Tag Archives: revolution

In An Insane World, Revolution Is The Moderate Position, by Caitlin Johnstone

When your choice becomes slavery and misery or revolution, the latter becomes an attractive option. From Caitlin Johnstone at caitlinjohnstone.com:

It should not be considered radical or extremist to oppose mass murder for profit and power.

It should not be considered radical or extremist to oppose the globe-spanning power alliance that is perpetrating most of that mass murder on the world stage today.

It should not be considered radical or extremist to oppose the existence of secretive government agencies which have extensive histories of committing horrific crimes.

It should not be considered radical or extremist to say that everyone ought to have a basic standard of living instead of being deprived of food, shelter and medicine if they have the wrong imaginary numbers in their bank account.

It should not be considered radical or extremist to oppose the existence of a small class of elites who use their vast fortunes to manipulate our entire society toward their advantage.

It should not be considered radical or extremist to want plutocrats and government agencies to stop deliberately manipulating people’s minds using mass media propaganda.

It should not be considered radical or extremist to want everyone to have an equal chance of getting their voice heard in our information ecosystem instead of a few select power-serving lackeys.

It should not be considered radical or extremist to want a society that is ruled by the many for the benefit of the many instead of one that is run by the few for the benefit of the few.

It is very normal, sane and healthy to want a world where everyone has what they need to live, where everyone is free to do, say and think whatever they like as long as it isn’t hurting anyone else, and where nobody is being murdered by powerful governments. This is a very basic, intuitive, common sense desire to have for yourself and for your fellow human beings; it’s wanting for your society what you want for yourself.

Yet people who promote policies which are aimed at creating this kind of world are consistently marginalized and dismissed as radicals and extremists. It’s okay to say you oppose war in principle, but if you oppose any specific acts of warmongering being perpetrated by your government you’ll get labeled a Russian asset, a dictator apologist and all sorts of other pejorative labels which exist solely to justify keeping you off of mainstream platforms. It’s okay to think we should live in peaceful collaboration with each other and our ecosystem, but if you promote specific policies to make that happen you’re an evil commie, a class warrior and a moonbat in the same way.

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What Motivates America’s Revolutionists? by Vasko Kohlmayer

At some point if you’re trying to decide what motivates someone, you look at his or her deeds rather than his or her words. From Vasko Kohlmayer at lewrockwell.com:

“Revolution is the solution, not voting!” chanted a group of kneeling protestors in Manhattan in June this year.

“Our fight for liberty, justice, and freedom continues. Together, we can — and will — transform. This is the revolution,” reads a posting on the website of Black Lives Matter. In the accompanying video the narrator says, “We continue the tradition of revolution. We feel earth shifting beneath our feet… Now it’s time to transform. Together change is coming.”

“Milwaukee’s Protest Leaders Say ‘This Is the Revolution’” proclaims last week’s magazine headline.

Another writer observes: “These are not just riots; this is a revolution to change America.”

“This Is a Revolution! ”declares the title of a piece on the website called “The 74 Million.”

In recent months it has become clear that we are in the midst of a revolutionary push whose objective is nothing less than a complete remaking of our society. The assault has been coming not only from the crowds in the streets but also from other corners such as academia, the media, and even the highest reaches of the US government. Recently, for example, Ilhan Omar, a member of the US House of representatives, has openly called for a dismantling of the American way of life as we know it:

“We can’t stop at criminal justice reform or policing reform. We are not merely fighting to tear down the systems of oppression in the criminal justice system. We are fighting to tear down systems of oppression that exist in housing, in education, in health care, in employment, [and] in the air we breathe.”

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Why America’s Revolution Won’t Be Televised, by Pepe Escobar

The recent riots bear less of a resemblance to a revolution than a mass temper tantrum. From Pepe Escobar at asiatimes.com:

The so far purely emotional insurrection 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 FBI. The NY Federal Reserve. The Treasury Department. The CIA in Langley. Wall Street houses.

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.

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Our Revolutionary Age, by the Zman

The almost complete disconnect between our powers that be and the common clay is similar to that between the French aristocracy and the peasants before the French Revolution. From the Zman at theburningplatform.com:

If one were to conjure just one image to explain the French Revolution, it would be of the sheltered and self-indulged Marie Antoinette saying “Qu’ils mangent de la brioche” when told the peasants were starving. Perhaps framing it alongside an image of the peasants in the streets, desperate for food. The story is apocryphal, but it probably stands as the most enduring image of the Revolution. The decadent and indifferent ruling class on one side and the desperate peasants on the other.

Even though the story is not true, it works as an explanation for what happened in 18th century France. On the one hand, there was a ruling class that was increasingly out of touch, physically and culturally removed from the people. On the other hand, the people were evolving away from the ruling class. The growth of what we would call a middle-class was changing the nature of France. It is the psychological separation that drove the political dynamic, leading to the revolution.

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Rebellious Thoughts, by the Zman

Slowly but surely, people are giving up hope that the political system will change for the better. William Barr’s refusal to prosecute James Comey didn’t help. From the Zman at theburningplatform.com:

Most people reading this will claim that they are not surprised that the people behind the seditious plot to overturn the 2016 election will not face charges. To be on the dissident right requires a degree of cynicism about political institutions. Democracy assumes things about humans that the dissident knows are false. Therefore, a system relying on people to act in a way that is against their nature is doomed to fail. That and the people attracted to democratic politics are always the worst society has to offer.

No matter how clear-eyed you are about the nature of man, politicians always have the ability to disappoint even the most cynical. If most people on this side of the great divide are being honest, they are let down by the news that the oleaginous James Comey will escape justice for his crimes. There was that flicker of hope that William Barr would not be another slithering reptile and do the right thing. Again, these people always have the ability to disappoint even the most jaded among us.

The thing is, there has always been a sense that these people operate by a different set of rules than the rest of us. It’s such an overused trope that when you see a James Comey type of character in a movie, they seem one-dimensional. They’re just the stock bureaucratic bad guy everyone knows how to hate. The same is true of the duplicitous villain like Bill Barr. In movies, that’s the guy the hero foolishly trusts, only to learn that he is more villainous than the James Comey character.

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Waiting for the Collapse: A Liberty Renaissance, by Atilla Mert Sulker

Those of us who want liberty have to make the case now, but should realize that the opportunity for liberty won’t happen until after the economic collapse. From Atilla Mert Sulker at lewrockwell.com:

In my previous article, I came to the conclusion that for libertarians to be successful in realizing their ends, they must change their method, and do so significantly. Putting trust in the political box and Congress has ultimately failed in advancing the freedom movement, and must be abandoned for good. Perhaps the best hope libertarians have is to wait for the impending collapse, and seize this as an opportunity to inject their ideas into the vacuum created by the death of the empire.

Spreading the ideas to fill the vacuum is by no means a spontaneous process. It must be done before the vacuum is created. It is the prevailing mindset of the population before the collapse occurs that shall determine how the vacuum will be compensated for. If the mindset preceding the collapse is one of socialism and dicta, then the vacuum will be filled with such. If the mindset preceding the collapse is that of neocolonialism and empire, then the vacuum will become compensated in such a way. In this same way, if the mindset is that of liberty and voluntarism, the restructuring of the political society will occur in favor of such.

Crane Brinton’s great work, The Anatomy of Revolution, underscores the causal connection between political change and prevailing ideas. In this book, Brinton compares the development of a revolution to that of a fever. He lays down four stages: 1. Incubation; 2. Symptomatic; 3. Crisis ; 4. Convalescence. The incubation stage is that of underlying causes coming into contact with the political apparatus. The symptomatic stage is that of political struggle becoming observable and evident. The crisis stage is the breaking point, i.e., the collapse of the empire. And the convalescence stage is the recovery from the crisis.

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The Corrupt System Will Never Police Itself, by Brandon Smith

A doctor will perform open-heart surgery on himself before the US political system will reform itself. From Brandon Smith at alt-market.com:

False hope breeds crippling apathy – This is what I have to think to myself when I see the news media fervor over the second arrest of (alleged) billionaire Jefferey Epstein, or similar events which in most cases end up fading into the background and forgotten. The public’s favorite distraction has always been to watch high profile people kicked out of their castles in the clouds, but I would point out that even when the globalists sacrifice one of their own in the public eye it is usually only to satiate the masses and their hunger for justice for a very short time. The system is not designed to root out evil; it is designed to obscure and perpetuate evil.

Epstein is a perfect example of this. He was already prosecuted on pedophilia charges over 12 years ago and received a “sweetheart” plea deal which allowed him to serve a mere 13 month sentence. How many child rapists get that kind of treatment in our court system? And what about the vast array of people (including political leaders) that were close friends and associates with Epstein during his “Lolita Express” days? Are we really to believe they knew nothing about what was going on? That they visited his island and never saw any wrongdoing?

Why didn’t they come forward immediately? Why did they wait until Epstein was already being prosecuted before they publicly admonished him? Is it because they were involved in the same activities? And if so, why have they not been prosecuted as well?

My point is, people should lower their expectations that justice will be served or that the “dominoes will fall” in the Epstein case.  Also, keep in mind that James Comey’s daughter, Maureen Comey, will be on the prosecution team in the case, AND , Donald Trump’s Labor Secretary, Alexander Acosta, is the same man who brokered Epstein’s immunity deal.  Like strands of malignant cancer, these people are wrapped around every facet of government.

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We Need a Martin Luther King Day of Truth, by Edward Curtin

We need the truth about Dr. King’s assassination, for a start. From Edward Curtin at off-guardian.org:

Atlanta, Georgia, USA — Martin Luther King Jr. listens at a meeting of the SCLC, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, at a restaurant in Atlanta. The SCLC is a civil rights organization formed by Martin Luther King after the success of the Montgomery bus boycott. — Image by © Flip Schulke/CORBIS

As Martin Luther King’s birthday is celebrated with a national holiday, his death day disappears down the memory hole. Across the country – in response to the King Holiday and Service Act passed by Congress and signed by Bill Clinton in 1994 – people will be encouraged to make the day one of service. Such service does not include King’s commitment to protest a decadent system of racial and economic injustice or non-violently resist the U.S. warfare state that he called “the greatest purveyor of violence on earth.”

Government sponsored service is cultural neo-liberalism at its finest, the promotion of individualism at the expense of a mass movement for radical institutional change.

“Nothing in all the world is more dangerous,” warned Dr. King, “than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.”

How true those words. For the government that honors Dr. King with a national holiday killed him. This is the suppressed truth behind the highly promoted day of service. It is what you are not supposed to know. It is what Thomas Merton, as quoted by James W. Douglass, called The Unspeakable:

It is the void that contradicts everything that is spoken even before the words are said; the void that gets into the language of public and officials declarations at the very moment when they are pronounced, and makes them ring dead with the hollowness of the abyss. It is the void out of which Eichmann drew the punctilious exactitude of his service.”

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The Yellow Vests Get it Right, by Robert Gore

Financial nuclear warheads.

The mainstream media has degenerated irreparably. Here’s a reliable rule of thumb: if it’s important it’s not covered; if it’s covered it’s not important. Stories in the American mainstream press about Yellow Vest protests have been few. One aspect of the protests, transcendently important, has received scant coverage.

The Yellow Vest protestors have called for a coordinated run on French banks. Whether they realize it or not, they’re playing with nuclear warheads that could annihilate not just the French, but Europe’s and the entire world’s financial system. Because inextricably linked to the ends of contemporary governments―how much they can screw up the lives of those who must live under them—is the question of means―how do they fund their misrule? The short answer is taxes and debt.

Since 1971, when President Nixon 
“temporarily” suspended international convertibility of dollars for gold (it’s never been reinstated), the monetary basis of the global economy has been fiat debt. Neither government or central bank debt nor currencies are tethered to any real constraint, like precious metals (see “Real Money,” SLL). Thus, politicians and monetary officials can create as much debt as they want: debt by fiat.

Government and central bank debt is at the apex of the global debt pyramid. The next tier is commercial banks that have accounts at central banks. Those accounts are bank assets and central bank liabilities, or debts. Central banks expand their fiat liabilities to banks in exchange for banks’ fiat government debt, an exchange called debt monetization, which is a bit of a misnomer since no “Real Money” is involved. The “monetization” is the central bank’s fiat expansion of banks’ accounts with the central bank in exchange for fiat government debt, which expands banks’ assets available for loans to governments, businesses, and individuals.

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Our Revolution’s Logic, by Angelo Codevilla

A preview and analysis of the coming revolution. From Angelo Codevilla at theburningplatform.com:

Hat tip Hardscrabble Farmer

In 2010, Claremont Institute Senior Fellow Angelo Codevilla reintroduced the notion of “the ruling class” back into American popular discourse. In 2017, he described contemporary American politics as a “cold civil war.” Now he applies the “logic of revolution” to our current political scene.

The primary objective of any people who find themselves in the throes of a revolution is to find ways of diverting its logic from its worst conclusions.

Prior to the 2016 election I explained how America had already “stepped over the threshold of a revolution,” that it was “difficult to imagine how we might step back, and futile to speculate how it might end.” Regardless of who won the election, its sentiments’ growing “volume and intensity” would empower politicians on all sides sure to make us nostalgic for Donald Trump’s and Hilary Clinton’s moderation. Having begun, this revolution would follow its own logic.

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