Come the Revolution

When it’s bad to be the king

©Bryan Zepp Jamieson
7/22/07

The first time someone asked me why people weren’t revolting against the Putsch junta was in 2005.

Oh, people talked about revolution in the 60s, of course, but after that, it became the province of the paranoid nuts. No matter how hard you listen, a phrase like, “Aliens from Betelgeuse disguised as dogs have seized control of the President’s mind and so we must revolt immediately” doesn’t really qualify as political discourse. Not even when Reagan was president and such a theory might have had a certain intellectual appeal.

No, this incident in 2005 when a sane, sober, well-respected member of the community looked me in the eye and said, “I don’t get it. Why aren’t people rioting in the streets over all this?

“All this” is a sweeping phrase that covers the depredations of the Putsch junta: the illegal occupations and the vast cost those have inflicted, the hidden-yet-widely-noticed collapse of the economy, the ominous gulf between the super-rich and the rest of America (and one of the main reasons why, in “the richest country in the world,” most people are struggling to get by), and the increasing corporate control of our lives.

Why aren’t people outraged?

Short answer: they are. That’s why I have more and more people saying things like “why aren’t people out in the streets?” I’m no longer hearing this just once in a while, and not just from stray nuts. I’m hearing it from ordinary people who have looked at the news and, knowing they can’t say, “I’m ready to revolt” instead say, “Why aren’t people revolting?” Nor is it just folks like me who have opposed Putsch from the beginning, alarmed that he stole the election and strongly doubtful that he and his handlers had America’s best interests at heart in the wake of what amounted to a coup against the country. These are people who voted for Putsch, supported attacking Iraq, believed in “trickle down economics” and are worried about terrorism. A lot of them are conservatives who realized the monsters who took over the GOP and who run the administration are not conservatives, but are in fact fascists.

There’s no doubt in my mind that things are coming to a head and that sooner, rather than later, the American society will reach its breaking point and people will be openly opposing the Putsch junta, vociferously if not with actual violence.

History is useful here. It can’t tell us any specifics, but it can give us some indications of what to watch for, and what to surmise from things that may not seem all that important at the moment.

First, any sort of sudden revolutionary spasm will be triggered by a spark. It will be one instance, seemingly trivial and lost in a sea of abuses and injustices. And chances are good that it won’t even be true. Marie Antoinette was being kind, not callous, when she said “let them eat cake” and then promptly sent her banquet out to the people clamoring for food outside the palace. The British never greased their gun parts with grease from cattle. The Boston Tea party was staged, not by patriots outraged by a tax hike on tea, but by smugglers outraged by a tax CUT on tea. It will probably be an urban legend, and people, already fed up and restive, will seize on it.

Don’t expect to hear about any revolution on the radio or tv, or see it in the papers. That’s right, folks, you heard it here first: The Revolution Will Not Be Televised. What you will see is a flock of stories about “Islamist extremists” conducting “acts of terrorism” in odd places like Reading or Tulsa or Ely. Such “terrorist acts” might consist of painting graffiti on the city hall, or blowing up the road in front of the national guard armory, or a mass protest that somehow includes more people than there are actual Moslems in the United States.

The government will issue seemingly contradictory warnings. “The terrorists are Islamic middle eastern extremists, so watch EVERYBODY.” Watch that guy Schwartz down on the corner. He looks kinda middle eastern, and might be an Islamic extremist. Those rabbis are a tricky bunch, you know.

You’ll hear more about it on the internet, in your email, on the phone talking to friends and relatives. You’ll start hearing about fairly major, serious incidents that just didn’t show up at all in the news. Eventually, as a Resistance forms, you’ll start hearing reliable voices from the underground who can give more comprehensive descriptions of what’s going on.

The military will keep a curiously low profile. The government would love nothing more than to use military force to quell an uprising, but the fact is that tactically it doesn’t work (“asymetrical warfare,” in which one group uses tactics to negate a large military superiority of the opposing force), and there’s the problematic fact that the military might not accept orders to fire on the American civilian population. Remember, the military has little use for this regime, and indeed, Pentagon leaders might be holding secret meetings out of sight of party operatives like Edelmann to consider the merits of a military coup, if only to “restore calm.”

The police will be the government’s front lines, especially in the big cities. They will fight the pitched battles, and it will be their cruisers hit by IEDs, and their homes firebombed as things worsen.

There’s a large reactionary group of people in America that have their own agenda. This includes the reactionary billionaires who control so much of America’s media, the John Birchers, the KKK, and the neo-nazis. They’ll instigate and fight both sides, much like they do now (some of the most poisonous voices on the web both siding with and attacking the Putsch administration are extremists from the far right who want a fascist dictatorship, and maybe a race war). If there is one single element in American culture that is likely to turn a revolt into a bloody Iraq on a much greater scale, it is them. Unfortunately, a lot of America’s gun nuts are in this group, and many of the rest are empty headed flag-wavers who will side with the government in the odd belief that the government is more American than the people it is fighting. The gun nuts, then as now, will have nothing productive to offer.

Worst case scenario: America becomes what Iraq is now, and from there slides into a multi-sided genocidal civil war. Millions die, the economy is shattered, America is no longer a relevant player on the world stage.

Best case scenario: Congress impeaches Cheney and Putsch, tensions ease, there is an election widely trusted in 2008, and America veers away from becoming the first corporate fascist state and the crisis passes.

One important thing that most Americans don’t realize because their own revolution eventually had a happy ending: revolutions usually make things far worse, not better. “Better” may eventually turn up, but it takes a while. Even America, with its “dream revolution”, took another 13 years to get a functioning central government, and it was another quarter century after that before it was considered a stable government. And the biggest threat still lay 50 years ahead, a civil war born from wrong steps taken during the revolution. Most revolutions are more of the Ugandan or Argentinian variety, in which lots of people die and a miserable vicious regime “restores order” until the next revolution.

But I’m at the point where I no longer believe that a revolution can be avoided, and think that now is the time to warn people of what to expect.