“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.” Sun Tzu, ancient Chinese intellectual, 544-496 BCE
Sun Tzu once again wrote the truth. The warrior has to truly understand his or her enemies – and his or her own weaknesses.
This method also applies a full understanding of the enemy’s total world views, reading their articles and books, and especially, and most importantly, getting inside their minds.
This method fully understands their tactics, and so we will stay ready for their coming affronts. The most important questions revolve around: why do they hate us so much, and why do they want to exterminate us physically? Our enemies have operated a continual war against us.
We can look at their social class backgrounds. They represent mostly high socio-economic elites, and they tend to work in the fields of state media propaganda, government-union bureaucracies, state mandatory education, software corporations, and corporate entertainment media. Note where they live, such as urban enclaves in high-priced sections of town with gated communities, or doormen, elevator men, or armed security.
Smart observers will analyze their cultural formations, which often represent university-college trained ideologies. We could even scrutinize their cultural tastes, such as preferring to dine out in restaurants rather than cook their own meals, frequenting certain ‘hipster’ hangouts, such as expensive bars, clubs with lots of synthetic drug use, and attending gigs of certain genres of music.
These observations relate to intensively doing our research. We will not only know our enemies, we will even be able to think like them.
That first part is not hard to do. But knowing thyself is a lot harder to perform. The reasons are that we must face ourselves with total and complete honesty. We have to look at ourselves from a distance, as if some casual onlookers just spotted us at a remote position, and then we can critique our faults. We ought to know our weaknesses, and like other social-cultural groups in the United States, we do have glaring weaknesses.
Before pointing out America’s gun culture weaknesses, we first need to understand the political practices of hegemony, national popular movements, organic intellectuals, historical blocs, war of position, war of maneuver, and optimism of the will.
These political practices come from the writings of the Italian Communist intellectual, Antonio Gramsci, 1891-1937 AD. The Italian Fascists murdered the guy through criminal neglect in prison, but his political methods eventually transformed the Italian Communist Party into the most powerful Communist Party outside of the Warsaw Pact after WWII.
I would like to thank my Neo-Marxist tenured professors within the Amerikan university education system for teaching me these occult arts in manipulating political power. Many Americans wonder why Amerikan universities are such Left-wing madhouses. Administrator, six figure salary bureaucrats now run these scam stations, and they are more corrupt than most union boss officials. Most concernedly, our political enemies, inclusive of Amerikan university administrators, have been using these political tactics against us.
Gramsci took his political ideas from the combat tactics of WW I in Europe, with its mass mobilizations of drafted armies, trench warfare and technology efficiency in destroying human life. Gramsci applied such military tactics to the furtive arts of political alliances and to the political engagement of total defeat and no surrender.
Hegemony is simply the art of maintaining strong political alliances, often containing contradictory ideologies, transformed into a powerful force of action. Gramsci understood that hegemonic political action has the potential to block state hegemonic alliances, and even overthrow them. The Fasciste movement in 1920s Italy did just this.
American gun owners are a diverse group, such as hunters that like to eat fresh meat, sports shooters, self-defense trainers, gun store employees, military veterans, ex-cops, small business owners that run businesses in rough neighborhoods, trailer living people that like to shoot metal in the deserts.
We also have lots of other different people within our cultural salad, inclusive of lots of women, gays and lesbians, Muslim Americans, Anarchists, bikers, Jewish Americans, Atheists, Evangelical Christians, African-Americans, Latino-Americans, tattoo-piercing artists, sex workers and artist musicians. Yet, our political enemies often portray us as a fringe group of politically reactionary, overweight, older white men with genetically attached baseball caps and a bad wardrobe style.
National popular movements are political hegemonic movements that successfully become integrated within the national culture. Some good historical-ideological examples, within American political history, have represented: Jacksonian Democracy, Manifest Destiny, The Cause of the Southland-Dixieland, Abolitionism, The Gospel of Wealth, The Temperance-Prohibition Movement, Federalism, Constitutional Law, Environmentalism, Public School Education, The American Economic Dream, Racialism-Eugenics, The Black Liberation Struggle, Populism, The Big Stick Policy, The Labor Movement, Second Wave Feminism, Multiculturalism and Progressivism.
American gun culture holds profound and deep roots within American culture and history – and it will always stay that way. Our strong cultural power inside of the United States means that our political enemies are desperately trying to dislodge us from our privileged cultural position. Even with such a privileged cultural position, Gramsci learned from the aftermath of WW I that a strong cultural-political hegemonic alliance can dislodge and defeat the strongest national-cultural affinities. Like the human condition, culture changes and morphs into absurd newer creations.
Historical blocs are the different national popular movements that make up hegemonic political alliances. They are important because, in Gramsci’s own words, they are organic, meaning they spring from the cultural roots of the country. The political leaders are true citizens that represent the nation. Successful hegemonic alliances must have organic intellectuals as their public voices. American gun culture is definitely American. Our political-enemies however prefer to live in a more sophisticated culture, such as Europe and Australia.
The strategy for historical blocs is to transform themselves into national popular movements. Next, they must form powerful hegemonic blocs or counter-hegemonic blocs of political alliances in order to completely seize political power – and ultimately destroy their political enemies.
The first strategy is the War of Position, where the political movement uses deep political tactics against its ideological enemies, such as entrapments, faking mobilizations, incendiary language, incessant political agitation, continual propaganda outlay, and ultimately, incitement to violence.
All of these political tactics work in that they eventually weaken the will of the enemy to respond adequately, since the political opposition has to continually defend its positions, representing the War of Attrition. Eventually the beaten down opposition must either fortify itself, close off its gaps, and slowly decline and fall for final liquidation, or it must surrender gradually to the political onslaught, and ultimately become the tribute paying slaves of their new masters.
Gramsci referred to this end game for political victory, which is always violent, as the War of Maneuver. All successful hegemonic blocs must first utilize the War of Position, and then when achieving some cultural power in the nation, move into the War of Maneuver.
Ultimately, Gramsci encapsulated his most famous phrase, Pessimism of the Spirit; optimism of the Will. Gramsci insinuated through this statement that the Communist or Radical inside of the War of Position must reject any spiritual or religious morality.
Instead, the United Left has to replace such weak sentiments with a continual and untiring political struggle, or political warfare, against the Enemy. In fin, the revolutionaries have to seize political power in order to physically annihilate the Enemy. Modern history has shown the way in successfully using the Gramscian political process.
America’s Gun Culture is now facing such a War of Position – and our political enemies have learned the same Gramscian political tactics from their own Neo-Marxist tenured professors that they studied under. The Neo-Marxist tenured cowards have taught in the Amerikan university system for over a generation. Hopefully, we can now see where both our weaknesses and strengths lie.
As gun owners we must avoid contributing our writings to hard right-wing blogs that spout non-stop bigotry, often against the corporate media’s new hate targets: Muslims, and we should stop supporting pro-war/pro-US Military articles, which yell for more violence, revenge killings, bombings, genocide and mass murder.
While those right-wing political blogs will often attack the mainstream corporate media, they always echo chamber their 1984 Goldsteins of the Year, such as ‘Radical Islam.’ We don’t particularly like the outrageous fulminations coming from the ‘hoplophobes,’ so why do we collaborate with the rants of Islamophobes, homophobes or negrophobes?
Just because those political blogs often feature pro-gun articles does not mean they are our political allies. These hard right-wing blogs often belong to other hegemonic blocs. When we contribute to their rants and bile, we fall into our political enemies entrapment strategies.
The corporate mainstream media will once again picture us as ignorant, white racist, right-wing kooks. And always remember after the Sandy Hook Mythology Movement – many of those same hard right-wingers joined with their supposed progressive political enemies calling for gun restrictions.
We possess guns because we believe in the natural right to self-defense for all of humanity – including for our political enemies. We reject cowardice and stand upon the code of honor. We will never surrender to tyranny and we value our liberty.
This does not mean that we find guns sexy or even beautiful. Guns, like all weapons, are tools for extermination. We only use weapons as a last resort against any agitated wild animal, criminal attacker, or tyrannical invasion force, ready to physically harm us, our family, or our good friends. All of humanity has the right to defend themselves from violent attacks.
Most Americans are with us on this point, including many young urban hipsters, with pseudo-Leftist politics, who don’t know us, and who probably don’t any guns. Let us celebrate our diversity of differing political ideologies and backgrounds – yet united in our eternal virtues of courage, honor and gentleness.
The gun confiscators’ preferred method in dislodging America’s gun culture from the core of American cultural identity is through extreme, cowardly name calling. They commonly refer to us as terrorists, gun nuts and enablers of mass murder, and some have even called for outright, mass gun confiscation and snitching to the cops when we open carry. This is another war of position tactic.
We will simply reply to their calumny that they are gross hypocrites and lazy cowards: while they hate guns for us, they love guns for the cops and the military, which often target the poor, and the people who can’t fight back around the world. They rant for gun confiscations, yet they want the regular police officers and the enlisted military soldiers to bear the burdens of such a national confiscation, or having to detain open carriers.
Our most formidable weapons, which will carry out the defeat of their War of Position, is our knowledge of history. Educated Americans know about the Revolutionary War for Independence, the Civil War-War Between the States, John Brown’s Raid, WW I & II, and the Wild West Frontier. Guns entered all of those conflicts.
Tyrannical Laws never deserve the respect of a free people. Courage and Honor never comply, and never will we just follow orders. We didn’t come into this Earth to die as slaves.
Thomas Paine, the American radical wrote in his political pamphlet, The Crisis No. 1, (1776), “These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph…”
We stand upon this truth. We remain within our hallowed ground, well inside American national culture. Whatever War of Positions the Enemy thrusts against us, we shall not surrender.
We respect honor, they do not. They are cowards, we are not. Never forget this.
Guns and Anarchy 