Yesterday I posted about the absurd plans of people who want to create separate armed enclaves where they hope to live free lives without the government imposing its will on them. As readers were quick to point out, while the military fortifications and weaponry envisaged may have been barely adequate in medieval times, it would take a modern army less than five minutes to overpower them.
Their biggest threat is not the government but having people laugh them out of existence. The Daily Show also got in its licks at this irresistible target in three segments, the second and third aiming at Glenn Beck’s even more grandiose nuttiness.
(This clip was aired on January 29, 2013. To get suggestions on how to view clips of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report outside the US, please see this earlier post.)
Glenn Beck is reputed to now be worth 100 million dollars. Where else but in the USA could a talentless asshole like him become rich?
One thing I do love about these things is that (particularly in the case of the Citadel) they mandate safety training & proficiency requirements for all firearms usage, something they would, no doubt, decry as nanny state liberalism were they to be required by any State or Federal legislation.
I wonder if those idiots know that “citadel” is an Arabic word?
Er, you sure about that?
citadel (n.)
1580s, “fortress commanding a city,” from Middle French citadelle (15c.), from Italian cittadella, diminutive of Old Italian cittade “city” (Modern Italian citta), from Latin civitatem (nominative civitas; also source of Portuguese citadella, Spanish ciuadela; see city).
Not a lot of Arabic in there that I can see, although there is some French, which I’m sure they consider almost as bad.
The idea of separatist communities is actually quite popular with “reactionaries;” people who call themselves “reactionaries.” It’s easy to make fun of Glenn Beck’s Independence, USA and the Citadel’s medieval “well fortified” planned community but these ideas and plans represent a real desire among many to “go underground” and be among “their own kind” beyond the control of the increasingly morally degenerate increasingly totalitarian liberal regime (as they see it). I sometimes wonder how real this strategy of isolation from the wider society is but it is something that a lot of people talk about. There is certainly greater residential segregation; people living more with others similar to themselves and who think like them. Often this kind of segregation appears spontaneously, a lot of it is based on churches and religious networks. The emergence of secular self-isolating communities seems to be a relatively new phenomenon.
There is a process of cultural revival that will have to take place; it is a question however how much this cultural revival will be based on the creation of and recruitment into self-isolating communities and how much the revival will be based on political style campaigning aimed at the general population where the “new recruits” will be geographically disbursed and maintain their social connections with the “ordinary people” around them. Somehow I think the religious branch of the revival will tend to self-isolate while the secular branch will tend to be “out there” in the community. That is at least the pattern so far.
The cultural revival will have two priorities; self-preservation and expansion. The self-preservation part will tend to promote a “home base” of self-segregation while the expansion part requires interaction with the community. Often this is done by having a “home base” that “outsiders” are encouraged to join. This is the typical religious model; you have an established church which is “home base” and often constitutes a socially separated community and then the church members try to recruit new people to join their church.
Alcazar?