Total War, Sherman’s policy was to inflict harm sufficient to shatter the Confederate’s will to keep fighting.
Now, thanks to today’s preeminent domestic terrorists, these three words have new meaning. The over privileged trust fund babies who lead the self-described “anti-fascists” (Antifa) have now added Atlanta, Georgia to their tally of civic victims.
Because police responded with deadly force after coming under gunfire from Antifa thugs who were trying to blockade a new training facility, these wannabee revolutionaries called for “nights of rage”. Rent-a-mobs appeared with their usual accoutrements of stones, bricks, and Molotov Cocktails.
These oh-so-precious provocateurs then attacked businesses, cars, and human beings while wearing their face masked black-on-black riot-party costumes. Police were their chief targets.
Consider why an attack on an officer of the law is worse than other type of assault. An attack on a peace officer is not an act against an individual. It is an assault on his role as a protector of the rule of law and guardian to us all. It is an assault on all of us, because it is an attack on our very society, itself.
Without law, there can be no civil society. Without those who bravely join the thin blue line that separates each one of us from anarchy, there can be no law.
Antifa’s violence is as purposeful as any perpetrated by paramilitary Marxist revolutionaries. Every step they take has the intention of bringing closer their millenarian day of reckoning.
To utopian materialists like Antifa, the equivalent to the coming of the Jewish Messiah, the second coming of Christ, or the revelation of the Islamic Mahdi is “the Revolution”. This is their Day of Judgment, which will burn away the thoroughgoing corruption of the present world and usher in their thousand years of peace, their utopia.
Such an earthly paradise is worth any price for the committed believer. No morality, compassion, empathy, or restraint can be permitted to trammel their ardor as agents of revolutionary change. Every foul act imaginable is permissible in service to the ideals of their revolution.
The fundamental ideal cherished by the intellectual Anarchists who make up the core of Antifa is that people, individually and collectively, would be better off without both society and law. This notion is utterly without merit.
Never in human history has anarchic chaos produced anything other than a life of abject poverty and utter insecurity, punctuated by a violent and premature death. Their lawless paradise would be a living hell.
There is an irony in Leftists advocating a dilution of the rule of law. The mainstream of socialism-by-any-other-name is profoundly Legalist. Legalism is a major intellectual movement in the history of all civilizations, especially China and the West.
Legalists believe that a society can legislate a revolution in human nature. By enforcing laws against vice, we can be made virtuous. By prosecuting expressions of our dark side, we can surgically separate people from their own negative tendencies.
This is why Totalitarians make so many laws; to trim our subconscious as if it were a topiary or a bonsai tree. Legalists acknowledge the existence of no problems beyond their capacity to lawfully correct.
In psychology, this is called Operant Conditioning; the application of reward and punishment to manipulate behavior. Dog training is a benign form of this. Less benign are the employment of Operant Conditioning by the Nazis in their Concentration Camps and by the Communists in the USSR’s Gulag Archipelago, Cambodia’s Killing Fields, and today’s Uighur Re-Education Camps in Xinjiang, China.
Because of the Left’s Legalistic tendencies, the Anarchists’ genuine dedication to building a lawless utopia is doubtful. Their eradication of the rule of law cannot possibly prevent the tyranny of the majority from oppressing any and all dissent.
The only predictable effect of the rule of law’s collapse would be the erasure of our Constitutionally protected rights as citizens. No longer would the mob be restrained from lynching anyone who questioned their orthodoxy. No longer would those who wield power through mob rule have to hold their rapacious hunger to control the rest of us in check.
Under both Anarchy and Totalitarianism, the individual’s fate is annihilation. Too little law and too much law are both lethal to the personal aspirations of any human being who is not a member of the governing elite. We must reject the twin heresies of Anarchism and Legalism as twin aspects of the same tyranny.
We each must personally oppose the domestic terrorism of Antifa and its funders. Our Constitutional laws deserve our loyalty. Our Law Enforcement Officers deserve our admiration. Our communities deserve our active involvement to keep them free from fear; just as those who legally armed themselves and took to the streets did to protect Coeur d’Alene the last time we were threatened by Antifa violence.
We should be inspired by what Alexis de Tocqueville said about “Democracy in America”. What amazed him most is that Americans who were hundreds of miles from the nearest courthouse or law officer chose to behave lawfully the vast majority of the time.
Our ancestors chose to be laws unto themselves; to willingly obey the well-known laws of God and man without the need for punishment or reward. Only people who choose to master themselves are worthy of freedom from the control of others.
