Dispatch 003: Burn Notice: Better Red is Dead
Newton's Third Law is a cold motherfucker and governments seem to be absolutely terrible at extrapolating second and third order effects. This augments a series examining possible responses.
Publisher’s Note: In other news, I am honored to have been appointed the Smedley D. Butler Fellow at the Libertarian Institute.
Welcome to the third installment of the CG Dispatch, an essay series.
I am going to use this opportunity to explore some of the more contemporary topics and on occassion use fictional narratives to drive the speculation. Low cost resistance to tyranny is emblamatic throughout history.
When it comes to the current squabble over statuary and memorials, the answer is so simple. Remove all of them from the public spaces and place them in private hands on private lands where responses to looter and vandalism are less problematic.
***
Some housekeeping:
I have taken a break from Gab and Twitter; I returned to Twitter after years away to help promote the podcast and I have had to tame the vampire by severely restricting the time I spend on it. I will surface to periscope depth on both social media accounts on Sunday mornings but not between to better focus on projects I am tackling. Please use the messaging function on those if you wish to chat.
And I am leveraging the Notes feature here at Substack to post my brain-zephyrs occasionally.
I wanted to personally thank my ten paid subscribers: Pete, Will, John, John H, GS65, GW, R5, KK, V1Z, DC, PO and OLM.
I wanted to thank my personal correspondents who reach out to me at Protonmail.
I encourage everyone to use the comments function here at substack to tease out the conversation.
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“In every war, no matter how great a government’s power, its rule is never absolute. In every war, no matter how allegedly righteous the cause, the effort is never total. No campaign has ever or will ever be fought with the leadership united in favor of it and with the rank and file unitedly behind them.
Always there is a disgruntled minority that opposes a war for a multitude of reasons such as reluctance to make necessary sacrifices, fear of personal loss or suffering, philosophical and ethical objection to warfare as a method of settling disputes, lack of confidence in the ability of the leadership, resentment at being called upon to play a subordinate role, pessimistic belief that victory is far from certain and defeat very possible, egoistic satisfaction of refusing to run with the herd, psychological opposition to being yelled at on any and every petty pretext, a thousand and one other reasons.
No political or military dictatorship ever has been one hundred percent successful in identifying and suppressing the malcontents who, typically, conceal themselves behind a veil of silence and bide their time.”
Eric Frank Russell, “The Wasp”
Sometime in the near future…
The Antifa bus convoy was a motley sight indeed. Ever since the entire movement had evolved from the now relapsed Occupy movement, the Soviet Bolshevik flavor of the adherents had become more apparent in both their garb and street theater. They’d even co-opted the militia element with armed rebels posting on the web and creating video docs of training with firearms in remote locations. The red bandanas and hammer and sickle were becoming far more common than before mixed in with the masked heroes parading about.
The Red militias appeared to be just as corpulent and motley as the conservative variant that appeared in the 1980s and 1990s. The Maoist flavor of the Long March was a constant refrain in their communications and they had conquered most of the Federal leviathan and its constituent parts tentacled throughout the country.
The three buses and various vehicles came to a stop outside the small remote town of Courtville in southern Utah. A tiny memorial to Chief Walkara who was a licensed slave trader in the territory, was located near the town square. Wakara and his band had a profitable slave trade with Mexican traders before the arrival of the Mormons. They traded captives, mostly women and children from the weaker nomadic Paiute and Goshute tribes, with the Mexicans for goods. The Antifa were expanding their guerrilla theater to the rural enclaves now emboldened by the spectacular success and cover provided by the media in big cities across the country. The late notice of assailing this statue may have been the intersectional squabbling of competing victim groups, in this case, aboriginals and slave trades.
Charlie glassed the colorful convoy and whispered into the mike: “On their way.”
He got a squelch in reply.
The staties had set up a cordon but were half-hearted at best. The Mormon community was intensely gun-shy about engaging the Antifa crowds in Utah. Salt Lake City had seen some action but the local police tended to turn the other cheek and let the Antifa agitators have their way. The police briefly stopped the convoy but apparently the “permits” onboard were good to go.
The buses continued into the tiny town and rallied ‘round the square where the statue to the aboriginal chief was standing.
Charlie’s little troop didn’t give a rat’s ass about the government statue to the old Indian. The police in SLC had manhandled one of their own after confronting protesters who had torched a storefront that belonged to Joshua. They’d been tracking movements and activities ever since through the Mormon jungle telegraph system in Utah and beyond. Not hard when Facebook attracted the kind of self-revelation so common to the Bolshies who seemed to revel in the opportunity to relive the exploits of their red diaper doper baby parents from the 1960s. California contacts had confirmed that ten of the malefactors were onboard the convoy heading in.
The revelations of Antifa money laundering and proceeds from three letter agencies had rocked the DC corridor but the compliant media had buried it within a week and the news cycle drifted past the episode connecting the Bolsheviks with official Washington.
The usual suspects from both parties condemned such revelations as mere conspiracy theories like the death of Seth Rich and the corpse-piles connected to the Clinton crime families.
No, this was personal and the low-level guerrilla conflict that Antifa had touched off across the country was lighting virtual signal fires across the country.
Three Antifa had been severely injured in northern Mississippi when they had assaulted a Confederate statue there.
The legal pockets to bail out the Bolshies and defend them in court turned out to be deeper and more influential than anyone had suspected.
“Send the message.”
On the town square, Tim, a young man with long hair in a Grateful Dead T-shirt wandered over to the first bus disgorging the raucous crowd of Antifa youth. He started chatting with a couple, they laughed together and then shook hands and parted ways.
Tim waved up to Charlie, lowered his arm and used a hand signal to mean “enemy” by grabbing his right wrist.
Charlie turned to his companion and smiled. “Some things are never easy, are they?”
They watched as the Anitifa folks started putting masks and bandanas on and grabbing weapons from under the bus. The police were sparse but present. Time after time, Charlie had heard reports of the thin black and blue line providing both overt and covert support to Antifa.
The merry band of protesters was interspersed with folks carrying mostly long-arms with shotguns and Kalash-pattern rifles most prominent. Some of the air-soft copies even had the tell-tale orange tips on the end of the barrel. It was assumed that some folks would be carrying pistols, most likely the undercover Federal agents egging the crowd on and the Antifa commander network that assigned cell leaders. The tell-tale expensive ear-miles were the indicator. The crowd unfurled black banners and red communist flags, rallied and started marching toward the statuary in the main square.
“Got one…”
Charlie: “What do you have?”
“Statie; portly balding guy three rows deep with the 5.11 tactical pants and the CCCP flag. Both his pants and flag are brand new right out of the bag. He just spoke into a Motorola. FM mode at 150.50500, Utah staties. Must be an overtime hire to monitor and infiltrate.”
“Rog, paint him a no-go to engage unless he fires first. He’s probably here to guide his colleagues in mischief.”
******
The band of miscreants meandered en masse to the statue in the middle of the park. So far, everything was peaceful and the few folks Charlie had sent over to wander with the mob were reporting no violence.
“Commies have been waging war on free range humans since they could hit dirt with sticks.”
“Or bury the bodies in the dirt. Yeah, but they’ve never been this bold with the youth contingents.”
******
The usual street fights broke out in the square between the usual suspects as countless news stories had bored viewers with for the past year. The very thin line of cops in riot gear ebbed and flowed with the contestants as they batted at each other.
The shot rang out and the plump Trump supporter fell in a heap. The crowd surged forward and screams filled the air as the crowds melted into a tumbling melee as cops waded in with batons and more shots were heard. As if scattered by a klaxon alarm, the respective combatants separated and rotated on an axis like a flight of birds and went their own ways. The Antifa crowd headed to the buses, none were even from the town they’d road-tripped to.
*******
The three buses snaked slowly out of town and then accelerated on the main arterial to the highway.
“Which bus is the statie in?”
“Last one, red bus with the Che head on the side.”
“Get the bird up…”
A quad-copter gently rose from its roost in a field near the roadway. The sun shimmered off the rotors making it sparkle. It had a small cargo slung underneath. After reaching one hundred feet, it accelerated toward the small bus parade heading out of town. It swung forward of the leading bus and met it head-on and as it swooped in front of the bus, off-loaded seven ounces of bright red paint on the windshield and sheared off to the wood-line and disappeared.
The bus had been making about 60mph when it was struck by the paint, the bus started to sway steadily left and right and then veered left violently, careening over the shoulder and tumbled down a small embankment.
Two more quad-copters flitted out of the wood-line and delivered their tiny but potent payloads. They had gasoline mixed with aluminum carboxylates in small containers slung below. The lads had “prepped” the buses earlier with pinhole punctures in the fuel tanks to the buses with framing nailers since the buses had parked near a construction site.
The pilots guided the birds to the fuel tank now exposed by the bus laying on its side. Fuel was gently cycling out of the holes puncturing the tank earlier. The accelerant hit the side of the bus and cascaded to join the diesel pouring out on to the field. A third bird popped a roman candle and lit a conflagration that started to consume the entire bus as it hovered over.
All the birds lit off and flew back in the direction they had come from. The engagement had taken two minutes to complete.
The bus ferociously burned. It was blackened and consumed in less than four minutes.
“Senseless violence.”
“Indeed”.
None of the perpetrators had been closer than one mile to the scene of the incident. Nor were there any forensic leads on either the paint or the accelerants, they were simply common products that weren’t tracked like so many household items in America.
“Under such conditions, to try to suppress popular resistance movements by force is futile. If inadequate force is applied, the resistance grows. If the overwhelming force necessary to accomplish the task is applied, its object is destroyed. It is a case of shooting the horse because he refuses to pull the cart.”
– Robert Taber, “War of the Flea”
Nice. I’m in Southern Utah right now; reading about the Mormon Militia and the Utah War has been pretty cool.
Bill, Honestly you really need to write a novel. It would be a real page turner.