Dwight: January 6…That’s An Insurrection?

I read an amazing book over Christmas, “The Irish Civil War” by Timothy Pat Coogan and George Morrison…

It does a masterful job of exploring how the present-day Irish Republic threw off British rule 100 years ago. It also illuminates the roots of the ongoing tragedy that is Northern Ireland.

Even more compelling than the text are the hundreds of photographs of the fighting, starting with the Easter Rebellion in Dublin in 1916 and culminating in the establishment of the Irish Free state after a bloody internecine struggle between the warring factions of Irish nationalists which followed the British withdrawal.

(I highly recommend the 1996 Liam Neeson film “Michael Collins” if anyone is interested in that chapter of history.)

I’d always heard that the British sealed their own fate in Ireland by gratuitous acts of brutality against the Irish rebels, which alienated most of the population and turned them against continued British rule.

The book I read over Christmas offers vivid proof of this proposition. This is a lesson that we would do well to keep in mind, i.e. repression may work for a while but ultimately you cause those you repress to rise up with renewed ferocity.

This is ironic in view of liberals always pontificating that this country never learns “the lessons of history” ,whether it be at home or abroad.

Needless to say, they almost never bother to explain what specific lessons from the past we’ve failed to absorb or how they apply to some contemporary situation we face as a nation.

What’s even more disheartening is when liberal pundits are very knowledgeable about the historical parallels between some past event and a new challenge which confronts us yet draw exactly the wrong conclusion from the examples they cite.

I thought of this when I saw an article in USA Today which appeared on December 28, “From Oklahoma City to January 6: How the U.S. Government failed to stop the rise of domestic terrorism.”

The authors, Josh Mayer and Kevin Johnson, go on at great length how the failure to “monitor” right wing extremist groups led to not just the 1995 Oklahoma Federal Office building bombing and the events of January 6^th at the U.S. Capitol. They give other examples, including our own local tragedy of the shooting at the Jewish Community Center in Overland Park in 2014, as well as the October 2020 alleged plot to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer.

I looked into these incidents and found that none of the participants were part of any kind of organized group, with a comprehensive plan, designated leaders, etc. In each instance, you had a lone malcontent with a few confederates nursing a grievance.

                                                 That’s an insurrection!( Dublin,1916)While looking into this point, by chance I found an article from 2014 about the Jewish Community Center shooter, Frazier Glenn Miller,

“Were Feds Duped by White Supremacist and Alleged Killer Frazier Glenn Miller?”  This appeared in The American Prospect, a well-known liberal magazine.

By one Chip Berlet, the author clearly understands that the Federal government’s use of Miller as a prosecution witness against fellow white supremacists led to disastrous results in a 1988 criminal case. Not only was he paid for testimony which was very weak and led to the acquittal of all the other defendants. To add insult to injury Miller was taken into the federal witness protection program and provided a new identity, a house in a new state, as well as a generous yearly living stipend.

After he received this kid glove treatment in return for testimony of little value, he apparently returned to his old ways and in 2014 he drove to Overland Park from his new home in Springfield, Missouri and murdered three people.

Berlet concluded his article with a challenge to honest liberals:

“ Today we condemn entrapment, paid informants, political grand jurors, and dubious witnesses targetting left-wing anti-war protesters, environmental activists, and others. Shouldn’t we take the same position when the target is on the political right?”

This is exactly the point that the USA Today journalists miss. Each of the instances they list-Oklahoma City, the Jewish Community Center murders, the Whitmer kidnapping plot-all involve actions taken by government agents that took dangerous situations and made them deadly.

Even Mayer and Johnson’s USA Today article concedes that it is frustrating to undercover government informants if the people they’re targeting merely talk a good game. After all, how can you pull off a big sting operation just because they have an ideology you find repugnant? Somehow there has to be more, i.e. you’ve got to induce your fellow conspirators to commit a crime or at least take steps to commit a crime.

The crime can be a silly anachronism that no one has been charged with since 1865, i.e. “sedition” or “insurrection.” It can be a trivial one that can be used to impose draconian punishment out of all proportion to the underlying offense, i.e. “parading” or “disrupting a governmental proceeding.” This is where the Feds come in as agents provocateur, inciting or entrapping someone who otherwise would not have broken the law.

It appears now that the Murrah Federal Office Building explosion was a government sting operation gone awry.

Timothy McVeigh’s plans must have been known to someone in the Federal government because several of the federal agencies which had offices there had employees who were not in the building on April 19, 1995. No one bothered to tell the day care center operators on the first floor.

(By the way, the federal prosecutor who handled the case was named Merrick Garland. Feel better?)

If the FBI agents (12!) had not egged on the alleged Whitmer kidnapping plot, it would never have been hatched. By the same token, if the FBI had not used agents’provocateur on January 6^th urging protesters to go into the Capitol Building, there is a reasonably good chance the riot may not have happened. Several individuals have been identified urging the crowd on but none of them has been charged or arrested. Why not?

All this made me think of the dramatist Tom Stoppard’s breakout play from 60 years ago, “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead”. Based on a sub-plot in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, it is a play within a play, about two minor actors who get enmeshed in a palace intrigue that ultimately costs them their lives. They are the quintessential bit players-in every sense of the term-in over their heads, pawns to forces they only vaguely understand.

I thought of them because of two stories about January 6^th by the ineffable Judy Thomas of the Kansas City Star.

One appeared last February and told of three local men associated with the Proud Boys. The latter is a right-wing group for young men who like to drink beer and brawl with their left -wing counterparts like Antifa. An article by Thomas similar in tone appeared on January 10^th of this year regarding two local women from Leavenworth, also charged in the Capitol riot.

All five of these people appear to be from modest, working-class backgrounds. One was employed as a sheet metal worker, one was a beautician, another worked for the railroad. Interestingly, one of the men was a policeman, another was a 20-year U.S. Marine Corps veteran, with numerous decorations and three deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan.

(Somehow these latter facts got left out of the exhaustive profiles written by Thomas, probably because they made the defendants more sympathetic.)

None of these five people had destroyed property when they entered the Capitol. None was accused of physically attacking the police. Yet all have been charged with multiple crimes and labeled terrorists and white supremacists simply by virtue of being present that day in the Capitol.

(Smearing people as racists and extremists is Judy Thomas’s stock in trade, as I can personally attest.)

Their ideology may indeed be “repugnant” to liberal journalists like those who write for the Star. However, if it turns out that Federal undercover agents had encouraged or incited them to go into the building, the defendants are really only guilty of letting themselves be manipulated by cynical political operatives of the Deep State; the permanent uniparty government which runs the legal system, the bureaucracy, the upper echelons of the military and the intelligence community.

Like Stoppard’s hapless tragedians they are bit players whose lives (and those of 700 other Americans who went to D.C. to seek redress for their grievances.) have been destroyed for the political gain of our ruling class.

Judy Thomas took additional sadistic delight in describing the sentencing hearing of one of the local women 10 days ago. At the time the sentence was imposed (for the heinous crime of “parading”), the defendant was forced to grovel and abase herself before the D.C. federal judge.

It was a scene out of a Stalinist show trial or a Maoist self-criticism session, where the accused must first confess to crimes against the regime and then beg for mercy.

Judy Thomas of the Kansas City Star revels all the more in the defendants’ humiliation and suffering precisely because they are powerless and despised.

Denying the accused the right to a speedy trial, access to counsel, medical care, decent living conditions in jail, holding them as political prisoners who must recant their beliefs before they’re allowed to enter a plea bargain, all these things have happened to those charged in the January 6 riot.

Why has none of this registered with Judy Thomas and the other ideologues passing for journalists at the Kansas City Star?

Ignoring civil liberties because you don’t like people’s politics is a very dangerous and frightening thing. That it is at least in part because of the victims’social class as “deplorables”, “bitter clingers” and “smelly Wal-Mart shoppers”makes it an even bigger moral obscenity. For a publication that styles itself as a champion of the poor and downtrodden, it is especially repellant.

The British ruling class paid a terrible price for its cruel and brutal response to the Easter Uprising in Dublin in 1916.

I predict the American ruling class will suffer the same fate for its response to the January 6, 2021 protests in Washington.