January 6th And The Charge Of The Hairy Crazies–Look Elsewhere For True Anarchy, Coups, And Revolution

The civil wars of Angola, Zaire, Sierra Leone, and Liberia were not pretty affairs – violent, savage, brutal excesses for the sake of dominion over land, natural resources, or simply power.

The conflicts in Sierra Leone and Liberia were perhaps the most stunning in their barbarity.  Child soldiers were kidnapped from poverty, trained in the art of killing, and sent off to massacre the enemy which sent the same badly trained, brainwashed children into battle.

The subcontinental African conflict between Angolan rebels and South African regulars was no less savage and left Angola in a state of perennial war.  In Africa there are no such things as easy Western-style lines of engagement.  Every tribal group wants in, and no chance to up the ante, rise up the ranks, and make money is lost.  The vast wealth of Angola – oil, diamonds, and minerals – is worth fighting for; so when the more traditional war ended, the real battle for turf and population control continued.

The secessionist war between Katanga Province and the federal government of Kinshasa was one of the first and most bloody battles for the continent’s vast natural resources.  Copper was like gold in the 50s and 60s, and assessment of military losses and gains relative to war’s objective – today’s risk-averse calculus – had no place in the minds of Katanga rebels whose eyes had always been on the prize, and nothing would deter them from achieving it.

Civil wars in Algeria after independence from the French were no different – horrific, bloody affairs.  The same was true once the former Yugoslavia broke apart after the demise of the Soviet Union – every one of the former republics saw the opportunity to reclaim the rights over land, wealth and resources and years of civil war followed in Bosnia, Herzegovina, and Kosovo.

The civil wars in a once calm African idyll – Mali - have pitted corrupt governments and even more corrupt militaries against ISIS, the Tuaregs, and themselves.  Ethiopia has been in a perpetual state of civil war with battles over small tracts of worthless desert wastes.

The guerilla warfare in Colombia pitting the rebel FARC and the federal government was never ending.  Cocaine and emeralds fueled the fighting and no side seemed to have the military power or international support to gain victory.  The civil wars in Nicaragua and El Salvador, in both of which the United States played an important role, were more political in nature, challenging the US government with communist intent.   Death squads, extrajudicial killings, civilian atrocities, and prolonged fighting disrupted and disabled both countries now struggling to regain a place at the commonwealth of nations.

The ragtag bunch of hairy, Halloween-costumed wing nuts who stormed the steps of the Capitol early in 2022 needed to be stopped like any other bunch of hoodlums, street thugs, and wooly crazies.  The fact that this gang of louts, pimps, crackers, and wackos from the backwoods got as far as they did was a testimony to their inchoate and wild ambitions.  They were not neutralized and stopped well before the events at the Capitol exactly because they were simply toothless, aimless, leftovers.  Stopped they were, and as much as the progressive Left insists that this was indeed an attempted coup orchestrated by none other than Donald Trump, the nation saw Halloween gone bad.

There are some who have compared Donald Trump to Hitler – both geniuses of incendiary rhetoric, masterful staging torchlight marches, and bloody-minded, raw pursuits of power – and that Trump as orchestrator of January 6th was no different than Hitler and his support of the Brown Shirts, the Gestapo and the SS.

Worse are these same progressives who claim that the Charge of the Hairy Crazies was a coup, a violent insurrection, a revolution of national proportions.  Such a claim diminishes the lives of those millions of Africans and Central Americans who have been innocent victims of real coups, real insurrections, real, savage violence.

Hilarious, raucous laughter was heard in the halls of Luanda, Bamako, San Salvador, and Freetown when news of the ‘attempted coup’ in Washington broke.  Government and military leaders and their political claques howled with delight over the events of January 6th which proved beyond a doubt that the United States was a withdrawn, myopic, self-important nation with no sense of proportion; all of which boded well for these ragged, failing societies which understood that no nation which so misunderstood human nature and its most violent expressions would ever be feared.

The same hilarity was heard during the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky affair.  How could the President of the United States, the most powerful man in the world, be satisfied with diddling an intern with a cigar, getting sucked off, and then denying it with “It all depends on what is is”.

We may not like the Big Men of Africa, presidents-for-life, one-party dictatorships and perpetual political manipulation for personal gain, but they, like it or not, are what make the world go round.  Genghis Khan had no feminine side, no compassion, and not one iota of conciliation in him.  He created the most extensive empire the world has ever seen and did it with blood, savagery, and brutal intimidation.  While the likes of today’s Big Men or imperialists like Putin, Erdogan, or Xi are only tepid reminders of the master, they still have Khan-like intentions. 

America, especially in this love-one-and-all inclusive, diverse, compassionate progressive era, actually believes that simply by setting an example of political rectitude, doing the right thing, and most of all, caring, it can and will prevail.  Meanwhile presidential offices throughout the world are laughing .  American political response to this January 6th thing – so immature, so childish, so ridiculous – is a perfect example of America’s dalliance with fanciful idealism.  Any country getting so upset over nothing, an upsetting of a tea table, broken china and bibelots and nothing more not only cannot be feared, is automatically and summarily dismissed.

Now that a Republican House of Representatives has replaced the Democratic one, the clamor for a public evisceration and hanging of Donald Trump will lessen; but the political vixens, the inveterate Trump haters, the progressive, gray-haired Swarthmore women will keep up the Salem-style call for ‘justice’.  The preachers of Puritan Salem had the right idea, they opine. Torture the bugger until he confesses, then boil him in oil.