Kenosha, Wisconsin has been ravaged. Minneapolis has been burned. Black Lives Matter and Antifa continue to tear the heart out of once-great cities like Portland. A siege of the White House is being planned. Nationwide, violence has moved into suburban areas and residential neighborhoods. Groups of extremists are specifically targeting the residences of mayors, chiefs of police and other political enemies.
The establishment press continues to peddle the notion that what we are seeing across the nation is nothing more than “peaceful protest” designed to achieve change within the existing system. No doubt, even many people in the streets believe this. They think they are marching for more “humane” police forces, or reduced incarceration, or a few new social programs. They believe that, when the protests and riots are over, they will still live in the United States that they knew before, but it will just be a slightly better nation.
Of course, people harbored the same delusions in 1959 Cuba and 1917 Russia. Even the foot soldiers of those revolutions likely believed they would still have the countries they grew up in, just with a brighter, more democratic future. They discovered far too late that at the heart of the movement in which they were caught up were hard men with very different ideas about the future.
We cannot afford to repeat this naivety.
We are not experiencing a wave of social unrest generated by injustice or police brutality. We are watching an insurrection in progress, one which uses police violence as a pretext, but which has as its goal the destruction of the existing social, economic and political order in the United States.