Glenn Beck was frothing at the mouth this week -- just before he went on an obviously much-needed vacation -- about an obscure French book that is hard to obtain and which no one appears to be reading, aside from a handful of anarchist aesthetes:
While the government warns that right-wing extremists could be domestic terrorists, and The New York Times, says I could incite those crazy conservatives to violence, the extreme left is actively calling for violence!
As world economies go down the tank and unemployment continues to rise, disenfranchised people are set to explode.
The dangerous leftist book that could spark this is "The Coming Insurrection." This is a call to arms for violent revolution, authored anonymously by a French group called the Invisible Committee who want to bring down capitalism.
This started in France and spread to countries like Greece and Iceland, where people are out of work, out of money and out of patience.
Now it's coming here. The book comes out in English in the U.S. in August. I have one of the first English copies.
... Remember the media will tell you the right is the one to be feared. They do everything they can to tie any random nutjob shooting to conservatives. "The shooter was a fan of '24' — '24' starred Jon Voight — Jon Voight is a conservative!"
But this is a call for violence. Here is more:
"It's a question of knowing how to fight, to pick locks, to set broken bones and treat sicknesses; how to build a pirate radio transmitter; how to set up street kitchens; how to aim straight."
The synopsis of the book describes it as "an eloquent call to arms arising from the recent waves of social contestation in France and Europe... a strategic prescription for an emergent war-machine to spread anarchy and live communism."
A few years ago I said that Europe is on the brink of destruction. This is yet another sign that it's coming. Even in Japan where protests have been seen as taboo since the 1960s, young people angered over the economy and fear for their future — taking to the streets, beginning to unionize. The communist party of Japan says they are getting 1,000 new members a month.
This book has not even been released in this country yet. It has been passed hand to hand and via the Internet, much like the pamphleteers in pre-revolution America. Thomas Paine was one of them. He issued a call to arms. I am not doing that. You are an idiot if you start shooting people — all that does is delegitimize the cause. Be like Ghandi, like Martin Luther King.
But people on the extreme left are calling people to arms.
Funny thing about that. The extreme right -- the people Glenn Beck wants you to forget all about -- have actually been calling people to arms for a number of years now.
They've done it with books like The Turner Diaries and Hunter, as well as lesser-known texts such as Richard Kelly Hoskins' Vigilantes of Christendom, Robert Pummer's The Road Back to America, and Ben Klassen's The White Man's Bible. All these texts explicitly advocate the use of lethal violence on a massive scale in instituting white-supremacist rule. And they have roughly the same kind of circulation that The Coming Insurrection does.
Which is to say, they're largely relegated to the fringes. But that doesn't mean people don't act on them -- these books have in fact inspired the very kinds of acts of domestic terrorism that Beck wants to pretend away as just "isolated incidents" that have nothing, nothing at all!, to do with right-wing fearmongers like himself.
The people who read these books are very much with us. In the 1990s, they called it the militia movement or the "Patriot" movement. Now they just call it the Glenn Beck Fan Club. Some of them are the same folks who have been putting Beck's screed, Common Sense, on the bestseller list.
Hmmmmm... Can you say, "projection," people? I knew you could.
