A Street-Fighting Man?

Gates of Vienna does not advocate violence as a solution to the problem of Islamization.

Dymphna and I take have taken that position not just to avoid being shut down by Blogger or investigated by the Department of Homeland Security — although such considerations obviously play a role in our strategic thinking — but also because we believe that violence will not provide the most effective solution to the problem.

Violence may indeed come, despite our aversion to it. But we will continue to strive for a non-violent resolution through public debate and the ballot box.

We may well be pursuing a chimera, but we will persist.

When I was in school in England back in the 1960s, one of our teachers was a man who had lived in Germany during the interwar period. He was adamant in his belief that no one who had lived through an extended time of civil unrest would ever wish for such a thing to happen.

Those who argue for violence are in effect hoping for a breakdown of civil order. Germany during the period 1918-1923 — from the Armistice through the Treaty of Versailles to the Inflation — provides an instructive example.

The Freikorps — disillusioned nationalists who had been armed by the war, and then deprived of their monarch — took to the streets to do battle with the Communists. During the same period Anton Drexler founded the Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, later the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (National Socialist German Workers Party, NSDAP) to oppose the international socialism of the Communists. The streets of Berlin ran red with blood nearly every night.

And we all know how that one turned out.

The rule of law is a precious thing, not to be lightly discarded. Yes, I realize that our treasonous leaders on both sides of the Atlantic are dismantling the rule of law even as I write these words. But its total disappearance — warring militias, armed thuggery, heaps of bodies in the streets — is not an alternative to be desired.



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