A Warning of Fascist Violence to Come. posted by Richard Seymour

Via Antiwar.blog, a fascist warning from the insuperably dull Glenn Reynolds. Apparently, the real problem with the massacre at Haditha is that the antiwar/anti-American Left has been "reporting 'Hadithas' over and over again over the last three years." And so:

The real danger is that we who support the war will reach the point that we say "we might as well be taken as wolves then as sheep". At that point the left can celebrate that they have made our military and those who support it the people they claim we are. Once that happens however any compunction about respecting them will be gone, and remember one side is armed and one is not.

That is a fate that I don't wish on any of us.

As Jason Schwartz notes, this is not an unknown attitude among would-be goose-steppers. The note of contrived victimhood, in which the apologists for war stipulate that they are mere behaviourist bots, not responsible for their actions, only reacting to stimuli abundantly provided by the anti-Americans, is compounded by Reynolds: "crying wolf leads in the end to moral callousness, as people assume that there's no point in behaving morally when they're going to be called monsters anyway". Coolly, he adds, "This seems rather uncontroversially obvious to me." Of course, this is flatly false, but the clinical attitude crudely effects the self-alienation integral to the fascist purview - one is an instrument of God, or fate, an Avenging Angel, enacting la justice de Dieu. How pleasurable to say that one will be terrible, cruel, unremitting etc., and yet not responsible. It will be a mere biological fact, a natural fact, the homeostasis of the body politic.

We've heard these unabashed howls of self-pity and calls for bloody revenge from the American right before. My advice is to take it seriously - they mean it. Given a sufficient crisis or upheaval in the US, these guys will be the first ones to volunteer for a nationalist military revival. Like those who met in the Milan Industrial and Commercial Alliance in 1919, they will "wage war" on the left "for having opposed nationalism".