I also read the following New York Times guest OpEd a few days ago. It also prompted me to think about whether Trump's cult threatening violent civil war would be willing to die for him.
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If the Jan. 6 insurrectionist they knew they would risk getting shot if they breached the Capitol barriers would there even have been an assault on the building? How many of Trump's cultists would really engage in the violent civil war they threaten if they knew they had a serious chance of being killed or wounded?
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Artem Chekhisis the author of this guest essay in The NY Times Opinion section. He wrote “Absolute Zero,” an account of his time on the front line in the Donbas, and is currently a volunteer patrolling the Chernobyl exclusion zone.
Here are excerpts:
I too have my dead. In the course of the conflict, I’ve learned of the deaths of various friends and acquaintances, people I had worked with or people I’d never met in person but with whom I maintained friendships on social networks. Not all these people were professional soldiers, but many could not help but take up arms when Russia invaded Ukraine.
I read obituaries on Facebook every day. I see familiar names and think that these people should continue writing reports and books, working in scientific institutes, treating animals, teaching students, raising children, baking bread and selling air-conditioners. Instead they go to the front, get wounded, develop severe PTSD and die.
He concludes:
To quote Kurt Vonnegut, even if wars didn’t keep coming like glaciers, there would still be plain old death. But encounters with death could be very different. We want to believe that we and our beloved ones, the modern people of the 21st century, no longer have to die from medieval barbaric torture, epidemics or detention in concentration camps. That’s part of what we’re fighting for, the right not only to a dignified life but also to a dignified death.
Let us, the people of Ukraine, wish ourselves a good death — in our own beds, for example, when the time comes. And not when a Russian missile hits our house at dawn.
This is my posted comment to his essay:
Thank you for your poignant and powerful essay. I wish it could be read by Russian soldiers dragooned into their army and being fed lies that they are liberating Ukraine and will be greeted as heroes.
I also think about members of the Trump cult here threatening a violent civil war if their messiah is indicted and wonder if they would be willing to lay their lives down for him. My sense is that only a tiny minority of them would be willing to die for him.
There's a saying here, all hat and no cowboy, which means that someone is all talk and no action. I think it applies to most of these people.
Since posting the comment above I read this:
This article noted that Trump posted this on his TruthSocial private Twitter-like website:
When Trump writes “it means by sacrificing everything” he is obviously exhorting his supporters to give up their lives for him. What else could “everything” mean?
RawStory also noted the following:
Trump also shared another post demonizing President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris and other top Democrats as enemies to the nation.
"Your enemy is not in Russia," the meme said.
What Trump is saying here is that we have nothing to worry about as far as Russia goes. They are not our enemy according to Trump. By extension he is saying we shouldn't be paying attention to, let alone be concerned about, the thousands of Ukrainians that are being killed by the Russian army. If Democrats are enemies of the nation then Trump is as much as admonishing his supporters to be what he considers patriots and take up arms against them and to be willing to die to stop them.
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Ukrainians taking up arms to fight the Russians aren't willing to give up their lives for Volodymyr Zelenskyy, they are ready to make the ultimate sacrifice for the freedom of their country. President Zelenskyy doesn't entreat Ukrainians to risk their lives and limbs fighting the Russian invaders. He doesn't have to do this.
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I seriously doubt that the vast majority of members of the Trump cult clamoring for a violent civil war, especially if Trump is indicted, would actually be willing to die for this cause. In fact, if those who invaded the Capitol on Jan. 6th knew they would risk being fired on and possibly killed or wounded I doubt many of them would have breached the barriers.
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The majority of the Jan. 6th mob weren't mentally ill the way most people who have tried to break into the White House have been. If the Capitol was protected the way the White House is with the Secret Service protecting it ready to use lethal force to protect those they are charged with the mission of keeping safe I think Jan. 6th would have been a large raucous crowd chanting slogans behind the barriers. No officers would have been injured and no bike racks would have been knocked over.
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What if the rioters at the Capitol faced what peaceful Black Lives Matter protestors faced when they demonstrated in from of the Lincoln Memorial in June, 2021?
If one of the Jan. 6th insurrectionists tried to go beyond a police or National Guard like what is pictured above and was shot dead I suspect that most of the crowd who saw this would have turned and run in the opposite direction.
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In some states home owners can simply shoot anyone, armed or not, who breaks into their homes, in others they have to flee if they can. If armed Trump cultists think of trying to break into a building, any building whether one housing a government office or not, I wonder if they would do this if they knew the police would shoot them. Do they think their Trumpian whiteness would protect them from the police who they with considerable justification think support their cause?
More media coverage:
Then, on Sunday, Trump acolyte Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) didn’t bother with the disingenuous niceties. He went straight to the threat. “Most Republicans, including me, believe when it comes to Trump, there is no law. It’s all about getting him,” Graham said on Fox News, citing the decision not to prosecute Hillary Clinton for having classified information on her private email servers. “And I’ll say this: If there’s a prosecution of Donald Trump for mishandling classified information after the Clinton debacle … there’ll be riots in the streets.”
Lest you missed his point, Graham said the phrase twice — and then Trump reposted his comments on his social media platform. A retired Air Force lawyer and chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Graham said nothing to convey dismay over the prospect of violence; to the contrary, his clear meaning was that outrage would be justified.
and this:
It could be argued that some of the QAnon cult and other believers in the MAGA message coming from Trump are gullible and believe utter falsehoods. Whether or not they are clinically delusional, or suffer from paranoid schizophrenia, can't be determined. It's possible a few of them hear command hallucinations, voices telling them they have to take up a firearm and join a mob. They might not consider, or even care, that they could be shot if they tried to engage in a violent protest where they went against law enforcement or National Guard troops with orders to shoot those who refuse orders to disperse and threaten people’s lives.
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I think that unlike those fighting the Russians in Ukraine for whom considering their own death is a very real, and a risk they willingly take when they go on missions, for those MAGA cultists threats of violence is mostly an abstraction. It is something they really don’t take seriously and don’t believe will happen to them. The want to believe they are patriots like George Washington was. They have no conception of what a true violent revolution is where the bullets are flying and people are dying.