The story of the Spanish Civil War is a lesson in how two radical minorities dragged a whole country into a devastating civil war because the center was too passive and inept. Two small groups (one larger but still a clear minority) plunged everybody into a tragic conflict of three years in length that destroyed the country. The possibility of an imperfect yet real democracy was sacrificed to the belief that some people are on “the right side of history” and shouldn’t be losing elections just because their ideas are too radical for most of the population.
One response to “Civil War Lessons”
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“because the center was too passive and inept”: After two years of watching far too many people around me sleep through a successful (though ‘unconventional’) war of China against the United States, I’m beginning to think that the center, by definition, is always going to be passive. Whether or not it is inept depends on whether the elites of its society are relatively honest, or fundamentally corrupt. With reasonably honest elites, the get-along-to-go-along passivity of the center does no harm, and may even be a virtue that helps society function.
Unfortunately, in 2021, the United States’ elites are corrupt and insane. There are honorable individual members of the elites, but they are recognized dissidents, and great efforts are being made to marginalize them no matter how substantive their previous achievements or previous level of earned respect. Peter McCullough has an h-index of 120, but he’s now a “rogue doctor” because he’s bothered to point out that early drug treatment of Covid-19 is far better for most people than vaccination. Jay Bhattacharya has an h-index of “only” 57, but he dared to sign a petition asking the U.S. and U.K. governments to adopt a more targeted and sane approach to controlling Covid-19 (the Great Barrington Declaration), so he was targeted by a propaganda campaign by his own country’s government. Steve Kirsch donated $20M to the Democratic Party, was given an award for public service by then-Senator Hillary Clinton (!), and funded successful development of a cheap repurposed drug for Covid-19 treatment (fluvoxamine) which passed Phase III trials; but he’s pointed out the adverse side effects of Covid-19 vaccines, so now he’s a crazy conspiracy theorist and villain. Objective achievement and merit, or having the facts on one’s side, are no longer relevant to our elites. Only stupid conformity matters. So our passive ‘center’ will, for the foreseeable immediate future, moo and obey the corrupt elites.
We’re either going to collapse into bovine subservience or have regime change.
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
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