Going Athens on Main Street?

"Going Athens," an expression I invented today, comes from the world of American history, from a little known incident--"The Battle of Athens"--that took place on Aug 1st, 1946, in Athens, Tennessee, an incident that deserves greater study for its possible contemporary implications. A brief account of the incident can be found here. A 1992 Hallmark movie, An American Story, was loosely based on the incident.

There is something vaguely apt about posting it on Bastille Day.

The concept occurred to me last night upon reading a comment placed on the board of a financial blog I follow: the comment can be found at 17:54:36 EDT posted by "Black Swan." It deals with the threat of citizen violence against the city council of Cape Coral, Florida, which "are doubling the number of police at Council meetings and are installing metal detectors. This comes after a meeting attended by 500 citizens erupted in many threats against Council members, and with half of the citizens were so enraged, that they stormed out before the end of the meeting." Read the comment and said rage is easily understood. How far might that rage take them? A look at the "Battle of Athens," also known as the "McMinn County War," might be illustrative.

What the "Battle of Athens" was all about was nothing less than a violent armed rebellion by a group of WWII veterans against a corrupt political machine, a rebellion that resulted in victory for the rebels and universal condemnation of them by the media of the time. Violence is not a good solution to problems, unless it furthers the interests of the financial oligarchy bent on dominating every aspect of all life on earth, in which case it becomes necessary force required to maintain order and therefore though lamentable, inevitable. Violence or even the threat thereof by the plebs is terrorism, plain and simple, particularly if it is directed against their betters: the financial overlords and their political lap dogs; there can be only one response to such effrontery.

Perhaps a better-known Twentieth Century American insurrection took place in 1920 in a West Virginia town that became the subject of the 1987 John Sayles film Matewan. The Battle of Matewan in turn led to "the largest armed insurrection in the United States since the American Civil War, the Battle of Blair Mountain," to quote a Wikipedia entry. The latter, larger battle has been written about in the 2006 history The Battle of Blair Mountain: The Story of America's Largest Labor Uprising and in the 1987 novel Storming Heaven, among other works, but this important part of American history is not taught in the indoctrination camps called schools, nor does one hear much about it. Instead, the news from Tennessee is that "After losing homes, families move into tents." "Tea Parties" have taken the place of hurling dynamite at the Athens jail.

"Going Athens," however, is a remote but nevertheless conceivable reaction on Main Street to the looting and repression being foisted upon the public by a globalist cabal determined to impose a global rule by a supposed intellectual elite that has replaced the corn-pone corruption of post-war McMinn County, Tennessee, with the slick Saul-Alinsky-style Acorn activist such as the one who occupies the White House.

This writer does not believe that "Going Athens" is a wise course of action, if for no other reason that the forces arrayed against any latter-day uprising would be devastating. It bears remembering that during the Battle of Blair Mountain, on orders of WWII hero Gen. Billy Mitchell, "Army bombers from Maryland were also used to disperse the miners, a rare example of Air Power being used by the federal government against US citizens. A combination of gas and explosive bombs left over from the fighting in World War I were dropped in several locations near the towns of Jeffery, Sharples and Blair. At least one did not explode and was recovered by the miners; it was used months later to great effect during treason and murder trials following the battle." Just imagine Predator drones instead of tasers and, well, you get the picture, I'm sure.

Going bye-bye might be a better option for those who believe that the U.S. and other northern hemisphere countries are becoming more like Caligula's Rome than Plato's Athens. Those of that turn of mind should give thought to resettlement in a rural Shangri-la, where "Going Athens" is called a "cacerolazo."