By Wrongly Calling The Capitol Rabble ‘Terrorists’ Joe Biden Will Likely Create Some

DISPATCHES FROM MOON OF ALABAMA, BY "B"
This article is part of an ongoing series of dispatches from Moon of Alabama

The hyperventilating over Wednesday's MAGA cosplay in the Capitol Building continues:

In a blistering speech one day after pro-trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol in an unprecedented security breach, U.S. President-elect Joe Biden said the perpetrators should be considered 'domestic terrorists'.

"Don't dare call them protesters. They were a riotous mob. Insurrectionists. Domestic terrorists. It's that basic. It's that simple."

That the incoming president declares a number of activists from the  Is this a terrorist?

Those rabbles were in no way terrorists. They were not even a mob. Most of them were out-of-town rednecks who felt that they had been wronged. They wanted to express that. They were surprised when they found how easy it was to enter the Capitol and they apparently took more time to take pictures than to rearrange the furniture.

This was not a coup attempt either. These folks had no weapons, no training and, most importantly, they had no plan of what to do except to maybe enter to then leave:

And yet, and yet…. This was no Vietnam-level rioting. This wasn’t even a serious occupation, which one would think was the point, to keep Congress from executing the final ratification of the Biden win. Could you image the spectacle of democracy chastened if the Trump mob had held the Capitol and forced Congress to scramble find a hotel ballroom in which to finish their official business?

Nope, Congress was back in business by 8:00 PM, roughly seven hours after the barbarians stormed the walls, albeit with pretty much everyone badly rattled and some Trump supporters rapidly backpedaling from their former positions.

Despite the gravity of the event, if you look not very hard at what happened, both sides in their different ways were shambolic.

Another such view:

[L]et’s be clear about what did not take place at the Capitol Building last night. This was not a fascist coup, as so many shrill, supposedly liberal commentators are claiming. Their flagrant use of the word ‘fascist’ to describe every political movement they disapprove of is an insult to reason and history. This wasn’t a coup full stop. The National Guard suppressed the morons, the barricades were put back up, and even their hero Donald Trump told them to go home. A coup is a conscious effort to illegally seize power from the government. These people couldn’t even believe they made it into the Capitol Building. They were like children finding a candy store unguarded.

A children's game. Indeed. 

There was also a curious lack of resistance from the relevant authority:

[Rep. Anna] Eshoo also blasted the Capitol Hill police, calling their lackluster response a “failure across the board” and describing the barricades outside the Capitol complex “like doggy doors … it was like, ‘Welcome, I’m taking you on a tour.’ ”

Lawmakers, she said, had gotten a detailed memo about street barricades and procedures, but when she arrived and looked across the Capitol Hill plaza, “I thought, where is everyone?”

There was obviously a lack of seriousness, almost childish undertone, to the mob's actions. (AFP/Getty Images)

These were not terrorists but tourists who came from all over the states to Washington for fun and to register their disagreement with the 'elites'. The Capitol Hill policemen correctly recognized that the protesters were not enemies of the state but rather normal Americans:

Maggie Haberman @maggieNYT - 4:16 UTC · Jan 8, 2021
Cops gave rioters directions to Schumer’s office but aimed a gun at a photographer and didn’t believe she was a journalist. Astonishing this is the level of security in the halls of a co-equal branch of government in the post-9/11 era.

Yet Biden and others are furious about the stunt because it lifted the veil off their vaunted U.S. 'democracy' and its empty rituals:13118

Nicholas J. Fuentes @NickJFuentes - 21:01 UTC · Jan 7, 2021
The US Capitol is hardly a “sacred temple of democracy,” it’s the sleaziest brothel in the world, totally bought and controlled by powerful interest groups and foreign governments. Who are they kidding?

Congressional processes are dirty fights about the distribution of the loot. There is nothing sacred about it. Just consider the massive bribes that were taken during the Georgia Senate races. Those hundreds of millions of 'donations' will have to be paid back in kind.

The real danger to the people does not come from those 'deplorables' who walked into the Capitol but from the 'elite' who will use the incident for their purposes:

The threat inflation, the wild claims about a fascist coup, are transparent efforts by the cosseted political and cultural elites to endow their project with moral importance; to give their restoration of managerial, technocratic power after the four-year populist experiment – which is fundamentally the project that Biden and his influential supporters are currently engaged in – the gloss of historical urgency. It is mission creation.

Worse, this narrative-building will allow the elites to circumscribe even more forms of political thought and speech than they already desire to do, on the basis that the latent fascism among the American rabble is likely to be stirred up by inflammatory ideas and commentary. Indeed, we’ve already been given a chilling glimpse of this post-incursion clampdown on ‘violent’ speech in Twitter’s extraordinary decision to ban, outright, three of Trump’s tweets last night and to lock him out of his account for 12 hours.

It strikes me that this unilateral use of corporate power by Silicon Valley to prevent the democratically elected president of the United States from engaging with millions of his voters and supporters, to physically forbid him from partaking in online discussion, is a grave assault on democracy, too. More grave, I would say, than the immoral and anti-democratic incursion of the Capitol Building. Already, right away, we are seeing that the threat-inflating response to last night’s events will likely have longer-lasting negative consequences for open debate and democratic norms than the thing itself.

It is even worse than that. The Democrats reaction to the slapstick action is likely to create more strife.

That Biden now falsely declares that the people who enter the capitol are terrorists, who thereby need to be handled as such, will deepen the rift within U.S. society. It guarantees that some of the 'deplorables' who Biden designates as terrorists will become real ones. The U.S. military has ample experience with doing that in Iraq and elsewhere. During the early years of the occupation it designated legitimate resistance to the occupation as terrorism and thereby sowed the seeds for real terrorism.

An even worse strategy is to blame the whole incident on the 'terrorist leader' Donald Trump. During the rally that preceded the Capitol incident Trump did not tell the people to enter the building [but he strongly insinuated it—Ed.]:

“I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard,” Trump told the crowd on Wednesday.

After the people had unexpectedly entered the Capitol building Trump asked them to leave:

He said: "I know your pain, I know you’re hurt. We had an election that was stolen from us, it was a landslide election and everyone knows it especially the other side.

"But you have to go home now, we have to have peace, we have to have law and order, we have to respect our great people in law and order. We don't want anybody hurt."

Some 74 million people voted for Trump. What will they do if the Democrats now unfairly try to impeach him over an incident he did not cause?

Do not expect them to ignore it or to change their opinions. This analogy is apt.

Max Abrahms @MaxAbrahms - 14:21 UTC · 5 Jan 2021
Careful what you wish for.
My research shows leaders often restrain lower level members.
So taking out the leader tends to make the group more — not less — radical in its tactical choices.
I have loads of empirical & theoretical work on this finding if you’d like to discuss.

Even the Islamic State foresees that this will lead to more strife within the U.S.:

[T]he bitter feeling of defeat that the supporters of the 'Taghut' Trump have expressed during their recent protests- which followed the protests of their adversaries from the supporters of the 'Democratic Party' during the past year- will push them to exert more effort and offer more support for their Taghut during the next four years or whoso stands with him alongside the seat of the presidency, in order to achieve revenge for themselves and achieve victory over their adversaries again. This means that the conflict between the two parties and their supporters inside America will be very intense, and the focus of the policies of the two parties during this time will be greater on the internal issues to guarantee gaining more electoral votes.

By using the 'terrorist' moniker Biden, and the media, are taking this thing into the wrong direction. It creates more extremism and will likely have bloody consequences.

Posted by b on January 8, 2021 at 19:00 UTC | Permalink

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