A reactionary is someone who reacts. In political terms, a reactionary favors a return to a former political order. In the USA, the former political order was slavery. In the UK, the former political order was serfdom and indentured servitude. In Russia, the former political order was collective farms and gulags (Stalinism) and before that serfdom and peasants. In most countries, before the industrialism was agrarianism – basically back-breaking farming.

In its purest form, the ultimate return would be a return to living in caves or its equivalent – fallout shelters. Scientists like Albert Einstein and quality science fiction writers long ago came to the conclusion that after World War Three, that World War Four would probably be fought with sticks and stones because civilization would collapse and humans would return to the Stone Age. Of course there would be changes: The air would be unbreathable, the water undrinkable, and even if you could grow crops, then they would be full of radioactive isotopes. As for sticks, most trees would be burnt up in the firestorms of either a thermonuclear war or the Earth being hit by an asteroid such as the Biblical Wormwood (sometimes called Nemesis).

This is not to suggest that all survivalists are reactionaries. Survivalists come from all over the political spectrum. However, survivalists who are also reactionaries can be identified by their hoarding of weapons and ammunition while other survivalists stock up canned food and bottled water. It is fair to ask if reactionary survivalists plan to rob other survivalists after World War Three. They claim they want to defend themselves against thieves. But who would want what they have? You can’t eat bullets.

Historical examples of reactionaries are slave-owners (such as southern plantation masters), Confederates, the Red Shirts (of the Reconstruction South), the Nazis (a contraction of the German word Nationalsozialistische which translates as National Socialist), and the Italian Fascists. Modern-day examples of reactionaries are ultraconservatives, members of the John Birch Society, extreme right wingers, neo-Nazis, neo-Confederates, Sons of Confederate Veterans, the Ku Klux Klan, the kind of Religious Right Christian Fundamentalists who send their children to Bob Jones University, and Islamic Fundamentalists such as the Taliban who want to return to the past.

Wide swathes of the world are still ruled by brutal right wing dictators (most of Africa and most Muslim countries) who keep their countries from progressing and even try to take them back to a medieval or feudal system of the past. The US government (in the name of the American people) has traditionally supported these thugs by giving them billions of American tax dollars and then average Americans actually wonder why we are hated by average people in other countries! However, there have been promising signs of progress in removing dictators in Africa and Middle Eastern Arab countries in 2011.

Examples of individual reactionaries are:

• Jesse Helms – who used code words like “block” when he said to stop the “block” (black) vote and was nearly the only non-South African to support apartheid
• Barry Goldwater – who used the N-word when he saw black reporters at a Republican convention and voted against the Civil Rights Act
• Richard Nixon – nearly impeached for the Watergate cover-up
• Ronald Reagan – He kicked off his winning presidential campaign with a stump speech in Klan country near where the boy Emmett Till was tortured to death and went on to get the CIA to sell drugs in black ghettos to fund illegal activity in the Iran-Contra scandal. Reagan also bankrupted the middle class in America. Numerically, the middle class is the majority of the population.
• George Bush Jr. – He bankrupted the working class and took the Trillion dollar surplus left behind by Clinton and left the country with a Trillion dollar deficit that President Obama has to clean up. [Round numbers are being used here for the sake of brevity]. 9/11 happened on his watch because of Operation Ignore and because of his close ties to the billionaire bin Laden family. The only plane that flew after all planes were grounded was the private jet of the bin Laden family. Did anyone think to interrogate them as to the whereabouts of Osama? Only now (May 2011) are the three wives of Osama in custody. His administration had such a dismal environmental record that not only can one conclude that he was pro-air pollution and pro-water pollution but by delaying progress on reversing climate change, he may well have doomed the human race. Widely considered the worst leader of all time – up there with Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Jefferson Davis, and Pol Pot.
• Karl Rove – who led the Republican wilding known as the Patriot Act which nullified the Bill of Rights
• Dick Cheney – He supports torture. This makes America no better than Iraq under Saddam – and using Saddam’s own prison Abu Ghraib. This policy shift puts US service men & women as well as US intelligence agents in danger of being tortured if captured where before it was unacceptable because if the USA does it, then people around the world figure it is okay. And that in turn is because people in other countries follow the example set by the USA.
• Sarah Palin – She thinks global warming is imaginary after being governor of a state impacted by global warming. Alaskan coastal villages have been lost to the sea as the average temperature there rises along with ocean level. The ice pack of the Arctic Ocean and the glaciers in Greenland are melting even faster than the direst predictions of climate scientists. Sarah Palin has also been a member of the Birthers who think President Obama was not born in the USA. Palin rallies have often included people in the crowd who shout the N-word and reference monkeys when Obama is mentioned. [If the offensiveness of the monkey reference needs to be explained to someone, then they are too far gone to understand the explanation anyway.] “Kill him!” is said by attendees at Palin rallies and Palin uses cross-hairs on her political advertising. If the president is assassinated, they should arrest her. Governor Palin also supports drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge since the very concept of wildlife refuges (or perhaps National Parks) is foreign to her as is the fact that petroleum oil contributes to climate change. Perhaps she has forgotten that the Tran-Alaskan pipeline has had spills and that the Exxon Valdez tanker devastated part of the Alaskan coast.
• Rush Limbaugh – He condemned drug addicts until he was caught abusing drugs. He calls himself harmless but has singlehandedly led the campaign to stop any progress on reversing climate change. Bush at least would order up more scientific studies (which he would then ignore) but Limbaugh takes it a step further and doesn’t think that we should even listen to the warnings of scientists. He doesn’t think air pollution is all that bad and dismisses those who want to save rain forests (the lungs of the planet) as tree huggers. He is even pro-pollution because he thinks a Canada that is tropical would mean a greater crop yield. Has he even considered what would happen to the United States? You cannot dismiss him as merely stupid because while other reactionary talk show hosts tell their reactionary listeners to go into liberal churches and machine gun down the worshipers or to shoot Democrats like Gabrielle Giffords (using code words), he has enough sense to not advocate violence openly and overtly.