Ian Welsh

It took me a while to understand the reaction to the attack on the Capitol. At this point only five people have been killed, no actual Reps or Senators were harmed, and so on. The response, however, has been absolutely savage. If it is up to Liberals, everyone involved will go to prison, and Reps and Senators will be impeached. (It probably isn’t up to them on the latter.)

Biden is talking about creating a new law aimed at ideologically-driven violence, which will be Patriot Act II, and which will be used far more frequently and far more intensely against BLM and Antifa than against the right-wing. Among other things, it’ll be a tool for law enforcement, and law enforcement is right-wing or neoliberal, as are prosecutors.

As with 9/11, the reaction is being driven by FEAR. Terror, even. Those who have something in the US realize they could lose it all, and those who have little but are keeping their heads above water, realize that they could have those heads shoved below water and held there.

It’s the fear of a COUP, of insurrection, of the government being overthrown. Liberals now really believe it can happen in the United States. The attack finally broke through their shell of, “Oh, we can fuck over 90 percent of the population and put 99 percent of the population in fear and it won’t backfire! Oh no!”

They now understand that their political order is in danger, and not eternal. It is not “The End of History,” their version of political-economy is not eternal and everlasting, nor obviously the good and right and everyone knows it and agrees.

And it’s those ungrateful right-wingers, the ones they’ve been pandering to for 40 years. The nerve!

Now let’s first point out that this is TERROR of a COUP.

A coup.

The US has launched dozens of coups around the world. The US is the world leader in coups. The US overthrows governments regularly, including democratic ones.

My overseas friends are having a great time with this.

Why did the coup in DC fail? Because the is no American Embassy in DC to provide logistical support.

…

Why was there a coup in the US this year? Because travel restrictions meant they couldn’t do one overseas!

You get the idea.

So, if you are terrified of this attempted coup, and what will happen if a future right-wing coup succeeds, you now understand what those in dozens of other countries have gone through and those in a hundred countries or so fear.

Get it? Coups are terrifying and bad, especially when they overthrow a democratically-elected government.

THE US IS THE BAD GUY.

American-backed coups were and are an act of evil aggression. Biden will continue trying to overthrow Venezela and Iran, learning nothing, and Americans, learning nothing from this experience, will continue to support his efforts.

What’s happening in the US right now is that FEAR is controlling people’s reactions. Fear is probably appropriate, because as best I can tell, there are going to be similiar actions at almost all of the 50 state capitols. In Pennsylvania, Republicans refused to seat a Democratic Senator.

The US government has a legitimacy crisis. Something like 20 to 25 percent of voters think that the government is illegitimate, that the election was stolen, and that the Democratic party is illegitimate. Democrats feel the same about Republicans.

Twenty to twenty five percent is enough to sustain an insurrection more or less indefinitely, though somewhat below the threshold need to win a serious one.

The US is in for a bad period. People who genuinely think that an election was stolen and government is illegitimate, will do something about that and feel completely justified. Massive de-platforming and censorship of their views is going to be seen as confirmation of their world-view — that the media has been lying to them (which it has, but not about the election), and will not quell the insurrection.

Welcome to the Hell you imposed on other countries, USA. I didn’t want this to happen, even though, honestly, as a country, the US deserves it (though yes, many individual Americans don’t). Perhaps, instead of letting terror drive you to be even greater monsters, you might learn from this.

For those of you who are Christian, you might meditate on “those who live by the sword, die by the sword,” others on the fact that when you treat people badly, both you and they tend to become monsters. Those who are abused become abusers at a much higher rate than those who weren’t. (For a country that epitomizes this in obvious and sad ways, see Israel and its treatment of Palestinians.)

I reiterate my message of the last 12 or so years, that the US is in for bad times. With every year that has gone by, the time to get out or prepare for those bad times has decreased.

The US now has the necessary conditions for a low grade insurrection. How bad it will be, or if it will fizzle out, I don’t know, but the conditions exist.

Take that into account, and remember, the right-wing militias include a lot of eliminationists. They want to kill left-wingers, Jews, Blacks and “race traitors” in vast, vast numbers. If they ever get the chance, don’t bet on them not doing so, because if you’re wrong, it’s the last bet you’ll lose.

It’s also true, of course, that this could be a cyclical thing that doesn’t hit the worst excesses possible in the cycle and subsides. I certainly hope so, for a variety of reasons. Just understand that right now we don’t know that it will subside.

The next four years, at least, are going to be UGLY. Be prepared.

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I want to return to this once more.

If you’ve watched videos of the protestors who got past security in Congress you know they weren’t exactly the A-Team. It’s true they had a little bit of inside help, and that the cops clearly didn’t want to seriously oppose them. Even so, it wasn’t a super-sharp operation.

Yet, they did get in, and if a few of them had automatic weapons in bags, they could have killed a lot of Congress members. It is fortunate for Congress that’s not why they were there.

The conclusion I draw from this, though I’m no military man, is that an organized attack could easily take Congress and kill or take hostage almost all its members.

Even if the Capitol cops made an effort to fight back, I don’t think they’d stand a chance against people who knew what they were doing.

The defense is essentially intelligence: If you know an attack is coming, well, the Capitol cops have plenty of backup they can get onsite. That was, apparently, offered before the protest/attack and refused.

So, anyway, anyone with decent op-security can eliminate most of the legislative branch any time they want. Good to know.

(America continues to amaze. With the largest military and police budgets in the world, they persist in the legacy of 9-11, when they couldn’t get any armed planes into the sky, despite having the world’s largest air force.)

The next thing to note, AGAIN, is that the people who did this appear to have genuinely thought they were saving democracy. Had that been the case, they’d be heroes. What they are, instead, is suckers. The people who convinced them are the primary criminals here, not the schmucks who believed them — who are now likely to get a hammer dropped on them, as a cop has now died.

Next, note the following:

I have seen polls where about 70 percent of Republicans think the election was stolen. So what happens next is the creation of a myth:

There was an election, it was stolen. We tried to intervene, mostly peacefully, and we lost.

Trump has now backed down fully, and his partisans appear to be furious. They feel used, but that will turn into a “stabbed in the back” narrative.

In other words, the ideological justification for a coup will be in place: “They stole the election, and mostly peaceful efforts didn’t work, and the patriots who tried it are martyrs.”

Now this doesn’t automatically mean a coup, or revolution, or anything, but understand absolutely clearly that what has happened is a consequence of the swamp of American politics and governance. You have a massively polarized electorate and a media system which repeatedly lies to people or lets them believe lies. Slamming the barn door isn’t going to work, because what will happen is a complete distrust of remaining media.

This distrust is rational in its own way. It’s not like the “liberal” media doesn’t lie all the time, about consequential things too, like Iraq or whether Russia is putting bounties on American soldiers. They just lie about different things, in service of a different set of elites.

Once you lose trust, as in the case of the Boy Who Cried Wolf, it’s hard to get it back — even when you’re telling the truth. There’s no reason to trust the New York Times, say, or CNN, or MSNBC. They might be telling the truth, but they’re serial liars.

Add to this the fact that the US has spent 40 to 50 years dealing with economic decline for a plurality to a majority of the population, especially the young, and you have a classic recipe for bad times, including the possibility of insurrection, coups, civil wars, and so on.

There’s no way to be certain what will happen, but we can recognize that the necessary conditions are in place for very bad events.

The US has no real enemies who can harm it, except Americans. It has been that way ever since the Revolution; it’s a simple matter of geography (and these, days, insane over-armament.)

The enemy is inside the house, and he’s you.

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So, my take on Trump was always that he wasn’t a coup threat because he was too incompetent to pull it off, but that he was dangerous in the sense that he was showing someone who IS competent what was possible.

I still think that’s the case. He’s a boob.

But Trump has proven something important today: Capitol police, whose job is to protect Congress, just let the protestors through. They removed barriers and even took selfies with them.

If an Antifa group had tried this, swarming up, trying to climb through windows, shoving aside barriers, lounging in the Speaker’s Office, they’d have been shot down like dogs. Instead, I’m seeing arrest totals of around fifteen.

So what we now know is that when a serious right-wing mob or militia, one that really does intend to overthrown US government (this group did not), shows up, the cops will not stop them; their opposition will be no more than token.

At that point, it will come down to the military. In this case, it’s clear the military would not acquiesce, but for a President who gets the military onside enough to at least paralyze them, or is smart enough to make sure that the colonels or generals in charge of capitol-adjacent troops are on his side or will not intervene, the coup will succeed.

Anyway, the US is now a pre-coup nation. The necessary conditions are in place: vast inequality, poverty, a stabbed-in-the-back narrative, and a storyline that a right-wing President was overthrown through voter fraud. The police have indicated they will not stop a coup. All that remains necessary is to paralyze the military, or make a deal with them, and a smart, would-be dictator will be able to do the job.

I don’t say this lightly, and I don’t say it WILL happen. I don’t know if it will. But the conditions for it are there.

Note that the conditions are there, right now, for a right-wing coup, not a left-wing one. The cops and many members of the military are sympathetic to the right, not the left.

I’ve been saying for some time that left-wing people should consider getting out of the US if they can, and if not, figure out how to protect themselves from what is coming.

That is now more true than ever. A right-wing coup in the next ten years or so, or a civil war is now at least in coin-flip probability territory.

Might avoid it; might get lucky. But it is a bet and one with near equal odds.

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