America’s Domestic Enemies use Stochastic Terrorism and other forms of intimidation to disempower American citizens as they pursue their aims to transform America into a Fascist nation.
Stochastic Terrorism is the practice by duplicitous leaders of publicly demonizing a person or group, and provoking their supporters to perpetrate abuses, including violence, against their targets.
Collective fear stimulates herd instinct, and tends to produce ferocity toward those who are not regarded as members of the herd.”
– Bertrand Russell
Stochastic Terrorism, when effective, also induces such fear within individuals’ spiritual dimension that they restrict themselves privately from thinking, let alone saying or doing, anything that can be interpreted as supporting groups or causes that have been condemned by their leader.
“I can conceive of no better service than boldly exposing the weakness, liabilities and infinite corruptions of democracy.”
–Walt Whitman
Leadership failure by both major parties, in symbiosis, has resulted in a political system that allows an extremist minority in the Republican Party to rule over popular majorities. Nevertheless, there are Republicans, even some Republican politicians, who, even now, have a higher loyalty to the Democratic Principles that were adopted by the founders than they do to the Fascist Principles fiercely promoted by America’s current rulers.
FEAR, however, induces many loyal Americans in the Republican Party to refrain from openly chastising members of their party who violate America’s moral, ethical and justice values. Most of them live in areas heavily populated by Republicans, and are members of groups laden with Republicans. They understand that if they overtly advocate for the pursuit of the Principles of Democracy that are espoused by Democrats, they are very likely to be viciously attacked.
“People fear nothing more terribly than to take a position which stands out sharply and clearly from the prevailing opinion; they fear being different for they have seen evidence that peculiarity breeds contempt and often shunning.” – M. L. King, Jr.
“The January 6 insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol building and the politicians who use openly authoritarian language are often depicted as the biggest threats to democracy. Yet “democracy’s assassins” always have political accomplices who appear to abide by democratic norms but quietly undermine them.” (Levitsky and Ziblatt)
“In a time of universal deceit, depravity, and decadence, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” – George Orwell
How would Americans have treated an avowed “Foreign Enemy” who urged followers to commit a coup d’état.
I am confident that some of the political accomplices were driven to self-constraint on January 6, 2021– to neither openly condemn nor applaud the event. Additionally, the unprecedented contradictions of the episode as fostered by the then sitting Republican president likely produced a moral struggle that tested the resolve of even traditional Republican loyalists and found it insufficient to solve the resultant voting dilemma. I have no doubt that a large percentage of the 111 million 2024 self-disenfranchisers were disenchanted Republicans; and I believe as well that the, coup d’état attempt against America was a prompting cause.
“I’m for truth, no matter who tells it. I’m for justice, no matter who it is for or against. I’m a human being, first and foremost, and as such I’m for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole.”
– Malcom X
But as James Baldwin said:
People in flight (FEAR) never can grow up, which means they can never, really, become citizens — and we simply must not surrender this great country to those people. We must not allow their fear to control us, and, indeed, we must not allow it to control them. Rather, we should attempt to release them from their panic and their unadmitted sorrow. We ought to try, by the example of our own lives, to prove that life is LOVE (LOVE OF COUNTRY, defined as the comprehensive rubric for patriotism, duty, compassion, justice, righteousness, integrity, ethics, morality, respect, unity, and responsibility) and that that nation is doomed which penalizes those of its citizens who recognize and rejoice in this fact.
MY PRIMARY CASE IN POINT:
Terrorist acts committed years ago were condoned by local southern governments and southern white churches – i.e., lynchings. The primary targets of lynchings were not the ones lynched, but those who looked like Billie Holiday’s Strange Fruit, and would internalize the lesson, and remain in their places, fearful of worse fates. This is classic Stochastic Terrorism that causes long-lasting self-suppression. Today, about 11 million adult Blacks are consistent self-disenfranchisers.
Patriotic American Liberals and Conservatives — not those who are semi-loyal to democracy — regardless of political party, understand that America will never achieve her economic power, grace and moral authority if a substantial proportion of her citizens continue to be trapped in the basement of this nation simply because current Stochastic Terrorists, America’s severest Domestic Enemies, have emboldened the nation’s historic oppressors and silenced both opponents to terrorism and its victims.
