I've had this in the back of my mind for a while.
Most people think Phil Sheridan, who hated Indians with a passion, said the only good one was a dead one. He didn't, of course, It was honed down into that familiar quote.
A lot of people felt that way, from the days when the Wild West was west of the Hudson River to the islands of the Pacific in WWII. Many had reason. And, yes, decimating the fighting men of one side helps the winners prevail all the more completely.
Many of the South's leading commanders (Stonewall, JEB, Van Dorn (granted, shot by a jealous husband), and Albert Sidney Johnston, etc.) and sizeable portions of its troops were killed in action. The best the unreconstructed Confederates could do was the Klan.
We know how the Commies obliterated anybody who could be a nuisance any chance they got, to the tune of 130 million dead. Hitler achieved the same with the Night of the Long Knives and other vehicles of civic enhancement. The French citoyens wiped out the nobility and the Good Ol' US of A didn't have much trouble with Loyalists because the American Revolution was also a very ruthless civil war at the end of which a great many Tories departed for more congenial outposts of royal Albion. Many returned, but any resistance was DOA.
So consider this point. We all know the enmity between the ever-shrinking (and it is) Left and real Americans continues to gain in viciousness. The Brooklyn shootings Troop mentioned are the latest example. A lot of people think we'll see a second (third, actually) civil war.
If so, will we have to decimate the Left unto the third and fourth generation or, as Andrew Jackson did with the Five Civilized Tribes, drive them from the United States?
I ask this because we all know the Lefties are in it for the long run. We've beaten them before and they've always regenerated. It took the Democrats 50 years to bounce back from the Civil War and another 20 before they were able to control of the government. What we call the Deep State is merely the way the Left used civil service. The Roosevelt Reds stayed for their 20 years in the bowels of the government and many got another Federal job for another 20 years. The old New Dealers became so entrenched, it took someone like Reagan, who was willing to wage war on them, to change things and the old Reds passed the torch to the hippie dippy types trained by more New Dealers, tenured in colleges all across the country.
And that's where we are today.
So, we'll play a new round of Dorothy Thompson's old parlor game, Who Goes Nazi?.
Can we live with these people or is it them or us, to the last man, woman, and child? They've always had it in the backs of their minds. What William Ayers dreamed 50 years ago is being proposed today under the rubric of Flu Manchu. They would if they could.
Where do you come down?