Time was, wars were declared in formal notes, delivered by one nation’s ambassador to the potentate of another nation. Military operations waited until that note had been received and acknowledged. When hostilities did begin, they were often battles scheduled to begin at a particular time and in a particular place, with prior warnings delivered to any noncombatants in the area. Battles would often have mercy breaks, during which each side would collect its dead and wounded and care for them.
Time was.
I shan’t trouble my Gentle Readers with the tale of degradation that’s brought us to where we are. You may already know it, or some of it. Suffice it to say that nations’ warlike practices are no longer so civilized. The Geneva Conventions, noble attempts to return warfare to some degree of decency, are mostly honored in the breach, if at all.
Today, wars begin with a military strike. “Oh, you didn’t know we were at war with you? Well, you know it now.” The attitude needs no analysis from me.
That new “standard” applies to civil wars as well.
Just in case you’ve been completely disconnected from national events for the past day or so, yesterday a sniper ended the life of Turning Point co-founder and popular conservative activist Charlie Kirk. A high-powered rifle bullet found his jugular from an estimated two hundred yards away. For a moment, it was a tragic, stunning shock, nothing more. Then the reactions and commentary from the Left began to accumulate: celebrations compounded with statements that “he deserved it.”
It was barely possible to rationalize away Charlie’s murder as the deed of a madman, a “lone wolf,” before those reactions and comments began to appear. After that, it was no longer possible to interpret the assassination as anything but a declaration of war. Real war, the kind fought with bullets and bombs.
The Right has been muttering darkly about the possibility of a modern civil war for some time. We’ve never wanted one. We hoped we could restore the Constitutional order of the United States by argument, education, and electoral action. We failed to reckon with the emotional dynamics in this deeply divided country. We also failed to understand the two attempts on Donald Trump’s life as we should.
Clarity has come.
I could go into depths of detail that would sicken even me, but there’s no need. The matter is simple. The Left has lost at the ballot box. It has lost the national argument. It has lost the emotional allegiances of decent Americans. Its back is to the proverbial wall. Its remaining choices are surrender and violence – and the Left never surrenders.
War is upon us.
We don’t get to say “No, we don’t want this,” and end it that way. We don’t get to stand back and hope it will happen somewhere else, to someone else. We don’t get to declare a personal armistice and live our lives quietly while others argue over the terms of the peace treaty. We don’t even get to buy peace by surrendering. We’re in Israel’s position now: every one of us in the Right is on the front lines.
Charlie Kirk was targeted because of his effectiveness, but even more because of his openness. He wasn’t a supreme commander, any more than was Archduke Franz Ferdinand. He was a high-value target, but nevertheless a target of opportunity.
Other conservative speakers and public figures are on notice. But then, so are we all.
I wish I could end this on a positive note, but there aren’t any positives to the thing. The Left has declared war on the Right. The violence will continue. It will probably escalate. More people will be maimed and killed.
There’s no predicting the outcome. The Right has been too determinedly civil. We’ve never accepted the absoluteness of the contest. We’ve proceeded as if the contest could and would be settled by argument alone. But our adversaries will not accept defeat by that standard. They won’t stop short of anything but total power over all of us: the power of life and death and everything in between. Why should they not go to guns when the national discourse and the electoral contests turn against them?
It’s August 1914 in America. The next few days will reveal much. For now, pray for our country. And clean and oil all your guns, of course.
- Entries
There’s been whispers of civil war against the left since President Trump’s attempted assassination, so far we Christian conservatives have resisted, but we can only be pushed so far and forgiving for so long. First Andrew Breitbart, President Trump and now Charlie Kirk.
All I can say is lock and load and wait for the signal.
“We’re in Israel’s position now: every one of us in the Right is on the front lines.”
Said a mouthful there, Fran.
Civil war should not be lightly – or emotionally – entered into. Revenge, if any is to be had at all, must be served cold, with a thorough dependence on reason – and not being driven by emotions. War is a last resort, and there is no guarantee of a good result – or of a short war, in fact the reverse is more likely, as Putin has found out in Ukraine, his “ten-day war” continues on, with no end in sight, after over three and a half years. And the war will bankrupt both Russia and Ukraine, and leave both the worse for the experience. Negotiating mineral leases by Putin would have been far less costly – but that war is not an ideological conflict, it is being fought for purely commercial reasons – control of valuable resources. The current conflict here is driven by ideology – and could be solved easily by going back to the original conception of the Union as a confederation of states, as set out in the Tenth Amendment. Instead, the centralized and consolidated government in Washington is attempting to enforce “one size fits all” policy, and that has never worked, no matter which side currently holds power. We are – and have been, since the outset – two separate countries, one of largely rural states, and the other made up of largely urban states, and between the two there is no common understanding of how policy should be – and this has set up a continuing conflict. The Congress is split in half and has been so for decades, and so are the states and the electorate. The only way forward as a union is to be a confederation of states as set out in the Articles of Confederation of 1777, with the federal government reverting to this former Constitutional role as mediator between states and provider of common defense, and little else, a limited government with strictly enumerated powers. And it should be borne in mind that civil war here in the US would benefit the new Communist Axis of China, Russia, and North Korea, opening the door for them to seize more control over more territory in their unchanging quest for world domination. And a possible result might be an invasion of the US itself, it would be easy enough with the millions of Chinese nationals imported during the Biden Administration, the 300,000 Chinese “students”/PLA cadre who are currently in place, and importation of military munitions and materiel via container ships loading containers onto railroad cars at our PRC-controlled ports on the West Coast. If that were done, the war could be a fait accompli and over within days. So there’s that to consider as well.
Breitbart had the proper response