No days unalert; … alertness when most necessary, is always missing, and not to give the matter a thought is to be slated for destruction.  Gracian #264

George Rebane

Over the years to this day we have seen that our leftwing neighbors don’t have much truck with concepts like nuance or shades of gray.  Their more simple worldview resides comfortably in the corners of the extreme – for them the needle is always pegged: yes/no, black/white, racist/woke, 0/1, socialist/capitalist, … .  (Bang-bang policy in control theory)  This embrace of simplicity goes back to the Bolshevik revolution and continued all throughout the 5-year civil war that followed.

During that terrible strife, communist partisans would stop trains of ‘White Russians’ fleeing the already consolidated Red areas.  They would have the passengers dismount to line up next to the tracks and show their palms.  Those whose hands were found to be soft and/or uncalloused were executed on the spot as bourgeoisie enemies of the people.  There was no middle road to be examined, nor any propensity to do so.  Terror was the name of the game, and to make their omelet, some necessary eggs had to be cracked.

A more brutal version of this was carried out by the NKVD in the Baltics when the Soviets invaded in 1940.  The reign of stark terror lasted most of the first year as tens of thousands of Estonians (and similar numbers of Latvians and Lithuanians) were summarily executed or rousted at 3am with a 15-minute warning to prepare for a one-way cattle car trip to the Siberian gulag.  My electrician father made the ‘enemies’ list which was leaked to him, and allowed him to gather my mom and me to head into a deep forest near my grandfather’s farm.  There we spent the next six months living in a hole in the ground covered with branches and boughs while the partisan bands roamed the countryside with their lists of the condemned.

My uncle Leo was not so fortunate.  He, along with more distant members of our clan, was caught and executed.  Somehow, my great-aunt Alvina Maksimov (to the family she was ‘tädi Alvi’) survived a horrendous series of NKVD interrogations.  She ran the leading fashion house in Estonia and therefore was an obvious capitalist.  She was also the wife of Adm Maksimov, former commanding officer of the czar’s Baltic fleet.  (Of course, the admiral himself was in deep hiding somewhere unbeknownst to his wife.)  For weeks during the summer of 1940 she was told to report to the NKVD headquarters in Tallinn.  There, after waiting for hours with other similarly summoned souls, she would be ushered into a bare room containing a wooden table and two chairs on one of which sat the NKVD official with her file in front of him along with his Nagant revolver conspicuously displayed.  Two Red Army soldiers stood guard in the room.

The interrogation ended with your being allowed to walk out the door you came through, or your body being carried out the other door to the room.  All that was heard in the waiting room was a pistol shot.  It was that simple; no appeals to a middle ground where extenuating or mitigating circumstances could be presented and considered.

But that state of affairs was not reached by the Bolsheviks in one giant step.  No, it took many small steps during which certain individuals began to be publicly ostracized, shamed, silenced, refused, accused, indicted, arrested, and so on over a period time during which the new regime was busy segregating its enemies while promising a rosy future for the growing horde of compliant constituents.  This took less than ten years; by the end of the 1920s Stalin was already killing the irredeemable and deplorable non-compliants by the tens of millions in the Ukraine and the gulag.

In our land the first firm steps toward homogeneous behavior and beliefs have already been taken, and the next more firmer steps to identify and segregate the non-compliant are being outlined daily and brought to bear weekly.  The ascendant Left has made it clear that they have no intention of wanting to heal the country’s divide.  Their power is now such that more direct action is possible to proceed with their ongoing fundamental transformation of America.  If some vestiges of nuanced resolve remain, these will be systematically purged from the new policies and diktats that are promised henceforth to blanket the land.

As an example of the depths to which we have already descended, we hear today that Mollie Hemingway, the senior editor of the conservative The Federalist is on the list to have her voice be silenced.  And she is merely an ancillary in the entire process to shut down and/or deny availability of the major social media and internet mass communication channels to those about to be cancelled. (more here)

For some reason I can’t explain, I still believe that the Harris/Biden administration, along with their Team Pelosi/Schumer congressional comrades, will not be able to bring the country to its knees in this round, although they will continue to make gains.  Their final push will require more than the 80M devotees of the least accomplished and corrupt duo to inhabit the West Wing in a century.  They need more time to drill into the nation’s light thinkers such woke concepts as critical race theory and the evils of ever-present systemic racism and white supremacy movements.  However, there is nothing yet on the horizon to stop them from executing that schedule; most certainly not the current cohort of weak-kneed Republicans whom Trump has left more directionless today than ever.  And forget about the so-called middle roaders, those who only wrap themselves in their yellow stripe and bow to whichever extreme is winning.

PS. For a more local harbinger of all this, see today’s op-ed ‘No space for compromise’ by the newspaper’s editorial board in the 9jan21 Union.

[10jan21 update]  Rush to impeachment – Take 2.  Tens of millions of Americans saw nothing inciting to insurrection (or sedition) in Trump’s Wednesday speech.  If others did, then the best the country should make of it would be a public debate on the perceived deportment of the President.  Instead, we have the Dem leadership inciting impeachment for nothing but short-term political gain with their party’s radical leftwing.  Most certainly the Dems care nothing about how this ridiculous eleventh-hour impeachment attempt further seals the great divide (lower case) in our nation, and gives added support to the notion that they have an even more pernicious agenda in mind for our country.  Parts of this are being revealed daily in the hysteria by the Left’s corporatist allies to shut down communications that counter their cause – truly an evil bunch down to the marrow of their bones.  (more here)

Speaking of real sedition, did everyone pick up on Mrs Pelosi’s attempt to inject herself into the military command chain yesterday?  It was her call to General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, asking him to ignore further orders to the military from the President, and instead to consult with Congress (i.e. herself) before taking any actions.  Her avowed basis for this despicable attempt was to save the world from a nuclear holocaust that Trump might trigger, a basis without any basis save another illegitimate power grab.  The WSJ records this turn of events in its 9jan21 edition – ‘A Coup of Pelosi’s Own’.

[11jan21 update]  Where can one find Trump’s Wednesday ‘impeachable’ speech, you know the one that launched the assault on the Capitol?  The actual speech had none of what the rabid Left and their Democrat leadership are claiming, and so it has been cancelled on the internet – sorta like constantly rewriting history, news archives, and the airbrushing of photos in the USSR during the Stalin era.  By all reports of people listening to Trump on that day, the speech was a long and tedious nothing-burger.  People who left early for the Capitol found that the building had already been breached by the mob composed of people who clearly got their marching orders way before anything that the President could have said.  But all of that makes no nevermind to the dedicated Dems bent on one last TDS hurrah, and that requires that the public will not be able to find anywhere on the lamestream media those “incendiary” words that constituted the alleged damning and “seditious” call to “insurrection”.  Well, it’s hard to bury anything completely on the internet, so with a little poking I found that the Arabs on Aljazeera have posted the transcript of the Wednesday speech in its entirety (here).  Now I again invite anyone – especially of our Left – to cite the impeachable words that launched the Capitol mob.

[12jan21 update]  National Propaganda Radio’s chief counsel Michael Beller was recorded in a lengthy session by Project Veritas advising that if Democrat nominee Joe Biden lost, people should “go to the White House and throw Molotov cocktails.”  (more here)  There is no record of his having to walk back these remarks, or being booted from social media accounts.  But then, that’s understandable since he’s a leftwing TDS sufferer.  The revelation of new double standards has become a torrent since the conservatives’ Washington protest, and the assault on the Capitol.  Reading the lamestream, one is led to believe that the record of leftwing street demonstrations is as clean as the fresh-driven snow.  Some intellectual basis for the Left’s claim is expertly fashioned by two reports from George Washington University’s Program on Extremism – ‘Surveying the Landscape of the American Far Right’ and ‘White Supremacist Terror: Modernizing Our Approach to Today’s Threat’.