Ron Collins
Aug 27, 2017 · 2 min read

violent extremes on the Left and the Right are two sides of the same evil coin.

In this vein I’ve long believed that the better historic occurrences to examine for clues to what is going on in America, are neither the Cold War nor either of the world wars, and perhaps not even our quite regionally-designated own civil war of the 1860s.

Each of these has value in itself as a repository of human experience to learn from, but I think that looking more deeply into the Russian and later Spanish civil wars might better help to decode what happens within nations which might ultimately lead both to international conflicts, and the rise of regimes far more repressive and despotic than had been envisioned before they began.

The Russian and Spanish civil wars ceased early on to be truly representative of any ideological cause or ideal: whether in a nation, or a village, or across a family table, one came to be either “Red” or “White” as if the conflict between the two in itself described the whole of the human experience. For the Reds to win in Russia or the Whites in Spain, showed in the longer term no essential difference in guaranteed freedom from tyranny: a Bolshevik commissar speaking Russian after a civil war was just as likely to be a danger to one’s own personal liberty, as a fascist post-Republic civil servant speaking Spanish. The likelihood of one’s door being knocked down in the middle of the night by secret police and armed soldiers was no less a threat from the one, than from the other. Ideology itself was nothing but a high-stakes, winner-take-all gamble with one’s own future: on whether the Reds or the Whites would ultimately reign supreme, and which side might be less likely to seize one’s property and throw one’s loved ones into political dungeons or line them up against walls for a firing squad.

And in these wars between neighbors, there were no firm lines, whether named “Maginot” or “Mason-Dixon” or “Iron Curtain.” To allow our own American civilization to descend into actual armed factional chaos, would be as much or more brother against brother and neighbor against neighbor as ever happened in Russia or Spain. No such luxury, as equating being on a side with living in a region behind designated borders, is available in a civil war. We might all do well as Americans to look at Russia and Spain early in the last century, and their experiences as totally fractured societies at war with themselves, when we choose what rhetoric to use and whom to identify as enemies.

Perhaps even more so, when each of us decide who are our allies.

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    Ron Collins

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    Recognizing that women have no need of any special status granted them by men is as respectful of women’s abilities as it is protective of men’s