Alastair, I think we should get "real" about what the patient needs to
do. Absolutely.

What I DON'T think is that using the internet to advocate the "smoking
out and execution" of elected leaders is any way of getting real.  I
think it's mostly fake, in fact.

I think proposing this Wild West shoot-em-up "solution" appeals to
every fantasy that every teenaged boy and every adult male been fed by
Hollywood movies.  But I think it's a dumb strategy; won't work. Even
if it doesn't get the radicals doing it arrested - which I think it
might -- it won't make the change that we all want and need.

By way of analogy, I remember the differing strategies for the black
civil rights movement that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Black
Panthers advocated in the US in the 1960s.  Dr. King was not always the
saint he's portrayed to have been, but he pushed a strategy of
non-violent civil disobedience that was denounced by some critics as
wimpy; yet it was a strategy that thousands of African Americans in the
South could actually follow.  It appealed to the US media as well, it
won enormous publicity, and eventually it helped push the US government
and the society as a whole into making enormous changes.

The Black Panthers, who both scared me and appealed to my guilty white
conscience in the 1960s, got enormous publicity by carrying around guns
and displaying those guns when trying to monitor the police to prevent
police brutality.  The result was that there were something like 19
leading Black Panthers killed in less than a decade; the mass media
ended up hating them, and their movement disappeared quickly without
achieving its revolutionary objectives.

I mean no disrespect to the Panthers, who seem to have been
remarkably brave individuals.  But individual acts of violence, I
think, are pretty much useless in terms of inspiring large-scale social
movements.  I'm also opposed to them on moral grounds, which I guess
makes me wimpy and biased, and I have to admit that by boldly breaking
all the rules, someone engaged in violence can sometimes trigger the
imaginations of the apathetic.   And triggering the imaginations of
people is a good thing.

But generally speaking, I think strategies based on individualized acts
of violence LOSE, and often trigger counter-reactions that make
everything worse than before.  And what is the point of following a
strategy that's going to lose?

Lenin and the Bolsheviks, in 1902, based their revolutionary strategy
not on individual acts of terror, but on a newspaper - Iskra, or "The
Spark" -- on the theory that when the great masses of the Russian
working class and Russian peasantry got real information about what was
happening in society, and a radical theory of what it meant, THEY, the
workers and the peasants, would make the revolution.

Not a few idealistic bomb throwers, saboteurs and terrorists trying to
act on behalf of everyone else - but the aroused people themselves
would make the revolution.  And while I certainly don't support
everything that Lenin and his followers did, I think history shows that
this strategy of fighting "ruling class hegemony" with IDEAS and
INFORMATION eventually did have just the effect that was expected of
it.

If we want to get the grossly overweight patient in my analogy to diet,
I think, we're going to have to MOTIVATE the patient to change.  Not
hit him over the head and tie him up so we can force him to diet.
Especially since he's a hell of a lot bigger than we are, and he's got
an assault weapon at his side.  If we try hitting him, unless we knock
him out on the very first try, he's going to kill us.

If we want to avoid committing revolutionary suicide for no purpose,
then, we HAVE to talk to the man -- and in language that will get him
to listen.  But you're absolutely right about the situation now being
fairly desperate, and change being needed soon.