"A show trial is a public trial in which the judicial authorities have already determined the guilt, and/or innocence, of the defendant. The actual trial has as its only goal the presentation of both the accusation and the verdict to the public so they will serve as both an impressive example and a warning to other would-be dissidents or transgressors.[2] Show trials tend to be retributive rather than corrective and they are also conducted for propagandistic purposes.[3] The term was first recorded in 1928." wiki on show trial
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"National Guard troops deployed in Washington, D.C. for the Biden inaugural in the wake of the storming of the Capitol last week have been authorized to use lethal force, according to a report by U.S. News that cited a Defense Department official. The D.C. National Guard had issued a statement Wednesday that troops under its command had been authorized to carry weapons." gateway pundit
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"Is there something in the character of politics that makes it illogical, a “blood sport”? Is that why it is called an “arena”? Perhaps a brief look at early American history might give a clue.
From the beginning, Americans were fiercely independent, passionate, but deeply divided. Only about one-third supported the revolution; the majority were either neutral or remained loyal to the British (“Tories”). A fierce internal terrorist campaign raged throughout the war between these two groups of Americans. So intense was the divide that a British Chaplin was moved to write that,
'These Americans, so soft, pacific and benevolent by nature, are here transformed into monsters, implacably bloody and ravenous; party rage has kindled the spirit of hatred between them, they attack and rob each other by turns, destroy dwelling houses, or establish themselves therein by driving out those who had before dispossessed others.' [Note the word “rage.”] "political hysteria"
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It appears to me that Schumer has in mind to try former President Trump in the senate with John Roberts presiding. IMO this is unconstitutional. As Alan Dershowitz said on the TeeVee today, the prospect of such a procedure should be horrifying to all. Why? If the congress can try a private citizen and bar him/her from holding federal office, then whichever party controls the congress can simply bar significant opposition figures from office by re-defining the meaning of statutes, imputing motive where there is none and through guilt by association. This all begins to smell like Stalin's show trials in the 30s in which he killed off his Old Bolshevik comrades and the leadership of the Red Army. Trump will always remain vulnerable to the civil courts. The Dems fear that Florida or federal courts in Florida will not extradite him? They should live with that in the interest of maintaining the Union.
We now have most of downtown Washington, DC transformed into a Green Zone on the Baghdad model. 25,000 federalized National Guard troops plus various kinds of cops occupy that zone. 25,000? How about 1,000? How about 2.000? What do they expect, an attack on the Biden inauguration platform from the other end of the Mall? The bridges from Virginia are closed by order of his majesty Ralph Northam. We live here under Ralph's imperial decrees in a vast outdoor prison. The ability of the imperial authorities to wall us up, each in our own crummy little domain bodes ill for the future.
Not for the first time am I disgusted by the susceptibility of those I thought my countrymen to waves of hysteria. German and then Communist spying in WW1, Prohibition, internment of Japanese descended citizens of the US in WW2, McCarthyism, the 2K fantasy in which people waited for the end of civilized life, 9/11, after which the whole country went into a profound funk and stumbled about terrified of the NEXT ATTACK. And now, we have the Left's desire to destroy opposition, the opposition of 75 million citizens and to do it through mass mobilization of political hysteria.
This will never be the same country again. We have lost the talent needed to maintain a federal republic. pl
https://www.iwp.edu/articles/2019/07/29/political-hysteria-american-as-cherry-pie/
SATs are Out. Social Credit scores are In.
Troops at Inauguration Pre-Screened for Extremism, Says DC Guard Commander
“We will use the minimum force required to protect ourselves,” said Maj. Gen. William Walker, in an exclusive interview.
BY KATIE BO WILLIAMS, Senior National Security Correspondent, Jan 16, 2021
https://www.defenseone.com/threats/2021/01/troops-inauguration-pre-screened-extremism-says-dc-guard-commander/171456/
First they came for Assange, now they come for Trump.
I think we always knew they’d persecute Trump and his family until his last breath; even after that.
However, the move to declare members of congress who questioned the vote “seditious” is somehow, to my mind, much worse. Yes, all opposition will be purged.
https://www.salon.com/2021/01/17/texas-democrats-demand-ted-cruzs-expulsion-from-senate-his-conduct-was-seditious_partner/
The WaPo articles calling for Cruz and Hawley and others to be purged are disgusting hysteria and a naked power grab.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/01/11/republicans-responsible-sedition-now-want-unity/
The Left is pushing too far too fast. They’ve lost all perspective. IMO, this won’t end well for any of us; including them.
I’ve lost about a third of my friends on social media, especially FB. These are solid people, ad agency execs, successful writers, business analysts, small business owners, retired cops and military. They left for uncensored [at least for now] forums – or are now entirely off all social media. They aren’t going to stop communicating with one another. We talk on the phone or by email. They aren’t going to stop feeling the way they do about current events. They’re just going underground, where their resentment and sense of disenfranchisement smolders.
My last hope is that the military/NG is, on the whole, in line with our outlook as opposed to the Lefties. The Lefties seem to exist secure in the concept that the military consists of stupid robots that will mindlessly do the bidding of sleaze bags like Pelosi, Schumer, AOC. IMO, keep pushing and maybe find out how misplaced that concept is. Sad it may come to that.
Come on Trump. Get your desk cleared and get to Florida. I want to see the government try and extradite him. Insanity rules.
Show trials, purges & political denunciations – the Soviet parallels are increasing daily. Are Army political commissars next?
https://www.armytimes.com/news/your-army/2021/01/12/after-deadly-capitol-riot-army-looking-at-which-troops-require-security-screening-ahead-of-biden-inauguration/
Colonel,
Is it time yet or is it possible to conduct another SST war game thread in which we work through the possible and likely processes by which the country will split? I would welcome the in-depth insight of many here on what may come to pass in such a process.
Perhaps it’s too early and a sufficient set of known starting premises are not in place yet, but I think it’s high time that we all start thinking in detail about how it might unfold, and how to prepare ourselves as best we can for the ensuing mayhem.
We have been Morgenthau’ed and not just industrially.
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-morgenthau-plan-john-dietrich/1116763529
AK
Would that be called “inciting rebellion?”
Artemesia – “The roughly 25,000 National Guardsmen deployed to the U.S. capital to ensure President-elect Joe Biden is able to be sworn in peacefully went through an additional background check to weed out any whiff of domestic extremism.”
Wouldn’t it be less manpower intensive to go through their ballot papers and weed out any Guardsmen who voted for Trump? You’d have to offer re-education for the rejects and something a little more positive for the hard cases but presumably that’ll be done anyway. Can’t leave domestic extremists running loose in the community without taking precautions, especially those who’ve had military training.
It would though be inadvisable to extend this procedure to the American Trump voting population as a whole. Seventy plus million is a lot of people to re-educate and in any case they don’t seem to be going the right way about it.
The Dems ought to take a leaf out of the experts’ book. The writer Sebastian Haffner, who started off as a lawyer, was one of those who got re-educated in the ’30s. The way he tells it you had to do that if you wanted to enter the professions.
So he went along to the indoctrination course. Didn’t have much choice if he wanted to be a lawyer. The re-education wasn’t coercive at all. The instructors jollied them all along saying “We know all this indoctrination stuff is nonsense but it’ll ease off soon. Just go along with it to keep them happy.”
So he did. As did his mates. The re-education obviously didn’t take with Haffner. He was one of the hard cases. But it took with most of his mates and that seeming acquiescence was enough to keep the Nazis in power without too much domestic opposition.
That was proper soft totalitarianism on the way to becoming hard. The more optimistic Dems seem to want to jump that stage and go all out from the start. Can’t see it working.
I bet a lot of people are thinking that dispatching 25,000 troops to DC is the only way a decent-sized crowd will be in attendance for Beijing Biden’s inauguration. I’ll never be convinced that all of this faux outrage and hysteria, like the COVID fearmongering during the campaign season, isn’t a way to mask Biden’s lack of appeal.
I recall several pre-election pollster warnings that low enthusiasm was going to be a problem for the Democrats. Yet miraculously, we’re being coerced and re-educated to believe the senile, do-nothing grifter actually won the all-time highest vote count. Give me a break.
As far as show trials go, Congress has succeeded in cheapening the value of impeachment as to render it nearly unexceptional, a mere asterisk. Unfortunately for them not everyone is as gullible, as willingly credulous, as their faithful partisans.
Sir,
I suppose it would be in polite company. Of course, I would like to clarify that my proposition was merely a rhetorical device to demonstrate how preposterous the notion of national disintegration would be to any Right-Thinking
subjectcitizen. In no way would I actually advocate for or ask you to undertake an exercise that would upset the blossoming national unity behind the very unifying new administration and Congress that are set to guide us into a glorious, united future.“We have lost the talent needed to maintain a federal republic.“
Col. Lang,
I agree
These people are incredibly short sighted.
That show trial would be a stupid and self defeating stunt, which would increase the divisions in this country, solidify the resistance to their rule, and certainly make a martyr out of Trump.
At no point would it strengthen their hold on power, it only weakens it. And that should be obvious to them, but it isn’t, I don’t understand why.
It feels like they can’t see passed tomorrow, which is what truly worries me. They continue to destroy the traditions, which protected us, and institutions which sustained us. If anything, they’re moving faster and faster.
I think they’ll break this country.
– Eliot
Eric Newhill
I don’t have much faith in the military as a last resort against the deranged Democrat-media party.
The trigger pullers maybe, the brass, OTOH are dyed in the wool swamp creatures.
TV
Am I among the “brass?”
@Horace
Knowing an extremely low quality (and it continues to deteriorate steadily) of the American historiography of WW II, if I would be you–I would be very cautious with what I read. The whole title of the book you proposed is already a typical sensationalist revisionist fantasy, which shows clearly that the author is in historical falsification business, most likely whitewashing Nazis. There is plenty of “scholar” literature like that to go around in the Anglo-sphere and it is not a real history, but propaganda. Not to mention the fact that Morgenthau Plan was never really implemented, to start with. Most of what was written about USSR in the US after the WW II, with some rare, however important, exceptions, is garbage along the lines of Ziemke’s war fantasies.
AK
Glad to hear that.
TV
Faith in the military last resort option is difficult to gauge without knowing what the “stuff” is that Pence and Miller have “been through” and what Miller meant by “We’ve gone through some of the most complex military operations this country’s ever conducted”. Maybe we’ll find out in the next 60 hours or so.
For anyone who didn’t see this, Miller’s unscripted remarks to Pence start at 17:45.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/watch-live-pence-celebrates-anniversary-of-u-s-space-force
Not to mean direct snark, but the elites governing the states are the designers of “Green zone Baghdag model, it was only a matter of time it came back to Washington.
Who’s to say that the various torpedoes of factionalism and national fragmentation we’ve been firing at everyone else might at some point circle back at us? I used to theorize about national breakup and have been chastised more than once by people I discussed the plausibility of it with. I think now: why not? It’s the historical destiny of most empires and big nation states to fall apart once their mainspring is broken. Sufficient precedent conditions are not yet here, but they could be in process. The potential rise of one party rule will set things in motion; nations that do that always over reach and self destruct.
Col Lang:
I don’t know you, but by “brass” I mean flag ranks spending significant time in the swamp.
You’re a retired O-6 so no, not “brass.”
The military brass seem to be going out of their way to show their disdain for Trump, by emphasizing that they wont give him the usual farewell ceremony.
I dont see this ending well
I believe Col. Lang observed some time back that we’re not the people that our fathers were. IMO, that is correct.
While we bandy about with words like “liberty”, “rule of law” and “constitutional republic” and have the basic framework for that, in practice we’ve long moved away from all that. From warrantless surveillance to civil forfeiture and the “strict constructionists” on the Supreme Court who seemingly always rule against the natural rights of citizens and in favor of corporate and state interests, the trend over the decades is clear. Consolidation of both economic and political power.
We have not arrived at this juncture in a step function. It has been a slow and steady erosion of individual liberties over decades. It’s an absolute minority today, even a low single digit minority that believes in the primacy of the natural rights of citizens and that government and moneyed interests by their very nature consolidate power and must always be restrained.
When contemporary Americans are so caught up in tribalism including the left-right frame and the partisan frame and also so easily distracted by the oligarchy with the hysteria du jour, they just can’t step back and see the forest from the trees and notice that they are being enslaved in the land that their fathers fought for. Not that prominent people have not warned about this creeping authoritarianism.
Here’s Sir James Goldsmith in 1994 as the “globalization” rocketship was entering its boost phase and Bill Clinton & both the GOP & Democrats in Congress were signing NAFTA and granting the Chinese communists Most Favored Nation status.
https://youtu.be/wwmOkaKh3-s
Recall Admiral John Poindexter’s Total Information Awareness program that was launched during the Reagan administration. Reagan was the GOP’s god for a good long while.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_Information_Awareness
And then there was Soshanna Zuboff among many others including Tim Berners-Lee warning about the monopolistic practices of Big Tech and its implication on behavioral manipulation.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/feb/02/age-of-surveillance-capitalism-shoshana-zuboff-review
Then of course there is Noam Chomsky, dismissed by the “right” because he was from the “left”, noting how consent is manufactured.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12617.Manufacturing_Consent
And one of the pinnacles of domestic “information operations” when the American people were propagandized by both political parties, the media, and the national security apparatus to a war on false pretenses in a land half the country couldn’t pronounce, and no one was held to account. Instead, many were rewarded.
https://youtu.be/ovHrd-Q3Av0
Naturally an attempted coup on an opposition presidential campaign and a duly elected president by the national security apparatus in collusion with the media and the political establishment was just the next logical step.
Now, an argument oft used is that the American people are armed and will resist tyranny. What’s the over/under that a so easily propagandized & distracted people will ever be able to resist tyranny? How much deprivation before a Lech Walesa shows up? Or even a Napoleon? Or is it a Robespierre?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maximilien_Robespierre
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lech_Wa%C5%82%C4%99sa
@Barbara Ann
What is this? More QAnon nonsense? I was hoping that kind of intellectual detritus would not find its way here.
I am completely dismayed and depressed about our current political and social mess. I thought I should look into my insurance plans and my financial plans.
Then I realized that doing so would be a waste of time. I feel like the ploughman and the mouse in Robert Buns’ famous poem:
“But Mousie, thou art no thy-lane,
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men
Gang aft agley,
An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,
For promis’d joy!
Still, thou art blest, compar’d wi’ me!
The present only toucheth thee:
But Och! I backward cast my e’e,
On prospects drear!
An’ forward tho’ I canna see,
I guess an’ fear!”
Or I can become even more depressed and turn to Shakespeare:
“Life is but a walking shadow that struts and rets its hour upon the stage.
It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound an fury and signifying nothing.”
All I can do is pray that the world my children and grandchildren will live in will somehow, with the grace of God, become “the city set on a hill.”
Right now, I am left only with praying, and I can only hope that many others will be praying also for God’s grace for our nation.
“Not for the first time am I disgusted by the susceptibility of those I thought my countrymen to waves of hysteria. ”
This is true throughout the West’s media space. The important questions are who is engineering the hysteria, how and why?
People believe, like Homer Simpson, that TV wouldn’t lie to them.
What future does a nation have when a significant part of it’s citizenry (including a major political party) dislikes or flat out hates it?
TV
I was an SES-4 after retiring from the Army but the true Swampies got rid of me so that should be recorded in my favor.
The fact that DC has been turned into an armed fortress is simply a reflection of how ‘popular’ Team Harris/Biden is with the average American (the Green Zone analogy is spot on). DC hasn’t been this fortified since the Civil War (or at least since the Vietnam Era march on the Pentagon).
I had some mixed feelings about the events of January 6th. Now I see some value in what took place that day. It has forced the latent totalitarian impulse present in the soul of the Democratic leadership (and their Republican fellow-travelers) to the surface. Most of us knew it was there; now it is on grand display for all to see.
There is simply no way that these people taking power are going to allow private citizens to remain armed. Look for a full throttle attack on the 2nd Amendment.
Unhinged Citizen
I must assume your comment was directed at my link to Miller’s remarks at the Space Force anniversary. Not sure why you would think this has anything to do with QAnon.
I am not aware of anything visible that could be described as “the most complex military operations this country’s ever conducted” – certainly not within the timescale covered by Miller’s tenure. Care to clear up my “intellectual detritus” with your own opinion on what Miller was referring to?
Y2K was not a fantasy. I was part of a team working 24 months at the leading IC agency to find and correct all the instances of it in our software. (Finding was difficult; correcting was trivial.) Which we did, testing it exhaustively in virtual machine at critical dates, like Jan. 1, 2000, Feb. 29, 2000, Sep. 30, 2000, etc.
The second leading IC agency, located about 25 miles northeast in an adjacent state, did not, in its arrogance, and had its main database fail New years Day 2000: fortunately a public holiday thought the world, giving them time re-group.
Ed Lingren,
I agree with what you say about the 2A. Very unfortunate, very arrogant and very stupid that they will go there. It’s going to cause something no one wants to have happen.
They can’t trust their hastily assembled Praetorian Guard to carry live ammo after an FBI screening of the 25K; how much less so after they enact gun confiscation? Who do they think is going to protect them as they begin to walk all over 75 million Americans? It’s like they’re a determined suicidal death cult.
TV
I have been reviewing your comments and have decided that you probably should find somewhere else to feel superior.
While driving on Friday I listened to NPR on the radio describe the National Guard preparations. The reporter stressed that the troops were issued M4 rifles, which seemed odd compared to most reporting. I figured it was to distinguish the NG from people that carry assault rifles.
I really don’t know how expected Biden administration attempts at gun control will work out. I’d like to point out that last year there was a surge in firearm purchases and a lot were new owners that don’t fit the stereotypes for firearms owners. These new owners of legal firearms may not be as supportive of gun control as they may have been in the past. A positive aspect of the people new to firearms is that NRA firearm safety classes held at local ranges are filled up.
SAC Brat
The M-4 is what the libs call an assault rifle, anything black with no wood, a pistol grip, etc.
SAC Brat
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M4_carbine
I think we are crossing signals. Normally in the US news media bad people carry assault rifles. Good NG folks have M4s. Police carry Patrol Rifles.
A note of cheer. Sort of.
These people are cunning and unprincipled but they are fundamentally stupid.
Evidence? The entire neocon PNAC project (and these are the same people plus or minus) has produced the exact opposite of what they wanted. And they still don’t get it.
But. It will take a while.
Small illustration of my last comment.
“If you are looking for “Why Face Masks Don’t Work: A Revealing Review” by John Hardie, BDS, MSc, PhD, FRCDC, it has been removed. The content was published in 2016 and is no longer relevant in our current climate.”
Cunning and unprincipled people would remove it, but only stupid people would tell you that they did so.
https://www.oralhealthgroup.com/features/face-masks-dont-work-revealing-review/
Patrick Armstrong, ‘
This is probably what you are looking for:
https://www.oralhealthgroup.com/blogs/the-peculiar-reality-of-covid-19/
Here’s a refutation from another dentist, just for perspective.
https://www.cda-adc.ca/jcda/vol-66/issue-4/186.html
Hardie’s right, there is no hard evidence, but Petty is also right, no evidence doesn’t mean it’s wise to do nothing. Common sense and best-guesses apply. Who would want their surgeon to argue that he or she will not wear a face mask while performing surgery on oneself, citing a lack of hard evidence it makes any difference? That hard evidence, though, would require surgeons not wearing masks and surgeons wearing masks to obtain.