I’ve been meditating on violence for couple of weeks now, and I observe that violence is like a dance. It has beginning, a middle, and an end.  There is a ceremony to it. It requires two parties, at least. More for line dancing.  It can be beautiful to behold and also ugly.

Now I’m not talking about the personal application of kinetic force; I don’t know anything about that.  That’s not what this series is about. Sure, I can shoot a gun —  everyone should have some basics on that just for safety’s sake, just like they should know how to tie a knot, swim, drive a car, and slice a turkey at Thanksgiving. 

I’m thinking about violence as a part of the world we live in.  Violence is a regular and steady component of every civilization that I am familiar with.  I mean, the United States is “that” nation that is constantly at war — we have been at war for more of our history than we have been at peace.  Inside the US, there is constant violence ( I’m not just talking street crimes — those hold no interest to me).  Armed government workers (policemen) and prisons are fundamental parts of our society; America would not be America without our own domestic standing army of “policemen” and the largest prison system, per capita, on the planet.  Those are institutions of violence.  We now have more armed federal civilian government workers than the entire U.S. Marine Corps.  And this does not include state, county and local law enforcement.

But that’s not what this article is about, either. Others can wax quite elegantly about that.  

I want to talk about how the dance starts.

There is a ritual to beginning violence.

Violence begins, I have observed, as an act of deception, braggadocio, humiliation and lies.  Violence begins with the public justification for violence.

Here’s now this works.  A big man walks around. He insults you.  He gets into your face and speaks really loudly.  He insults you and your bloodline. He does this in front of other people.  But he doesn’t just haul off and hit you.  He’s baiting you. He’s trapping you.    And at some point either you cave in and retreat  which signals your complete and abject surrender.  You are fully humiliated and he has strenghened his position of power, not only over you, but over everyone else in the room.

But you don’t have to retreat.  This is an option, but not the only option.

How do you resist him?  Can you stand up to a man twice your size without him pushing you off balance? Do you spit in his face? Do you grab a club and hit him?

Here’s what’s really happening: the bully wants you to stand up to him because, so far, he has been very careful to throw his weight around without crossing the line of a crime.  Maybe he “accidentally” bumped into you.  You can’t haul off and smack him without looking like the aggressor.  You can’t shout “you are an idiot and a bully!” because now you have people looking at you like you are immature and insecure.  And, of course, some observers will say you are escalating the situation by responding to him. You can’t call the cops because — well there just aren’t any cops that are going to come help you.

So you’ve either have to humiliate yourself or you have to resist.

And when you do resist, the bully will scream “He hit me! He hit me!” And make sure the whole room knows you hit him and then he will turn around and smash your face in an call it self defense. And he’ll probably get away with it because no one really cares.

This is how it works.

And it works this way in the international arena as well.   A player works hard at provoking someone else and hoping they respond.  And then they tell to the whole world that they are the innocent victim of agression. The must  morally justify extreme violence against the other nations and do this by creating their own victim-hood.  

It is not sophisticated once you know what is going on.  It is how the dance is done.

If your adversary refuses to be drawn in, you invent an insult.  The Gulf of Tonkin incident was a wholesale invention of the US government to justify US escalation in Vietnam.  The explosion of the USS Maine in Havana Harbor turned out to be an inside job (the explosion came from the inside of the ship, not an external torpedo or bomb) to justify the war glamour against Spain.

And the is by no means the only player of the game — all countries do this.  Israel does this. Russia does this.  The Brits do this.   It is standard behavior — it is just how it is done.

And we see this dance  inside the United States as one faction is pitted against another.  We saw it in Charlottesville where Southern men wanted to stand up for the Southern military heroes.  The opposition on the Left showed up. The police did nothing to keep the two separate. Some yo-yo rain over a Leftie and gave the Left the greatest political gift they could have imagined — complete and utter justification for violence against the Right.  This is easy stuff.  Now I’m not saying the dead woman was set up by the Left, I’m just saying the got an unexpected bonus — they don’t really care about her, but boy was her death worth it!

And we’ll see more of it. Police are going to seize some nut-case’s guns, a few Second Amendment loyalists are going to show up, shots will be fired and the Left will say “we told you so all along! These people are crazy! We need to take their guns and crush them!”

I doesn’t need to be consipiratorial either.  Cops arrest a man for something minor.  Maybe the suspect struggles a little when a cop has him in a choke hold.  Then the cop chokes him harder because he is “resisting.”  Man dies.  Cop is justified.   The cop didn’t even mean to choke him in the first place, but this is how it happens. 

Again, this is grade school stuff.  Create a problem, and then offer the solution.

Bait them into making a stupid move and then crush them utterly. 

If only the Right was sophisticated enough to do this.  But we are not. Because we abhor the deceit that this requires.

In the end, we need to understand that this is the game and this is how it is played.  In the end, we need to know that there is no right answer — there is no proper way of committing treason against the Empire.  

The system is rigged. The bully calls the shots. The press is whole-heartedly and unabashedly on the side of the established power in the United States.  There is no way out of this.

And we are not going to vote our way out of this, either. We didn’t vote our way into it (it was done through political indoctrination by the public schools and by court decisions overturning basic things like marriage and by corporate rules to undermine freedom of speech).   It’s rigged.

So the choice is going to be this — go ahead and be humiliated and submit and then tell yourself that it’s not your fight and it’s not your battle, and that God wants us too be at peace.  No. You are wrong. That is called cowardice. It may be wrapped up in cotton candy to make you feel better about your own cowardice but it is still cowardice.  And God hates cowards. 

The fight is coming.  Wrap your head around it.  Free your mind.

God has a purpose in violence.  He doesn’t avoid it.  He uses it to shape His people.  Read Judges 3:1-2  and we’ll talk more about this latter.

Fritz Berggren, PhD
Thanksgiving Day, 2019