The Death Of A Clown (Anatomy of a Coup Redux)

 

"Every Regime Change operation began with repeatedly calling an election fraudulent, refusing to accept the results, and bringing in violently disruptive right-wing forces to try and change the results. These disrupters are always called 'democratic forces' in the US media when they are in other countries. This was the US tactic of choice in Ukraine, in Venezuela, in Syria, in Libya, in Hong Kong and in Bolivia, just to name a few recent examples." - United National Antiwar Coalition website

William Blum left us on December 9, 2018, but his legacy lingers on, and his master list of Instances of the United States overthrowing, or attempting to overthrow, a foreign government since the Second World War II continues to grow.


(* indicates successful ouster of a government)


China 1949 to early 1960s
Albania 1949-53
East Germany 1950s
Iran 1953 *
Guatemala 1954 *
Costa Rica mid-1950s
Syria 1956-7
Egypt 1957
Indonesia 1957-8
British Guiana 1953-64 *
Iraq 1963 *
North Vietnam 1945-73
Cambodia 1955-70 *
Laos 1958 *, 1959 *, 1960 *
Ecuador 1960-63 *
Congo 1960 *
France 1965
Brazil 1962-64 *
Dominican Republic 1963 *
Cuba 1959 to present
Bolivia 1964 *
Indonesia 1965 *
Ghana 1966 *
Chile 1964-73 *
Greece 1967 *
Costa Rica 1970-71
Bolivia 1971 *
Australia 1973-75 *
Angola 1975, 1980s
Zaire 1975
Portugal 1974-76 *
Jamaica 1976-80 *
Seychelles 1979-81
Chad 1981-82 *
Grenada 1983 *
South Yemen 1982-84
Suriname 1982-84
Fiji 1987 *
Libya 1980s
Nicaragua 1981-90 *
Panama 1989 *
Bulgaria 1990 *
Albania 1991 *
Iraq 1991
Afghanistan 1980s *
Somalia 1993
Yugoslavia 1999-2000 *
Ecuador 2000 *
Afghanistan 2001 *
Venezuela 2002 *
Iraq 2003 *
Haiti 2004 *
Somalia 2007 to present
Honduras 2009 *
Libya 2011 *
Syria 2012
Ukraine 2014 *

One could add to this list Macedonia 2017, Bolivia 2019, Belarus 2020, and without trace of irony, the United States 2020-2021.


Jim Shepard writes:

The conflict between countervailing violent military forces has prevented the total victory of either. That’s rough a summation of the results of World War Two. In general the total victory of a violent force or movement which has been stimulated to a high pitch of fanaticism and vindictiveness is a guarantee of disaster for any hope of civility or legality. That has been seen in China and in Russia in the 20th century with catastrophic results.

I find it chilling that in the United (so far, officially) States in the wake of their victory the vindictiveness of the enemies of President Trump is showing its teeth and demanding that any and every countervailing position be hauled into the public square and burnt at the virtual (if not literal) gallows pole. The prospect of the Inauguration of President-Elect Biden in one week, far from cooling the rage, has heated it white hot. Is this what happens when an adversarial system such as ours annihilates one adversarial side? A Prosecution with no Defence, what is there to stop it?

Examples? In Portland Oregon, the home of Rose City Antifa, Powell’s Books, largest independent (so far) bookstore in the USA, was forced by an Antifa mob to evacuate because it was proposing to sell Andy Ngo’s book “Unmasked” highlighting the openly displayed mob violence of Antifa over the last many years and charging Antifa with destroying democracy in America – how much more Orwellian could it get when an Antifa mob violently demands that Antifa violence not be recognized as violent? But USA Today tells its readership that the term “Orwellian" is not to be used in a manner not approved by the government of Never-Trumpism soon to be inaugurated.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wants a congressional committee to be established to propose legislation to restrict what she judges to be “false information”, that is, stuff she disagrees with. You Tube has become the third major media platform to Un-Person the President of the United States now protected in a remote, undisclosed location apparently in fear for his safety.

And who could entirely blame him since Vice President Pence is besieged by screaming, addled, withered but un-dead Nancy Pelosi who demands that he invoke the 25th Amendment to declare his president insane and remove him from office one week before he is due to be removed from office. Liz Cheney, Daughter of Dick, now apparently the third ranking House Republican, howls for the impeachment of the president-in-flight.

Twitter howls with outrage as Uganda does the same thing as Twitter (and YouTube and Facebook) did by shutting down social media critics of the government. Chris “Fredo” Cuomo angrily condemns Trump supporters for violence and critics remind him that he had condoned the much worse BlM/Antifa violence as “protest”. The term “Stop the Steal” is declared Verboten in DC by order of the High Command and the four star establishment of military shills in Washington warns the lower ranks of the US military to be “ready” for the Inauguration.

Did we think that the Supreme Court is out of action after refusing to even look at the evidence for any and every legal challenge to the presidential election? Oh no. The SCOTUS is alive enough to intervene and cancel a stay of execution so that the first female convicted murderer since 1953 can be put to death. So the SCOTUS is open for business if anybody wants ruthlessness to be rubber stamped. At least that woman was convicted legally. The cold-blooded murder of innocent, harmless Ashli Babbitt was extra-legal; please dear God, it will not be a prelude to more extra-legal violence against people the Supreme Court has left defenceless.

I can’t blame President Trump for fleeing Washington. And I can’t blame anybody else for wondering, as I do, why the apparently victorious Democrats are still howling for the the cancellation of the speech, freedom and civil rights of Trump and of Trump supporters or anyone who has a countervailing opinion or anyone who dares to so much as suggest that the massive tide of evidence and sworn testimony to the fraudulence of the November 3, 2020 presidential election even exists.


All of this goes to the question, why, with only seven days of his presidency remaining, are they trying so desperately to have Trump publicly shamed and removed from office?

Perhaps the answer can found if we turn our attention to Blum’s master list, and examine the way in which former leaders have been shamed, exiled, and even executed after being removed from office in blatantly rigged electoral processes. Three recent examples come to mind.

Lenin Moreno was installed as Ecuador's 16th president in May of 2017, replacing the left wing Raphael Correa who had served in that office for 10 years. Correa’s government had given asylum to Julian Assange, and unsurprisingly Moreno's first order of business, after receiving a $4.2bn IMF loan, was the expulsion of Assange from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. The final blow for Correa came when he was sentenced in absentia to eight years in jail for corruption, precluding him along with his former vice-president Jorge Glas from any political role for 25 years.

Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is a Brazilian politician and former union leader who served as the 35th President of Brazil from 1 January 2003 to 31 December 2010. As a founding member of the Workers' Party he ran unsuccessfully for president three times before achieving victory in the 2002 election and being re-elected in 2006. During his tenure Lula presided over an extraordinary period of economic growth which lifted tens of millions out of poverty. Lula recently walked free after serving 580 days of a 12 year sentence for corruption and money laundering handed down by the controversial judge Sergio Moro and upheld by an appeal court. Lula has always maintained his innocence and argued the case against him was politically motivated.

More recently ousted Bolivian president Evo Morales has had criminal complaints filed against him accusing him of statutory rape and human trafficking. Without going into any further datail, anyone at all familiar with Morales and Bolivia’s recent history can attest to the absurdity of these allegations.

There is a common thread which unites the three above mentioned cases. All were without question, in one way or another, US backed coups d’etat against democratically elected leaders who dared to stare down the spectre of US imperialism. And in each case, the legal proceedings were designed to prevent these men from ever seeking office again.

Why, you might ask, would I compare left leaning Latin American political leaders to Trump? Consider if you will Trump’s take on the sacred notion of American exceptionalism, professed as an article of faith by all those who have walked before him:

“I don’t like the term. I’ll be honest with you. People say, ‘Oh he’s not patriotic.’ Look, if I’m a Russian, or I’m a German, or I’m a person we do business with, why, you know, I don’t think it’s a very nice term.” ‘We’re exceptional; you’re not.’”

We here a lot about Trumpism, but what exactly is it? That depends on who you ask I guess. What is generally implied is some sort to reductio ad hominem mashup of DJT's well published character flaws - a kind of belligerent, narcissistic white supremacism. This is no more useful than it is edifying. Somewhere between 'Trump is a racist sack of shit' and 'Biden is a communist pedo' there must be space for a reasoned analysis of what actually sets the two apart.

The ruling class is not a monolith. There exist within it factions, one managerial and the other entrepreneurial. One globalist and one nationalist. One owned by and large by Wall St and the other by the Koch Brothers and Amazon. What Trump seems to represent more broadly is an insurgent faction within a ruling class long dominated by globalist interests. All of this makes MAGA much more than a slogan.

He ran against Obama's TPP and Clinton's NAFTA which were designed to destroy manufacturing and service jobs in the US. He ran against permanent wars, regime change and so-called "nation building". Paradoxically none of this made him any less a faithful servant of the ruling class, as is evident in his constant vilifying of China, Venezuela and Iran. A garrison state requires a designated enemy. For the liberal faction it is Russia, for Trump it is China. Ultimately both read from the same CIA/Pentagon script.

Whatever your view of the man, Trump's many personal and political failures are not what's in question here. Rather it is how he has positioned himself, like no other in recent memory, as representing the popular will. Make America Great Again resonated with 75 million voters to whom HRC had previously given the moniker 'deplorables'. Did Biden even have a campaign slogan?

We are caught in a post-epistemological paradigm. Since ‘fake news’ was entered into the common vernacular - largely thanks to Trump - nobody appears to know which way is up or down. In this sorry state of affairs, there are those who see Trump as a demagogue and a danger to democracy, who consider the recent election outcome a natural correction, and the events of January 6 as an 'attack on the constitution'. On the other side of this equation are those who see Trump's populism, in particular his stated opposition to America’s endless, wasteful wars and emphasis on 'America First' as an impediment to business as usual, and his ouster and subsequent impeachment as a coup d'etat by Bush-Obama neocons. I make no bones about which side of this particular divide I stand on. 

While his corporate tax cuts may have failed to benefit a large number increasingly marginalised 'deplorables', average household incomes have actually risen by around $95 a month during Trump's tenure, a considerable improvement on the $14 achieved under Obama, and the measly $3 under Bush. Notwithstanding the escalation of arms sales and bombing campaigns targeting mostly civilians and civilian infrastructure, Trump also leaves office with the distinction of being the first POTUS in 39 years not to have started a new war, not to mention being the first sitting POTUS to visit North Korea.

Questions remain as to whether Trump was ever intended to be any more than a place holder for the establishment, but it is perfectly clear that his removal, and the erasure of any legacy he might have left is now of paramount importance. As to the question why bother to impeach him with only seven days of his presidential term remaining, the examples of Correa, Lula and Morales above make this perfectly obvious. Trump's mere removal from office is not sufficient. He must be made an example of, and he must never be allowed to run for public office again. Trump’s peacenik populism must be buried in the dustbin of history, along with his base - mostly good honest folk whose only apparent crime was wanting to be have their voices heard - so that America can 'heal'.