When the Villagers Finally Have Had Enough of the Pillagers Some adversaries only understand defeat.
When the Villagers Finally Have Had Enough of the Pillagers Some adversaries only understand defeat.
I’m watching two different things play out at the moment, and it seems awfully clear that the same rule governs the ultimate resolution of both.
Yes, I’m talking about Iran. I’m also talking about their domestic allies here in the United States, the Democrat Party.
The people in charge of Iran are eerily similar to the people running the DNC. They both boil down to something which gets described in different ways; my formulation would be to call them pillagers.
As in, the world is divided into two camps — villagers, who make their livings and express themselves based on what they build and earn and negotiate for on the basis of giving value for value, and pillagers, who get by on what they can shake out of the villagers. Democrats and millenarian Twelver Shi’ite barbarians are both pillagers.
And then there’s Zorhan Mamdani, who seems to be something like the nexus between those two groups. But that’s another column.
The thing about pillagers is that they don’t respect the rules of the village. Their view of the village hasn’t really changed from the days of the Mongols and the Huns — the village is a place where you ride in with swords and arrows drawn, slaughter the villagers and burn their buildings down after you’ve looted the place for all it’s worth, and then you head back to camp with your wagons laden with their valuables and goods, not to mention their women and children as your slaves.
Negotiations with the pillagers generally involve how much tribute they’ll let you pay them in order that they don’t ride into the village with torches burning and swords out. The idea of the pillagers agreeing to bring anything to the table in those negotiations is a pretty arcane one, but it’s not unheard of.
You get to that latter negotiation when the villagers raise an army and abjectly kick the pillagers in the teeth with it. For advice on how that’s done, you can ask Julius Caesar, for example. Or perhaps Jan Sobieski.
It generally takes a lot to raise the hackles of the villagers enough to want to engage in such unpleasantries. Consider that even in December 1941, mere hours before Pearl Harbor, there was an American consensus for staying out of World War II. That’s the underlying context behind those conspiracy theories, which had Franklin Delano Roosevelt letting the attack happen so that he could drag the public into the war.
The thing those theories miss is that it isn’t about the villagers. It’s about the pillagers. The enemy has a vote, and what he votes for is war.
The Left does this thing with the world’s various pillager regimes. It’s something of a weird anthropomorphism, whereby they pretend, for example, that the Twelver Shi’ite lunatics who run Iran — who openly espouse their goal of starting so much trouble that a 1,200-year-old imam will climb out of a well and perfect the world — were just regular guys minding their own business until Mean Donald Trump and his Hebrew overlords came along to break their rice bowls.
The thing to remember about this is that while it’s a stupid argument they’re making, it’s not one born of stupidity. It’s bad faith that underlies this, just like it was bad faith that allied the Left with Fidel Castro, Joe Stalin, Daniel Ortega, and Yasser Arafat.
Game recognizes game. Pillagers recognize pillagers. The Left in America has always fantasized — and fetishized — the kind of power a Castro or Mao or Ho Chi Minh could agglomerate, and as such, they’ve modeled themselves after those monsters. Otherwise, why would anybody wear a t-shirt with Che Guevara’s face on it? Guevara died screaming like a little bitch with no friends around, once the Bolivian villagers decided they’d had enough.
And that brings us to the lesson, which is that negotiating with these people on any terms other than those dictated by the villagers is utterly fruitless.
Donald Trump is a businessman. In Trump’s reality, there’s always a deal to be had. There’s a win-win somewhere. One of the interesting things to watch, where Trump is concerned, has been his arc in this regard. Trump, particularly in his first term, came into office with an almost charming naivete. He did strike some very good deals, and he did have a lot of successes. But the Russia hoax was a good example of how utterly unprepared Trump was for the intractability of the pillager Obama regime he was replacing, and they all but wrecked his presidency on a series of laughable lies.
At least with Iran in this term, Trump understood that in order to get a deal, he’d have to impose the villagers’ will on the mullahs. What he’s finding out now is that there is no deal to be had with this regime.
Accordingly, it seems like Trump has settled on a sustainable and correct policy, which is simply to blockade Iran and run out the clock on their regime until it dies.
That’s messy, though. We’re already seeing evidence that rather than shutting in their oil wells, the Iranians are dumping crude into the Persian Gulf — something which, if it continues, will create an ecological disaster not dissimilar to Saddam Hussein lighting all the Kuwaiti oil wells aflame during the first Gulf War. And if you think the welfare of the Iranian villagers will be held in any consideration as the blockade continues, you should think again. This is going to hurt a lot of people. But Iran getting a nuclear weapon that they will almost certainly drop on Tel Aviv at their first opportunity — because if that doesn’t raise the Mahdi, then nothing will (hint: nothing will) — hurts even more.
As for the pillagers here at home, there isn’t such a cohesive strategy. Though the fact that state legislatures throughout the South have jumped on the opportunity following the Callais decision to impose the same sorts of district maps on the Left that it has imposed in blue states does look like the presence of some fighting spirit. The naming of JD Vance as the “fraud czar” and the rapid escalation of prosecutions of welfare fraudsters who seem to have an inordinate volume of connections to the Democrat political class is another example.
Trump’s administration this time around seems to be showing more of an understanding that the pillagers can’t be bargained with. But that understanding is severely lacking among the lesser lights of the GOP.
Even there, though, I can see a bit of progress. Those primary elections in Indiana, where the RINO state senators who refused to draw new congressional maps after the governor and state House demanded them were blown out, was a strong signal that the villagers are ready to send the army to rout out the pillagers.
The fact that appeasers like John Cornyn and Bill Cassidy look like goners in Senate primary races in Texas and Louisiana, respectively, looks a lot like a change in tone. And the legislators in Tennessee who last week were unmoved by an unmitigated Charlie Foxtrot of a spectacle put on by that state’s political pillager class, passing a new Congressional map which likely has the effect of replacing a white Jewish leftist guy with a black conservative woman — as the pillagers screech about the loss of “Black representation” — deserve a special bit of mention for their pugnacity.
But we need more. Much more.
We need a Republican Party — not to mention an American majority — which is resolved to the reality that we have enemies, people who hate us and who can’t be reasoned with, and we aren’t going to be able to make peace with them any other way than by first inflicting harm on them in volumes that change their worldview.
And we don’t have it. Not yet. But it does seem like that’s coming.
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