In true progressive form, the City of Minneapolis, which has decided that it doesn’t need the police, is now advising its citizens how to surrender more effectively to criminals:

Meanwhile, Minneapolis citizen groups are having to do the work of protecting their neighborhoods from criminals. 

I moved to New York City in 1998. It was fascinating to be a newcomer to the city and to hear native New Yorkers talking about the bad old pre-Giuliani days, when the city seemed ungovernable. The city had learned its lesson, they would say, and would never go back to what it once was. Well.

The Seattle City Council is moving to abolish the entire Seattle Police Department and replace it with a “civilian led Department of Community Safety & Violence Prevention.”

In the proposed legislation, the council argues that the Seattle Police Department “[perpetuates] racism and violence” and upholds “white supremacy culture.”

The council endorses the “Decriminalize Seattle” agenda that would replace the police force with:
–”Culturally-relevant expertise rooted in community connections”
–”Housing, food security, and other basic needs”
–”Trauma-informed, gender-affirming, anti-racist praxis”

And finally, the plan demands that the City conduct an “immediate transfer of underutilized public land for BIPOC community ownership”—in essence, the redistribution of land, which is a hallmark of Marxist regimes.

This is madness. If Seattle moves forward with its plan to abolish the police and permanently close the region’s largest jail, it will lead to the immediate collapse of public order. But for now, the political class is following the mob.

The left-wing lunatics really are in charge of the city’s government. Look at these other documents someone linked to Rufo. Excerpts:

Seattle’s Office of Civil Rights has developed a “race and social justice” curriculum for all 10,000 city employees.

I’ve obtained new documents from the city’s segregated “whites-only” trainings, which induct white employees into the cult of critical race theory.

The trainers require white employees to examine their “relationships with white supremacy, racism, and whiteness” and explain how their “[families] benefit economically from the system of white supremacy even as it directly and violently harms Black people.”

Under the banner of “antiracism,” Seattle’s Office of Civil Rights is now explicitly endorsing principles of segregationism, group-based guilt, and race essentialism—ugly concepts that should have been left behind a century ago.

Rufo has screenshots of the documents and Powerpoint slides of this racist anti-white insanity. For example:

I guess at this point, I want them to hurry up and do it. We can sacrifice Seattle so liberals all over the country can see what a disaster this is and in the long run we’ll all be better off. If Seattle actually goes through with this, we are going to see a complete collapse. I mean epic. When people and businesses start fleeing and property values plummet, Seattle might make Detroit look like a healthy city.

Can it really be that the people of Seattle want this?

theamericanconservative.com

We can delegate to specialists debate over the ultimate nature and causes of the current unrest in the United States. The focus here is not on that but on one of the more ominous characteristics of the crisis, whatever its origins might be judged to be. In the Capitol Hill neighbourhood of Seattle two weeks ago, for the first time since the Civil War in the 1860s, something purporting to be a competing government was established on U.S. territory. So far, the organized forces of society, the legitimate (should we say condescendingly, the “internationally recognized”?) government, have not reacted to that challenge in any way, other than to meekly submit to some of the usurpers’ most outrageous demands. Those demands have so far centered mainly on preliminary issues such as “defunding” local law and order forces and restricting the range of tools available to them to deal with lawlessness. The resulting demoralization and disorientation of the police force, engendered by the cowardly and politically short-sighted capitulation of city of Seattle and state of Washington political leaders, is bound to have grave consequences later on. At some time in the near future, the foolishly emboldened terrorists will have to be suppressed by those same policemen (perhaps even assisted by regular army troops) once the evils released from Pandora’s box multiply and the civil breakdown becomes extensive and intolerable.

The gift of prophecy would have been unnecessary, historical perspective being enough, to accurately foresee the gangrenous spread of the Capitol Hill model elsewhere in the country, once goon squads who were trained, poised, and waiting for the authorities to demonstrate their fecklessness got the message that they could engage in repercussion-free rampages. Predictably, new “liberated zones,” run by elements that would not be described inaccurately as terrorists, are now emerging elsewhere, in Portland, Atlanta, and Minneapolis. To drive the point home, the local Seattle warlord and his henchmen have put up highly provocative signs at exit points from their illegally seized domain: “You are entering the United States of America.”

This still is not an American replay of 1917 Russia, but it might be approaching Russia’s 1905. Or, to suggest a contemporary and perhaps more meaningful analogy, it may be a re-enactment of the initial stages of the Yugoslav dissolution process detonated in the early 1990s.

Minor technical differences being duly acknowledged (the Yugoslav collapse was induced with ethnic tensions as the principal driver, while in the U.S. that role is assigned to racial tensions), there still remain impressive broad analogies. In early 90s Yugoslavia, the federal government also was disunited in purpose and political program. Latent separatisms that had kept a low profile while the economy was good and, mostly by inertia, the centralist idea still enjoyed a measure of prestige, suddenly emerged as respectable options and began to attract adherents. Violence broke out at selected points in Yugoslavia (it is still unclear who selected them and according to what criteria), as if to test the will and capacity of bewildered government structures to protect citizens and impose order. Demands to reconfigure the Yugoslav federation, rather than to deal directly with the rising tide of disorder, were put forward by demagogic local leaders who seized the attention of a divided and confused public. It soon became clear that the demagogues’ goal was not to improve the federation but to seize parts of it and turn them into their own “independent” fiefdoms. With the growing irrelevance of the central authorities, international mediation, unmistakably favouring the centripetal forces, was imposed. The “death of Yugoslavia” (as someone famously put it) was assured, and those who directed the process were obviously keen that the decedent’s rigour mortis be as uncontrollably violent as possible.

Yugoslavia scarcely would have died if influential elements within the governing apparatus had not seen advantages for themselves in helping to undermine its vitality and cohesion. Whether or not they precisely envisaged the ultimate consequences of their conduct is an intriguing question, but for the moment it can be set aside. The destroyers from outside the system and their enablers from within the system worked in tandem because they saw their separate agendas converging at certain key points. Ultimately the enablers from within the system set in motion forces that undermined their own authority, and when the smoke had cleared they were unceremoniously swept aside.

Only someone cognitively dissonant or wilfully blind will fail to sense a disturbingly similar pattern playing itself out in post-corona America.

Here is an example that should ring alarm bells. In the already entrenched “autonomous zone” of Seattle a few days ago a murder occurred and another citizen was wounded in the shootout. But here’s the rub: “The shooting happened at about 3 am in the area near downtown known as the Chaz, short for ‘Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone’, police said in a statement on Twitter. Seattle’s police department claimed in a press release on Saturday morning that when officers responded to reports of gunshots inside the protest zone, they ‘were met by a violent crowd that prevented officers safe access to the victims’.”

The police were successfully prevented from performing one of their basic functions, in this case not mob control, but simply investigating a crime scene and assisting victims.

The hooligans then sent a clear message who is in charge: “Police were later informed that the protesters’ own medics transported the two gunshot wound victims to a hospital, the department said.”

City authorities put their tail between their legs and did nothing about it. Inhabitants of the former Yugoslavia would have no difficulty interpreting the portentous significance of this comparatively minor incident and drawing proper conclusions from it.

Should it come as a surprise, then, that police in Atlanta are now inventing pretexts not to come to work and that they are increasingly refusing to respond to emergency 911 calls? Their stated rationale, that they are acting in solidarity with one of their colleagues who is being criminally prosecuted for shooting a black man to death under controversial circumstances, sounds rather indeed. But their underlying concern is serious enough, and it is a symptom of the slow disintegration of the system. Policemen see the writing on the wall and know that standard rules for dealing with lawlessness have been suspended. They do not want to risk being exposed to criminal charges for making a politically incorrect decision in a tense situation. Quite sensibly, they prefer not to be cannon fodder in confrontational games between the various warring factions of the political elite.

The process of controlled demolition has started and it is in its initial stages. Unless firm and decisive steps are taken now to counteract it using methods more civilized and professional, and less inflammatory, than those applied to the Branch Davidians, the emerging trends will at every turn become more difficult to control and reverse. Police forces are by definition the first line of defense of a cohesive and orderly society. Their demoralization and withdrawal of social support for the proper execution of their task augurs ill for the body politic in question.

All that may be music for the ears of Professor Panarin, of course strictly in his capacity as a scholarly predictor of political trends (and here). Panarin, however, has the privilege of watching the unfolding of his increasingly fashionable ideas from a safe distance. The show is less fun to watch from ground zero.

“Will you join in our crusade?
Who will be strong and stand with me?
Beyond the barricade
Is there a world you long to see?
Then join in the fight
That will give you the right to be free.”

The Donald Trump administration, which is essentially a proto-fascist regime, reacted with an expected horror to the establishment of a barricaded Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, or “CHAZ,” within six blocks of east Seattle during protests aimed at demanding an end to police brutality and other fascist law enforcement tactics.

Trump falsely claimed that Seattle’s traditional anti-war, anti-globalization, and counterculture district, was occupied by “antifa,” a non-existent organization that the far-right insists is made up of communists, anarchists, terrorists, and whatever bogeyman the right-wing decides top throw into the mix. In fact, “antifa” is a portmanteau of the words “anti,” meaning against, and fa, which is short for fascist.

The CHAZ in Seattle was declared by its residents, not outsider extremists as alleged by Trump and his allies, in the wake of nationwide Black Lives Matter protests after the police killing of African-American George Floyd in Minneapolis. Trump vowed to take back control of CHAZ with federal troops if Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan and Washington Governor Jay Inslee, both Democrats, failed to act. Such an action by Trump would have been illegal and unconstitutional on its face, but such threats have been part and parcel of Trump’s slide into fascist rule. In response to Trump’s idle threat, Durkan called the occupied area a large “block party” and told Trump to go back to his White House bunker. By June 12, Capitol Hill residential leaders were negotiating with the Seattle Police Department to permit them back into their vacated East Precinct district station, which lies in the heart of CHAZ.

The CHAZ almost immediately drew the ire of fascist vigilante gangs in the Pacific Northwest, where many such groups are often indistinguishable from police and sheriff departments. One right-wing vigilante drove his car through a group of protesters in the CHAZ and shot a protester at point-blank range. Fox News began altering its videos to show non-existent armed “antifa” gangs patrolling inside the CHAZ. Fox News’s propaganda was worthy of that spewed forth by Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels’s diatribes against Socialists and Communists during the dying days of Germany’s Weimar Republic.

The fascist right in the United States, with Mr. Trump as their loudest spokesman, began linking the CHAZ and similar nascent autonomous protest zones in Nashville, Tennessee and Asheville, North Carolina to “anarchists,” “antifa,” and “Communists.” However, the autonomous zones in Seattle and those attempted in Nashville and Asheville were nothing more than large “block parties” reminiscent of the “teach-in” protests held on college campuses during anti-Vietnam War protests in the 1960s. However, it was part of a right-wing propaganda barrage to liken Seattle and other protest zones to the Paris Commune of 1871.

After the surrender of the French government to Prussian forces in 1871, members of the French National Guard and workers established a revolutionary workers’ government in Paris. All laws that perpetuated military control over Paris were abolished, making the Paris Commune not much different than the CHAZ zone’s expulsion of police who had subjected residents of the Seattle Capitol Hill neighborhood to pepper spray, flash bang grenade, and other “non-lethal” weaponry attacks. As seen with civil rights protests around the United States and the toppling of statues honoring the Confederacy, Christopher Columbus, and Jim Crow-era segregationist politicians, the Paris Commune destroyed the Vendôme Column, which honored the military victories of Emperor Napoleon I. When the French Army entered Paris to restore the control of the exiled French government in Versailles, the Paris communards erected barricades to defend the commune. After the French Army defeated the communards, many of the revolutionaries were arrested and sentenced to death. Others were deported to French colonies like New Caledonia.

Just as Trump and his Republican lackeys called the CHAZ protesters “anarchists” and “antifa,” the U.S. ambassador to France at the time of the Paris Commune, Elihu Washburne, referred to the communards as “brigands,” “scoundrels,” and “assassins.” Any time power is seized by the people from the right-wing elites, there is always a propaganda campaign to demonize left-wing activists in the worst possible terms. It was the case in 1871 in Paris and it is currently the case in Seattle in 2020.

Seattle’s CHAZ is negotiating with city authorities on not only the return of the police under certain prerequisites, including a no-use policy on chemical agents like pepper spray and tear gas on neighborhood residents and homeless people, but also on institutionalizing the CHAZ as a governing entity. This development makes the CHAZ more like the Freetown Christiania in Copenhagen, Denmark.

Established in 1971 on the grounds of a vacated military base, Copenhagen protesters upset with the high cost of housing established their own rent-free and police-free autonomous zone. One of the leaders of Freetown Christiania was Danish journalist Jacob Ludvigsen. He wrote: “The objective of Christiania is to create a self-governing society whereby each and every individual holds themselves responsible over the well-being of the entire community. Our society is to be economically self-sustaining and, as such, our aspiration is to be steadfast in our conviction that psychological and physical destitution can be averted.”

Although Denmark’s Social Democratic governments allowed Christiania to fend for itself, conservative control by Prime Minister and later NATO Secretary General Andres Fogh Rasmussen meant trouble for Christiania. In 2004, Denmark’s Conservative government declared Christiania’s “autonomy” to be illegal. In 2005, Christiania’s 1000 residents decided to ban hashish booths along “Pusher Street” in the enclave to forestall a government invasion. In 2007, Copenhagen police entered Christiania in force. Tear gas was used on the commune’s resistance forces. Rasmussen and his right-wingers, many of them the ideological descendants of Denmark’s pro-German government during the Nazi occupation, wanted to expel Christiania’s residents as “squatters” and turn the land over to developers for the building of expensive housing units. Lawyers for the government claimed that Christiania’s residents were only given the right to “borrow” the land, not own it, pursuant to a 1989 agreement. Currently, the government of Denmark, which has, in essence, has become Denmark, Incorporated, a capitalist contrivance masquerading as a social welfare state, has given Christiania’s residents the option of buying their properties. Meanwhile, the land development vultures continue to circle the autonomous village within a city.

History has not been kind to autonomous communes. Paris’s 1871 commune was brutally put down. Revolutionary Catalonia fell to the fascist forces of Generalissimo Francisco Franco in 1938. The Kowloon Walled City was demolished in 1993 and Free Derry, an Irish nationalist enclave in Northern Ireland ended with OPERATION MOTORMAN, a massive British armed forces invasion in 1972. Athens’s anti-austerity autonomous zone of Exarcheia is now largely a thing of the past, thanks to Greece’s right-wing government. The Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (NES), a libertarian socialist collective government of Kurds, Arabs, Syriac-Assyrians, and Turkmen, in predominantly Kurdish areas of Syria, is under siege by Turkish, Syrian, and pro-Saudi jihadist forces.

A few environmentalist Zones to Defend or “ZADS” continue to exist in France and Rebel Zapatista Autonomous Municipalities or MAREZs continue to guard against Mexican federal government incursion in the rebellious Chiapas state. Christiania has suffered a slow burn to what will likely be its extinction and redevelopment as a community for Copenhagen’s wealthy elites. Seattle’s CHAZ has a rather trustworthy negotiating partner in the Seattle mayor and city council and perhaps it will continue to exist in some form. But with Trump, his supporters, and fascist armed vigilante gangs making ominous noises, CHAZ could go the way of the 1871 Paris Commune.

Not even the November election will settle matters in any final way. It might, rather, sharpen the contest further.

What are the key vectors to this scission? It is firstly, that in the U.S., ‘facts’ are no longer tolerated as facts. Facts like ideology, have separated into two irreconcilable camps, each at each other’s throats. And, secondly, any authority or sourcing for what is asserted as fact, in today’s world, has long fled the scene. Today we deal only with one psychic ‘emotivism’ (in Alasdair Macintyre’s formulation), up and over, against, another. Much heat; no light.

Those who do not agree are called any number of pejorative names, but which essentially are meant to indicate that the other be a ‘barbarian’ in the old Roman sense: i.e. someone beneath relevance; beneath one’s attention; a ‘babbler’ (barbarian’s original meaning). And worse: these people lie, and would stoop to any illegitimate, seditionist (i.e. unconstitutional) means, to obtain their illicit ends. That is how both parties, broadly, see each other. Hyper-partisanship.

This is not really new – we knew it already. But what has this to do with the Mid-East and beyond? Its salience is that, in pursuit of validation for one or other of these psychic perspectives, one U.S. faction is prepared to force submission to the ‘rightness’ of America’s founding Christian Messianism – almost oblivious to potential consequence. To this end, a large part of the Middle East is being threatened with societal and economic collapse.

Clearly, reason or diplomacy will not avail. It will be dismissed as babbling. It is striking too, that some officials almost rejoice in the pain and starvation they may cause. Their language unveils the implicit strata of religion to these actions: They speak to ‘just retribution’. If it is America’s so-called ‘interest’ to collapse Hizbullah, Syria’s President Assad or Iran’s Revolutionary government, then the American interest too, is that these whole nations, their peoples, should suffer economic apocalypse. So be it: Merited.

As one American historian, Professor Vlahos, describes the situation in the U.S.: not only has America separated into two nations, it has, furthermore, divided into two separate religious sects, at odds with each other, yet both reflecting polar sides to America’s original religious impulse. One, (the party presently in office), sees national identity rooted in an American, golden, earlier age, upholding property, commerce and liberty as traditional inherited rights (signifiers of God’s Grace, in the Calvinist, Protestant meme).

The other (more in the apocalyptic vein), “looks to the future. They call themselves progressives; see the perfection and purity that lies ahead, and looks to the past as a deep and dark stain – as an imperfect, barbarous, primitive past that needs to be cast off – and a shining uplifting future needing to be sustained”. Both are existential and conflicting visions, Professor Vlahos says, “telling us how to live; defining good and evil, there is no place for compromise between them”.

The killing of George Floyd, however, has ignited an uneasy truce into flames. Floyd’s killing has become the iconic symbol – surpassing it specific content – to compare in the depth and intensity of the cultural animosities on both sides – to the Dreyfus affair in France between 1897–1899. In The Proud Tower, Barbara Tuchman writes that Dreyfus, a Jewish officer suspected of spying for the Germans, never a particularly notable personality to begin with, became an ‘abstraction’ to his supporters and detractors. She summarized:

“Each side fought for an idea, its idea of France: one the France of Counter-Revolution, the other the France of 1789, one for its last chance to arrest progressive social tendencies and restore the old values; the other to cleanse the honour of the Republic, and preserve it from the clutches of reaction”.

Will Collins writes in The American Conservative that “it is hard to think of a more apt comparison to the current moment. The language of existential conflict was mainstreamed on the American Right by the 2016 election. A now-infamous essay, “The Flight 93 Election,” compared voting for Donald Trump to a desperate attempt to retake a hijacked plane from the 9/11 terrorists. On the Left, the incremental liberalism of the Obama administration has given way to something more radical, a thoroughgoing critique of American institutions and history that suggests – and sometimes says outright – that revolutionary change is the only path forward”.

These two conflicted psychic images are defining not just America’s domestic arena, but global geo-politics, too. Acutely aware of these schisms, Americans are becoming easily agitated and angered by notions that China or Russia might wedge the void.

Unprecedented recent sanctions on the Syrian and Lebanese peoples (via the Caesar Act) similarly are the effusion of a stridently-held, yet contested missionary vision. These comprehensive sanctions are precisely intended to harm people – even to starve them, or precipitate them into civil war. That is what they are meant to do – U.S. Envoy to Syria, James Jeffrey, celebrated the fact that U.S. sanctions against Damascus have “contributed to the collapse” of the Syrian economy.

And this is the ‘good/evil’ temper of the moment. For such a dark fate is precisely what many conservative Americans would like to visit upon those fellow Americans who occupy Seattle’s Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (or now ‘Protest Zone’– i.e. CHAZ).

They would like the electricity, the water and the food cut-off. For this is America’s internal contradiction: These BLM protestors hate America’s Golden Age: they regard the latter as a “dark stain”, a barbarous primitive era that must be cast-off. The ‘party of the Golden Age’ would love to see the CHAZ occupiers’ starved into submission – only they can’t. It would spark internal U.S. turmoil, and a return of, most probably, violent protest.

But for the luckless people of Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Iran, being sanctioned into oblivion is no problem. They are ‘morally stained’ in both U.S. ‘visions’. One U.S. party cannot abide their rejection of America’s righteous ‘moral’ vision; and the other sees these nations to be residing in such barbarous, primitive and imperfect conditions, that state-overthrow becomes inevitable, and to be desired. (Most of Europe falls into this latter, hyper partisan category, too, if couched in a veneer of ‘liberalism’).

Looked at through this psychological lens, Israel and Palestinians fall into a different place. It is a case of Israeli ‘ordinary vice’: Most ‘golden age’ Americans of course, see Israel as walking a parallel path to their own. There is real empathy. But not so from the ‘awokened’ 20+ year-old, BLM-supporting, generation of Americans.

Their ‘woke’ ideology is radical. They view the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s as having unequivocally sold-out. No place for compromise now: America is both innately racist and oppressive. Its founding principles must be ripped out and replaced. BLM is waging this struggle against the U.S. founding principles, but the fight against U.S. empire, are one and the same, they say.

It is not clear whether the woke 20+ generation, in alliance with BLM, has succeeded in suborning the older, liberal generation of Democrat leaders, CEOs and senior police and military officers who lately have knelt before the altar of the BLM agenda – or if BLM simply is being used by the latter as a tool against Donald Trump. If the latter, it will not be the first time that the mainstream has co-opted a radical movement to use for its own ends, only subsequently to discover that that is they – the mainstream –were the dog ‘wagged’ by its radical ‘tail’. (The history of Salafism and its jihadists comes to mind, in this context.)

The question is mere quibble: What is undeniable is that wokeness is coursing through parts of Europe and America faster than the Coronavirus infection. Whilst Israelis love diversity politics, they are frightened by the liberal-BLM discourse of a coming struggle against racism and oppression.

Unless this ‘awokening’ butts up against an early ‘herd-immunity’ in Europe and America, this current will impact the region in ways that are not at this juncture foreseeable, but likely inevitable. Already Israelis are showing greater nervousness about annexation in the West Bank, and the Jordan Valley; and Gulf States led by the authoritarian UAE, are preparing to cast-off from the U.S. wharf, and pleading for a new berth in a safe Israeli harbour.

Are they sensing a change in the wind? Seeking safety? Will the region’s own 20+ generation assimilate the spirit of wokeness?

Since the rioting began after the death of George Floyd it’s been obvious to anyone with any experience in covering global politics that these have been a directed operation aimed at undermining the presidency of Donald Trump here in the U.S.

The formation of the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ) in downtown Seattle is the latest in a series of provocations and escalations intended to goad Trump into invoking the Insurrection Act of 1878 and deploying the military to put down these riots endlessly promoted by a complicit media in the West as mostly ‘peaceful protests.’

They are anything but that.

This is a situation that, because of the subsidization of it by the Mayor, Jenny Durkan, and the Governor, Jay Inslee, that will persist just long enough to descend into violence and chaos. Note how I don’t use the word anarchy.

Because we’ve already seen a form of government form in the CHAZ, with a governing council, a constitution of sorts and decrees of white people paying reparations to black members of the community.

Raz Simone, like a latter day Issac Hayes – the Duke — from John Carpenter’s now prophetic Escape from New York, is passing out AR-15s and AK-47s to keep the peace of the gun. And in no time some pigs will become far more equal than others.

But, even if my worst predictions about the CHAZ do not come to pass, since it is very much a tactical operation in the grander strategy to undermine and delegitimize Trump, there will still likely be violence.

All we have to do is look at what happened in other so-called color revolutions that piggy-backed on legitimate protests against existing, corrupt governments.

This reminds me of the situation in Ukraine in 2014 where the protests on the Maidan plaza in Kiev turned violent when snipers began shooting from rooftops. And to this day there are questions as to who shot who and what actually happened.

But given that a peaceful stability in the CHAZ serves no one in power, on either side of the political divide, the likelihood of a similar provocation is very, very high.

The way I see this, the people in the CHAZ are pawns in a much larger game being played by the power elite many of them want to overthrow.

All it takes is one agent provocateur, one guy with a rifle and a narrative springs into being.

If there is one thing that is abundantly clear after four years of watching this escalation in the U.S. it is that there is nothing Trump’s enemies won’t do to make things worse.

Because, in the end, this is about far more than Trump. This is about moving the U.S. into a failed political and economic state. The economic destruction is already well underway thanks to the persistence of the COVID-19 insanity.

The new normal of face masks and social distancing highlight the sheer cowardice of the corporate managerial class and the complicity of the corporate leadership, as The Saker pointed out in a recent post. He asks the question that if money isn’t the object of this corporate ‘bowing to the mob’ what is at stake.

The answer, of course, is power:

Specifically, the U.S. deep state – at a major faction within that deep state – is clearly desperate to get rid of Trump (and *not* for the right reasons, of which there are plenty).

There are plenty of signs that illustrate that Trump is even losing control of the Executive, including Secretary Esper contradicting Trump on what is a key issue – restoring law and order – or the U.S. Ambassador to South Korea voicing support for BLM (I consider that these actions by top officials against their own Commander in Chief border on treason). Needless to say, the pro-Dems neo-libs at Slate immediately began dreaming about, and calling for, a military revolt against Trump.

And that new normal now separates Americans along yet another vector, one much subtler than wearing a MAGA hat or sporting a ‘Coexist’ bumper sticker on their hybrid.

And that’s exactly why I think there’s going to be some kind of Maidan-like event in the CHAZ if President Trump continues to refuse to take the bait and roll the tanks in, metaphorically, to break it up.

But, ultimately, this isn’t Trump’s job, it is the job of the local elected officials to provide services to protect the property and livelihoods of their constituents. But that’s not what’s on display in Seattle.

It isn’t on display in New York City either where Mayor Bill DeBlasio is doing everything he can to disarm and delegitimize his own police force and enflame tensions by allowing looters to run wild while enforcing social distancing rules against Hasidic Jews trying to worship in peace.

This is a movie whose ending I’ve seen before and I didn’t like it the previous times I watched it. What’s sad is that the people who’ve released this one are the same ones who released the previous ones.

It’s a tragedy which, frankly, as I’ve talked about ad nauseum. Trump has invited this onto himself because of his own weakness to confront his attackers while engaging in similar behavior against countries he doesn’t like – Syria, Lebanon, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Venezuela.

No one in the international community will shed one tear if Trump is deposed in November or during his second term. Many of us Americans recognize his faults and what they’ve wrought but still understand that the alternative to him is the restoration of the worst parts of the Empire.

His only true accomplishment to date has been staying in power in a White House where his power has steadily eroded to the point of near irrelevancy. If he doesn’t make substantive moves to neutralize those behind the CHAZ he will be the one blamed when it explodes.

Trump and hawkish Republican figures have repeatedly toyed with the idea of “sending the troops in” to quell demonstrations that have engulfed the U.S. over the past month since the horrific killing by police officers of black man George Floyd in Minneapolis on May 25.

That has, in turn, led to an outcry that the president is attempting to violate the country’s laws by threatening to deploy federal troops to do policing work which would normally fall under the authority of the individual states. Trump is also accused of inciting violence by fomenting fears over national security, fears which are exaggerated given the generally peaceful nature of protests against police violence and racism.

In a remarkable sign of the constitutionally explosive situation, the Pentagon’s top military commander General Mark Milley recently expressed regret about Trump’s politicization of the nation’s armed forces. Other former military leaders have weighed in similarly. The tensions reflect tacit concerns that Trump is assuming dictatorial powers. Democrat presidential rival Joe Biden got in on the act by making an extraordinary statement in which he said that he was confident the Pentagon would intervene to evict Trump from the White House, if the incumbent tried to defy the electorate in November. Even the public contemplation of such a scenario seems a bizarre acknowledgement of how far things have gone awry in U.S. politics.

That’s why Fox News’ fakery over the Seattle protests takes on an even more sinister aspect. Last week, the Murdoch-owned, pro-Trump channel published photoshopped images of armed protesters purportedly taking over Seattle. It also attributed scenes of burning buildings from previous unrest as if they were unfolding at the same time as the alleged armed insurrectionists.

Seattle, the most populous city in Washington state on the U.S.’ west coast, has seen a significant popular demonstration against police violence, whereby a downtown area has been declared a “cop-free zone”. The city’s police decided to deescalate confrontation that erupted after the killing of Floyd, by unilaterally withdrawing from the precinct. Citizens have formed a “Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone” (CHAZ). They are calling for “defunding” of the police budget and more spending on social services. The same demand has been made elsewhere by other cities and states.

What the Seattle protest has dramatically shown is that heavy police power is not required for law and order to prevail. Most reports have characterized the Seattle civilian occupation as largely peaceful, multiracial and a manifestation of people power. Where it will lead to and what it will achieve in terms of policing in the future is anybody’s guess right now.

But already the Seattle citizens have won the argument that U.S. policing is out of control in terms of its militarized operation and use of excessive lethal force, especially against African-Americans and other minorities. Some 1,000 people are shot dead every year in the U.S. by police officers.

The counter-narrative put out by Trump and his ilk is that “defunding” means scrapping police forces altogether and leaving the country at the mercy of criminals and anarchists. This fear-mongering paints an apocalyptic meltdown of American society. It is a favorite trope of elites and fascists whose depiction of society is one teetering on barbarian masses running amok, rather than trusting in the democratic cooperation between people to better organize society.

Fox News was forced into making an apology and retraction for its deliberate falsification over events in Seattle after local paper, The Seattle Times, investigated the images. However, that admission did not stop Trump from telling his millions of followers on Twitter that Seattle was being ransacked by “domestic terrorists”.

Addressing the city mayor and state governor, Trump fumed: “Take back your city NOW. If you don’t do it, I will. These ugly Anarchists must be stopped IMMEDIATELY.”

He may not have specified military force, but the implication is unavoidable. After all, Trump has previously threatened to send in combat troops to end other protests which he has also claimed have been orchestrated by “Antifa” (a loose network of anti-fascist activists).

Seattle mayor Jenny Durkan hit back, advising Trump to “go back to your bunker”. She added: “It’s not terrorism. It’s patriotism. We do not need anyone, including the president, to try to sow further divide, further mistrust and misinformation.”

Federal security organizations have found there is negligible involvement of “Antifa” in nationwide protests. The peaceful takeover of Seattle’s Capitol Hill is also not connected to such groups. There have been reports of an armed man appearing to be a protester in the city. Be that as it may, it is nowhere near reflecting the scenario painted by Fox and its most prominent subscriber of an armed insurrection and mob rule.

Irony abounds. Trump has made “fake news” a signature soundbite as if he is the sole victim of it. He also has claimed that his presidency is in danger of falling to a coup plotted by the deep state. But the Seattle episode shows there is no bigger peddler of fake news than Trump and his Fox friends. And if they could get away with it, this White House would be ordering federal troops to round up civilians exercising their democratic right to protest against police violence. Trump is the one sailing close to a fascist coup.

So what really is the Capital Hill Autonomous Zone cum People’s Republic all about?

Are the communards mere useful idiots? Is this a refined Occupy Wall Street experiment? Could it survive, logistically, and be replicated in NYC, L.A. and D.C.?

An outraged President Trump has described it as a plot by “domestic terrorists” in a city “run by radical left Democrats”. He called for “LAW & ORDER” (in caps, according to his Tweetology).

Shades of Syria in Seattle are visibly discernable. Under this scenario, the Commune is a remixed Idlib fighting “regime counter-insurgency outposts” (in communard terminology).

For most American Right factions, Antifa equals ISIS. George Floyd is regarded not only as a “communist Antifa martyr”, as an intel operative told me, but a mere “criminal and drug dealer”.

So when will “regime forces” strike – in this case without Russian air cover? After all, as dictated by Secretary Esper, it’s up to the Pentagon to “dominate the battlefield”.

But we’ve got a problem. Capital Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ) is supported by the city of Seattle – run by a Democrat – which is supported by the governor of Washington State, also a Democrat.

There’s no chance Washington State will use the National Guard to crush CHAZ. And Trump cannot take over Washington State National Guard without the approval of the governor, even though he has tweeted, “Take back your city NOW. If you don’t do it, I will. This is not a game.”

It’s enlightening to observe that “counter-insurgency” can be applied in Afghanistan and the tribal areas; to occupy Iraq; to protect the looting of oil/gas in eastern Syria. But not at home. Even if 58% of Americans would actually support it: for many among them, the Commune may be as bad if not worse than looting.

But then there are those firmly opposed. Among them: the “Butcher of Fallujah” Mad Dog Mattis; color revolution practitioners NED; Nike;

JP Morgan; the whole Democratic Party establishment; and virtually the whole U.S. Army establishment.

Welcome to the Only Occupy Others movement.

Still the question remains: how long will “Idlib” be able to defy the “regime”? That’s enough to cause an alleged “bully”, Attorney General Barr, many a sleepless night.

Real Black Power

Trump and Barr have already threatened to criminalize Antifa as a “terrorist organization” – even as Black Lives Matter has pointed a yellow dagger in the asphalt of 16th St. in D.C. towards the White House.

And that brings us to the across the board legitimacy enjoyed by Black Lives Matter. How’s that possible? Here is a good place to start.

Black Lives Matter, founded in 2013 by a trio of middle class, queer black women very vocal against “hetero-patriarchy”, is a product of what University of British Columbia’s Peter Dauvergne defines as “corporatization of activism”.

Over the years, Black Lives Matter evolved as a marketing brand, like Nike (which fully supports it). The widespread George Floyd protests elevated it to the status of a new religion. Yet Black Lives Matter carries arguably zero, true revolutionary appeal. This is not James Brown’s “Say It Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud”. And it does not get even close to Black Power and the Black Panthers’ “Power to the People”.

The gold standard on civil rights, Dr. Martin Luther King, in 1968, concisely framed the – structural – heart of the matter:

“The black revolution is much more than a struggle for the rights of Negroes. It is forcing America to face all its interrelated flaws—racism, poverty, militarism, and materialism. It is exposing evils that are rooted deeply in the whole structure of our society. It reveals systemic rather than superficial flaws and suggests that radical reconstruction of society itself is the real issue to be faced.”

The Black Panthers, young, extremely articulated intellectuals who had mixed Marx, Lenin, Mao, W.E.B. Du Bois, Malcolm X and Frantz “Wretched of the Earth” Fanon took MLK’s diagnosis to a whole new level.

As summed up by the Panthers’ Minister of Information Eldridge Cleaver: “We believe in the need for a unified revolutionary movement … informed by the revolutionary principles of scientific socialism.” That synthesized the insights of MLK, who was, crucially, a proponent of color blindness.

Fred Hampton, the target of a de facto state assassination in December 1969, made sure the struggle transcended race: “We got to face some facts. That the masses are poor, that the masses belong to what you call the lower class, and when I talk about the masses, I’m talking about the white masses, I’m talking about the black masses, and the brown masses, and the yellow masses, too. We’ve got to face the fact that some people say you fight fire best with fire, but we say you put fire out best with water. We say you don’t fight racism with racism. We’re gonna fight racism with solidarity. We say you don’t fight capitalism with no black capitalism; you fight capitalism with socialism.”

So this is not only about race. This is not only about class. This is about Power to the People fighting for social, political and economic justice under a system that’s intrinsically unequal. It expands on the in-depth analysis by Gerald Horne in The Dawning of the Apocalypse, where the 16th century is fully dissected, “creation myth” of the U.S. included.

Horne shows how a bloodthirsty invasion of the Americas engendered fierce resistance by Africans and their indigenous populations allies, weakening imperial Spain and finally enabling London to dispatch settlers to Virginia in 1607.

Now compare this depth of analysis with the meek, almost begging for mercy “Black Lives Matter” slogan. One is reminded, once again, of Malcolm X’s sharpness: “We had the best organization the black man’s ever had—niggers ruined it!”

To solve the Black Lives Matter question, one must, once again, follow the money.

Black Lives Matter profited in 2016 from a humongous $100 million grant from the Ford Foundation and other philanthropic capitalism stalwarts such as JPMorgan Chase and the Kellogg Foundation.

The Ford Foundation is very close to the U.S. Deep State. The board of directors is crammed with corporate CEOs and Wall Street honchos. In a nutshell; Black Lives Matter, the organization, today is fully sanitized; largely integrated into the Democratic Party machine; adored by mainstream media; and certainly does not represent a threat to the 0.001%.

The Black Lives Matter leadership, of course, argues that this time, “it’s different. Elaine Brown, the formidable former chairwoman of the Black Panthers, takes no prisoners: Black Lives Matter has a “plantation mentality”.

Try to set the night on fire

Set the Night on Fire is an extraordinarily absorbing book co-written by Jon Wiener and the inestimable Mike Davis of City of Quartz and Planet of Slums.

Cataloguing in exhaustive detail the L.A. of the Sixties, we are plunged into the Watts riots in 1965; the antiwar movement joining the Black Panthers to form a uniquely Californian Peace and Freedom Party; the evolving grassroots unity of the Black Power ethos; the Che-Lumumba club of the Communist Party – which would become the political base of legendary Angela Davis; and the massive FBI and LAPD offensive to destroy the Black Panthers.

Tom Wolfe notoriously – and viciously – characterized L.A. supporters of the Black Panthers as ‘radical chic”. Elaine Brown once again sets the record straight: “We were dying, and all of them, the strongest and the most frivolous, were helping us survive another day.”

One of the most harrowing sections of the book details how the FBI went after Panthers sympathizers, including the sublime Jean Seberg, the star of Otto Preminger’s Saint Joan (1957) and Godard’s Breathless (1960).

Jean Seberg contributed anonymously to the Panthers under the codename “Aretha” (yes, as in Franklin). The FBI’s COINTELPRO took no prisoners to go after Seberg, enrolling the CIA, military intel and the Secret Service. She was smeared as a “sex-perverted white actress” – as in having affairs with black radicals. Her Hollywood career was destroyed. She went into deep depression, had a stillbirth (the baby was not black), emigrated, and her – decomposed – body was found in her car in Paris in 1979.

In contrast, there have been academic rumblings identifying the sea of converts to the Black Lives Matter religion as mostly products of the marriage between wokeness and intersectionality – the set of interlinked traits that since birth privileges heterosexual white men, now trying to expiate their guilt.

Generation Z, unleashed en masse from college campuses across the U.S. into the jobs market, is a prisoner of this phenomenon: in fact a slave to – politically correct – identity politics. And once again, carrying zero revolutionary potential.

Compare it once again to immense political sacrifices of the Black Panthers. Or when Angela Davis, already a pop icon, became the most famous black political prisoner in American history. Aretha Franklin, when volunteering to post bail for Davis, famously framed it: “I’ve been locked up for disturbing the peace, and I know you’ve got to disturb the peace when you can’t get no peace.”

Elaine Brown: “I know what the BPP [Black Panther Party] was. I know the lives we lost, the struggle we put into place, the efforts we made, the assaults on us by the police and government – I know all that. I don’t know what Black Lives Matter does.”

It’s open to endless debate whether Black Lives Matter is intrinsically racist and even inherently violent.

And it’s also debatable whether taking a knee, now a household ritual practiced by politicians (complete with Kente scarves from Ghana), cops and corporations, really threatens the foundations of Empire.

Noam Chomsky has already ventured that the protest wave so far carries zero political articulation – and badly needs a strategic direction, far beyond the obvious revolt against police brutality.

The protests are dying down just as the Commune emerges.

Depending on its evolution that may pose a serious problem to Trump/Barr. The President simply cannot allow a running color revolution to develop in the middle of a major American city. At the same time he’s impotent as a federal authority to dissolve the Commune.

What the White House can do is to dog whistle its own counter-insurgency units, in the form of armed to their teeth white supremacist militias, to go on the offensive and crush the already flimsy supply lines of the wokeness-cum-intersectionality crowd.

Occupy after all took over key areas of 60 American cities for months just to suddenly dissolve into the ether.

Additionally, the Deep State has already war-gamed plenty of scenarios to deal with siege situations way more complex than the Commune.

Whatever happens next, one key vector is immutable. A state of permanent insurrection only benefits the 0.00001% plutocracy comfortably ensconced while the plebs set the night on fire.

As is often the case, there are a number of inconsistencies in the narrative. If one looks at the numerous photos of the protests in many parts of the country, it is clear that most of the demonstrators are white, not black, which might suggest that even if there are significant pockets of racism in the United States there is also a strong condemnation of that fact by many white people. And this in a country that elected a black man president not once, but twice, and that black president had a cabinet that included a large number of African-Americans.

Also, to further obfuscate any understanding of what might be taking place, the media and chattering class is obsessed with finding white supremacists as instigators of at least some of the actual violence. It would be a convenient explanation for the Social Justice Warriors that proliferate in the media, though it is supported currently by little actual evidence that anyone is exploiting right-wing groups.

Simultaneously, some on the right, to include the president, are blaming legitimately dubbed domestic terrorist group Antifa, which is perhaps more plausible, though again evidence of organized instigation appears to be on the thin side. Still another source of the mayhem apparently consists of some folks getting all excited by the turmoil and breaking windows and tossing Molotov cocktails, as did two upper middle class attorneys in Brooklyn last week.

Nevertheless, the search goes on for a guilty party. Explaining the demonstrations and riots as the result of the horrible killing of a black man by police which has revulsed both black and white Americans would be too simple to satisfy the convoluted yearnings of the likes of Wolf Blitzer and Rachel Maddow.

Which brings us to Russia. How convenient is it to fall back on Russia which, together with the Chinese, is reputedly already reported to be working hard to subvert the November U.S. election. And what better way to do just that than to call on one of the empty-heads of the Barack Obama administration, whose foreign policy achievements included the destruction of a prosperous Libya and the killing of four American diplomats in Benghazi, the initiation of kinetic hostilities with Syria, the failure to achieve a reset with Russia and the assassinations of American citizens overseas without any due process. But Obama sure did talk nice and seem pleasant unlike the current occupant of the White House.

The predictable Wolf Blitzer had a recent interview with perhaps the emptiest head of all the empowered women who virtually ran the Obama White House. Susan Rice was U.N. Ambassador and later National Security Advisor under Barack Obama. Before that she was a Clinton appointee who served as Undersecretary of State for African Affairs. She is reportedly is currently being considered as a possible running mate for Joe Biden as she has all the necessary qualifications being a woman and black.

While Ambassador and National Security Advisor, Rice had the reputation of being extremely abrasive. She ran into trouble when she failed to be convincing in support of the Obama administration exculpatory narrative regarding what went wrong in Benghazi when the four Americans, to include the U.S. Ambassador, were killed.

In her interview with Blitzer, Rice said: “We have peaceful protesters focused on the very real pain and disparities that we’re all wrestling with that have to be addressed, and then we have extremists who’ve come to try to hijack those protests and turn them into something very different. And they’re probably also, I would bet based on my experience, I’m not reading the intelligence these days, but based on my experience this is right out of the Russian playbook as well. I would not be surprised to learn that they have fomented some of these extremists on both sides using social media. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that they are funding it in some way, shape, or form.”

It should be noted that Rice, a devout Democrat apparatchik, produced no evidence whatsoever that the Russians were or have been involved in “fomenting” the reactions to the George Floyd demonstrations and riots beyond the fact that Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden all believe that Moscow is responsible for everything. Clinton in particular hopes that some day someone will actually believe her when she claims that she lost to Trump in 2016 due to Russia. Even Robert Mueller, he of the Russiagate Inquiry, could not come up with any real evidence suggesting that the relatively low intensity meddling in the election by the Kremlin had any real impact. Nor was there any suggestion that Moscow was actually colluding with the Trump campaign, nor with its appointees, to include National Security Advisor designate Michael Flynn.

Fortunately, no one took much notice of Rice based on her “experience,” or her judgement insofar as she possesses that quality. Glenn Greenwald responded “This is fuxxing lunacy — conspiratorial madness of the worst kind — but it’s delivered by a Serious Obama Official and a Respected Mainstream Newscaster so it’s all fine… This is Infowars-level junk. Should Twitter put a ‘False’ label on this? Or maybe a hammer and sickle emoji?”

Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman Maria Zakharova accurately described the Rice performance as a “perfect example of barefaced propaganda.” She wrote on her Facebook page “Are you trying to play the Russia card again? You’ve been playing too long – come back to reality” instead of using “dirty methods of information manipulation” despite “having absolutely no facts to prove [the] allegations… go out and face your people, look them in the eye and try telling them that they are being controlled by the Russians through YouTube and Facebook. And I will sit back and watch ‘American exceptionalism’ in action.”

It should be assumed that the Republicans will be coming up with their own candidate for “fomenting” the riots and demonstrations. It already includes Antifa, of course, but is likely to somehow also involve the Chinese, who will undoubtedly be seen as destroying American democracy through the double whammy of a plague and race riots. Speaking at the White House, National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien warned about foreign incitement, including not only the Chinese, but also Iran and even Zimbabwe. And, oh yes, Russia. One thing is for sure, no matter who is ultimately held accountable, no one in the Congress or White House will be taking the blame for anything.