A great film and nice biscuits but…
Ginger Stampley spectacularly misunderstands not so much our views on the dynamics of insurrection, but the entire nature of the conversation that was taking place. Whilst I also think she gravely under estimates the polarisation going on in American society, I do not think that is really the issue. She says our views are based on dystopian fantasy. Well, yes… that is the whole point. Neither Walter nor I think the United States is ripe for armed groups to rise up against state tyranny… things would have to get far worse than they are for that to even be within the realm of possibilities as things stand.
I actually look to civil society in the United States, for all its many and variegated flaws, as the Anglosphere’s beacon of hope and regard it as almost certain to overcome the contrary tides of repressive statist stasis (well, almost certain). For there to be an armed insurgency in the US beyond that of fringe groups like the KKK, I would have to be quite wrong in my essentially optimistic long term view of US society. Yet if it turns out I am, and that Waco was just the first and most spectacular of many, then the dystopian fantasy would indeed be turning into dystopian fact, and the required ‘popular support’ for armed resistance Ginger talks about would indeed start to develop.
The reason I am so keen to prevent the attempted disarming of American society is that this is a wonderful litmus test of civil society’s health… and hence why I am increasingly pessimistic about already disarmed British civil society, which grows more like Stanley Kubrick’s vision of ‘A Clockwork Orange’ year by year as our common law rights are rachetted away by Brussels with the assistance of people like Tony Blair and Jack Straw and David Blunkett and Michael Hesaltine and Christopher Patten, all profoundly hostile to the essential underpinnings of non-state centred British civil society.
Thanks to Gary Larreategui for a small correction
