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by Pepe Escobar
from
TheSaker Website
as they protest at the makeshift memorial in honor of George Floyd on Tuesday in Minneapolis. Photo: AFP / Chandan Khanna
lacks political structure and a credible leader
to articulate
grievances...
The Revolution Won't Be Televised because this is not a revolution. At least not yet...
Burning and/or looting Target or Macy's is a minor diversion.
No one is aiming at the Pentagon (or even the shops at the Pentagon Mall).
The real looters - the ruling class - are comfortably surveying the show on their massive 4K Bravias, sipping single malt.
This is a class war much more than a race war and should be approached as such. Yet it was hijacked from the start to unfold as a mere color revolution.
US corporate media dropped their breathless Planet Lockdown coverage like a ton of - pre-arranged...? - bricks to breathlessly cover en masse the new American "revolution."
Social distancing is not exactly conducive to a revolutionary spirit.
There's no question the US is mired in a convoluted civil war in progress, as serious as what happened after the assassination of Dr Martin Luther King in Memphis in April 1968.
Yet massive cognitive dissonance is the norm across the full "strategy of tension" spectrum. Powerful factions pull no punches to control the narrative. No one is able to fully identify all the shadowplay intricacies and inconsistencies.
Hardcore agendas mingle:
To quote the Temptations: it's a ball of confusion.
Antifa is criminalized but the Boogaloo Bois get a pass (here is how Antifa's main conceptualizer defends his ideas).
Meanwhile, the policy infrastructure necessary for enacting martial law has evolved as a bipartisan project.
Protesters jump on a street sign near a burning barricade near the White House during a demonstration against the death of George Floyd on May 31, 2020 in Washington, DC. Photo: AFP
We are in the middle of the proverbial, total fog of war.
Those defending the US Army crushing "insurrectionists" in the streets advocate at the same time a swift ending to the American Empire.
Amidst so much sound and fury signifying perplexity and paralysis, we may be reaching a supreme moment of historical irony, where US homeland (in)security is being boomerang-hit not only by one of the key artifacts of its own Deep State making - a color revolution - but by combined elements of a perfect blowback trifecta: But the targets this time won't be millions across the Global South.
They will be American citizens...
Empire come home
Quite a few progressives contend this is a spontaneous mass uprising against police repression and system oppression - and that would necessarily lead to a revolution, like the February 1917 revolution in Russia sprouting out of the scarcity of bread in Petrograd.
So the protests against endemic police brutality would be a prelude to a Levitate the Pentagon remix - with the interregnum soon entailing a possible face-off with the US military in the streets.
But we got a problem.
The insurrection, so far purely emotional, has yielded no political structure and no credible leader to articulate myriad, complex grievances. As it stands, it amounts to an inchoate insurrection, under the sign of impoverishment and perpetual debt.
Adding to the perplexity, Americans are now confronted with what it feels like to be in,
Iraq came to Washington DC in full regalia, with Pentagon Blackhawks doing "show of force" passes over protestors, the tried and tested dispersal technique applied in countless counter-insurgency ops across the Global South.
And then, the Elvis moment:
The Raytheon lobbyist now heading the Pentagon, Mark Esper, called it,
Well, after they got their butts kicked in Afghanistan and Iraq, and indirectly in Syria, full spectrum dominance must dominate somewhere.
So why not 'back home'...?
Troops gather during a demonstration on June 1, 2020 in Washington, DC. Photo: Joshua Roberts/Getty Images/AFP
Troops from the 82nd Airborne Division, the 10th Mountain Division and the 1st Infantry Division, who lost wars in,
...have been deployed to Andrews Airbase near Washington.
Super-hawk Tom Cotton even called, in a tweet, for the 82nd Airborne to do,
These are certainly more 'amenable targets' than the Russian, Chinese and Iranian militaries.
Milley's performance reminds me of John McCain walking around in Baghdad in 2007, macho man-style, no helmet, to prove everything was OK.
Of course:
And complementing the racism angle, it's never enough to remember that both a white president and a black president signed off on drone attacks on wedding parties in the Pakistani tribal areas.
Esper spelled it out:
What next? A Coalition Provisional Authority...?
Compared to similar ops across the Global South, this will not only prevent regime change but also produce the desired effect for the ruling oligarchy:
Proving once again that when you don't have a Martin Luther King or a Malcolm X to fight the power, then power crushes you whatever you do.
Inverted Totalitarianism
The late, great political theorist Sheldon Wolin had already nailed it in a book first published in 2008:
Wolin showed how,
Sinclair Lewis (who did not say that, "when fascism comes to America, it will come wrapped in the flag and waving the cross") actually wrote, in It Can't Happen Here (1935), that American fascists would be those,
So American fascism, when it happens, will walk and talk American.
George Floyd was the spark.
In a Freudian twist, the return of the repressed came out swinging, laying bare multiple wounds:
Instinctively at least, although in an inchoate manner, millions of Americans clearly see how, since Reaganism, the whole game is about an oligarchy/plutocracy weaponizing white supremacism for political power goals, with the extra bonus of a steady, massive, upwards transfer of wealth.
US President Donald Trump walks back to the White House escorted by the Secret Service after appearing outside of St John's Episcopal church across Lafayette Park in Washington, DC, June 1, 2020. Photo: AFP/ Brendan Smialowski
Slightly before the first, peaceful Minneapolis protests, I argued that the realpolitik perspectives post-lockdown were grim, privileging both restored neoliberalism - already in effect - and hybrid neofascism.
President Trump's by now iconic Bible photo op in front of St John's church - including a citizen tear-gassing preview - took it to a whole new level.
Giorgio Agamben has already proved beyond reasonable doubt that the state of siege is now totally normalized in the West.
Attorney General William Barr now is aiming to institutionalize it in the US:
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