The Bracken Anthology

by Matthew Bracken

  A SAMPLE SNIPER AMBUSH SCENARIO

  When word is received that a flash mob is forming at one of their pre-reconnoitered intersections or highway interchanges, the SAV team will assemble. Sometimes cooperating police will pass tactical intel to their civilian friends on the outside. Some clever individuals will have exploited their technical know-how and military experience to build real-time intel collection tools, such as private UAVs. Police will have access to urban security camera footage showing MUYs moving barricade materials into position—a normal prerequisite to a flash mob riot intended to stop traffic. Tip-offs to the vigilantes will be common, and where the networks are still functioning, citizens may still be able to access some video feeds. Sometimes, police will even join the SAV teams, incognito and off-duty, blurring the teams into so-called "death squads."

  The operation I will describe (and it's only one of dozens that will be tried) uses two ordinary pickup trucks and eight fighters. Two riflemen are lying prone in the back of each truck, facing rearward, with removable canvas covers concealing their presence. Their semi-automatic, scoped rifles are supported at their front ends on bipods for very accurate shooting. A row of protective sandbags a foot high is between them and the raised tailgate.

  In the cab are a driver and a spotter in the passenger seat who also serves as the vehicle's 360-degree security. The two trucks don't ever appear on the same stretch of road, but coordinate their movements using one-word brevity codes over small FRS walkie-talkie radios. Each truck has a series of predetermined elevated locations where the intersection in question will lie between 200 and 500 yards away. Each truck is totally nondescript and forgettable, the only detail perhaps being the non-MUY ethnicity of the suburbanite driver and spotter driving relatively near to a riot in progress.

  By the time the two SAV pickup trucks arrive at their firing positions on different streets and oriented ninety degrees to one another, the flash mob riot is in full swing. A hundred or more of the rampaging youths are posturing and throwing debris into traffic in order to intimidate some cars into stopping. The riflemen in the backs of the pickups are waiting for this moment and know what to expect, trusting their spotters and drivers to give them a good firing lane. The spotters in each truck issue a code word on their radios when they are in final position. The tailgates are swung down, and the leader among the riflemen initiates the firing. All-around security is provided by the driver and spotter.

  Lying prone and using their bipods for support, the shooters have five to ten degrees of pan or traverse across the entire intersection. Individual rioters are clearly visible in the shooters' magnified optical scopes. Each of the four snipers has a plan to shoot from the outside of the mob toward the middle, driving participants into a panicked mass. The left-side shooters start on the left side and work to the middle, engaging targets with rapid fire, about one aimed shot per two seconds. Since the two trucks are set at ninety degrees to one another, very complete coverage will be obtained, even among and between the stopped vehicles.

  The result is a turkey shoot. One magazine of thirty aimed shots per rifle is expended in under a minute, a coded cease-fire is called on the walkie-talkies, and the trucks drive away at the speed limit. The canvas covering the truck beds contains the shooters' spent brass. If the trucks are attacked from medium or close range, the canvas can be thrown back and the two snipers with their semi-automatic rifles or carbines will add their firepower to that of the driver and spotter.

  Back at the intersection, complete panic breaks out among the rioters as a great number of bullets have landed in human flesh. Over a score have been killed outright, and many more scream in pain for medical attention they will not receive in time. The sniper ambush stops the flash mob cold in its tracks as the uninjured flee in terror, leaving their erstwhile comrades back on the ground bleeding. The commuters trapped in their vehicles may have an opportunity to escape.

  This type of sniper ambush and a hundred variations on the theme will finally accomplish what the police could not: put an end to mobs of violent rioters making the cities’ through-streets and highways impassible killing zones. Would-be rioters will soon understand it to be suicidal to cluster in easily visible groups and engage in mob violence, as the immediate response could come at any time in the form of aimed fire from hundreds of yards away. Even one rifleman with a scoped semi-auto can break up a medium-sized riot.

  Many citizens will take to carrying rifles and carbines in their vehicles, along with their pistols, so that if their cars are trapped in an ambush they will have a chance to fight their way out. If their vehicle is stopped outside the immediate area of the flash mob, they will be able to direct accurate fire at the rioters from a few hundred yards away. Inside the fatal hundred-yard radius, unlucky suburbanite drivers and passengers pulled from their cars will still be brutally violated, but the occurrences of large mob-driven street ambushes will be much less frequent once long-range retaliation becomes a frequent expectation.

  THE GOVERNMENT RESPONSE TO VIGILANTISM

  Where they will be unable to respond swiftly or effectively to the outbreaks of street riots by MUY flash mobs, the police and federal agents will respond vigorously to the deadly but smaller vigilante attacks. These sniper ambushes and other SAV attacks will be called acts of domestic terrorism and mass murder by government officials and the mainstream media. A nearly seamless web of urban and suburban street cameras will reveal some of the SAV teams by their vehicles, facial recognition programs, and other technical means. Some early arrests will be made, but the vigilantes will adapt to increasing law enforcement pressure against them by becoming cleverer about their camouflage, most often using stolen cars and false uniforms and masks during their direct-action missions. Observe Mexico today for ideas on how this type of dirty war is fought.

  Eventually, the U.S. Army itself might be called upon to put out all the social firestorms in our cities, restore order and security, pacify the angry masses, feed the starving millions, get vital infrastructure operating again, and do it all at once in a dozen American Beiruts, Sarajevos and Mogadishus.

  Good luck to them, I say.

  A few hundred "Active IRA" tied down thousands of British troops in one corner of a small island for decades. The same ratios have served the Taliban well over the past decade while fighting against the combined might of NATO. Set aside for a moment the angry starving millions trapped in the urban areas, and the dire security issues arising thereof. Just to consider the official reaction to vigilantism separately, it's unlikely that any conceivable combinations of local and state police, federal law enforcement, National Guard or active-duty Army actions could neutralize or eliminate tens of thousands of former special operations troops intent on providing their own form of security. Millions of Americans are already far better armed and trained than a few hundred IRA or Taliban ever were. And the police and Army would not be operating from secure fire bases, their families living in total safety thousands of miles away in a secure rear area. In this scenario, there is no rear area, and every family member, anywhere, would be at perpetual risk of reprisal actions by any of the warring sides. Civil wars and dirty wars are very ugly; never forget that fact.

  In this hyper-dangerous environment, new laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in vehicles would be ignored as the illegitimate diktat of dictatorship, just when the Second Amendment is needed more than ever. Police or military conducting searches for firearms at checkpoints would themselves become targets of vigilante snipers. Serving on anti-firearms duty would be seen as nothing but pure treason by millions of Americans who took the oath to defend the Constitution, including the Bill of Rights. Politicians who did not act in the security interest of their local constituents as a result of political correctness or other reasons would also be targeted.

  A festering race war with police and the military in the middle taking fire from both sides could last for many years, turning American cities into a living hell. Remember history: when the Br
itish Army landed in Northern Ireland in 1969 they were greeted with flowers and applause from the Catholics. The Tommys were welcomed as peacekeepers who would protect them from Protestant violence. That soon changed. Likewise with our tragic misadventure in Lebanon back in 1982 and 1983. Well-intended referees often find themselves taking fire from all sides. It's as predictable as tomorrow's sunrise. Why would it be any different when the U.S. Army is sent to Los Angeles, Chicago or Philadelphia to break apart warring ethnic factions?

  For a long time after these events, it will be impossible for the warring ethnic groups to live together or even to mingle peacefully. Too much rage and hatred will have been built up on all sides of our many American multi-ethnic fault lines. The new wounds will be raw and painful for many years to come, as they were in the South for long after the Civil War. The fracturing of the urban areas, divided by no-man's-lands, will also hinder economic redevelopment for many years because the critical infrastructure corridors will remain insecure.

  Eventually, high concrete "Peace Walls" like those in Belfast, Northern Ireland, will be installed where the different ethnic groups live in close proximity. That is if recovery to sane and civilized norms of behavior are ever regained in our lifetimes and we don't slide into a new Dark Age, a stern and permanent tyranny, warlordism, anarchy, or any other dire outcome. Dark Ages can last for centuries, after sinking civilizations in a vicious downward vortex. “When the music’s over, turn out the lights," to quote Jim Morrison of The Doors. Sometimes the lights stay out for a long time. Sometimes civilization itself is lost. Millions of EBT cards flashing ERROR might be the signal event of a terrible transformation.

  It is a frightening thing to crystallize the possible outbreak of mass starvation and racial warfare into words, so that the mind is forced to confront agonizingly painful scenarios. It is much easier to avert one's eyes and mind from the ugliness with politically correct Kumbaya bromides. In this grim essay I am describing a brutal situation of ethnic civil war not differing much from the worst scenes from recent history in Rwanda, South Africa, Mexico, Bosnia, Iraq, and many other places that have experienced varying types and degrees of societal collapse. We all deplore the conditions that might drive us toward such a hellish outcome, and we should work unceasingly to return America to the path of true brotherhood, peace and prosperity. Race hustlers of every stripe should be condemned.

  Most of us wish we could turn back the calendar to Norman Rockwell's America. But we cannot, for that America is water long over the dam and gone from our sight, if not from our memories. John Adams said, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” If that is true, judging by current and even accelerating cultural shifts, we might already have passed the point of no return.

  The prudent American will trim his sails accordingly.

  (This non-fiction essay and the short story “What I saw at the coup” were both written largely in response to the article published on July 25, 2012 in the semi-official Small Wars Journal titled “Full Spectrum Operations in the Homeland: A Vision of the Future.” My twin essays represent starkly different “visions of the future” that would-be tyrants, their hopeful henchmen and other self-deluded nimrods may want to consider, before ordering the U.S. military or militarized federal agencies to suppress Americans citizens.)

  #11

  September 2012

  How Islam—and the ever-present threat it poses to humanity—could be brought to an end

  (Posted in Lawrence Auster’s “View From the Right”)

  Your commenter James P. writes: “Muslim refusal to engage in rational debate, engage in self-examination, or permit “humorous” attacks on their religion are not weaknesses. They are mighty strengths! They are not Islam’s ‘brittle glass jaw’; they are its bulging biceps! These attributes generate fear in their enemies, and cause their enemies to seek to avoid provoking Muslims and to appease Muslims when they are angry.”

  I agree that these attributes of Islam have proven to be a great advantage to it as a war religion for 1,400 years. However, we are now seeing before our eyes a paradigm shift that may bring about the end of Islam in the present generation. Samuel Huntington spoke of Islam’s “bloody borders,” but until the modern era, the true scope of the horror was only realized by the victims living on those borders who were under constant attack (the ultimately unsuccessful and now condemned counter-jihad we call the Crusades being the notable exception).

  Five hundred or a thousand miles from Islam’s bloody borders, it was always difficult to make people understand the existential threat Islam presented to all non-Muslim societies. After its early rampant “break out” period, when seen in the context of each generation, Islam appeared to be merely biting off one more small slice of territory at a time. And on it marched, generation after generation, always moving forward, rarely being pushed back, impervious to self-examination or reformation, as deadly in our modern times as it was at the beginning.

  That is changing now, because today the entire world sees Islam’s true face revealed when Muslims go into these insane rages after perceived insults to Mohammed. Their ingrained lack of introspection means that Muslims can easily be provoked into going beyond the stealth-mode they normally follow beyond Islam’s bloody borders, waking up the world to the existential threat Islam poses to all non-Muslim societies. Down the centuries, the West has often had appeasers and accommodationists as leaders, men who were willing to cut short-term local deals that over time always led to incremental Islamic advances. And these weak Western leaders were the only men who mattered, era by era. Today, as a contrast, average citizens around the world are beginning to understand how to push Islam’s automatic rage buttons, and this changes the former equation in a fundamental way. As you mentioned, videos released by lone, non-state actors at the right time could be used to torpedo the next sell-out by Western appeasers, such as over the inclusion of Turkey in the EU.

  Another fundamental difference today from prior centuries is that millions of people understand that Islam has another tremendous weakness, another glass jaw, and that is their worship of the black moon rock in Mecca as Islam’s literal god-head. This black rock enshrined in the corner of the Kaaba is essential to Islam in a way that nothing in Judaism or Christianity is. The Cross lives in the hearts of Christians, and Christianity would not be destroyed if Jerusalem or Rome were destroyed. But that physical black rock in Mecca is the “hard drive” of Islam. Muslims believe that it contains all of the sins of all of the observant followers of the Prophet since the time of Mohammed, as sort of an Islamic Doomsday Book. Two of the Five Pillars of Islam involve the physical worship of that black moon rock. One is the Hajj to Mecca where pilgrims walk in a circle around the rock, and the other is the five-time daily prayer performed in its direction. (The other three pillars are ephemeral: the Shahada conversion prayer, the tithe, and observing Ramadan.) A religion that is impervious to change or self-examination (which James P says are strengths) cannot suddenly be reduced to The Three Pillars of Islam after 1,400 unbroken years as the Five Pillars of Islam.

  In ancient Islamic history, the black moon rock was once stolen by a competing tribe, but after a brief time it was “found.” Islam carried on because nobody outside of a very small circle of imams even knew the rock was missing before it was replaced. But if Mecca was suddenly turned into a giant crater, there would be no way to conceal the fact from the world at large, including every Muslim. Today, observant Muslims believe that if every infidel nation fired every rocket and bomb at Mecca, Allah would turn them back or stop them in mid-flight. It is impossible for observant Muslims to believe that the Infidels could destroy the Kaaba, which is literally the physical manifestation on earth of their “greatest God.”

  The Crusaders were only able to retake Jerusalem for a short time, and never got close to taking Mecca (assuming that they even understood its importance to Islam and had some notion of taking
it). It was not within their power to threaten this source of Islam’s power and mystique, even if they had desired to do so. In all eras before modern mass communications, even if a Crusader “commando team” had made it to Mecca, it would not have changed anything, because the leading Muslim clerics would have replaced the black rock and rebuilt the Kaaba, and nobody would have ever known, in the same way that nobody at the time knew that the black rock had once been stolen and carried off.

  Today, the entire world would know in the same hour that Mecca had been destroyed. This would destroy Islam as surely as the Aztec and Inca religions and empires were destroyed when the Spanish conquistadors captured and executed the “living Gods” at the center of the Aztec and Inca belief systems. If there is no Mecca, there is no Islam. There can be no Islam with three instead of five pillars, the two physical pillars having been destroyed by the Gods of the Infidels. “Allahu Akbar” means “our God is greatest.” This cannot be so if the Infidel God destroys the physical god-head of Islam, which is the black moon rock at the Kaaba in Mecca.