Shrinking the Technosphere: Updated
How US Special Interests Use Political Technologies to Keep the
Population Fooled
By Dmitry Orlov
Part 1 Here
October 21, 2015 "Information
Clearing House" -
Previously in this series of
posts we outlined how inside the US
special interests use political technologies to keep the population
fooled. We also showed how these efforts will eventually fail,
either through internal contradiction or because the parasites
eventually end up killing the host. We will now turn our attention
to political technologies used by the US against the rest of the
world. This may seem like a digression from the task of addressing
the question at hand—of how to bring about social change in order to
avert climate catastrophe—but it is necessary.
The long list of political technologies used within the US to keep
Americans fooled helped us show just how pervasive and destructive
these technologies are. We are yet to see any ways to neutralize
these technologies—because Americans have failed to do so. To find
examples of successful ways to neutralize them, we have to look at
what the US has been attempting to do to the rest of the world—and
failing.
No matter how good America's luck has been—isolated geographic
location, plentiful natural resources, the gigantic windfall of its
victory in World War II, the additional windfall of the Soviet
collapse—the luck was bound to run out eventually. In fact, to a
large extent it already has: as a purely practical matter, it simply
isn't possible to continue running roughshod over the entire planet
if you run roughshod over your own population as well. The US has
less than 5% of the world's population, half of whom are obese, a
third on drugs and a quarter mentally ill. It leads the world in
deaths from gun violence, police murders and prison population. Half
the children are born into poverty and a third into broken and
nonexistent families. Over a quarter of the working age population
is permanently out of work. By no stretch of the imagination is this
a description of a group that can rule the world..
Beyond the simple matter of all good (or, if you prefer, evil)
things eventually coming to an end, the rest of the world has
evolved some effective antibodies against American political
technologies, and some of them may be helpful in bringing about the
rapid social changes that are needed in order to avert climate
catastrophe. Before the US empire is swept away in a wave of
confusion and embarrassment, we may be able to extract some useful
lessons from it.
We can divide the political technologies the US uses against the
rest of the world into three broad categories. Although the first
two may not involve overt, physical violence—at least not every time
they are applied—all three categories are actually forms of
warfare—hybrid warfare.
- International Loan Sharking
- The Orange Revolution Syndicate
- Terrorism by Proxy
John Perkins describes International Loan Sharking in
his Confessions of an Economic Hit Man:
Economic hit men (EHMs) are highly paid
professionals who cheat countries around the globe out of
trillions of dollars. They funnel money from the World Bank, the
U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and other
foreign “aid” organizations into the coffers of huge
corporations and the pockets of a few wealthy families who
control the planet's natural resources. Their tools included
fraudulent financial reports, rigged elections, payoffs,
extortion, sex and murder. They play a game as old as empire,
but one that has taken on new and terrifying dimensions during
this time of globalization.
These efforts eventually produce a bankrupt country
that is unable to service its foreign debt. Whereas in previous eras
the US used gunboat diplomacy to extort payments from deadbeat
countries, in a globalized economic environment this has been
rendered largely unnecessary. Instead, the simple threat of refusing
to provide liquidity to the country's banks is enough to make it
capitulate. In turn, capitulation leads to the imposition of
austerity: health, education, electricity, water and other public
services are either cut or privatized and bought up on the cheap by
foreign interests; private savings are confiscated to make symbolic
payments against a ballooning foreign debt; subsidies and tariffs
are changed to benefit G8 nations to the country's detriment, and so
on. Society crumbles; young people, and anyone talented or educated,
tries to emigrate, leaving behind the destitute old, the hopeless,
and the social predators.
This political technology has worked a great deal of the time, most
recently with Greece, Portugal and Ireland. But there are still some
countries which, although integrated into the global economy, are
politically able to withstand this juggernaut and insist on
maintaining their sovereignty and on pursuing a set of policies
independent from Washington's dictate. In these cases, the US
deploys a different political technology, which goes under the name
Orange Revolution (although the actual colors vary). This technology
uses large groups of nonviolent protesters to produce social
disorientation, disorganization and disintegration, to render the
political elites within a country impotent, and to exploit the
moment of chaos and confusion in order to install a puppet regime
that can be controlled from Washington.
The methods of Orange Revolution are often touted as a nonviolent
way to bring about regime change. Gene Sharp, the great theoretician
of nonviolent revolution, is insistent that all protest should be
nonviolent. But the concept nonviolence, comforting though it is to
delicate minds, needs to be set aside—because it just plain doesn't
exist.
Just because a crowd isn't throwing Molotov cocktails at police
while illegally blocking access to a public building does not make
it nonviolent. First, the use of a crowd for a specific purpose is
already a form of force. Second, if the demonstration is illegal,
and if restoring public order would require violence, then the crowd
is using the threat of violence against itself as a weapon
against the rule of law. Calling such a crowd nonviolent is
tantamount to declaring that a man making demands while pointing a
gun at his own head isn't being violent simply because he hasn't
shot himself yet.
The architects of regime change insist on the use of “nonviolent”
tactics specifically because they pose a much thornier problem for
the authorities than an outright revolt. If the government faces an
armed uprising, it knows exactly what to do: put it down. But when
the youth of the nation parades around in matching T-shirts (that
have been mysteriously shipped in from abroad) shouting deliberately
anodyne, aspirational slogans, and the entire happening takes on the
air of a festival, then the government's ability to maintain public
order gradually melts away.
When the conditions are right, the regime changers fly in the
mercenaries with the sniper rifles, carry out a public massacre, and
blame it on the government. These snipers appeared in Egypt in 2011
during the effort to topple Hosni Mubarak. They also appeared in
Vilnius in 1991 and in Moscow in 1993. In Tunisia in 2011 they
actually got detained. They had Swedish passports and Northern
European faces. They said that they were there to hunt wild
boar—with sniper rifles, in Tunis.
Let us not allow ourselves to be misled: all three types of
political technologies the US uses against the rest of the world are
types of warfare—hybrid warfare—and “nonviolent warfare” is an
oxymoron. “Nonviolence” is a misnomer; with respect to Orange
Revolutions, the correct term is “delayed use of violence.”
What transpires in the course of an Orange Revolution is typically
as follows:
Phase 1: Groundwork. The action is instigated by a small,
ideologically and politically unified, networked group of elite
individuals sponsored by Washington's NGOs, think tanks and the US
State Department. Their goal is to appear to the government as “the
voice of the people” and to the people as “the legitimate
authorities.” They use methods of information warfare: hunger
strikes, small demonstrations, speeches by dissidents and symbolic
clashes with police in which the protesters play the victim. To hide
the fact that they are a small, closed clique of outsiders and
foreigners in Washington's pay that has conspired to overthrow the
government, they merge into large popular groups of citizens,
infiltrate legitimate protest movements, and inject their specific
slogans alongside popular public demands. Once they achieve a
“virtual majority” and accumulate enough followers to march them out
for a photo shoot so that Western media outlets can champion them as
a popular protest movement, they move on to...
Phase 2: Destruction of Public Order. During this phase, the
goal is to achieve maximum social disruption through nonviolent
means. Streets and public squares are occupied by almost perfectly
peaceful crowds of young people chanting moderate, popular slogans.
They start by holding officially sanctioned demonstrations, then
start probing the limits by changing the route or by holding
meetings longer than scheduled. They start using ploys such a
sit-down demonstration accompanied by the announcement of an
indefinite hunger strike. While doing this, they actively
propagandize the riot police, demanding that they be “one with the
people” and trying to force them to become complicit in their at
first minor transgressions against public order. As this process
runs its course, public order gradually disintegrates.
During this phase, it is important that the protesters do not engage
in any sort of meaningful political dialogue, because such dialogue
may lead to a national consensus on important issues, which the
government could then champion, restoring its legitimacy in the eyes
of the people while sapping the protest movement of its power. The
regime changers pursue the opposite strategy: of delegitimizing the
government by proliferating all sorts of councils and committees
that are then held up as democratic, and therefore legitimate,
alternatives to the government.
The time of elections is a particularly opportune moment for the
regime changers to exploit by claiming that there has been fraud at
the polls and by using the social organizations they have
infiltrated as fronts in order to claim to be speaking on behalf of
the true majority. The White Ribbon Revolution in Bolotnaya
(“Swamp”) Square in Moscow on May 6, 2012, right before Putin was to
be reinaugurated as president, went nowhere; in that instance, the
regime changers broke their teeth, and their local operatives in the
“opposition movement” are now some of the most widely despised
people in Russia. (Hilariously, the little white ribbons, which were
shipped into Russia from somewhere just in time for this action, had
also been worn by Nazi collaborators during World War II—something
many Russians knew while the foreign puppetmasters behind the fake
protests clearly didn't.) But almost the same technology did work
later during the Euromaidan Revolution in Kiev in February of 2014.
When those tasked with protecting what's left of public order become
sufficiently worn down to react forcefully when the situation calls
for it, the stage is set for...
Phase 3: The Occupation. During this phase, which, if
effective, is quite short, the protesters storm and occupy a
symbolically important public building. This is a very traditional
revolutionary tactic, going back to the storming of the Bastille on
July 14, 1789, or the storming of the Winter Palace on November 7,
1917. If the preparations were successful, by this point the
government is too internally conflicted to act, the defenders of
public order are too demoralized to follow their orders, or both. In
some cases, as in Serbia, in Georgia and in Kyrgyzstan, this is all
it took to move on to phase 5. The highly organized people behind
the supposedly spontaneous blitz now declare themselves as the
legitimate government, and demand that the real government obey them
and step down. However, sometimes it doesn't work, in which case
there is always...
Phase 4: The Massacre. Mercenaries with sniper rifles are
flown in and ushered into the upper floors of public buildings
overlooking city squares where rallies and demonstrations are being
held. By this time the defenders of public order are sufficiently
demoralized by their inaction in the face of increasingly brazen
challenges from the protesters that a few of them can be easily
corrupted by large bribes from the foreign sponsors of the regime
change operation. They accept the money and depart from the scene,
leaving doors unlocked or even handing over the keys. The
mercenaries go to work and kill a hundred or so people. Western
media immediately express outrage, pinning the responsibility for
the massacre on the government, and demanding that it resign. The
protesters are incited to immediately echo these slogans and a
groundswell of misplaced outrage sweeps the government out of power,
setting the stage for...
Phase 5: Regime Change. The new government, hand-picked by
the US embassy and the US State Department, assumes power, and is
immediately given recognition and support by Washington.
This strategy can be quite successful—to a point. As we shall see,
society can and sometimes does develop effective antibodies against
it. It is notable that just about any government—from the most
democratic to the most autocratic—is susceptible to it, the only
real exceptions being absolute monarchs who can make heads roll the
moment someone starts speaking out of turn, or those rulers who
derive their legitimacy from a divine right that cannot be
questioned without committing sacrilege.
The government has no good tactical options. It cannot declare the
mass of protesters outside the law, because they are, after all, its
citizens, and most of them are not even directly guilty of any
administrative transgressions. But if it is to restore public order,
it must crack down on the demonstrators. If it cracks down early,
then it looks heavy-handed and authoritarian, handing ammunition to
the protest movement. If it cracks down at the height of the
protests, then it causes a lot of unnecessary casualties, turning
much of the population against itself. And if it attempts to crack
down when it's too late, then it only ends up looking even weaker,
accelerating its own demise.
But the government does have an excellent strategic option, provided
it lays the groundwork for it beforehand. The problem with opposing
this sort of supposedly nonviolent, externally driven regime change
operation is that it cannot be effectively opposed by a government.
But it can be quite effectively opposed and disrupted by a
relatively small group of empowered individuals acting directly and
autonomously on behalf of the people. This is the topic we will take
up next.
We will not discuss the third method of regime change—Terrorism by
Proxy—because, frankly, it doesn't work. It is yet to result in the
installation of a stable puppet regime in any of the countries where
it has been tried. It failed in Afghanistan: after the Soviets
finally withdraw, the country became a failed state. America's pet
terrorists, termed al Qaeda, were then used as decoys to justify
invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, but the decoys came to life and
threatened to destabilize the region. The latest group of America's
pet terrorists, ISIS, who, as of this writing, are so impressed by
the Russian bombing campaign against them that they are busy shaving
off their beards and running away, has become a huge embarrassment
for the US. Terrorism by Proxy does reliably produce failed states,
and although some may claim that this is a reasonable foreign policy
end-goal, it is very hard to argue that it is in any sense optimal.
In a sense, this is a requiem for these three political
technologies.
The first one—International Loan Sharking—is not going to work too
well going forward. Developing countries can now borrow from China's
Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, in which they can become
shareholders. Countries around the world are unloading their dollar
reserves and entering into bilateral trade arrangements that
circumvent the dollar system. With its own finances in disarray, the
US is no longer able to function as the purveyor of financial
stability.
The Orange Revolutions have also largely run their course, because
the political technology for neutralizing them is by now quite far
along. The latest large-scale effort—in the Ukraine in 2014—has
resulted in a failed state. Subsequent efforts in Hong Kong and in
Armenia fizzled.
Lastly, Terrorism by Proxy not only never worked correctly, but is
now poised to prove hugely embarrassing for the Washington
establishment. The Russians, with Syrian, Iranian and Iraqi help,
are swiftly rubbing out America's pet terrorists with equanimity and
poise, while their erstwhile puppetmasters in Washington are visibly
demoralized and spouting preposterous nonsense. But there are still
some important lessons to be extracted from all this—and we should
extract them before it all gets covered by a thick layer of dust.
Dmitry Orlov is a
Russian-American engineer and a writer on subjects related to
"potential economic, ecological and political decline and collapse
in the United States," something he has called “permanent crisis”.
http://cluborlov.blogspot.com
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