Kessler's Rebellion

"You go to some of these small towns in Pennsylvania like a lot of small towns in the midwest. The jobs have been gone for 25 years and nothing replaced them and they've gone through the Clinton administration and the Bush administration and each successive administration has said these communities are going to regenerate and they have not. So it's not surprising that they get bitter and they cling to their guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them." Barack Obama- 2008 Presidential election

"Welcome to Gilberton, Pennsylvania, where men with loaded guns, propping up a suspended police chief accuse all other citizens of being “tyrants”. It is a place where men with Swastika tattoos claim the “other people” are the Nazis. What, didn't you hear about this on CNN, Fox, MSNBC, or really anywhere else? Isn't NPR even interested in this story? For whatever the reason, no one is touching this. Perhaps the Federal government fears a stand off and doesn't want this to snowball, or inspire other towns with similar demographics to go the same route. Whatever the reason, this is a true case of media blackout." Daily Kos-August 6,2013

The events in the small Pennsylvania town of Gilberton over the past month have served at once to focus and expose the deep rifts in American society which have grown into ever deeper chasms under the Obama regime which has arguably become the most divisive administration in US history. As the specters of economic collapse, civil unrest, a de facto police state, martial law and even the prospect of a civil war loom over the nation, an unprecedented extremity of opinion, mutual hostility, and open confrontation has created a supercharged atmosphere of intolerance, suspicion, and outright hatred. Such is the present legacy of five years of the present regime.

Many had long expected that the contradictions inherent in such a pluralistic and yet grossly unequal system would inevitably breed the kind of destructive impulses kindling the inevitable the societal conflagration incrementally spreading across the land. After having been lulled into the stuporous complacency of visceral satisfaction fed by decades of unfettered material consumption and the apathy which accompanies chronic over indulgence the largely incapacitated American public now struggles under the increasingly unsustainable weight of the failing empire, corrupted, debt ridden, demoralized, the at once envied and much despised opprobrium of the rest of civilization.

Chief of Police Kessler of Gilberton and his 100 man "militia", the so called Constitutional Security Force, are the first public glimpse into what is now transpiring in the inner enclaves of "small town" America that the putative president so condescendingly referred to in 2008. While the more discerning might speculate as to the real origins and purpose of Kessler and his Pennsylvania mountain men, there is little dispute that they are presently a determined, well armed, and funded force to be reckoned with, who control the environs of the town of Gilberton and undoubtedly far beyond in at least apparent open opposition to the federal government. As well displayed in the various videos posted by Kessler and his minions on YouTube, the militia is throwing down the gauntlet and openly challenging the attempts by federal and state governments to regulate and restrict the possession of firearms in direct violation of the Second Amendment of the Constitution. 

In view of the fact that the Kessler's CSF purportedly commandeered a Gilberton town meeting and prevented some citizens from entering the building, a meeting at which the town council apparently suspended Kessler for a month for the unauthorized use of town property, the implications for many Americans going forward is ominous and marks the opening salvoes in a civil war for control in the various burgs and towns scattered throughout the heartland of the nation.

Domestic Subversion 

The well established and historic propensity for subversion through the ancient stratagem of "divide et impera", or divide and conquer, has been practiced by successive US administrations with varying degrees of success internationally for several decades. The clandestine efforts of intelligence agencies often involve arming and funding opposing sides in the internal political dynamics of nation states. Indeed, the Hegelian dialectic of thesis, antithesis, synthesis as expressed in the actionable formula of problem- reaction-solution has formed the basis of the attempts to proactively "create" history through the opportune levers and organs of state power. 

The absolute control and manipulation of the destiny of nations depends upon the ability to promote social and political policy through conflicting ideological constructs. The resulting and inevitable conflicts of diametrically opposed positions and their equally inevitable resolution give rise through the Hegelian model to the desired "synthesis". The present "controversy" over the availability and accessibility of firearms to the public and its underpinning in the Second Amendment is but one of the most recent emanations of this paradigm.

 Nowhere in the world have guns and ammunition been made so readily accessible than in the US. Now that the efforts to regulate and limit that relatively heretofore unquestioned access have accelerated in the US the last bastion of the unfettered possession of firearms, the struggle between the antipodes of the dialectic have been formally engaged. The obviously provocations of engineered mass shootings at the Aurora theater and Sandy Hook are intended to have as their template the 1996 Port Arthur massacre in Australia which resulted in the ban of semi-automatic weapons in that country and the strict regulation of most other guns, resulting in their de facto elimination.

While the Australian gun confiscation was effected through largely "peaceful" means, the situation in the United States some 20 years later as evidenced in the provocative actions of Mr. Kessler and the CSF as well as the unprecedented militarization of local police agencies and multifarious domestic federal government agencies, promises an infinitely more violent outcome. When we consider the volatile undercurrents of extreme racial hostility exacerbated by the Zimmerman affair and the profound social dislocations of the economic implosion, one can only expect the most dire consequences.