We've seen this same scenario play out on the international news a thousand times before. Some populist despot on a power binge locks down the capitol with heavily armed and uniformed soldiers on the street. Some kind of crisis is declared. Some kind of enemy is denounced. Both are usually conveniently vague and open to expansive interpretation. Everyone but a few brainwashed zealots know the score and what was once a barely functioning plutocracy is reduced to an armed encampment with soldiers serving as a newly christened dictator's jackbooted errand boys and a quire of armored vehicles singing his praises in a diesel fueled chorus.
Yep, we've seen this same scenario play out a thousand times before but this time it isn't playing out in some third world banana republic, it's unraveling as we speak on the streets of the capitol of the most powerful empire on earth and it's spreading like spilt milk under a refrigerator near you. In the sacred name of law and order, Donald Trump, the Batista of Mar-a-Lago, has federalized law enforcement in Wahington DC and sent in 800 National Guardsmen and another 450 federal law enforcement agents to lord over the national monuments with assault rifles and pose fearsomely for the cameras. One could be forgiven for being tempted to believe that this is just some reckless publicity stunt to throw people off the Epstein trail and I'm sure that played a part in the timing, but this is clearly part of a much larger campaign.
Trump already fed the Tenth Amendment to the tank treads with his brazenly unconstitutional military occupation of Los Angeles, and a series of leaks and executive orders have made it clear that it won't end in Chicago either. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has been tasked with establishing a 600 Guardsman "Domestic Civil Disturbance Quick Reaction Force" that can be deployed within hours to cities across the country to quell whatever "civil disturbance" America's increasingly omnipotent Executive Office deems to be a national emergency with a dusty coupon booklet of antiquated war powers.
This isn't a dictatorship yet but this sure as shit is how they start. I know because I've been studying the one's the CIA sets up in third world countries for the better part of my miserable young life. This is also why, even though I am certainly very disturbed by what's transpiring, I am just slightly less than shocked. Our country's vaunted liberal peanut gallery can spend hours in front of the bathroom mirror perfecting their 50s monster movie shriek, but this country has been exporting fascism like Coca-Cola for centuries; did you Karens honestly believe that this poison product would never follow you home? And I'm not just talking ancient history here either.
I'm talking about our overthrow of Jean-Bertrand Aristide in Haiti in 2004 for the high crime of trying to raise the minimum wage of Disney sweatshops in Port-au-Prince and I'm talking about our decision to replace Manuel Zelaya with a drug peddling junta in Honduras in 2009. None of you people blank twice when America erased these democracy's and now those chickens are coming home to roost.
The only thing separating Donald Trump from fellow executive arbiters of authoritarianism like George W. Bush and Barack Obama is the fact that he finally brought the war home. This may be sickening but it was also inevitable, especially when you consider the fact that all these men did their part to drastically expand the powers of the executive office while growing America's military to the size of a fucking death star. Now, the jig is finally up. The illusion of American democracy has been dashed to smithereens on the petulant whims of a reality television goon and what really rubs his mainstream critics raw is how tacky it makes us look.
With that being said, weapons grade hypocrisy doesn't erase the danger marching through our streets as we speak and the fact that the die was cast several administrations ago doesn't mean that we should all just sit around snarking while Uncle Sam tries on mirrored aviator shades. What it does mean is that we have to get a little more inventive than monkeying around with electoral politics in a Weimar republic and we need to get a little more radical than singing "Give Peace a Chance" in state designated protest kennels. My crazed neurodivergent suggestion is that we actually reach out to the storm troopers.
These aren't well-trained Freikorps'; they're working-class weekend warriors trying to pay off their credit card debt. Many of them are barely out of high school and most of them had no idea what they were signing up for. Signs of discontent among these ranks have already surfaced in Los Angeles after Trump sent 4,000 National Guards to confront the scourge of undocumented maids at the El Segundo Motel 6. In fact, reports of downright aggressive disgruntlement amidst the SoCal barracks have become quite widespread just behind the scenes.
Multiple advocacy organizations representing military families, including the Sarah Stryder Initiative and the Chamberlain Network, have reported an influx of affected service members contacting them to express their disgust with Trump's mission in the City of Angels. At least 105 members of this deployment have also sought counseling from behavioral health offices and at least one company commander and one battalion commander have been reassigned after expressing their objections to Trump's orders.
This is fertile soil for mutiny which anti-fascists would be wise to sow. History is rife with examples of disgruntled soldiers leading open revolts that ultimately led to the downfall of the very regimes they were tasked with fortifying. A mutiny aboard the Battleship Potemkin launched by sailors unwilling to die for empire in the Russo-Japanese War ended in disaster but also ultimately sparked the Russian Revolution of 1905, which not only ended the war but set the stage for the October Revolution that would end the reign of the Tsar completely a decade later.
That same year, the Kiel Mutiny of 1918 was lit after a German crew refused to sail into certain death against the British Grand Fleet during the final days of the First World War and would inspire another revolution that would topple the Kaiser and put the final nail in the casket of a fading German Empire. In this case, the mutineers even set up democratic soldier's councils that rapidly spread across the country, erasing the corrupt governments in every city they occupied with little to no resistance before they made the tragic mistake of handing their decentralized direct democracies over to professional politicians who would sell them back to their officers for a Reich.
Perhaps the best example of gestapo in revolt however occurred within the ranks of our own military during the Vietnam War with the GI Movement, a radical antiwar insurgency that spread like napalm across every base from West Point to Danang, ultimately leading to nearly half of all enlisted American soldiers openly revolting against their superiors which nearly sank the whole damn empire before the Pentagon finally pulled the plug on their failed conquest of Indochina.
Over half a million incidents of desertion were recorded between 1966 and 1973. Another 488 incidents of sabotage on naval vessels were also logged during that time frame including the largest single act of sabotage in naval history aboard the USS Forrestal aircraft carrier in 1972 when a massive fire caused over $7 million dollars in damage and delayed the ships deployment by over two months.
All of this was done with the full support and collaboration of anti-imperialists across the expanse of occupied Babylon, from the Black Panthers of California to the Beheiren movement of Japan. And I say it can be done again! Naysayers will point to America's all volunteer army, formed for the express purpose of avoiding another GI Movement. I will point to a stagnant economy and a shriveling middle class that forces many young men and women to fight for food only to find themselves stop-lossed into an endless loop of deployments to one bombed out wasteland after another.
Now, these impoverished and deeply traumatized government mercenaries are being ordered to patrol their own streets for a senile billionaire child molester. Lynch me for my morbid optimism if you must but, Dearest motherfuckers, I think we can work with this!
But first we would be wise to remember that the most important target of any mutiny should always be the fascist construct of the standing army itself. A national guard is really the only armed force any nation should ever require but it should be reserved exclusively for the self-defense of the communities they serve, and this mission should include the defense of communities against their own government. This can only be achieved with the kind of civilian militias advocated by this nation's wiser founding fathers to serve specifically as a bulwark against any attempt to monopolize the use of force with a professional standing army.
The popularity of the anti-interventionist Defend the Guard Act across the left-right spectrum shows an increased awareness among soldiers and civilians alike for the necessity of these kinds of populist limitations on military power and in times of great crisis there is great opportunity for radical acceleration.
Empires are often at their most despotic before they collapse. Donald Trump just needs a little push, and I can think of a few good men who might just be willing to lend him a hand.
Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH
Soundtrack: Songs that Influenced this Post
* Mutiny, I Promise You by the New Pornographers
* Hey Joe by Jimi Hendrix
* California Uber Alles by Dead Kennedys
* What's the Frequency Kenneth by REM
* Street Fighting Man by the Rolling Stones
* Eat the Rich by Motorhead
* Rambozo the Clown by Dead Kennedys
* All Along the Watchtower by Jimi Hendrix
* We Gotta Get Out of This Place by Fear
* Doesn't Remind Me of Anything by Audioslave
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